On Wednesday, April 3, the Wednesdays at 4 Plus literary series at UB will feature noted writer and critic Larry McCaffery and novelist Doug Rice in a discussion of avant-pop aesthetics. It will take place at 4 p.m. in the Downstairs Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

Free of charge and open to the public, it is an opportunity to sample the work of some of avant-pop's underground morph artists.

Avant-pop will do what postmodernism didn't do, the popsters claim. They say that like all vanguard ideas in our social system, po mo was weakened, neutralized, petrified and devolved through constant pressure from capitalist urge to commodification. Finally, like all meaningful critiques, it was co-opted-sucked screaming into the prevailing cultural current.

McCaffery and Rice are just two of the notable avant-pop observers in the field. McCaffery (who coined the phrase) is the editor of two recent fiction anthologies, "Avant-Pop: Fiction for A Daydream Nation" (Black Ice Books) and "After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology" (Penguin). He is professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University and co-editor of three literary journals specializing in postmodern literature: Critique, Fiction International and American Book Review. His many critical books include "The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Coover, Gass and Barthelme," and "Postmodern Fiction, a Bio-Bibliographical Guide."

Rice, assistant professor of English and film at Kent State University, is the author of the novel "Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest." He also has published a number of short stories and performance pieces, one of which is "Life at the Parasite Cafe."

According to writer/theorist and a-p celebrant Mark Amerika, avant-popsters can be seen as a fresh wave of cultural shock-troops of the Warhol, Vonnegut, Rauschenberg and Velvet Underground variety.

"Our collective mission," reads Amerika's "A&P Manifesto," "is to radically alter Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal and subtly ironic gesture that grows out of the work of...artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch)...sit- uationism, letterism and neo-hoodooism, and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Slint, L7, Pavement, Stereolab, Meccanormal...."

Although popsters attend to many of the manifestations of pop culture, they are especially interested in its electronic realities. They use television, telephones, databanks, computers, CDs, hypertext, CD-ROM and video recorders to examine the positive and negative consequences of these very technologies on our communications, our thought processes, our values.

Adhering to the Robert Creeley-Charles Olson dictum that form is never more than an extension of content, avant-pop features artistic forms shaped of the detritus of contemporary culture. It employs the language and imagery of technology to describe our addiction to its associated objects and ideas. They say that if the Äber-kultur tries to absorb this cultural provocateur, it will be eating its own garbage, digesting its own production, choking on its own vomit.

As popsters, McCaffery and Rice are among those born and raised in what Amerika calls "our tele-visual, compu-corder, auto-digitized" world. They share a state of mind, rather than a style and number among their kind literary edge-runners like novelists Kathy Acker ("Empire of the Senseless," "Blood and Guts in High School") and Mark Leyner ("Et Tu, Babe"), artists like Cindy Sherman and Jenny Holzer and Amerika himself, who like other popsters, has given invited lectures and readings at UB over the past several years.

If avant-pop has a vehicle, it is the Internet, which it is all over like ants on a Snickers. In addition to a wealth of small-press publications, the movement cultivates its own frontier in privately published 'zines such as "256 Shades of Gray," put out by folks at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Like the Beats, the Black Mountaineers, the New American Poets, and postmodern theorists galore, avant-popsters know they'll receive a warm welcome at UB. They come here in droves, have been for years, because even before they had laid down a name, the English Department's wildcat poesis-mavens knew who they were and why.

If you'd like to bone up on the subject before the conference, you can. Just call up "avant-pop" on the Net for more information than you can gobble up in a month, or try these URLs: http://www.altx.com/memoriam/ orhttp://marketpla ce.com/alt.x/black.ice.books.html