March 6, 2002
PERSISTENCE OF ZINING

BLOATED LIKE A SEA-TOAD: Your Humble Editor considers himself something of a study in contradictions, in some things. One of these things is organization. On the one hand, I know where every book I own is located in my apartment, and can find scraps of handwritten manuscript from six years ago simply by closing my eyes and visualizing which red folder I stuffed it into. This is true, I can prove it, if you like, but you won't enjoy it, so don't ask me to, please. On the other hand, I am developing a theory of space-time that somehow explains how my Important Papers can turn into invisible, odorless dust the moment I stop looking directly at them. How do they know I've turned away? How can the Law of Conservation of Energy be applied to Important Papers that simply vanish? It's all very mysterious. So there's the contradiction: organized and disorganized at the same time.

Therefore, running an underground publishing empire, as I do, is often a challenge. I'm expected to somehow keep all sorts of things straight at all times, which is difficult if you're a) very disorganized in many things and b) as drunk as I usually am1. The hardest thing for me to keep track of is my mailing list, because people are constantly changing addresses, sending me cease-and-desist letters, disappearing off the face of the earth, or fleeing the country just ahead of DEA agents. It makes keeping track of things difficult. So every few months I pull out the huge, leather-bound tome filled with my spidery, indecipherable writing and try to make sense of it all.

Whenever I do this, I'm struck by the number of people on my TRADES list that have vanished just like my Important Papers. These are usually people who at one point or another produced cool zines (or shitty zines - I'm a trade whore and it don't take much) for a little while, often as briefly as one skinny issue. I generally continue to send them free copies of TIS every three months like an idiot, but it has got me thinking about persistence. And the lack of it in DIY publishing.

Persistence is, I think, about 50% of any success. Put simply, you've got to stick around long enough to get noticed - and you can never know how long that'll take. Sometimes one issue and you've got Hollywood mailing you checks. Sometimes you're old and feeble before everyone realizes how cool you are. And certainly there are plenty of Frank Stallones out there on whom fortune will never smile. Personally, I'm counting on persistence counting for something - eventually I'll morph into that DIY publisher who's cool simply because he's been doing it for fifty goddamn years. I'll turn up in Lifestyle sections across the country, a smiling old man surrounded by reams of paper, billions of words thrust out hot and steamy and ignored by a revolted world until they'd cooled into a grey mass.

Well, that's the plan, anyway.

Persistence, however, is one thing no one would attribute to most zine publishers. Many would even celebrate this as one of the cool things about self-publishing - the way everything is in constant motion, the way a zine has disappeared from the face of the earth just as you discover it, a tattered copy from two years ago in the zine rack at Tower. I wonder though. It's not that I think people should slave away on a publication for which they've lost all their passion, absolutely not. But I wonder why so many zines pop up in my mailbox, amuse me enough to send a trade, and then...disappear.

Part of what bothers me about it, certainly, is that these people usually don't just stop sending me a zine, they literally disappear, often without the tell-tale returned mail of someone who has moved. I mean, lots of ziners are students of some sort and after a few years of publishing from a fixed place it's natural that they'd move on, and break some connections along the way. But for many of these situations, it's like the person has vanished. being me, I start wondering if they've been murdered and consumed by Pagans after being allowed to be King for Day somewhere. But that's just me.

I also wonder if this kind of unreliable inconsistency makes people more dubious about self-published works. It's one thing if you're sure you're going to get a full subscription when you send in your money. It's quite another if you've got a 75% chance of being burned on your Five bucks. Five bucks ain't a lot, unless you're a voracious reader and you buy subs for every zine you dig out there. It's bad enough for we impoverished publishers who lose postage and stock sending issues to vanished ziners - we know what we're dealing with (or at least learn it very soon). But what about someone who sends you money after reading issue #2 in Tower or Powell's and then never gets anything in response? They're quite possibly not likely to ever chance cash on a similar publication.

Naturally, this being The Inner Swine and me being me, I have no solutions, just an endless list of sour complaints. Ha! That's entertaining your asses off, friends. I make it look easy, but it isn't. Easy, that is.

Still, I can't help but think that most of the zines that a majority of people recognize, no matter how deeply or long they've been into zines, are the ones that have persisted. Cometbus, Angry Thoreauan, Maximumrocknroll - these are zines well into their second or third dozen issues, zines that, even if they don't follow a definite publication schedule can be counted on to persist, to put out another issue. At the very least they can be counted on to not just disappear.

Here we are again, at the end of another column, and you're probably once again wondering the same thing you always wonder: was there a point to all that? Probably not. To decide yea or nay I'd have to go back and read what I just wrote, which might lead to proofreading. We can't have that. So let's just make up a point from whole cloth right now. The point is, you're all insane and terrify me. When I'm rich I'll build a fortress-like home that will keep me safe from all of you. There I'll be left in peace to let my fingernails grow, to wear tissue boxes on my feet as shoes, and to mutter to myself incessantly.

On that note: see ya! Send me an email if you want. Otherwise, check back in a few weeks for my next column.

Until next time, you can reach me here, and I remain

Jeff

2I swear one of my relatives is Marlon Brando, pretending.