Introduction

 

I’d like to apologize if the last introduction caused anyone to think I was burning out – truth of the matter is I just didn’t feel well while I was working on the issue. I’m feeling better now and, if anything, I think XD is hitting its stride.

I’d like to dedicate this issue to Al Cene and Jenny Makofsky (see page 4 for an article about Jenny).

You’ve all seen Al’s name in the supporters list since the inception of XD. He was also one of the earliest supporters of The Glovebox Chronicles and Leeking Ink. With stamps and small cash contributions he helped foster and encourage my publications, which was always appreciated on multiple levels. He passed away February 1, 2004. Al was 89. He was introduced to me by DB Pedlar around 1997 and soon began contributing his “Andy Brown” stories to The Glovebox Chronicles. He was also active with two writers’ groups in St. Petersburg, FL. Although we never met, I will miss his letters and his encouragement.

I have some good news to report. I think it is testament to the quality of the reviewers, writers, and editors associated with Xerography Debt that seven staff members were selected for inclusion in the upcoming Zine Yearbook, a yearly anthology of small press writing put together by the folks behind Clamor Magazine and The Allied Media Conference. Jeff Somers (The Inner Swine), Gavin Grant (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet), Matt Fagan (Love), Cali Ruchala (Sobaka), Donny Smith (Dwan) and I (Leeking Ink) all had pieces from our zines selected. Zine Yearbook should be out this summer from Soft Skull Press.

I’m offering a first come, first served sale on all back issues of Xerography Debt. Issues # 9-11 are on sale for $2 each (normally $3) and issues #2-8 are on sale for $1.50 each (normally $2). I only have a few copies left of certain issues so either email first or list alternate issues you’d like to receive. Sorry, #12 sold out already. Please, help support XD by lining the coffers and also help me make more space in my office.

 

Davida Gypsy Breier

February 2004

 

 

Basic stuff you should know

 

        If this is your first issue, XEROGRAPHY DEBT is a review zine for zine readers by zine writers. It is a hybrid of review zine and personal zine. Xerography Debt has its own freestyle approach. It is all about communication, so each reviewer has used the format or style most comfortable to him or her. Also, each reviewer "owns" the zine in a communal sense. We are individual artists and writers coming together to collaborate and help keep small press flourishing.

        Do your part by ordering a few zines from the many reviewed here and, if you self-publish, please consider including a some reviews in your zine.

        Xerography Debt’s reviews are selective. To explain the “system”: Some reviewers choose to review zines they have bought or traded with, some review zines that are sent to Xerography Debt for review, and some do both. Also, I buy zines at Atomic Books, my local zine store, and zine events, so if you see your zine reviewed and you didn’t send it in, that might be where Ifound it. Generally the only reviews you will read in here are “good reviews.” Constructive criticism is given, but basically we don’t have the time or money to print bad reviews. If you sent your zine in for review and don’t see it listed, wait a few months and see if it appears in the following issue. I read and then distribute the zines to the reviewers about two months before the print date. If the reviewer passed on reviewing your zine, it will be sent out again for the next issue. So, each zine gets two shots with two different reviewers. Ultimately, many of the review copies stay in the XD archives, but some are donated to zine libraries. Occasionally mistakes happen, postal or otherwise, so if you have a question about a zine you sent in for review, please contact Davida at PO Box 963, Havre de Grace, MD 21078 or davida@leekinginc.com.

        It is available for free online (some reviews and artwork will only be available in print) or paper copies can be ordered for $3.

        If you have an event, announcement, or project you would like to share, please get in touch.

        The lack of paid advertising within these pages is deliberate. Despite reviewing our friends and lovers, we try to be somewhat objective and free to do as we please. Needless to say, this brings up the point of needing some help to keep the machine running...

 

 

Sponsors

 

We see Xerography Debt as the PBS of review zines. It is by us, for us, with no financial incentive, just a dedication to small press. If you have a few spare stamps or dollar bills to help support us and the zine community, it would be most appreciated. Also, let me know if you wish to remain anonymous. This issue’s sponsors are:

 

William P. Tandy, Jan and Earl, DB Pedlar, Tracy Pickle, The Neilsen Ratings, Ted Mangano, Owen Thomas, A.J. Michel, Fred Wright, Blair Ewing, Christopher Robinson, Anne Thalheimer, Larned Justin, Jeannie McStay, Dar Veverka, Al Cene, and Brooke Young and the SLC Public Library and a several anonymous benefactors.

 

 

Jenny Makofsky

 

A few days before XD was set to go to print I received an email from Serena Makofsky. I read it several times, thinking I was misunderstanding something. Her sister Jenny had been killed in a car accident the week before. My heart sank.

The Makofsky sisters were among the first people I met when I entered the zine world. Their zine, Have You Seen the Dog Lately? was an improbable recipe of whimsy, intellectual discourse, goofy fun, and subtle educational lessons. That was the same improbably recipe of Jenny Makofsky.

When I visited Northern California for the Alternative Press Expo in 1998 I was lucky enough to be their guest. Lucky enough to hear some of Jenny’s stories in person. Lucky enough to hold memories of that trip and come home raving about these two amazing women I could now call my friends.

Jenny was a beautiful woman in every sense of the word, yet from the photos of that trip I had a hard time capturing that. I did however catch her making an odd face while eating cake.

It isn’t just those of us who knew Jenny who will suffer this loss. She was one of those rare souls who gave far more than she ever took. Her stories were part of that gift.

The Bay Area Storytelling Festival wishes to honor the life of Jenny Makofsky by establishing a fund, which will provide storytelling activities to a variety of recipients. Contributions may be sent to:

 

Bay Area Storytelling Festival

Jenny Makofsky Memorial Fund

P.O. Box 11891

Berkeley, CA 94712-2891

For further information, please

call Gay Ducey at (510) 841-6398

 

Donations in her honor can also be made to www.moveon.org and Seeds of Learning, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educational opportunities in rural Latin America; www.seedsoflearning.org; (707) 939-0471.

I’d like to share what Serena read at Jenny’s memorial service, as well as  few comments from XD staff:

 

I hope Jenny would indulge me in this last opportunity to be an older sister. I need to boss all of you around for a moment, and ask you to fill the gaps Jenny has left behind. The world needs people who-

 

1. Spend all day in the library doing research for a two-page paper.

2. Can do a perfect impersonation of Carol Channing singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”.

3. Argue all night over a book they haven’t read.

4. Will read “Little Bear” to Max seven times in a row.

5. Spend spare time reading Spanish dictionaries and memorizing poetry.

6. Fight the good fight.

7. Cook the perfect corn cake.

 

And, finally, after you have gone and done all the great things, and all the trivial things, I need you to come back, kick your boots off, sit on the couch, and tell me every detail.

 

Thank you, Jenny, for your stories.

Serena

 

“…her obituary and the headline referred to her as a “storyteller” and I realized what an important thing that is because stories will live for as long as people keep telling them. The fact that she will have no new stories to tell is a tragedy to be sure, but no one can ever take away her stories. If you read one of her stories and if made you laugh or smile nothing can take that away. If you’re walking down the street and you chuckle because you happen to see something that reminds you of a story she told nothing can ever take that away. My sincere condolences go out to her family and her friends and I just hope they will do what they can to make sure that her stories are with us forever.”

