#anybody know how to throw a community zine

[placentafluid]

actually waterparks is brainwashing their audience is a fucking awesome zine idea...

[lit--bitch]

Current-Reads (13/04/20 - 18/04/20) 🎺🐝

(Disclosure: I know one of the writers (Annie Dobson) I’m featuring in the current-reads this week through Writing Squad. I also know Tom Bland who runs Spontaneous Poetics but I don’t personally know the two writers whose work I’ve enjoyed on the zine. And I don’t know anybody else sadly, probably because I’m a loner and a loser). 

Here’s the standard preface: every Sunday without fail I throw up the freshest literature and photography I’ve read over the week, sometimes it’s a book, sometimes it’s a piece I saw in a magazine or an online zine, sometimes it’s something I saw on social media, etc. Sometimes I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to a few of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some pieces more than others. C’est la vie. And any titles that you see in bold are hyperlinked so if you click or tap them they’ll direct you straight to the source... or shopping basket. 

Anyway I’m just gonna get right into it. 

So this week I’ve been reading C.C. Hannett / kmwgh’s Lockdown Life and Charles Theonia’s Two Poems on Queen Mob’s Teahouse, I’ve read Haibun/Uncertainty/A Promise To Your Clothes from Jane Burns on Spontaneous Poetics and I flipped right back to September 2019 and re-read E.A.B’s have a wank because it’s fitting advice for our current predicament. I’ve returned to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume and I’ve been falling in love with Ariana Reines’s The Cow all over again, (whose new collection, A Sand Book, I’ll be reviewing in a few weeks time). Also been reading Annie Dobson’s Before The Ghost Town on the Writing Squad’s Staying Home series which boasts brilliant work. I can never get over how many amazing writers there are in the world. I’ve also discovered a new photographer with a brand new book out from Palm* Studios, Molly Matalon’s When a Man Loves a Woman. 

***

E.A.B’s have a wank, Spontaneous Poetics (21/09/2019): I keep going back to this specific piece because this poem makes you feel like you’re stood outside the John Snow in Soho, completely wasted, having a cig with a friend who’s also pissed up too. That’s the feeling I get from E.A.B’s work. She’s memorable and familiar and probably has a decent right hook. This poem is short, succinct, and means exactly what it means. I love work that is entitled quite plainly, in a way doesn’t subvert expectation—it’s tongue-in-cheek and funny. It’s also pretty good advice for when you’re in the midst of a global pandemic... or a personal crisis, I’m not sure what the difference is anymore. She also has another one up on Spontaneous Poetics, which is equally brilliant, blue balls at the end of humanity. 

Jane Burn’s Haibun/Uncertainty/A Promise To Your Clothes, Spontaneous Poetics (17/04/2020): This is a deeply sad poem eclipsed by grief and time’s relentless push and pull. It also has some absolutely beautiful personification, and it’s in the description of these vernacular objects that you really feel the subject’s hurting. ‘You’ is so empowering here, because it attempts to universalise the reader’s accessibility to the ardour of experience in this work, but is equally an attempt to sever the writer’s ‘You’ from themselves as ‘I’. This poem tells us that some pain is so painful, we can never fully accept that it has been ours to bear. 

Annie Dobson’s Before The Ghost Town, Staying Home from The Writing Squad (RECOMMEND): I’m not saying this just to be kind, all of the work on Staying Home is absolutely brilliant (discluding my own work, I promise I’m not that full of it) but Annie’s piece happened to be one of the first I read and I still think about it. Annie probably doesn’t know this but I stalk her writing. I’m her big fat secret admirer. Quintessentially British, her work smacks of kitchen-sink realism and cherry chapsticks you get in the chemist’s. I always get a noughties vibe from Annie’s writing, I always know what she’s on about. She doesn’t make the banality of life mystical, she treats the ordinary as well, just ordinary, and that’s magical enough anyway. Before The Ghost Town is a mish-mash of genres, it’s an essay but it’s a thought piece but it reads like a diary-entry and is formatted like poetry in some places. More than anything it’s a document on civilisation in Lewisham during the Covid-19 pandemic, and how full the world is still despite the reductive effects of a worldwide crisis. It’s a political critique on how fucked the UK government is, and how community is still one of the most valuable things we have in a world that is trying to make you fight over the last bag of fucking bread flour. It’s honest and sad and retrospective. It’s also filled with promise. I absolutely loved it. 

