Little magazines are back

The zine scene's seen weak weeks, certainly, but the gritty ink stays distinct: a permanent link for those who think outside the precinct. It may wax and wane, but for any with an intention to mention the subversive soul, zines offer distinct impressions.

I'd originally intended to simply argue that short form print never went anywhere and therefore had nowhere to return from, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to wax poetic ^.^

> A quarter-century ago, conventional wisdom held that ebooks, read on electronic devices, would replace books made of paper.

Until publishers thought “huh, we can increase our margins AND increase our prices too for ebooks?!”

You can tell this is yet another US centric post. Once having moved to France, almost five years ago, I've been and continue being pleasantly overwhelmed by the quality and quantity to choose from, of printed journals, magazines and books. Once a week, on Wednesdays, when the closest mediatheque is open the entire day, I go in and dive into reading everything I can, for hours and hours, with a small break for lunch, most of the time until they close.

I run a local print-only zine in SF called Lower Haight Local ! We print 1,000 copies a month with a local printer and have 20-30 neighbors contributing art or writing to each issue. We have a block party to distribute it each month.

I find that despite print no longer being the fastest place to get news, the physicality of it connects neighbors in a way online publications or social media cannot replicate. It’s pretty special - if you’re interested in getting your own zine off the ground or want to contribute, reach out!

So I just spent a week moving 60 linear feet of books and I'm done with dead trees. Neil Gaiman has a quote that goes something like "Books are like sharks. There's nothing better at being a shark than a shark. There's nothing better at being a book than a book. But a Kindle can make a very reasonable replacement for a bookshelf."

I'm probably going to get rid of my dead tree books and replace them with PDFs or text files (thank you Project Gutenberg for making plain text available.) I am suspicious of the Amazon Ecosystem and find text or pdfs read on a modern tablet preferable. Do not get me started about epubs. How can professional organizations make epubs that are so wrongly formatted.

Which is to say... I will buy your print book, as long as it also comes with a PDF or text version.

But I am very happy to see there's a corner of the world where non-trash, non-ai-slop is still valued. I only wish there was a happy medium between printed books and non drm digital documents for litzines.

I just returned from my mom's house. Visited her with my 4yo daughter. The house is full with old magazines and books, it's a time machine to my youth (and that of my parents). The magazines are full of drawings, annotations, etc, by me and my brothers... My daughter could connect with all that easily, we read together the same phisical comic book, she can see how her father and uncles draw on it just like her... Good luck having that on digital.

Today I had a bizarre experience. I went to a library. I spent a good 40+ minutes browsing through the aisles offering a truly intriguing selection acquiring a stack of books along the way and one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed.

A few of them were about how economically alienated Millennials are and why. One book with a broken piggy bank on the cover blamed boomers.

I mention this because I don't know how accurate my next claim is about to be because I put the books that may support my claim back on the shelf. If I hadn't then I would've just hedged my argument with "I need time to read these books but..."

It's a shame that Millennial's are yet to be able to turn what I'm going to call "The People's High-Brow Culture"—half-low-brow-half-high-brow—into sustainable media.

I think Tumblr was peak 'what I'm referring to'. No, don't call it mid-brow. This is different. I think. Who am I kidding. I don't actually have to prove my point. If I can get enough people to wax nostalgic about how everything they consumed online, particularly on Tumblr in the early 2010s, had just the right blend of dilettante mediocracy...passionate exchanges about art and culture without the professional affect is what I'm struggling to describe.

It's probably less a matter of economic alienation alone but an institutional kind as well. Maybe they're correlated. I did not get popular economics books that would help make my case here.

Vice may have been the closest real outlet to what I'm trying to describe but we should all know how that turned out.

I'm imagining a dilettante mediocracy...people who were too naive to know that the people working for the actual publications parallel to them could afford to loaf around and try to get paid for covering the things they wrote about.

It seems that alls left of this era is "BookTok" and "BookTube" and somehow apparently...Anthony Fantano.

This is not a good explanation of what I think. Sorry.

I'm tired of puffy stuffy "Bequest betwixt the classics, my dear" sort of media that Portico represents to me.

When do I get be middle-aged and affect my good taste on younger generations who are desperately in need of it. I don't wanna read about Myrtle Beach and Dean Martin or Marcus Aurelius!

Portico??? I don't even own a house!