Eric Lyden

 

“How frustrating it is to see someone who appeared to do little but give to others pass away at such a young age.”

Cali Ruchala

 

“Her zine was the first review I ever wrote for Xerography Debt! She must have been amazing if all those kids thought she was cool.”

Matt Fagan

 

There is an electric guestbook set up at

http://www.legacy.com/pressdemocrat/Guestbook.asp?Page=Guestbook&PersonID=1951629 if you would like to say a few words about Jenny.

 

Announcements

 

Zinester Classifieds at Atomic Books

There is a new Zinester Classified section on the Atomic Books site. It’s basically, a page where people can place calls for submission and people looking to submit stuff places can go and see what people are looking for:

www.atomicbooks.com/page.php?ep110&cat=110

 

New Jersey Zinefest

Planning for the second annual New Jersey Zinefest is underway. Help them make it an even bigger & better success than last year by spreading the word, lending a hand, or attending with all of your friends. It will be held Sunday April 18th, 12-6pm at: Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett Bldg., Rutgers University, 162 Ryders Lane, New Brunswick, NJ

For more info write to: N.Z. c/o Rutgers Univ., 25301 DPO Way, New Brunswick, NJ 08901; njzinefest@yahoo.com

www.njzinefest.com

 

Help out Microcosm Publishing

(Posted on A.j. Michel’s (Low Hug) blog, www.lowhug.blogspot.com)

Please help out Microcosm Publishing (www.microcosmpublishing.com)

        Over the past two years, both Top Shelf Comics and Fantagraphics were saved by sending out pleas over the ‘net urging people to place an order and save their businesses. Comic fans came to their rescue and helped to bail them out of a financial tight spot.

        Now it’s your chance to help out an independent distro, Mircocosm Publishing. Microcosm is based out of Portland OR and run by Joe Biel (The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting), Alex Wrekk (Brainscan) and Webly Bucket (Don’t Send Me Flowers!), three of the nicest, most dedicated people you’ll ever meet.

Joe recently published on the Microcosm Publishing website:

“The time has come once again to come to the aid of your, uh ... Microcosm. I was hoping I would never have to write one of these pleading and begging messages again but we somehow managed to get severely in debt. We’ve been taking on a lot of new items in the catalog lately and just published the new “Stolen Sharpie Revolution” and “CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting” and all of a sudden - our bills caught up with us! I was kind of hoping that the holiday rush would help cover these bills and it seems we’ve bit off a bit more than we can chew. While it’s certainly been a blast to do Microcosm for nearly 8 years, it has its share of financial trouble as a result. I don’t want to sound like an epitaph because it’s not quite dead yet but this doesn’t make it that easy to keep our heads above water. All orders are extra appreciated right now.”

 

New Addresses

Bobby Tran Dale/Botda has a new and more permanent address:

3542 Fruitvale Ave., PMB #141

Oakland, CA 94602-2327

 

Fred Argoff has switched apartments:

1800 Ocean Pkwy #F-10, Brooklyn NY 11223-3037

 

Ingleside News has now officially changed its name to Orange & Blue. The new e-mail is

orangeblue_zine@yahoo.com and the new website is

www.geocities.com/orangeblue_zine

 

Eight-Stone Press has launched a new website: www.eightstonepress.com

 

Submissions

Issue #8 of The Hungover Gourmet: The Journal of Food, Drink, Travel and Fun will be coming out this summer and we are looking for submissions for various sections of the newsletter. The two biggest areas of need are...

Going, Going, Gone Inspired by one last trip to Philadelphia’s infamous Veterans Stadium for a baseball game this section will examine favorite places and things that are going or gone. Have a favorite eatery that has disappeared? Did you fall in love with a fast food menu item only to have it yanked without any consideration of your feelings? Is a landmark from your hometown on its way out? Tell The Hungover Gourmet about it! We’re looking for recollections, memories and observations of approximately 500 words. If you have an idea for a longer piece, please get in touch before writing something up.

For Those Who are Fussy About Their Food Our restaurant/eatery review section which debuted in issue #7 has been a big hit! In an effort to provide a broader selection of eateries from around the country (and world!) we’re soliciting contributions from as many folks as possible. Here’s your chance... 175-200 word reviews are best and be sure to include the restaurant’s name, address, phone number and a rating of one (a place you wouldn’t recommend to your worst enemy) to five (the best meal, service, ambience you’ve ever had).

Other Topics Always Open to Contributions Flea market and thrift store reports. Hangover cures. Drink recipes. Bars We Love/Loved. Travel journals.

Deadline for submissions is March 15, 2004. Submissions can be sent via e-mail to editor@hungovergourmet.com or mailed to PO Box 5531, Lutherville, MD 21094-5531. E-mail Dan Taylor with any questions, thoughts, comments, etc.

 

HAVE YOU BEEN BAD?

Sooner or later, everyone has the opportunity to do the right thing - and then doesn’t all for the sake of being bad. And now Eight-Stone Press (ESP) wants to hear all about it!

BEING BAD is a forthcoming ESP publication devoted to your tales/poetry/artwork of the high road not taken - opportunities to do right not so much missed as forsaken. From childish pranks to petty acts of revenge to good, old-fashioned raunch, ESP knows you’ve been bad (hell, you’ve read this far, haven’t you?).

For consideration, send your submissions to Eight-Stone Press

Attn: William P. Tandy

P.O. Box 963, Havre de Grace, MD 21078

or email: esp@eightstonepress.com

 

 

Columns

The History of Zines:

Ralph Chubb

 

By Donny Smith

PO Box 411, Swarthmore, PA 19081

dwanzine@hotmail.com

www.geocities.com/dwanzine

 

        Unlike other English private printers, who trace their lineage back to Emery Walker and his exciting 1888 lecture on typefaces and printing methods, Ralph Chubb was of the family of William Blake. Like Blake, he had visions and transcribed voices. Like Blake, he was an artist and poet. (Like Blake, he drew his text directly onto the same printing matrix as his illustrations.) Like Blake, his prophecies spoke of political, spiritual, and sexual liberation. And that’s why, some say, he never attained commercial success.

        He was born in 1892 and grew up in St. Albans, England, north of London. According to those who knew him, “Darling Ralphie” was angelic and sweet. He played the romantic heroine in the family’s home dramas. He and one of his sisters would play in the galleries of the cathedral near their house and in the crypts. He went to school in the cathedral and learned Latin and Greek in the fortress-like medieval building. He began illustrating stories about knights and battles at a young age. But he had paralyzing nightmares about torture devices in the cellars of their home and “squids with quivering bellies.”

        In 1910, he earned a scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge. Here he met people who discussed sexuality and its history rationally and soon found that others had unusual predilections. He began to think of himself as a “pagan faun” and became a nudist.

        Unfortunately, he was enlisted as an officer in the war in 1914 and sent to France, where many of his men were killed and most of his friends. He was cited for bravery, but in 1918 was discharged as an invalid. He had nightmares of the guns for years. But the army paid for his course in art school.

        After art school, he moved back to his family, now living in rural Berkshire, and set up his studio in a hut in the woods near the family house. His brother Lawrence bought him type, showed him how to make wood engravings, and built a press for him out of a carpenter’s screw. Ralph, Lawrence, and their sister Ethel printed Ralph’s first three books on this press. He then printed prospectuses and mailed them out hoping for subscribers, without much success. And he was not satisfied with the results of his work. He found typesetting tedious and his printing equipment inadequate.