Molly Matalon, When a Man Loves a Woman: For a long time I shot pictures of men on 35mm to 120mm. I often felt strange doing it. I was used to the dogma of typical male politics; boys don’t cry, having a tough dad, penis envy, etc. It didn’t interest me anymore; the object of masculinity in its most vulnerable, in its deepest sensitivities was the impetus behind my desire to photograph men. Molly Matalon takes pictures of men I wish I had taken. But I don’t think she reverses the power dynamics, per se, although you can absolutely make the case for this, even argue her work is a case for the female gaze. But for me, she strips away these typical power dynamics, she doesn’t polarise herself as the subject, or the object. I don’t see tensions between sexes in these images. I see vulnerability, I see trust, I see relationships. I see men just as worthy of depiction as flowers, as fruits. I feel softness, I feel curves. The photographs in When a Man Loves a Woman are works of of idealisation of woman is implied by man, man as woman, woman as man, the fragile unity in these two creatures, and their reciprocations. She’s absolutely one to watch. 

Ariana Reines, The Cow (RECOMMEND): Ariana Reines is a writer so dear to me, that I can’t really contain in words just how much impact she’s had on me. I salute Elizabeth Ellen (a wonderful writer, and an editor at HOBART magazine in Los Angeles) who, one day, was moving apartments and very generously sent me a box of books all the way from the USA to my parents’ house in Manchester. In that box amongst many books lay Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl translated by Ariana Reines, and her debut collection, The Cow. So if it wasn’t for Elizabeth, I wouldn’t have read any Ariana Reines until probably much later on in life. At least, I’d like to think I’d have come across Ariana at some point anyway. 

The Cow was published in 2006 by my all-time fav magazine/publisher, Fence. The Cow isn’t poetry, isn’t prose, it’s not an essay, it’s just not any genre at all. And the fact you can’t categorise it is just really is emblematic of Ariana Reines as a writer, because she doesn’t redefine the dimensions of genres, she fucking blitzes them up in a big genre-food-processor. The Cow is the mythologisation and de-mythologisation of the woman as cow. It is the consumption and defecation of woman as cow. It is a lamentation. It is raw. It is beastly. It is thoughts and statistics and menstruation and abbattoirs. It is a dark work of art, and it’s one of the most beautiful, angry and strong texts I’ve ever read. It’s one of those books I think about often. I’d be engrossed on London tubes re-reading this over and over. It’s absolutely everything. 

Patrick Süskind, Perfume (RECOMMEND): Ah, the mothership. Patrick Süskind is... one of a kind. I borrowed the book from my best friend James and after reading it, I read it again. I still haven’t given back James’s copy (which I really need to), and I recently bought a UK first-edition of Perfume so now I can say it’s on my bookshelf. Reading Perfume is an intoxicating experience... I guess it’s because of the way Süskind writes about smell, and he writes about it so vividly that, for me at least, it can induce olfactory hallucinations. It’s not just about the story of a murderer with a superhuman power for scent, it’s about our relationship with different smells we come across throughout our life, their pungency and their ability to kind of tattoo our memory. You can recall scents in a way that you might not be able to with sounds. I don’t remember fully the way my maternal grandmother sounded, she passed when I was a little girl, but I still know her smell. It’s Youth Dew and sweets. Perfume induces sensations and memories in me. It’s a text I go back to time and time again. 

C.C. Hannett / kmwgh’s Lockdown Life, Queen Mob’s Tea House (03/04/2020): Queen Mob’s Tea House is a new fav of mine and their zine kind of reminds me of the Richmond Tea Rooms in Manchester’s Gay Village. They’re a bit Alice in Wonderland, a bit occult, a bit down-the-rabbit-hole, pink and sparkly, with black lace. If that description of the zine borders on pretension then, sorry. I have zine synaethesia. So these poems from ‘C.C. Hannett / kmwgh’ (I’m not sure I understand the name) were awesome little tidbits on living through a global pandemic. An ellision of pop culture, absurdity and tenderness. A reminder that we will never get this time back, and that if you’ve got the luxury of being with your loved ones right now, cherish it. I also really loved the last line of this guy’s bio, no social media handles or website, just: “You can find him if you want to.” Lol. 

