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CHAPTER 2 Ambassador from Somewhere Else R eturning to East Lansing in the fall, I definitely felt like an ambassador from a developing national counterculture, bringing news of the future back to my provincial homeland. My lady friend Carol having resumed her schooling in Albany, New York, and my accomplice Larry having chosen to rent an apartment with another friend, I needed to find a home for both myself and The Paper. I took over a small house near campus in whose basement was located the mimeograph on which all our movement leaflets for the previous two years had been printed; the front room became our office. We finally decided to begin doing our own paste-up; a local union activist donated a huge sheet of frosted glass that I turned into a light table big enough for three or four people to work at. Our first issue of the year (twelve pages, circulation increased to 4,000) had a modest collage on the front page made up of our most memorable headlines and graphics of the previous year, and a piece from me that began “An Editorial (!!) . . . in which the editor states his preference for fun and good newspapers rather than fighting and hassling, and explains how fun and good newspapers have been pursued since he last published an issue; also including a statement of his plans for the coming year.” One of our friends took one look at it and said, “Wow, Kindman’s been taking acid.” True enough. But we still intended to stick thorns in the side of the MSU administration whenever we could. The opening issue for the year included our version of orientation articles on life in the multiversity, by Char (“The university is well-suited for the task of conditioning . . . its inhabitants psychologically for the outside world, for MSU, like American society as a whole, can be characterized by, among other things, the condition of anonymity, the pressure of conformity, and the spirit of competition”), and “Culture at MSU,” by Larry (“Luckily for everyone, it won’t take long” to discuss). I’m unable to remember exactly what became of the enormous controversy of the previous year concerning our distribution on campus. Reading through the issues published during that second year, I find no sign of it, although plenty of new controversy was generated, and more inflammatory material than ever filled our pages. I presume the university just backed down and let us be; the times were certainly changing in many ways. We did form an 18 | Chapter 2 organization called Friends of The Paper to serve as our foil when we wanted to rent rooms on campus and do that sort of thing. Membership in the Underground Press Syndicate brought immediate benefits for us, in the form of a wealth of interesting articles available for reprinting as all of the member papers began exchanging copies with one another, as well as advertising from previously unattainable sources all over the country. Later, as UPS became more established, we began receiving advance copies of books and records for review. In addition, former staff members of The Paper were starting to migrate to graduate schools and urban centers around the country, and they began generating original copy for us to publish on the political and social happenings occurring in their areas. Finally, we were playing the role we had hoped for. People waited for our issues, which came out each week virtually without fail, each one looking different and more experimental than the one before. We had coverage of the antiwar movement from all over the country, of the expanding rock-music scene, of the changes under way in the university. We had consumer news, arts reviews, analysis of the financial involvement of Big Business in the university, original poetry and fiction (including more poetry and commentary from Jim Thomas in Vietnam), and a new edition of LandGrantMan each week, providing ludicrous counterpoint to our other coverage of whatever had been happening on campus. Pretty much whoever wanted to do so could comment on whatever he or she wanted to, in whatever verbal or visual form, and we would probably publish it. The Paper was a wide-open experimental forum, unlike anything we had seen or experienced before. In Issue 3, I published an editorial, “The Newspaper As Art Form,” each paragraph interspersed with a line from the Beatles’ song “Tomorrow Never Knows” (“Turn off your mind, relax and float...

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