        His first book, Manhood: A Poem, features a naked man on the title page and shows the influence of Walt Whitman and proto-gay socialist Edward Carpenter. It apostrophizes a man swimming in a vast mythological sea,

Breasting the swell of ocean with broad breast,

Heaving your huge shoulders out of the water

And crushing it with your thick thighs;

…

The monsters, I say, eye you

And writhe with their sinuous limbs together and wait, and eye you;

…

Then, when I see you thus, shall I not be proud to be a man? …

        The title page of his third book, A Fable of Love & War: A Romantic Poem, features a naked man with sword and shield, a naked boy with shield, and a weeping clothed woman. The poem tells the story of a warrior who returns from war to his boy-love and of the girl who comes between them—and in the telling, attempts to outline Chubb’s philosophy. As he states in the preface,

There is little happiness in thought, which is good but in so far as it helps goodwill. Simple loving kindness is the test of a man, which is to say love of near ones and simple things, of wild nature rugged or sweet and of her little friendly beasts of the earth and the air and the water, love of a beautiful boy, a hardy man, a tender mother, love (if one be an Englishman) of England.

        His next three books Chubb sent to commercial printers. Meanwhile, his family was also financing exhibitions of his paintings. A few critics compared him favorably with Blake and Michelangelo, but his paintings did not sell.

        His sixth book, the commercially printed Book of God’s Madness, begins with a kind of Manichean cosmology. God’s existence begins with his own self-awareness, an intense loneliness—which leads to insanity and then to creation, the product of insanity. The poem eventually turns to Chubb’s constant theme:

Liveliest effigy of the human race,

Loveliest in form, in spirit like a sword,

Boyhood! I weep to see you so disgraced,

From stream’s and meadow’s playground snatched away

To die on commerce’ bloody altar-stone.

Chubb depicts the ugliness of middle-class life, the fatness, laziness, mediocrity, cruelty, and waste. In the midst of this, however, there’s a brief theophany, a god appears lightning-like—

… a goodly youth,

Naked, triumphant, spurning with his foot

A heap of lumber, shattered instruments,

Books, broken statues, tumbled palaces;

And women, babes and elder men

Bowing before him and all crying out,

“Worthiest full life who fullest life enjoys!”

And he made answer on high, “Is any here

“Of fuller being than I? I’ll bow to him!”

—then is gone.

        To relieve some of the burden on his family, one of his sisters got him a job as art teacher at a nearby school. However, a few years later, his paintings and books started gaining notice and causing scandal. Eventually, rumors about his activities in London, the content of his books, and his involvements with local adolescents forced him to resign. He and his family moved to a village in Hampshire.

        In 1929, he gained access to some sort of duplicating machine, on which he produced his seventh book, a sexual manifesto titled An Appendix. The machine freed him from the tedium of working with metal type and the difficulties of combining type and block illustration. At about the same time, he acquired a lithographic press and began producing books by drawing and writing directly onto litho stones. Like the duplicating machine, this also freed him from dependence on commercial printers, but unlike the printers or the machine, it allowed him to produce high-quality images. His hand-printed books are hand-bound and often hand-colored; according to his biographer, they “shine like jewels.” He set up his press in his little studio in the woods and slowly produced books there for the rest of his life, occasionally travelling to London to offer his books in bookstores.

        His tenth book, The Sun Spirit: A Visionary Phantasy, featured a dialog between Spectre, Chubb’s unformed, tormented self, and Seer, Chubb’s mature, mystic self. Seer comforts Spectre as Spectre recounts incidents from his childhood:

At the time of puberty I had obsessions.

I walk’d always with downcast eyes and blush’d scarlet to meet anyone in the street.

I thought I harbor’d a secret vice which none had discover’d before me.

I caught site of my figure distorted in a shop window and thereafter imagined that I had a physical deformity which others ignored through kindness.

Spectre eventually has a vision that would form a core of his beliefs:

At eighteen years one Sunday in the mighty vaulted church I caught the glance of a dark-eyed chorister.

Instantly our souls flew to meet each other in wild embrace.

Had we not loved since the beginning with deepest love for ever and ever?

        His eleventh book, The Heavenly Cupid, or, The True Paradise of Loves, features what may have been Chubb’s most harmonious marriage of writing and drawing (judging from pages 2, 3, and 4 reprinted in various sources), with lilting calligraphy and simple, luminous figures leaning into or arching over the texts.

        His twelfth book, Water Cherubs: A Book of Original Drawings & Poetry, includes an artistic manifesto, “Notes on My Art”:

1. Art is simplicity & can best express the universal in a single symbol. 2. I choose the Boyish Body; because it is the divine image & better than anything else expresses the whole mystery of life. … 3. Love never harms, it blesses body & soul. 4. Everything in life without a single exception—from the Buttercup to the Sun, from the comma or tadpole or human babe to the unfolding World—is a sexual symbol of a Spiritual Fact. Everything in life, therefore is clean & pure & holy & divine. Sensual perception is falsity. 5. One facet of truth well expressed illumines the whole body of Truth for everyone. 6. The nudity of Art is for ventilation and purification. * I redeem [with a drawing of a stiff, cruciform boy rising from a broken egg].

        Chubb’s thirteenth book, The Secret Country, or, Tales of Vision, was a nostalgic look at incidents from his childhood, with accounts of dreams, psychic events, and prophecies, hints at early sexual experiences—and as always, exposition of his boy-centered theology:

And God appeared before me upon the hilltop, in the shape of a beaming naked youth of 15 years, with limbs of superhuman strength & beauty. He had golden curls & blue eyes. His figure was enveloped in a blaze of solar light; and in his right hand he bore a yellow sunflower.

     “I am the Son of Dawn” he said. “I am the divine one.”

     So then I knew him for Ra-phaos, who is the Holy Ghost made flesh. He is the Spirit of Imagination. (But although I say he appeared to me, yet I knew that I was really beholding my own self).

     “I am your Love” he said. (Now what my love is, that am I. Moreover I declare unto you who read that I, Ralph, am all that is. … )

     “… * I am for ever & ever. * I say, Let the true individual pile up delight upon delight, fulfilment on fulfilment to his soul. * Stint no desire! * For all your loves & graces are yours visibly to all eternity. Neither has the shadow anything in You at all!”

        Despite the insistent spirituality of this book, Chubb did not profess sainthood:

Now I make no claims for myself that I am a virtuous or holy character. I know too well that I am sensual, whimsical, & in certain circumstances inclined to be wrong-headed, fantastical & perverse. What I have is imagination, human sympathy (when kindly treated), and a great capacity for love. My sympathies are, in reality, much more universal than I have seen fit to give out in my books—not narrow & limited as I have sometimes pretended.

        The War, followed by long years of misunderstanding, poverty, and thwarted artistic impulse, have much to answer for in my case.

        Eventually, in the 1950s, poverty, illness, arson, and blackmail forced him to give up printing his visions. His long-suffering sister Muriel found a box of Ralph’s childhood stories and pictures. He used these to draw the final book printed during his life, Treasure Trove: Early Tales & Romances with Poems. He packed up the many unsold books and paintings in his studio and began shipping them off to libraries as donations.

