Austin Kleon

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Fancy zines


I think of all my books as fancy zines.

Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? I’ll let Wikipedia handle this:

A zine (/zi?n/ZEEN; short for magazine or fanzine) is most commonly a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. Usually zines are the product of a person, or of a very small group.

When I’m working on a book, sure, I flip through my bookshelves, looking for stuff to steal, but what I really love to do is head over to my zine drawer (see above) and flip through zines.

Even though my books are printed in mass quantities overseas and are shipped all over the world, I want my books to feel handmade, like they’ve just come off the photocopier.

Back in December, I wondered in my diary if I should just go ahead and do a real zine, and work my way up to a book:

Maybe next time. Or maybe the country will collapse and this tweet will come true:

There’s something really special about zines. “Zines Had It Right All Along.” “The Internet Didn’t Kill Zines.” Even though “The Blissfully Slow World of Newsletters” can feel close to the spirit of zine culture, nothing digital seems to fully replace them. “A blog is not a zine.”

Whenever I do a workshop with students, zines are the perfect thing to make together: We make a bunch of blackout poems, each choose our favorites, and then we sequence them, everybody getting their own page. Then we run them on the photocopier, fold ’em, staple ’em, and everybody gets to take one home:

If you want to learn more about zines, check out this book and hit up your public library — several libraries actually have zine collections now! The new Austin Public Library has a whole section next to the comics:

The search box

A few months, I became nostalgic for the good ol’ MS-DOS command prompt:

The nostalgia was brought on by two things:

1) reading two programming books back-to-back, Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code and Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, both narratives of making computers do what you want them to do, with snippets of code embedded into the text

2) watching the scenes in Halt and Catch Fire with character Cameron Howe punching code into her primitive computer, programming an OS that literally asks you what you want to do with the machine:

For the 4th season of the show, the marketing team cooked up these graphics:

Those search boxes have me thinking: maybe it’s not so much the command prompt I’m nostalgic for, but the days when the computer wouldn’t do anything without me — I had to explicitly tell the computer what I wanted to do, and if I didn’t tell it, it would just sit there, patiently, with a dumb look on its face.

I really miss how computers used to be “dumb” in this way. The primary computer in my life — my “smartphone” — is too smart. It used to constantly push things on me — push notifications — letting me know about all sorts of stuff it thought I wanted to know about, and it continued doing this until I had the good sense to turn them all off. It’s dumber now, and much better.

The apps are worse in the same way: they think they’re really smart. They assume they know what I want to see and what I want to think about. I want them to be dumber. I often wonder what Twitter would be like if instead of “What’s happening?” it would ask me, “What do you want to think about?” (You can still sort of do this: the “People You Follow” filter in Twitter’s advanced search is one of my favorite things.) Come to think of it, I’d pay for a Twitter app that bypassed my feed and went straight to the search box.

After all this time, this dumb little box is still my favorite thing on the internet:

I will not argue with strangers on the internet

All advice is autobiographical. A reader tweeted this page from my own book this week:

You’re going to see a lot of stupid stuff out there and you’re going to feel like you need to correct it. One time I was up late on my laptop and my wife yelled at me, “Quit picking fights on Twitter and go make something.”

I still fail at this at least weekly, but to quote Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction, “I’m trying Ringo. I’m trying, real hard.”

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