I’ve been asked a few times how I store my zines, but my solution (I put them in a box) is far less clever than cartoonist and journalist Malaka Gharib’s solution: She uses a binder filled with sheet protectors for trading cards!
I’m reminded of my friend, Hugh MacLeod, who carries his cartoons drawn on business cards in a little business card organizer:
Filed under: zines
Whenever I’m reading some pop psychology book (which, granted, isn’t often) I like to underline all the various versions of “studies have shown” that appear in the text.
For this zine, I searched an ebook edition for all the appearances of “study” or “studies” and typed them out onto a single sheet of paper.
Then I chopped them up and started re-arranging them, eventually realizing you could make a kind of nonsense that was grammatically correct and said absolutely nothing.
When I got something I liked, I re-typed the whole thing again, scanned it into the computer, and laid it out in zine form. Anything for a laugh these days…
More zines here.
Another zine made from the book, How To Entertain With Your Pocket Calculator.
Someone on Instagram commented that they hoped I chuckle to myself while I’m making these as much as they do while reading them. Probably moreso! They are made entirely for my own amusement, that is for sure.
I feel, actually, that this is still an entirely underrated reason for making stuff: simple diversion and amusement to entertain one’s self. I mean, honestly, if we can’t find some pleasure in making, why bother?
Other zines in this series: How To Talk To Someone With A Missing Imagination and How To Draw What is Invisible.
Read more of my zines here.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal said that almost 400 years ago. (Today is his birthday.)
There’s a wonderful chapter in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation called “Learn To Be Alone,” on the importance of solitude.
Merton writes that solitude is not “something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your soul.”
Solitude, for Merton, is “a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.”
He describes “a mechanism” for finding solitude that resembles Joseph Campbell’s “bliss station”:
There should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of other men.
“Learn to be alone” was also Andrei Tarkovsky’s reply when he was asked, “What would you like to say to young people?”
I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.
“Loneliness,” writes Maggie Nelson in Bluets, “is solitude with a problem.”
As I wrote in Keep Going, visiting this place is not about sticking your head in the sand. It’s about finding the quiet strength every day to center yourself so that you can do your work.
(The zine in this post was made from a page of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The text quoted is from Clark’s writing about Montaigne. The art is Albrecht Durër’s “Apocalypse.”)
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