frandroid

Just finished:

The Sleep of Reason, vol I: Cascade! It was phenomenal. The storytelling was amazing, and I was very amused and entertained. I could have used a bit more exposition at the beginning and after the main hinge point. I was amused/impressed at some of the very obscure vocabulary, and really dug the complexity of the internal dialogue the various characters had, especially some that ostensibly would be outside the natural ideological zone of the author. :) Looking forward to the next volume.

Grabuge Urbain. Je crois que j'ai ramassé ce zine plein-page couleur au Salon Anarchiste. C'est un zine pas mal punk et d'habitude, j'ai rarement de patience pour ça, mais la mise en page/les collages sont quand même poussés, et l'histoire d'une des autrices qui a raconté ses deux (!) poursuites gagnantes (!) contre la police pour cause de brutalité policière est assez impressionnante.

Retomber by Xiaoxiao Li: Despite the French title, this one is a thick English-language comic zine. This isn't a narrative as much as a diary-style thing, with lots of iPhone messaging conversations with an unidentified confidante. All drawing is line drawing with no fill, and all ink is coloured, no black. The effect is quite impressive. There are tons of self-portraits, including two with Munsch's The Scream's figure with are hilarious. It's fairly liberal young girl internal dialogue stuff that I don't usually have much time for, but it's quite compelling. There was a whole subset of young-asian-woman-internal-dialogue type of zines back in the 90s, but I hadn't seen one in a while, and this is probably one of the better ones. (I mean, other than the author's name, you could barely explicitly tell that it's Asian, but her voice is quite similar to that set, though I would be hard-pressed to describe it.)

I think I picked that last zine in the zine boxes at The Beguiling. I don't know exactly what Birkemoe is doing as a buyer, but there are one million unique zine issues in his boxes, some of them over 10 years old. Maybe he just orders a bunch of singles for his own reading pleasure and then dumps them in the sale boxes? Anyway, it's quite the selection. I mean, most of it is not really good, but it's one of the few times in my life where I really get to go crate-digging for zines, as opposed to comic book buyers and record buyers who have plenty of stores to cater to them (including that very store). I enjoy that.

Currently Reading:

Briefly read another chapter of Pirate Utopias. More and more I think The Pirate History Podcast did a better job at the actual history of Moorish corsairs (of course it's being produced 25+ years later...), but he doesn't really do the radical politics from a radical viewpoint, so Wilson's book is still relevant. At least I think so, I'm more into a history chapter than a politics chapter right now. I looked at the back cover of the book again and noticed blurbs by Christopher Hill, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh. Wheww! When I read this book for the first time in 1999, I didn't know who they were, but now I'm impressed.

Reading Next:

This is How You Win the Time War is overdue at the library with holds on it. Oops.

What have you been reading?

Drinking Culture by Christine Su

A fun zine about what drinking culture is like for Japanese workers. In this case, the worker is a Canadian teaching English. Christine discusses drinking establishments (including all-you-can-drink parties!), drinking culture as it rides along work culture or on the train, leading to my favourite sentence in the zine: "If you're wondering why Japanese people don't [bring their own snacks and drinks on the train], it's because they're obeying train etiquette, which includes: no talking on the phone, talk in a low volume, no eating, but, reading softcore erotic manga is okay." Christine has also published a bunch of other zines on her experiences of Japanese culture.

* * *

You Still Need a Coffin: A memoir/how-to about what to do when someone dies by Shivaun Hoad.

This is a microzine ♥️. Shivaun writes about the experience of dealing with their uncle's death, including cremation, mistaken organ donation (oops!), funeral, and other details while closer family were abroad. The folded inner page features a list of useful resources when dealing with a dead relative. While this could have been clinical, Shivaun actually delivers some humour and humanity to the process, and this turns out to be one of the most information dense microzines I've ever read, without resorting to small print.


Now start preparing your #PodcastFriday posts. ;)

I'm not getting ahead of these reviews... One per week!

First zine: Important Life Lessons I Have learned From the Plants I've Tried to Grow, by Katie Haegele, 2015, quarter-page-ish, 16 pages. (zine not for sale anymore)

It's pretty straightforward plant advice, along with plant drawings, that you can transfer to life, or rather people. It could be pithy but it actually works. A couple examples:

"A weed is just a plant you didn't want in your fussy fucking garden"

"Any tiny bit of green on an ugly, frizzled old plant means it's still alive. Don't give up on it yet"

The sum of these aphorisms might help you take better care of your plants or your friends, whichever you have a more clumsy thumb with.


Second zine... Well, I received a distro submission in the mail. I think I have not received one of those in 8 years? At least 5. When I had a website I always wrote that I wasn't taking submissions, because most submissions were frankly crap. Good writers are often not great at promoting themselves: you have to seek them out and find them yourself. Whereas the attention-seekers that have nothing to say are the ones that find you. So I opened the envelope and the cover seemed playful enough. But then it's all hand-written, it's not good hand-writing, and the guy is just a young man ranting at the world with clichés you've heard before. No need to name it, he'll eventually notice he doesn't get attention, and stop. Or he'll keep at it and become better. It's a rare zinester who's bad at it that keeps going at it for more than a few issues, especially these days.