Charles Theonia, Two Poems, Queen Mob’s Tea House (24/05/2017) (RECOMMEND): I loved both of these poems but I mostly wanted to talk about ‘shame’. I enjoyed ‘shame’ for its density—it’s a single block paragraph—the format has a weight to it, like that of feeling shame. I know this was published in 2017, basically I was just surfing the zine’s website and clicked on Queen of Pentacles (I was intrigued bc I read Tarot) and this was the  latest entry on there. I enjoy the bluntness and conversational-ism of these two pieces, but I particularly loved ‘shame’ for the way it unpacks shame as a multi-faceted, festering spawn that drags you under, and under, and under. Its resonance is powerful. 

*** Anyway that is enough from me zis week. Next Friday I’m reviewing Charlotte Geater’s poems for my fbi agent which is again from Bad Betty Press. Stay safe, eat cake. xxxxxx

[robo-cryptid]

I got so frustrated today while doing work that it led me into a weird reflexive spiral, and anyway I wrote up these handy lists (for myself, but also for you if you want it) of ways writing fanfic is and is not like writing academic stuff. 

Ways writing fanfic is kinda like writing academic papers:

1. You can assume your audience is smart, maybe smarter and more knowledgeable and more familiar with the material than you are. They definitely share a lot of the same background and jargon for the basic stuff you might have to explain in an original work. This means you don’t have to worry about over-describing or contextualizing everything. You can take shortcuts and dole out information only when it becomes relevant. They’ll let you know if something’s confusing.

2. Simple and straightforward writing is a lot more accessible to read than long, elaborate sentences. The long, elaborate sentences are important for more complex ideas (and for diversifying the sentences so there’s a “rhythm” to it all that keeps it interesting), but they’re usually not necessary for describing simple ideas. Alternatively, if you’re prone to long, elaborate sentences, throwing the occasional short, choppy little thing in there can be pretty attention-grabbing too.

3. It’s pretty important to maintain both active voice and whatever tense you’ve chosen (present or past). (I know, some science disciplines actually ask for passive voice, but those are often the same disciplines that complain that “lay audiences” find their articles boring. It’s not the only reason academic science is inaccessible and/or difficult to communicate to their publics, but it’s certainly not unrelated. Anyway, you probably don’t wanna describe your romantic fanfic the same way you describe your data and methods.)

4. As much as people struggle to reach minimum word goals, sometimes you have to work with maximum word goals instead. “How much can I explain/describe/accomplish when there are limits?” or “How much can I get away with not writing?” or “How much of this is actually necessary?” are such helpful questions. (I once had a philosophy professor who gave us max page limits and shortened the length of required essays throughout the semester while making the topics more and more complex. It was a pain in the ass, but it was really good practice!) Either way, editing to delete extraneous stuff is as important as adding things that are missing.

5. Sometimes the recurring plots and tropes are like when a whole class turns in an essay on the same topic. Sometimes your goal isn’t to spectacularly innovate but just to write the same damn thing and hope it resonates in a unique way.

6. Done is still better than perfect. 

Ways fanfic is nothing at all like academic writing:

1. Nobody’s grading you. Go ahead and fuck up; at best, you learn something from it (and maybe even learn it with grace), and at worst, you take a few hits to your pride. 

2. Publishing is as simple as clicking a button (unless you’re applying for zines, but those are rarer, and even then rejection has no bearing whatsoever on either your talent or, more importantly, your future prestige or career goals or whatever real world shit you have going on). You aren’t beholden to a panel of people looking to judge the value of your work. It’s just you, clicking that button. You’re fine.

