Category: The Written Word

My post from a few days ago about professionalism (or lack thereof) in zine publishing sent me on a little search for zine related mailing list, yahoo groups and online discussions on the subject. That’s where I discovered Zinester, a service that enables zine publishers to host mailing lists and ezines as well. While they don’t seem to be pitching themselves to print zinesters except in name (and really, since the print zine community is pretty decentralized, I don’t know how you could), the mailing list tool is perfect for zinemakers who given their inconsistant publishing schedule and low-tech operation have a hard time keeping in touch with their fans.

Now they can if they care to. Bravo.

During my stay in the hospital, I found myself inexplicably reading a stack of zines I had acquired over the last few months and most of then were just plain awful, dry, pedantic blather from people who had no idea how uninteresting they were.

A wonderful exception, however, brightened my mood, a how-to-make-a-zine guide from Microcosm Publishing, a Portland-based distribution house. Microcosm has been around since 1997 and is an absolute blessing to vaguely obsessive zine fan, a well-organized online catalog, distribution policies that respect both zinesters and fans and a manifesto that is neither pretensious nor self-rightous, just honest.

I was fortunate enough to grab Stolen Sharpie Revolution, which has some excellent DIY tips but I’d recommend just about anything they do.

“Kevin Smokler was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Kevin and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.”

–Inspired by Waking Ned Devine

My friend Maggie Barry just a series of articles on etiquette that are bright and funny rather than fussy New England. Way to go!

Arts & Letters Daily is gone, a victim of too little money and the inevitable end to the good will of their contributors. I will miss it terribly and shiver at the ever widening void of weblogs for humanities geeks. Or maybe I just haven’t found them yet. Well, one of the editors at AL Daily has started Philosophy & Literature which looks like a good start.

Across the country, medical schools are requiring doctors and medical students to take writing classes in an effort to produce clean case histories and see their patients as human beings rather than statistics. The thinking goes that if you have the language to tell a patients’ story (“Jane Doe had a ruptured spleen” rather than “The spleen was ruptured”), you can imagine them as a real person. Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital in New York even has its own literary journal.

Reading this reminded me of my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins as a rare humanities major in a sea of pre-meds, a bit like being the assistant chaplain at West Point. The two science geeks I lived with would alternate between making fun of my inactive career goals (“Ohhh Writing Seminars. You want fries with that?”) and begging me for counsol on their term papers (“Uhhh, Kev. What’s a passive verb?).

We didn’t stay friends but now I know what a Hippocampus is and hopefully they can string two sentences together. If not, I say send ’em’ to Bellevue!

My friend Dinah reminded me that I really have a pretty good life. Thanks, dear.

Dave Eggers answered readers questions recently over at McSweeney’s web site, if you’re curious about his second book and all, which is due out this month. There’s an excerpt on the New Yorker’s web site which, par for the course, is only readable if you’re an aphid crawling on the glass of your own monitor. Try printing it out.

My review of Barbara Kingsolver’s new essay collection Small Wonder is up at SF Station. Great great book.

I. Gadfly: Noun

a. A persistent irritating critic; a nuisance.

b. One that acts as a provocative stimulus; a goad.

II. Gadfly Magazine: An arts and culture magazine based in Charlottsville, VA

III. Gadfly Records: A Burlington, VT. independent record label

IV. The psuedonym of columnists in several publications

V. An SQL relational database.

VI. A possible career-path for me.