Thu, 02 Jan 2014
Haiku a Day
As many of you know, from July 2005 - September 2013 I made a zine called Haiku a Day. After 99 issues I stopped, wanting to stop while I was still going strong. Creatively, it's the second longest thing I've done in my life, and every month sending out the latest issue still gave me as much of a thrill as it did the first time I did it. It still tickles me that there are people out there who know me simply as "The Haiku Guy".
In honor of the 99 issues, I did two things. First, I created a special issue, Haiku a Day - Opus, containing my favorite haiku from each month. Only 99 issues were printed, and once they are gone, they're gone.
Second, I've released the entire series, including my raw material for making the zines, under a Creative Commons license.
Information on getting a copy of Opus, or downloading the archive, can be found here
Posted at: 23:01 | category: /zines | Link
Sat, 23 Jan 2010
Happiness is Organized Zines
For several years my zine collection has lived in a couple of cardboard document boxes. Initially just piled in, I took some effort a while back to sort everything alphabetically by title, stacked haphazardly in a couple of the boxes set on end.
This was unwieldy, and also made it hard for me to easily sort new stuff in. I finally got aggrivated enough by this process to buy a few plastic file bins and a box of two inch expanding file jackets, and today I got enough gumption to sort things out.
Each file jacket holds some number of titles. Some zines, where I have several issues, have their own file jacket. Others are grouped together. The tab at the top of the jacket is an ideal place to pencil in what zines are in that jacket.
Those all neatly fit into the file boxes, which stack nicely on my bookshelves.
Now we'll see how long they stay this neat....
Posted at: 20:14 | category: /zines | Link
Thu, 29 Jan 2009
Visiting EMU
At the last Shadow Art Fair fellow zinester and all-around good person Linette Lao mentioned that she is teaching a class a EMU this semester, and that she wanted to use a couple issues of Late Night Thinking in the class. She contacted me a while ago to get the zines and also to suggest that I stop by and meet with the class.
The class session was today, and it was a good experience. I always worry when I do things like this that I'm going to go too far off into old guy telling rambling stories mode, but I think I managed to hold that in check well enough. I also think I have a tendancy when talking, especially when talking about myself or things I'm doing to start to break eye contact and start speaking quietly or weirdly, and I think I managed to hold that back as well. The class seemed on par with what I would expect, a couple people fairly interested, a handful of people mildly interested, and a few that seemed to fade into the background, but on the whole there seemed to be a decent number of good questions, although there were some times when Linette had to ask me some questions to get the conversation started again.
It was incredibly weird, though, to see a room full of people pull out copies of stuff I've written, like it was a textbook or something. I quipped in the class that they probably represented about thirty to forty percent of my purchasers. And the amusement the students registered when I mentioned that I did the zine layout in LaTeX, a mathematical typsetting language, brought a smile to my face.
It was, on the whole, a fun experience, sweetened by Linette, her husband Mark and their daughter taking me out to dinner at the Sidetrack, where I continued by longstanding tradition of always ordering the Tempeh Philly. There were fried pickles, as well, which combined with the random craving (and the making of one lone fried pickle Monday night) I fear may re-launch my desire for fried pickles.
Posted at: 20:53 | category: /zines | Link
Sat, 01 Dec 2007
Late Night Thinking, Issue 0
After several years of thinking I should make one, and a year of stashing away bits of writing, issue 0 (Circumspice) of Late Night Thinking finally exists in physical form. 34 pages of random ramblings about Toronto, Ypsilanti, moving to Michigan, and more about making tea than you probably cared to know. You can find info about it here..
Haiku a Day is still going strong after over two years. I don't know where I was going here — my mind wandered for two minutes wondering how I'd count the number of haikus in the text file I keep them all in without having to manually count them. Anywho, more info at the link.