3. It’s way easier to get away with fucking with the “rules”. Whether you’ve deliberately made stylistic choices that do involve lengthy, winding sentences and tons of exposition and passive voice or whatever, or you’ve done it all by accident because “fuck it, this is a hobby, it’s supposed to be fun first and foremost,” that’s all valid too.

4. You can stop at any time. You don’t have to finish anything. You don’t owe anybody anything. Maybe you want to finish as a point of pride, and I think that’s rad -- I’m that way too, and there’s a lot of value in finishing what you started and what that does for your self-esteem to have accomplished A Thing! But you don’t have to. Don’t beat yourself up over things that should be fun.

5. You can work on whatever project you feel like working on. You don’t have to do them in any set order (unless you signed up for something with a deadline, but that’s definitely the exception more than the rule). You don’t have to constantly produce on someone else’s schedule. Make your own -- or don’t -- and stick with it -- or don’t. It’s your free time, not anybody else’s.

6. Done might be better than perfect, but there’s also nothing stopping you from going back to edit something plaguing you from days, or weeks, or even years ago. Hit publish now. Fix it later.

[gigslist]

53 WAYS TO SAVE THE WORLD - YOU CAN DO IT

I live in Haight Ashbury, walking distance to 4 hospitals. There are homeless tents on the streets, but there is no rush on hospitals. We live in a high density homeless mecca. Homeless people in California have typhus, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, fleas and rats and more. Everything that is highly contagious and nasty, but no covid? 

Same reports from friends I know in person in other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area who drive past hospitals every day. And reports from Los Angeles, which has the biggest visible homeless population! There are new web videos of high density homeless camps by different documentary makers every week. No ambulances, no body bags. If there was any of that at hospitals, DIY documentary makers would have it all over the web. I look everyday, nothing. 

I also talked to a neonatal ICU nurse, long time neighbor of 8 years. My nurse friend also has a masters in science. The vaccine was never tested long enough to check if it works nor safe. So far the vaccine doesn’t work. Nurses were told it was only one time, not they have to take it again. The extra virulent strains are fake, excuses to spread more fear to make more money for chemical companies. Lockdown is not going away until you go look for yourself and do something about it.

Do not trust the screen. It wants you to be isolated, so you don’t talk to others to find swap notes, or go see for yourself to find out the truth. Your emails and messages can be diverted and edited, posts taken down from social media. No public gatherings is a Communist takeover tactic. Divide and conquer. Marxism and Communism are the same agenda, take your freedom and your property. 

There is a virus, but it’s a deep fake AI computer virus telling you that people are ill when they aren’t. Telling you a loved one is in an ICU for covid, when they only have the common flu or common cold or another illness entirely. The people on the screen are actors. The network news doesn’t check its sources, it only copies what’s out there.  There are currently major court cases about it, but fake covid new takes up all the news searches, so you don’t know about it.

The software to make the deep fakes that spread the fake virus news is free, developed in the USA by game makers. I research entertainment and marketing technology for an arts biz zine. The USA has been invaded. The government you just elected is pandering to this invasion. Follow the money. Follow the yellow brick road. 

Throw in some communist agents to move things along with “Defund the police”, church smear campaigns, “cancel culture” and race riots, to keep you afraid and isolated. Now you are alone and unprotected and no privacy and no spiritual centers to gather for support or pray for comfort. But YOU CAN FIX THIS in the real world… don’t let anybody say you can’t.

If you are feeling like a deer in the headlights I understand. Here are some pointers to get started: 

Do not trust the screen. Socializing face to face is the best brain and health development for children and adults. Put the screen down and step away. Get back out there and rebuild your humanbeingness. YOU CAN DO IT with confidence.

Meet up with your friends face to face. Adults won’t bully face to face in front of other people. Talk about what you see with your own eyes for real. People are less likely to lie to you face to face and you have a better chance of seeing it. You also have real friends to swap real notes to check stuff. 

Saving the world is a lot of small things we can each do to make a big thing. We are stuck with the screen for some things for now. Maybe bills to pay or video meeting or online duties for work. Or online workshops if there’s no classes in your neighborhood. Use the screen for those, but sparingly. Do wear your mask in public and keep clean, but forget your fear. YOU ARE BRAVE to save yourself and your community.