        This was a bittersweet end to his career. In all his writings, “His sexual activities are recorded without reserve”; according to his biographer, “The artist seems to have made a solemn pact, where his own activities were concerned, never to deviate from the truth.” Chubb labored all his life to catalog his visions and harmonize them with various mystical systems into an ephebo-centric theology (focussing on adolescent men—neither pedophilic nor necessarily gay). Even though one critic divides Chubb’s work into four categories based on content, the ideas seem consistent throughout. Chubb expresses a denial of the material world and a contradictory delight in the senses; a rejection of God, law, and rationality; an embrace of love, kindness, and beauty. As he wrote in 1932, “My work is not a pastime … but is the living output of one who labours for humane ends content in humble circumstances.”

        His visions sometimes join us to ancient trinities—as in The Child of Dawn when he sees “the Lord”: “The Threefold Man Divine. With shining beard, / Majestic, on the right, the Father stood; / Upon the left, in tender motherhood, / Mary; and in the midst the radiant Child …” His words are sometimes grotesque—as in Songs of Mankind when he urges a young lover to nurse at his “poetic dug” (“My own soul’s calf, pull, pull”)—but sometimes beautiful and thought-provoking—as in The Heavenly Cupid, when he speaks of “A world of realized desire, / Not further than this world but nigher, / And broad and deep, not merely higher.”

        Chubb’s story will seem familiar to zinesters: personal isolation, unsellable work, self-reflective or confessional writing, eccentric worldview, problems with commercial printers, need for a personal printing apparatus, begging bookstores to carry publications, relying on the mail to sell publications. He died in 1960 and was buried beside his parents in an unmarked grave—later marked with a stone echoing Blake, “Ralph Nicholas Chubb, Poet and Artist. ‘Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself.’”

 

studies of Chubb

1960        “Blake’s mantle: a memoir of Ralph Chubb” by Roderick Cave, Book design and production v.3, n.2, pp.24-28 (includes illustrations from six of Chubb’s books and a portrait of Chubb)

1970        appendix to Love in earnest: some notes on the lives and writings of English “Uranian” poets from 1889 to 1930 by Timothy d’Arch Smith (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London; includes an illustration from one of Chubb’s books and a photograph of Chubb)

1970        Ralph Chubb, the unknown: a checklist and extensively expurgated biography by Anthony Reid (offprints from the magazine The private library, bound as a pamphlet; include illustrations from seven of Chubb’s books)

1991        “Ephebophilia and the creation of a spiritual myth in the works of Ralph Nicholas Chubb” by Tariq Rahman, Journal of homosexuality v.20, n.1-2, pp.103-127

 

anthologies including Chubb’s work:

1983        The Penguin book of homosexual verse edited by Stephen Coote (Penguin, Harmondsworth)

1990        Rants and incendiary tracts: voices of desperate illumination, 1558 to present edited by Bob Black and Adam Parfrey (Loompanics, Port Townsend, WA)

1998        The Columbia anthology of gay literature: readings from Western antiquity to the present day edited by Byrne R.S. Fone (Columbia University Press, New York)

1999        A day for a lay: a century of gay poetry edited by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard (Barricade Books, New York)

 

thanks to Swarthmore College Libraries’ Treasure Room for access to copies of these books:

1924        Manhood: a poem by Ralph N. Chubb (R.N. Chubb, Curridge, Berkshire)

1925        A fable of love & war: a romantic poem by Ralph Chubb (R.N. Chubb, Curridge, Berkshire)

1928        The book of God’s madness: an unfinished poem in three parts (whereof Part I slightly abridged was published as The cloud and the voice) by Ralph N. Chubb (the author, n.p.)

1939        The secret country, or, tales of vision by Ralph N. Chubb (the author, Kingsclere Woodlands, Hampshire)

 

 

 

The History of Zines:

Zinedom uber Alles

 

By Cali Ruchala

Diacritica Press

100 E Walton #31H, Chicago, IL 60611

www.diacritica.com

cali@diacritica.com

 

On July 23, 2002, a skinny, bookish physics professor coughed up the slop of his internal organs and drifted off into a permanent sleep. Surrounding him were mountain men, skinheads, and former commies and anarchists who had given up their lives to hunker down in this godforsaken West Virginia compound. All had discovered him, in one way or another, through the written word: a vast legacy of thousands of self-published pages that with the leader’s passing formed the group’s most precious asset.

This was the death waltz of Dr. William Pierce, acclaimed by a tiny subculture of “intellectual” racists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen as a milquetoast furher who would lead the white race to victory in the coming Racial Apocalypse.

As fishers of men, most Nazis cast their lines in prisons or other black waters. Dr. Pierce had a different plan for creating his vanguard of whites that would lead the “lemmings” of America through the Rapture. Through books, broadcasts, comic books and publications, he aimed at disaffected whites with a little pocket change to sustain him and his staff in their grim mountain fantasyland.

Dr. Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia on the fortuitous day of September 11, 1933. As a young man in the early 1960s, he could have been expected to smoke a little pot, drop a few tabs and grok at the patter of emerald rain falling in Portland, Oregon, where he was an young physics professor. He must have gotten hold of the brown blotter, though, and gravitated instead to the hilariously pseudo-fascist John Birch Society.

Even the Birchites were a little too bolshie for Pierce. In the nation’s capital, he swore allegiance to George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, volunteering at the office and editing the ANP’s publications. Under the watchful gaze of his new Aryan guru, Pierce developed his thoughtful philosophy of transforming America into a “white living space” and lining up Jews and “feminized wimps” and bulldozing them into landfills.

After Rockwell was assassinated by a disgruntled follower in 1967, Pierce found a new mentor in segregationist George Wallace. To compliment Wallace’s 1968 run for president, another rabid anti-Semite, Willis Carto, had formed an organization called “Youth for Wallace,” ostensibly to beat up hippies on college campuses. In the end, a falling out between Pierce and Carto led to a split. Pierce wound up with the bulk of the group, and renamed it the “National Alliance.”

Every racist organization feels the need to smear their hate like so many piles of feces across the printed page. Few, however, were quite as prodigious - or ingenious - as Dr. William Pierce. The National Alliance, he said, would never beg for handouts. Instead, they’d target intellectual misfits in the image of their founder - people who could buy something, people with jobs, which was (and is) something of a novelty in the White Power movement.

Moreover, Pierce understood marketing. Phrases like “market size” and “audience size” pepper his organizational handbooks. Nazis, he conceded, were unpopular. While Rockwell and Klansmen had made a great show of stomping about like newsreel stormtroopers, the Alliance was all about subtlety. “Most level-headed people,” Pierce once said, “even if they think of themselves as National Socialists, are going to be hesitant to get involved with that kind of circus.” To his followers in the Alliance, Pierce mocked what he called “the sieg-heilers” and derided his brothers on the fringe of the radical right as “freaks” and “defectives.”

When Pierce made his big foray into the print world, he deliberately targeted the disaffected white hippies he had battled in the 1960s. The Alliance’s zine for public consumption in the late 1970s - often produced on mimeograph when funds ran low - was accordingly given the punchy title of Attack! and designed in the same format as the counterculture and radical publications of the 1960s. It was also where he serialized his most famous creation, an amusingly turgid novel of purple prose called The Turner Diaries. The book allegedly served as blueprint for the Oklahoma City Bombing as well as a rampage by a white nationalist gang known as The Order (most famous for murdering acerbic Jewish radio personality Alen Berg, and having Oliver Stone make a movie about it).

