Finding lost life stories in the 'zine rack

On the value of documenting the regular ol' human experience.

Amira, “Quarantine Diary ‘20: Daily Routine Edition” (Source)

In the age of scrolling and sharing and sharing and scrolling (Whose kid just drew eyebrows on the dog with a marker? Who’s got COVID? Who wonders about the point of it all? Who went to the zoo?) it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for reading about the mundane details of other people’s lives.

But there’s a different quality to stories shared through zines. Writing stories down by hand, like you’re writing in your diary, makes them feel intimate and secret — even if you photocopy the text, then put a bunch of copies on the windowsill at the local coffee shop or dop them in the mail to strangers.

The classics of this genre, of course, are Cometbus, penned by the ever-traveling Aaron Cometbus, and David Greenberg’s Duplex Planet, which compiles stories from elders residing at the Duplex Nursing Home in Boston. But that’s just a sliver of what’s floating out there that’d be lost otherwise: the experiences of BIPOC Americans, the early struggle for LGBTQ+ rights, uncensored reflections on grief and loss, explanations of what it’s like to navigate the world with a disability or a chronic illness, or things you see and hear when you don’t have a car and take the bus.

Greg McCubbin, “Covid 2020.” (Source)

Quarantine Zines

First-person accounts of universal experiences are revealing, too. Just like our forebears didn’t like talking about the Depression and the Dust Bowl, most of us don’t want to talk or think about March 2020. Luckily for historians, there was an explosion of zine-making during lockdown. Some of them focused on mutual aid; some were art projects that helped alleviate the anxiety and boredom.

Oceania had some of the most rigorous lockdowns on Earth, so it’s not surprising this Melbourne zine collective turned out dozens of titles, including Quarantine Comics and Pizza in the Time of Covid. But “quaranzines” popped up everywhere, and research librarians — a clever bunch of folks — didn’t hesitate to snap them up for their collections, realizing what a valuable historical trove they’d be down the road.

Ohio State, one quaranzine-collecting institution, notes in its campus magazine that COVID-lockdown zines were “sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking. They touched on subjects like loneliness during quarantine, managing addiction while isolated, wandering the streets of a community where all the shops are closed. One offered tongue-in-cheek guidance from Skeletor, the villain from the He-Man cartoon, for getting through lockdown.” Librarian Jolie Braun, who launched the university’s quaranzine collection, explained they were important because they “spoke to this collective experience we all were having, but they showed how even a collective experience like quarantine was experienced so differently by different people.”

Thelma Ducoing Toole. (Source.)

The Confederacy of Cut-and-Paste

This is breaking the rules a little bit, but I think it bears a mention as an artifact in the world of uncensored, unselfconscious DIY publications: this collage diary, assembled by John Kennedy Toole’s mom, Thelma Ducoing Toole, which lives in Tulane University’s archives. (For those not familiar, JKT’s A Confederacy of Dunces is considered The New Orleans Novel).

It almost scans like a proto-Tumblr visual diary. Some pages are your standard scrapbook fare: Christmas cards, bits of doggerel clipped from the paper, hand-written song lyrics. She also glued in JKT’s school essays, his book reviews and ads for his book, and clippings about Walker Percy, who helped get JKT’s book into print. Her legendarily unflagging support of her son is on full display. But you can also see the off-center, quirky sensibilities that’ve endeared people to JKT in her as well. (He got it from somewhere, right?)

Her notebook is full of all kinds of offbeat ephemera. There’s an Arctic explorer shaking fins with a penguin; a poem titled “For a Dog Chasing Fireflies”; the dust cover of a book titled Neurotic Stars; and an article titled “Odd Folk, We Humans!” a roundup of the eccentric habits of well-known people ("Edward Fitzgerald, translator of the 'Rubaiyat of OMar Khayyam,' wore bedroom slippers on the street and a handerchief tied over his hat and under his chin.") Toole also harbored obsessions with Anarctica, endangered species, sculpture, photography and theater. She acted as a young woman, worked as an elocution teacher. The woman assembling these pages had an arstist’s mind, probably had frustrated artistic ambitions, and dealt with that by living vicariously through her son. You wonder what other books might’ve come into the world — and if her son would’ve been less troubled — if she’d been allowed to be an artist in her own right.

Poor Marshall’s Manual

Marshall Greenwood, aka “Poor Marshall, America’s Greatest? Poor Man,” wrote an epic budget-as-memoir, Poor Marshall’s Manual. It was rescued from the trash by a fellow Californian, Tim Lauzon, who photocopied it and mailed it out to people for a SASE and a few bucks.

Of course I had to order one. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it’s one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever read. Greenwood’s frugality game makes Mr. Money Moustache look profligate. He’s even frugal with letters of the alphabet, using abbrevations wherever possible. Here’s the overview of his book, plus his rundown of how he lives on $99 a month:

On the page below, there’s a bit more detail about how he lives on so little money, which paints a picture of his day-to-day life in a modest room, where he reads, philosophizes and mends his “sox” with masking tape.

Greenwood is eccentric, but he’s not unhappy; slashing his expenses down to the barest minimum seems to have given him a higher purpose, and if I dare say it, joy. He was a vocal critic of carpets, frozen pies, doctors, pets, gadgets, cologne, cars, concession food and concerts. He felt like he’d discovered the path to happiness and wanted to share it with the world, especially his conspicuously consumptive fellow Americans.

This version actually the second edition, where he “cut the fat,” from the original. It’s not beyond the realm of possiblity he penned third, fourth or fifth editions, each becoming more streamlined and haiku-like than the last.

A few last thoughts

• They’re not biographical zines, but a shoutout to STL classic Jet Lag, as well as NOLA’s Antigravity.

• Small literary magazines aren’t technically zines, but also do some heavy lifting capturing stories that’d be forgotten. Just last night, we went to a lmnl lit-sponsored reading at Windowsill Pies featuring Mona Lisa Saloy (the poet laureate of Louisiana) and Constance Adler (a creative writing prof at Tulane). Wonderful writers, both. Saloy’s poems, set in New Orleans, totally transported the audience to a version of the city that no longer exists — she evoked a whole world. The weather, houses, small talk, swim meets, records on rotation, food, radio broadcasts, jokes, faces, holidays — I feel like I learned more about New Orleanians in 30 minutes than I had the month prior.

• Finally, I have a beef with the assertion that The Comet was the world’s first zine. More on that in the coming weeks!