“I’m really sorry to do this via e-mail,” began the message Asha Anderson received from her friend Cullen Carter’s wife, Allyson, on April 9. “Last Tuesday night (April 1st) on his way home (biking) from class, Cullen was hit by a pickup truck who apparently never saw him, even though he had lights on his bike. It was right at dusk. Cullen hit the windshield, then hit the roof, denting it, and then landed in the bed of the truck….Right now, Cullen is in a deep coma.”
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Anderson, a writer and zine publisher who lives in Nevada, had never met Carter in person; they struck up a correspondence after meeting in the alt.zines newsgroup. She didn’t know his wife at all. But when she finished reading the message, which went on to give the details of Carter’s brain injury–not to mention his broken hip, bruised lungs, facial lacerations, cracked ribs, and fractured vertebrae–she did as Allyson requested, posting the text to the newsgroup to get the word out to the zine community. In short order she also created a page about Carter on her Web site (www.ashabot.com) that’s now home to weekly updates from Allyson on his condition (he’s out of the coma now), anecdotes about Carter and his writing from friends and fans, and several of Carter’s short stories. She also set up a PayPal account to collect donations toward his medical bills.
The group has stalked other literary big game like George Plimpton and Dave Eggers. In 2001 it launched a bitter protest after the Firecracker Alternative Book Awards dubbed McSweeney’s the best zine of the year. (The journal’s polished content and swank production values, they argued, should have taken it out of contention.) In February ULA founders Karl “King” Wenclas and Michael Jackman landed on Page Six of the New York Post after getting in a scuffle with Open City editor Tom Beller outside the Manhattan bookstore Housing Works. Last week Wenclas wound up on Page Six again after he incited a heated online debate over a dismissive article about the ULA that ran in last month’s issue of the Believer, the new literary magazine published by McSweeney’s. The piece referred to the ULA’s tactics as, among other things, “thuggish, cruel, and petty,” not to mention Stalinist.