Pierce also edited a members-only bulletin, Action, while developing his own, goofy (and, unfortunately, non-tax exempt) religion, “Cosmotheism,” in which whitey has replaced the red man as the “noble savage” spiritually in tune with an Aryan Mother Earth.

As the supply of gainfully employed former hippies dried up, Pierce shifted gears abruptly and decided to give his group the varnish of a modern elite. He injected a bit of Bolshevism into his Hitlerite propaganda, preaching that the National Alliance would serve as a “vanguard” to awaken the white nation in the coming race war. This is the sort of thing that got Manson in trouble, but Pierce, far from commanding a bevy of burned out hippie girls, was so lonely among his mostly male followers that he sent away to Hungary for a mail-order bride. She waited out her green card at the Alliance’s compound, and then left him.

In any case, the Alliance’s new image as a “vanguard” was reflected by a change in Pierce’s publications. Attack! turned into National Vanguard and Action turned into the National Alliance Bulletin. Pierce also launched Free Speech - a publication, in the best self-publishing tradition, entrusted to no contributors other than himself. In a nod to the changing times, Pierce even published comic books. New World Order Comix was intended to be a vehicle to motivate white schoolkids to rise up against their multicultural enslavers, but the series never got beyond the first absurd installment, titled The Saga of... White Will! From his West Virginia hideaway (allegedly financed as much of Pierce’s print bonanza by money donated from The Order’s heists), Pierce cranked out a weekly radio program, bought a White Power record label, began a whites-only fashion line called AryanWear (the products were actually made in China), and even released a buggy and primitive first-person shooter video game called Ethnic Cleansing, where a white-armed revolutionary runs around assassinating mixed-race couples and gangsta rappers.

Groups formed around a singular individual rarely survive their founder. So it is with the National Alliance. After Pierce’s death in July 2002, the Alliance has been ripped apart by rivalries, purges and mass resignations. Their membership rolls are falling and so too, not coincidentally, are their publishing ventures.

Anti-racist organizations often state that the National Alliance is the “largest” or “most-prominent” hate group in the United States. How many members do they have? Shockingly, at the time of Pierce’s death, the Alliance had less than 2,000 paid members and probably less than 5,000 “supporters” nationwide - and this was at the peak of their popularity. All the same, the National Alliance was said to bring in close to a million dollars a year. Pierce, an Aryan PT Barnum, merely sold his wares to the same people over and over again.

 

 

 

IT MEANS IT’S WANK

By Jeff Somers

P.O. Box 3024, Hoboken NJ 07030

mreditor@innerswine.com

www.innerswine.com

 

“So what does that mean? It means it’s wank.”- Vic Flange, www.fleshmouth.co.uk [now defunct], describing my zine.

 

THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING AND THE VALUE OF NOTHING

 ...in which your intrepid columnist wonders just how useful a review is to a zine publisher, and ponders whether good reviews or bad reviews are more useful.

 

        My zine got a bad review the other day. In and of itself this is not news, as my zine gets a lot of bad reviews, and the source of this particular review has never liked my zine anyway. And as far as I can tell, bad reviews of my zine are a fundamental building block of the universe, like quarks or light quanta—ubiquitous and necessary. Years from now, when super-scientists finally solve all the riddles of the cosmos and figure out what dark matter is, I’m sure they’ll find it’s made up of bad reviews of my zine. Okay, so what—Take it in stride, what’s the big deal, all this negative energy just makes me stronger—but this particular review wasn’t so much a review as one long insult directed towards me. You know the type of review I’m talking about; the review that basically calls you lame and boring seven different ways before wrapping up.

        This got me to thinking: What was the value of that review? On a basic level it did it’s job: It communicated the reviewer’s opinion of my zine to the reader (in this case, potentially summed up with a pithy it sucked that would have saved time, paper, and energy). But that’s about it; while a reader will know what the reviewer thinks of my zine, they don’t get a lot of clues as to why the reviewer hated it so much. Maybe I ran over the reviewer’s dog and they’re getting back at me. Maybe they don’t care for foppish alcoholic hipster doofuses and the humor they prefer (fey, giggling, and incoherent). Maybe they hate anything with fiction in it. Who knows? That’s the point. No one knows. All you know is that they didn’t like it.

        Of course, if you’ve grown to trust that reviewer, that may be all you need. Much in the same way I trust the bartender at Stinky Sullivan’s in Hoboken when they silently shake their head at the new beer I’ve gestured at and grunted for.

        But a review is a tool, and like all tools you need to know a lot about its parameters before you can really use it. Assuming that the review itself at least contains some hints as to the reasoning behind the reviewer’s recommendation, I started to wonder what the best approach was: Postive, negative, or a mixture?

        The Good. Some reviewing publications only print good reviews—not in the sense of liking everything that’s sent to them and publishing useless rubber-stamp reviews, but in the sense of only printing reviews of zines they recommend. The commonsense theory here is that there’s no reason to tell people what you hate; they’re reading reviews in order to find something they want to read. The good part about this is, since you know that every zine in there is recommended by someone, you can quickly scan the titles until something catches your eye, and you know that it’s being recommended to you. The value here is no wasted time, in the sense that reading about what not to buy is a waste of time, since you can safely assume that anything not in that publication isn’t being recommended to you, thus saving you the trouble of sifting reviews.

        The problem, of course, is the insular, clubby feeling such publications can get, when the lovefest gets a little thick. After dozens of pages of happy happy reviews, you can’t help but wonder how high the bar is. It’s like one hand clapping: If you can’t see the bad reviews, how do you know there are bad reviews? In other words, how can you be sure these happy happy people dislike anything?

        That’s the problem: The Control. Everything needs a Control against which to measure, to make sure you’re getting accurate results. A reviewer’s positive review can be said to only be valuable if they can demonstrate that they do, in fact, dislike something. A reviewer who likes everything is useless. When a review zine only prints positive reviews, you have to assume there’s a huge pile of rejected zines that would have gotten bad reviews. If you assume that, it still works, so the question becomes whether assuming something is a good way to operate.

        The Bad. Other review zines take the opposite approach: They pride themselves in the harshness of their reviews. While not having bad reviews as an editorial policy, these reviewers take the stance that a tough standard means only truly amazing zines get their approval, while any sort of mediocrity or lackluster effort is punished ruthlessly.

        Of course, snarkiness often becomes a goal in and of itself. Like at the lunch table I sat at during High School, insult-comedy quickly becomes a competition of wit, speed, and viciousness: Whoever got off the nastiest one-liner won. You read some of the harder-edged review zines, and you get the feeling the reviewers aren’t really reviewing zines, they’re scanning them for material for their pithy barbs. The bastards.

        It seems pretty obvious that the only way to really know the value of a reviewer is to read both what they like and what they didn’t like, and, most importantly, why they liked or didn’t like something. I think the reason someone doesn’t like a zine is often the whole point of a review. I mean, if someone starts off a negative review of The Whirligig by saying, “I don’t like litzines...” you know the poor zine didn’t have a chance, and that colors your appreciation of the review. On the other hand, if you’ve read ten reviews of litzines by that reviewer and they always hate them, and then they review The Whirligig and love it, that review tells you a lot more.

