J.M. Giordano

Kevin slaughters literary interests include illustrated pornography, satanic texts, nietzsche. and eugenics.

A few years Ago, when the peep booths over at Sweden Books on the Block switched to DVD, Kevin I. Slaughter happened upon 3,000 Super 8 porn movies. It took him three trips to get them all home, where the boxes and boxes of antique smut and all of the projectors fill up the attic in the house he shares with his wife.

We had to have that awkward talk about masturbation, eroticism, objectification, Slaughter says. I tried to frame it in evolutionary biological termsthe different ways men and women work. And being the egotistical individualist that I tend to be, its like, this is who I am. The biggest tension now is that the attic is full of it. It is more an issue about hoarding than porn.

Slaughter is not just a porn freak. For him, its also about the cultural value of these objects. He wants to digitize the films and preserve them. He says that the blues have faded out of the film, meaning these blue movies are beginning to appear largely red. I might have the only image of some film, you know, that exists anywhere, he says. The Kinsey Institute does some preserving of old porn, but not too much, and so I cant just get rid of it.

This preservationist attitude is also behind Slaughters publishing venture, Underworld Amusements. Using print-on-demand technology, he can bring out public domain books that may only sell a dozen copies. As a result, he can afford to publish only those works which allow him to say what he wants to say. When people ask him why he doesnt write, Slaughter replies: When I stop finding other writers who have said what I want to say a hundred times better, then I will start writing.

Underworld Amusements catalog includes new editions of old, illustrated pornographic texts called dirty readers; H.L Menckens translation of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsches The Anti-Christ; and a Satanic anthology in Spanish, to be released around December. Slaughter tends toward what he calls the fringes and neglected and intentionally pushed away. Of course, ideas like this dont pay the rent and, in addition to publishing, Slaughter does freelance graphic design and works at a gun shop on weekends.

With an antiquated, copper-colored mustache, a tall brow made taller by the grease in his hair, and retro clothes, Slaughter looks like he could have stepped out of a Coen brothers film. The walls of his living room are lined with his vast collection of booksan entire shelf of adult paperbacks, old educational manuals, Spengler, Nietzsche, Mencken, and he can quote from almost any of them in regard to any number of his obsessions, which include, in addition to porn, radical individualism, free-thinking, and eugenics (which he insists is not racist and has more scientific validity than cultural anthropology).

This may seem like a strange and somewhat unsavory combination of interests now, but porn and high-minded ideas have gone hand in handor something in somethingfor centuries. Works like James Joyces Ulysses and Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer were considered porn and were distributed by houses that dealt in smut. As Underworld Amusements web site puts it, it produces and disseminates objects celebrating [sic] both human accomplishment [and] human degeneracy.

Slaughters print-on-demand venture is the natural outgrowth of the zine culture he grew up around in Winston-Salem, N.C., in the 1980s. He started his first zine in middle school, and in his freshman year of high school, he published The Modern Anarchist, which printed the names and addresses of his teachers. Though he got into some trouble, Slaughter says that to some people it seemed the teachers behaved a little better for the rest of the year.

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Porn Again