DIARY // print-only
“humanity is a zine-making species and it always has been”
This week, inaugurating a new subgenre wherein I just write some stuff and don’t worry too much about whether it fits cleanly under the “fiction” or “essay” or “interview” header. It’s wildly innovative work, thrillingly loosed from all genre constraints, just that good old fashioned straight-up American blogging.
But because I’m a creature of a crassly commercial era and--crucially--an insecure person, there will still be promo opportunities. To wit:
⊳ The new issue of the Whitney Review of New Writing is out, and it includes my ~3k-word essay on Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance. I posted about this book in March and will be doing so again in the weeks to come, but for now I’ll just say that it was an immense privilege to try and write about one of the most profound and affecting reading experiences I’ve had in recent memory. I’m very grateful to the Whitney Review for being down to put this essay out, and I hope people read it and then let me do some more.
That’s it for my cool bullet point list; the remainder of this week’s self-promotional content will be expertly folded into the body of the post below.
Read on, consumer:
I have some design work in the new issue of First To Knock’s eponymous mail-order periodical, a semiregular newsletter (free in the U.S.) that features texts from across the very fine small press’s conceptual index of high/low reference points. A typical First To Knock experience might include a bit of archly hyperliterate textual commentary, some pulp newspaper aesthetic workouts, and at least one abbreviation in a foreign language, all of which this issue delivers.1 The periodical is also notable for its decidedly print-only orientation, which it would feel ridiculous to refer to as “notable,” except it actually is so manifestly rare that I’m gonna go ahead and do it.
The decline of print in general is a topic that I have no wish to get into, being simultaneously super exhausting and impressively boring, and anyway, anyone who’s kept their head up will be aware of the countless presses and outfits and artists continuing to work with print and doing really important shit.2 Humanity is a zine-making species and it always has been, and the kids these days can do stuff with a risograph drum that’ll make your head spin. But none of that means that a new publication, launched at this late date, that resolves to restrict its contents to the printed page isn’t, like, making a statement.
Emmett Grogan, as he appears in the new issue of First To Knock. Grogan also features in the recently digitized Arthur magazine issue 13.
Luckily, everyone can get stressed out about this, since versions of the same consideration—to be online or not to be? how and where?—are in play for publications of all eras, even ones which predate our spooky little subscription blog moment (to say nothing of the internet age more broadly). In the case of older, perhaps rarer printed material, the question becomes about the potential for archiving the stuff in digital form, an effort whose value is pretty self-evident—at least to me, since in the course of writing for this Substack I’ve drawn endlessly from Monoskop and UbuWeb and NOT BORED! and Bureau of Public Secrets, to name just a few—but also super complicated. Without getting into hosting or bandwidth or whatever (which I don’t know anything about), without even getting into the assumptions and cooptions and losses of context inherent in the open access model, there are still the tricky conceptual spaces to consider: nostalgia, posterity, reproducibility and disposability.
Some of what came up, anyway, when I clocked recently that the full run of Arthur magazine, the mid-00s repository of countercultural lore and chaos magick instructionals and stoner sludge graphic styles, had been almost entirely digitized for the first time. Arthur, which came free in the bin outside the record store, was a big deal for me during those high school years when, as a kid whose cultural tastes were running increasingly left-of-center, I nonetheless remained at great risk of falling for the era’s very safe indie culture (I also read The Believer, for instance). Arthur, by contrast, constituted my first exposure to a shit-ton of material from along the contemporary noise/experimental axis—most notably via Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s “Bull Tongue” review column—and nudged me to see some faint connections between past and present countercultures.3 The magazine also had a very real bearing on the trajectory of my life, which is insane but completely fucking true: when, in our freshman year of college, Esra and I started our band Angels in America and recorded our necessarily brash and ugly first tape, it was a no-brainer we were gonna mail our two copies to “Bull Tongue” for review, which is how we first heard that Thurston wanted to reissue the album on Ecstatic Peace. Soon he did, which in addition to being the most exciting thing that had ever happened to us was also, inarguably, responsible for any early momentum we might have had as a band that had still never played a show.4
Point is, seeing Arthur online after all these years brought me right up against a whole mess of feelings that I’d safely sequestered in my “print-only” life. I’ll be OK, but it’s an interesting new gnarl in the digital papertrail. Meanwhile, you should obviously peruse the archive which, while maybe not perfect and aughtsed-out beyond all decency, is still full of really great stuff. Come for the oral history of the Yippies, stay to watch New Weird America happen in real time.
The review of our first Angels in America tape in that... let’s call it singular “Bull Tongue” writing style. Arthur #31, October 2008.
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|___/\__,_|_.__/|___/\___|_| |_|_.__/ \___|Per FTK’s writeup on the issue: “Pseudo-Plutarch advises on the benefits of not speaking one's mind. Periodical co-editor Nico Ponce de Leon Dios discusses the language of dogs. Emily McHugh details a brief history of Puritan New England grave rubbing, replete with illustrations of her work. Matt Sweeney recommends a favorite New York book. Bryan Counter examines Tristram Shandy. Theophilus L. Human analyzes the science of signals and noise.”
As for the foreign language abbreviation, the issue employs one of my faves, the French “k7” (as in “ka-sept”) for “cassette.” If you ever played a noise show in Quebec, this one will warm your heart.
Just off the dome: there’s CF’s run of receipt zines; pirate publishers I won’t name using print-on-demand to actively bootleg rights-squatted books; and the unaccountably beautiful cardboard packaging for Meiji’s Chelsea caramels.
An effort I’m still stuck making, as evidenced by this whole damn Substack. “Bull Tongue” was also a crashcourse in the kind of hepcat lingo that, when combined with all the jazzy Pynchon puns I was reading at the time, really screwed up the way I talked and wrote for a while. But that too is my own fault.
Arthur was also a huge catalyst behind my moving to Western Mass for college at 19, and I just spent eight years as editor of an artbook press whose catalogue overlaps extensively with Arthur-adjacent cultural zones. A long shadow on this thing, is my point.