        Of course, what I think would be total genius would be a review zine that only prints positive reviews of The Inner Swine. Oh wait...that is The Inner Swine. Never mind.

 

 

 

The Reviews

Dan Taylor

PO Box 5531, Lutherville, MD 21094

www.dantenet.com

dante@dantenet.com

 

Despite having his recent honeymoon cut short by Hurricane Isabel, the editor of The Hungover Gourmet still believes that America offers many fine vacation destinations. Then again, he also believes that SMALLVILLE is the best show on television and Larry Bowa belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, so take anything he says with a grain of salt. A big grain of salt. You can get the latest issue of THG by sending $4 to PO Box 5531, Lutherville, MD 21093 or visit www.hungovergourmet.com.

 

MEDIAGEEK #1 ($2 ppd from PO Box 2102, Champaign, IL 61825-2102. Also visit www.mediageek.org. 36 pages, digest)

        When creating a DIY media empire, losing your shirt by printing a zine is usually the first step. Mediageek head honcho Paul Riismandel took the opposite approach by launching a website/blog and a weekly radio show before taking the plunge into print at the ripe old age of 31. And after reading the first issue of this primer on DIY and guerilla media, maybe we should make that a minimum age for starting a zine. At least Riismandel (and contributors like Aj Michel of Low Hug) makes you feel like you’ve gotten your $2 worth because he’s GOT SOMETHING TO SAY.

        And I don’t mean crying in his beer about a failed relationship, or what happened at his commune, or what he thinks about the latest packet of free CDs that showed up in his PO Box. Nope, what we get here is real content ­ a call to arms, examples of what you can do to became a media guerilla, how to do a zine, what to look for when buying a camcorder. In other words, a very real emphasis on the “Do It” in “Do It Yourself.”

        Frankly, this is a publication that could fill a gaping void in a zine world that does a lot of preaching to the choir.

 

CLAMOR #20 (May/June 2003, $4 ppd from PO Box 1225, Bowling Green, OH 43402. Visit www.clamormagazine.org. 66 pages, full size)

The phrase “preaching to the choir” was something I couldn’t get out of my head while I read the latest issue of CLAMOR, a magazine that describes itself as having “New Perspectives on Politics, Culture, Media, and Life.” With this being their “Food Issue,” I was extremely interested in what the contributors had to say about topics like fair trade coffee, working in food service, urban foraging, veganism, etc. Unfortunately, what I found were any number of articles that delivered exactly what readers of a magazine like CLAMOR would expect to find. In other words, a lot of the same stances against the practices of big business and big government that we’ve heard for years and years. And unlike MEDIAGEEK, very little that said, “Hey, this is what’s going on but here’s what you can do to change it or at least make your voice heard.” As a card-carrying meat eater, I suppose what I was looking for was something that told me WHY I should change ­ or at least re-examine ­ my ways. And like the last issue of the mag that I read, there are some great articles like Jason Gillis Lemieux’s energetic piece on foraging and the sense of home and community he gets from it and Harry Seitz’s disgusting (but passionate) treatise on bad behavior in food service. But for a magazine that preaches “new perspectives” in their tagline, I didn’t find much that struck me as new.

 

BANDOPPLER #1 (Summer 2003, $16 for four issues from PMB #P506, 6201 15th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107-2382. Visit www.bandoppler.com.)

        “Great, another music magazine,” I  thought as I dug into the first, slick-looking issue of BANDOPPLER. According to “publisher” Treble Bandoppler, the mag was inspired by seeing an issue of GRAND ROYAL six years ago. Six years ago? What the hell took so long? Ever heard of Kinko’s? Actually, the mag looks and feels way more like CHUNKLET, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. But I’ll give them points for: a) a serious article on Andrew WK; b) refusing to review free CDs (at least that’s what they say); and, c) a review section that tells me how many words the article is right along with the title. To be honest, I don’t listen to a whole lot of “new” music these days. I’m much happier listening to scratchy ‘Harmonicats’ LPs or the soundtrack to Michael Mann’s MANHUNTER, so there might be a lot of really groovy info about cool bands in here, but to me it was just a lot of words. Nicely laid out words on nice paper.

 

RATED ROOKIE Vol. 2, Issue 4 ($3 from 562 Park Place #3, Brooklyn, NY 11238. Visit www.rated-rookie.com.)

        I’d heard this zine’s name bandied about here and there, but had never come across an issue till this one showed up in the ol’ mailbox. With its flip attitude and articles that make you stop and think, “was that fiction or not?,” it reminds me a bit of EYE, which was one of my fave pop culture mags of the last decade. Unfortunately, the cover article on Bob Burns (who art directed such masterpieces of genre cinema as THE HILLS HAVE EYES, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE HOWLING and the incredible RE-ANIMATOR) is barely a page long while an oral history of “the forgotten war between Marilyn Manson and The Human Oddities” amounts to six pages of people bitching about what a fame-hungry poseur Manson was/is. Not what I’d call riveting stuff. But that’s a minor complaint, since the rest of the mag features the kind of short pieces that make even the lamest concept a quick read. A fun and well-designed mag.

 

Brooklyn #42 (Fred Argoff, 1800 Ocean Parkway #F-10, Brooklyn, NY 11223-3037; $10 for 4 issues) Like his other great zine WATCH THE CLOSING DOORS, this is editor Fred Argoff’s personal view into a world he knows very well. While WTCD gives non-New Yorkers a glimpse of the NYC Subway System, BROOKLYN is a great look inside the magical land of the title. We find out what Fred was doing the night the lights went out last summer, roadway idiosyncracies, the 26th installment of the Brooklyn lexicon and cool photos, history and facts. Personally, I’ve always been a little intimidated by New York City and preferred smaller, more intimate big cities like Philly and Chicago. Reading Fred’s zines makes me want to take a trip up 95 and explore the ins and outs of his New York.

 

Trouser Chili #5 (Waldo Thomas Frank, 2910 Sycamore Street, Alexandria, VA 22305; $2.00) Humor is a funny thing. No pun intended. Television networks, huge film corporations, magazine conglomerates, newspaper syndicates and more all pay good money trying to figure out what amuses you and me. And frankly, what amuses me might not be what amuses you. That said, a zine that tries to tackle such a dicey and often touchy subject deserves kudos. TROUSER CHILI features a mix of parody, smart-ass letter responses, and (surprisingly) some straightforward B-movie reviews. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. Your mileage may vary. The sinister takes on that old, preachy daily newspaper standard ‘Family Circus’ definitely made me laugh out loud, which is more than I can say for numerous television shows with so-called professionals.

 

Musea #125 (Tom Hendricks, 4000 Hawthorne #5, Dallas, TX 75219; It says Free but send the guy a buck) Wow, 125 issues! Even if it is just 8 pages, 125 issues is hella impressive. Also impressive is the three-page list of shows that the editor would schedule on his fictional television network. Guess what? I’d watch a bunch of these, and they’re not all that far-fetched given some of the reality shows and specials that air currently. Hell, put ‘Pilots’ (a showcase of TV pilots that the audience gets to vote on), ‘Trailer World’ (nothing but previews of upcoming films) and ‘High Thinking and Super Thoughts’ (human achievement at its peak without dumbing it down for the audience) on my cable system this week and I’ll tune in. Not sure how I feel about the “Zine Hall of Fame,” but when you’ve got a zine that’s been around for 125 issues, I think you’ve earned the right to do whatever you want!

