My distinguished career as a zinester continues.
I kind of share Wallace Shawn's attitude that it's no one's business what books (etc.) I read, but I will say that lately more than anything else I've been charmed and impressed with a ton of short-run, largely self-published comics and zines that are being produced these days (e.g. Grixly, see below). I've been an avid fan and follower of "alternative" comics since I was a young teenager, since even before I got into seriously reading "literature," and I don't think the scene has ever been so promising and exciting in my lifetime.
Inspired by this stuff (and taking lifelong cartoonist/zinester Sally Madden of the excellent Thick Lines podcast as a sort of role model), I've made my most significant contribution to the DIY world with TV Grime, a compendium of deeply personal reflections on every Halloween-themed television episode I've ever seen, laid out in a TV Guide-style grid on over 100 newsprint pages. I can't really draw, so I enlisted the talents of Beth Heinly, John Sammis, Andy Wieland, and a friend of mine who creates under the pseudonym Ollie Goodboy to provide supplementary comics.
Like most things I do and make, the appeal of this seems broad and obvious to me but is deeply confusing to most other people. However, I think that if you like my novel or various online shenanigans you will enjoy it. It's full of (I've been told) hilarious anecdotes and details, both pop cultural and weirdly personal. For the writer, it was a block-breaking exercise in attempting a more direct, accessible mode of prose and an endurance test to see if it was possible to come up with new things to write about the same hackneyed sitcom plots over and over again. For the reader it additionally offers the practical use of telling you where in the vast streaming mediascape to find Halloween episodes, whether classic or nearly irretrievably obscure.. An essential tool for planning your October viewings in the years to come!
When I was becoming serious about writing in the early 2000s, the thing to do after reading a contemporary writer's book was to look up their personal blog, which nearly all writers had (or were told they should have) at the time. That might not sound so different from the twitter accounts and substacks of today, but actually it was so much better. (I maintain that Jack Pendarvis's blog is a truly great work of hypertext literature.) There wasn't much of a discourse-torrent back then, and the platforms seemed to be designed in the interest of self-expression instead of in monomaniacal pursuit of "engagement," so instead of interfacing dutifully with whatever garbage might have been trending that day, writers would actually write idiosyncratically about things that interested them personally. Reading these blogs was an intimate experience; you felt you got to know writers as people in a way that seems impossible now.
All of which is to say that I miss an earlier era of the internet, of literature, and this zine is an attempt to create something that resembles it more than a substack or mailchimp. It's also a work of cultural criticism, and of memoir, and it's an elegy for the monoculture.