Save money, the planet, your mental health and time:

(This is how the middle class paid their mortgages, got great educations, and made their neighborhoods successful safe communities.)

Get social in person.

Go to a meetup or volunteer.

Have a dinner party.

Don’t use disposables.

Don’t shop on the screen.

Chat at local grocers for eye witness news.

Learn to cook and sew.

Learn to fix stuff.

Learn to upcycle.

No paper towels or wipes.

Use reusable washable dishrags.

Buy stuff that lasts or is fixable.

Invest in local made stuff.

Hand wash instead of dry clean.

Use an iron to press your clothes.

Use a dishwasher to save water.

Learn to do math in your head.

Learn basic bookkeeping.

Learn how to save water.

Avoid plastics, especially for food.

Baking soda and dish soap instead of bleach.

Brown vinegar or alcohol instead of bug spray.

Tobacco instead of diet pills and brain enhancers.

Home cooked whole food instead of vitamin pills.

Eat food made or grown nearest to you.

Learn lateral thinking - seeing knock on effects.

Do crosswords and puzzles.

Read magazines and news printed on paper.

Hand write letters to people, great privacy.

Don’t go away on holidays. Have a party instead.

Invest in mom and pop shops.

Read paper books from friends and libraries

Make friends with your neighbors.

Have regular community gatherings.

Start a neighborhood watch.

Help each other out.

Rent out rooms to pay the mortgage.

Live within bicycle distance of shops.

Go solar and off grid.

Use reusable batteries.

Grow hydroponic veggies in an apartment.

Background check all information.

Keep kids in school until at least 21 years of age.

Do not teach your kids to play computer games.

Teach your kids to play screenless games with other kids.

Teach your children the stuff in this list.

Journal every day to process your thoughts.

Check your spending everyday to know the numbers.

Set a limit on spending, so you are not borrowing.

Ward off or reprogram negative influencers.

Do public down silent protests.

Give common sense practical reasons.

Hand write protest letters and send registered mail.

Even if you don’t believe in God, pray together.

Hugs heal lots of stresses and fears.

Think positive, be positive, do positive.

I’ll not write the book full of reasons why. Try it and learn for yourself.

Something Else Important to help your community:

The mental health hospitals, homeless help, drug rehab, and local medical clinics and museums, arts centers and schools that the government is closing down. Those were founded and funded by private people who donated them to your community out of their own pockets, on top of taxes. Same with the founded police forces. 

A government does not have the right to take those away.

YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT, including the legal right, to organize and protest.

Group thought works just as well for positive stuff. YOU CAN DO THIS, don’t let anybody say you can’t. You can get out of your prison and save the world by putting the screen in its place. Face to face social community fun and human to human comfort and confidence. 

You’ve been bamboozled by bigoted bitches. YOU HAVE THE BALLS to be beautiful bastards and blast the bitches back big time. Don’t need big bucks and YOU CAN DO IT SCREENLESS to better beef up your privacy and freedom to talk. 

DO IT!!! <3 

The Marxist chick who doesn’t know that Marxism kills freedom of speech and religion. FYI she is a concept performance artist for a living. Her thing is gathering people in public to do something to disrupt. It was getting everybody to go naked and paint themselves gold, that didn’t sell books. So they decided to call themselves Marxists, because college students love that stuff, because they don’t have the educations to know better. Throw in some communist agents to move things along and you have “Defund the police” campaigns. 

Pull your s..t together and get out there and fight back. Reopen your shops and schools, only buy from mom and pop, tell the big corporations to f..k off.  

You cannot patent a natural medicine. You are being bullied to take it to make big Pharma rich and put kill off natural medicine. Tobacco is a better vaccine for a lot of stuff, ask native Americans.

Stop believing the screen, use your own eyes and ears. Go back to print news. 

Those people on the news reporting and giving interviews about the pandemic and vaccine are deep fakes. The software to make them is free.

and treated like mushrooms. Get out and fight back, save your people, save your mom and pop shops, save your neighborhood, save your community. If somebody says defund the police, lock them up because they are trying to make things worse for you on purpose.