 

Batteries Not Included Vol. X #11 (Richard Freeman, 513 N Central Ave., Fairborn, OH 45324; $3/US, $4/Foreign) Richard Freeman’s amazingly consistent BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED has been around for years, dispensing unique insights into the world of porn and porn films. But don’t expect to read BNI for titillating thrills or kinky good fun. Each issue (normally about 12 pages) is densely packed with news, interviews and articles that would be at home in any professional magazine. Take this issue’s cover story, “Under Nude Management” which relates the story of San Francisco’s Lusty Lady peep show theater workers. The dancers bought the theater from the owners and now run the bump and grind as the nation’s first worker-owned strip club. It’s a great tale of women that society would normally look down upon seizing the opportunity to take charge of their lives and do something positive in the sex industry. A fascinating tale that sits side by side with interviews with porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle, porn starlet-finder Mike South (who talks about the influences of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea), and the second part of a chat with actress Lynn LeMay. BNI is an always-interesting and smart look inside a sometimes-sleazy world.

 

Daina Mold

PO BOX 6681, Portsmouth, NH 03802

kittyzine@yahoo.com

 

BIG PINCH WORLD #1

BIG PINCH WORLD is my Surprise Hit pick of this litter. When I first skimmed through it, I was not quite sure what to expect. Lots of text with no immediate clues about the subject matter and a poem on the back cover? Could be either really good or really bad. But the minute I started reading, any doubts were cast aside as I immediately fell into the author’s words. Randy writes short glimpses of his life that touch on his family, his childhood, and the people he loves. In between, he ruminates on his own feelings and perceptions. The writing is straightforward and bare, yet artistic at the same time. Randy chooses his words carefully and it shows. Several sentences stand alone so much that I want to write them down. While the sentimentality might be a bit too much for some people, I think it’s done very well. BIG PINCH WORLD manages to articulate the spaces that live among all of life’s most serious events: the awkward silences, the wordless emotions, and the hope for meaning in lost moments. I think it’s magic and it makes me want to write.

P.S. This is just the first issue! I can’t wait to see more.

P.P.S. Like I said, this zine might not hit everyone else in the same place. So you might not love it like I do. But see for yourself!

$2 or fair trade; Randy Osborne, PO BOX 246, Fox River Grove, IL 60021

 

JUNIE IN GEORGIA/GHANA #13

I had just finished reading two issues of JUNIE IN GEORGIA/ GHANA when my XD review packet brought me this brand new issue. I was delighted to see it, since I was already deeply into Junie’s world. And what exactly does this world consist of? Well, Junie left Georgia to live with her boyfriend in Ghana for about eight months. Jeremy is doing some kind of study program, while Junie is just taking in all of the sights and trying to learn as much as possible about her surroundings. In JIG #13, Junie describes the horrifying effects of certain African diseases, an endless battle with The Bugs (your sissy little American spiders pale in comparison!), political protests, signature local dishes and (my favorite part) the mundane details of her everyday Ghanaian life. I can’t even imagine uprooting my whole existence to live in a place so physically and culturally remote (nevermind leaving my Kitty!), but reading these tales makes me wish I could take off tomorrow. The writing is conversational and casual, with funny stick figure drawings strewn about for visuals. (In another issue, the drawing of “Jazz Hands!” sent me into a fit!) The zine can be slightly difficult to read at times, but it’s quite worth the effort. It’s not often that an already entertaining perzine can teach you so, so much. I suggest you order #’s 11 & 12 as well to get a complete picture of this journey.

$2 or equivalent trade; PO BOX 438, Avondale Estates, GA 30002

 

LOVE

LOVE is a comic zine following the adventures of Jack and Pokie, two guys who happen to be in love with each other. Their creator, Matt, hopes to tell a story about a relationship between two people while avoiding the usual gay clinches (such as “gyms, cruising, and fancy French restaurants”!). I think he accomplishes this task fairly well. Jack and Pokie are real characters, not caricatures. Like most of us, they’re artists or writers with punk leanings. They work at crappy jobs they hate while wishing for something more. But the “more” isn’t what everybody else wants, like houses and cars, career, maturity, credit cards and social standing. I think the “more” is not so much about getting to another place, but about feeling okay with choosing a life that satisfies you. And no, I don’t mean the gay lifestyle here. I mean the punk-inspired, zinester lifestyle where creation is everything and daily life is fulfilling. Because there is no tangible “prize” to work towards, our lives are made to feel less successful, less real. Jack and Pokie are happy, if unsure about the future. I feel the exact same way. My life is very good, but it’s not like everybody else’s. And that sometimes makes me feel like shit, even though I know it shouldn’t. Because I don’t want my life to be like everybody else’s. Anyway, enough of my shitty, bitter philosophy. The drawing is good and I especially love the parodies of “Milk & Cheese” and “The Powerpuff Girls”! There’s just the teensiest bit of sex in here, many declarations of love, plus a wise homeless man to wrap it all up. Oh, and also I really, really want a crow’s nest of my very own! It would make my thinkings that much better.

$2; Meniscus Enterprises, 1573 N. Milwaukee Ave, PMB #464, Chicago, IL 60622

 

THE HUNGOVER GOURMET #7

I really love reading about food. Where food comes from, how it’s made, who makes it, where it’s served, who eats it, the traditions behind it, the future of food, its cultural significance... I enjoy reading about food as much as I love eating it, if not more. When I get a new cookbook, I sit down and devour its contents as though it were a novel. HUCKLEBERRY FINN? EAST OF EDEN? No thanks, I’ve got my COOK’S ILLUSTRATED BEST RECIPE SOUPS book, THE FRUGAL GOURMET, my fuckin’ Heloise and my Alton Brown. Nevermind that I hardly ever put my vast cornucopia of cooking knowledge to use. Yeah, I make my living as a cook. But it’s really not the same as doing it at home. Someday, when I’m in my declining years, I’ll be foisting trays of culinary delights upon frightened neighbor children who run, screaming, “EEK! It’s the crazy cooking cat lady! ARGGG!!!” Until then, zines like THE HUNGOVER GOURMET will satiate my appetite for good, hearty food stories. Issue #7 tackles forgotten eateries, restaurant reviews, a love affair with licorice, our own Davida’s admission of being a foodie, Indonesian dining mishaps plus zine & movie reviews and more. The combination of tantalizing contributors and savory editor make this a nutritious, tasty issue. It’s hard to read about eateries I’ll never be able to experience (because they’ve closed or they’re too far away), but I’ll manage. After all, my hobby is reading recipes I’ll never cook!

$2; Dan Taylor, PO BOX 5531, Lutherville, MD 21094-5531

 

ADVICE TO MYSELF

Writings, Ramblings, and Essays about Sexuality, Spirituality, Self, Situations, and Communication by (and for) RICH MACKIN

        I don’t know how in tune you are with zinester gossip, but Rich Mackin’s gotten himself into a mess. It has to do with sexual harassment, sexism, personal attacks, activism, feminism... basically every “ism” in the book. Here is his story. Here’s what he’s done to change, what he’s going to do, how he feels, how he lives. Backed up by a TON of research, Rich explores the very nature of sexual conduct, female/male perspectives, society’s ideals/ rules, what to do/ not to do if you don’t want to offend anyone, how to treat people, how to live inside of a plastic bag and not bother anybody with your presence... (OK, just kidding about that last one!)

        I’m a woman. I’m a feminist. But above all I’m a humanist. I disagree with some of what is written in ADVICE TO MYSELF, but not the things, as a feminist, I’m “supposed” to get riled up about. I’ve never been one to paint things black and white. I think gray is the color of humanity and it always will be. I applaud the fact that Rich is attempting to better himself. People would be golden if they tried this hard. But it’s almost too hard. Militant PC-ness does not agree with me.

        Regardless of your opinions on these issues, ADVICE TO MYSELF will make you think. It will teach you things and force you to ponder your behavior, your surroundings, your society. It’s difficult to review this zine without getting into my personal thoughts on the subjects at hand. But that’s a good thing. I’ve read a lot of political zines that simply place their ideals on a soapbox, shout down at you, refuse questions, then quietly slip out the back door. ADVICE TO MYSELF does not do this. It asks you to read, think, discuss, and respond. That’s a good thing.

(P.S. I miss BOOK OF LETTERS.)

$2 (suggested donation, proceeds benefit safetynet, an organization which educates men on intimate abuse and sexual violence); Rich Mackin, PO BOX 14642, Portland, OR 97293-0642.

 

Donny Smith

PO Box 411, Swarthmore, PA 19081

www.geocities.com/dwanzine

dwanzine@hotmail.com

 

Since our last issue, I’ve put my zine on hold, turned down a publisher’s interest in a zine history anthology Davida and I are working on, taken a ten-day trip to Nebraska, and gotten a second job as an English instructor at the college where I’m librarian.  I’m 6’ tall (but apparently getting shorter). My eyes are blue and my hair is reddish blonde. My turn-ons include skinny boys with glasses, good vegetarian cooking, and unruined landscapes. My turn-offs include loudness, crowds, and stupidity.

 

Emergency No.4 (2002?)

available from Ammi, PO Box 72023, New Orleans LA  70172  USA (ammiemergency@yahoo.com) for $2 cash or trade

subtitle:  Monsters!

on the cover:  photocopy of a photo of a girl maybe playing piano overprinted in linocut with a picture of the same girl wrapped in a monstrous worm or snake

inside:  In part 1, Ammi and her friends travel the country in a beat up car or hitchhiking, squatting here and there, doing performance art and activism.  In part 2, Ammi reflects on the suicide of her friend Sera Bilezikian and on the World Trade Center attacks.  

quote: That car represented everything wonderful and terrible about Laura.  None of the doors opened but all the windows did. We climbed in and out of them.  Anybody could mess with that car, but nobody could steal it and nobody could fix it.

        Laura was similarly always—unshakably, brilliantly, inappropriately—Laura.

        “You’re gay,” she accused me one day, bitterly.

        “I’m bisexual.”

        “But you’re dating a woman.”

        “Yeah.”

        “Well, everyone’s bisexual.  You don’t have to act on it in such a…such a…perverted manner!”

        Laura tended to say exactly what she thought, flushed and vehement, usually while knocking over a beer in the process.  Lots of times she said things she didn’t actually think, often while knocking over a beer in the process.

overall:  A sprawling epic of a zine.  Difficult reading, sometimes because of the hard-eyed social observation, sometimes because of the draining emotion, sometimes because the writing style was a little too artful (but the times I thought “That’s exactly true” outweighed the times I thought “I wish she hadn’t written it that way”). 

 

Etidorhpa #8 (September 2003)

available from Franetta, PMB 170, 40 E Main St, Newark DE  19711  USA for $2, trade, or the usual

subtitle:  Bit by Rubber

on the cover:  a burnt black baby doll

inside:  the maddening, exhausting story of a bounced paycheck, the unraveling of her workplace that followed, and her thoughts on work and where it leads us; a piece of fiction about a woman whose jobless husband keeps a terrible promise

quote:  Despair, resentment, anger and fear seemed to coat every available surface with the equivalent of astral soap scum.  I’m not sure about the existence of things like auras or other so-called psychic energies, but I know a bunch of unhappy people can make the air feel worse than the haziest LA smog.

overall: you’ll be thankful

Extricate #3 (2003?)

available from Dave Birchall, squatting in Manchester, for 60p (UK) or $2 (US); email blackandwhitecatpress@hotmail.com for information

inside:  comics about applying for unemployment benefits, photocopying, not driving cars, walking around seeing odd things, and giving up on “normal life”; also, a guide to squatting in Wales and England with a legal notice you can copy and fasten to the door of your squat to keep out police and landlords

quote:  a place to exist and / function as something / resembling a human being. / an end to the collective (in)sanity / that has taken over the world. / a wounded thought / left waiting on shadows.

overall:  The drawings are  ungainly and rely too much on scribble (more variety of line weight and texture would be good), and the human figures are definitely not drawn from life. I’m not saying it’s bad.  I just want more evidence of love of the medium.    

 

Flakes issue 1 (2003?)

available from Darren Hamby 8276382, S.R.C.I., 777 Stanton Blvd, Ontario OR  97914  USA for free

what it is: a perzine handwritten in pencil on notebook paper, since he doesn’t have access to a photocopier

inside:  a story or memoir about of few months of hanging out, getting stoned, getting drunk, and keeping out of trouble

quote:  As I sat there I felt I had accomplished what I had set out to do.  I had lived at the coast for a moment, partied with some local yokels and crashed through peoples backyards knocking things over.  I was mostly happy about crashing through peoples backyards.  End

overall:  He comes off as a goofus, but I gotta admire that he’s writing this out by hand, and I’m curious to know where the story goes from here. 

For the Clerisy Issue #53 (January 2004)

available from Brant Kresovich, PO Box 404, Getzville NY  14068  USA for (probably) a personal letter with book recommendations; kresovich@hotmail.com

subtitle:  Good Words for Readers

on the cover:  thoughts on why people who wear glasses are so attractive

inside: reviews of a broad range of books (Diet, Sex and Yoga; The GI War Against Japan; a V.I. Warshawski mystery; Cheaper by the Dozen (the book, not the movie); and more); zine reviews; interesting reader letters

overall:  I’ve always thought this zine was a little too smarter-than-thou.  But it’s always entertaining, and I find out about all these amazing books.  I use it for collection development at the library where I work!

disclosure:  Brent did review my zine Dwan as “unique,” with “Brave yearning poetry.”  (Flatterer!)

 

How to Make Trouble 3 (2003)

available from Homebrew Publications, PO Box 4434, Melbourne University, Parkville  3052  Victoria  AUSTRALIA (questionmarks01@yahoo.co.uk) for $5? (look for it in your local independent bookstore)

subtitle:  Revenge of the Trouble Maker!

inside:  snippets of historic and contemporary accounts of riots, protests, and pranks, mostly Australian, illustrated with posters and graffiti 

quote:  In the run up to the Olympics a student prankster hoaxes the Lord … Mayor of Sydney by handing him a “torch” made out of a chair leg, pudding tin and kerosene soaked underwear.