We are all endlessly unfolding fanzines," writes Pagan Kennedy in her new book, 'Zine (St. Martins Press), a collection of the zines she produced in the '80s and early '90s. Zines were like websites - before there were any. A mix of text and graphics, cheap and easy to put together at home, zines were new media. Through her own zine, Pagan's Head, and her Village Voice column, Pagan Kennedy became one of the form's best known proponents.
Harvey Blume met Kennedy at her apartment in Allston, Massachusetts - Boston's "punk rock suburb," the one with the "beautiful turnpike" running through it, as Pagan's Head puts it - to browse webzines and talk about changes in the things we read.
Wired: Has the Web won you over? Which are better, e-zines or paper ones?
Kennedy: There are advantages to both. Zines were the precursor to the Internet in general. The zine world was a network of people communicating, an underground network. In the offline world, zines are the most fluid form of publication. You just slap a zine together and copy it.How was putting out a zine different from putting up a homepage?
The zine thing funnelled into the community more than I've seen webpages do. I used to hand people in Boston Pagan's Head - I wouldn't send it - and even though I handed it to only a few friends, it got around in magical ways. Well, not magical ways. Bathrooms. People put it in their bathrooms, and when their friends came over, they'd sit on the loo and read about this Pagan chick. I'd be at a party and some total stranger would come up to me and say, "Aren't you Pagan? I read about you in my friend's bathroom." My zine seemed to reach a lot more people that way than my articles in the Village Voice did.Compared with the bathroom mode of distribution, how does the distribution of webzines work?
With the Web, you attract strangers who are goofing off at work. These people just happen to fall into your site. They're not friends of friends or people you're connected to in any way. Zine people, on the other hand, know each other. FactSheet Five (a "zine of zines" that lists and reviews the current publications) just added a gossip column to its format, and when I flipped to that page, I was disappointed to find out I'd already heard all the gossip.When did you start putting out Pagan's Head?
It was in 1988. I was trying harder than ever to write serious fiction, and it seemed like everybody I met was putting out a zine. Then I started doing a zine and understood the invisible constraints I had been working with in the novel. Whoever thought this up, I wondered - 250 pages about characters I'd never met in a constructed world? With the zine, all of a sudden I could tell my stories with cartoons, clip art, or drawings. I could get other people to collaborate with me. I produced the zine in a spontaneous mood very different from the brooding, self-critical state I enter when I'm writing fiction.How did putting out a zine open up a different world?
When I read Alice in Wonderland as a kid, I used to press myself against mirrors, trying to slip into that other place. I never did find a way in. Later, when I'd been writing fiction for years, I was both exhilarated and terribly unsatisfied. The trouble was, I didn't really want to be an author. I wanted to be a literary character. My zine was a tool for turning myself into one. I made up another version of myself - I call her Pagan1 now - who was a punk rock débutante in thrift-store gowns with dreadlocks flying behind her as she went on madcap adventures. People who read the zine believed I was her. They expected me to act like Pagan1 - and that helped me turn into her. For a while, my life was a vast performance-art piece, and I was a character of my own construction.You write a lot about the sheer pleasure of putting zines together.
My model was the holiday letter your Aunt Irma sends that tells what she's been doing and what all of her grandchildren have been doing. It's a broadcast to people you care about, something between a personal letter and a publication. My zines were broadcasts from Aunt Irma, plus cartoons.Is there something on the Web that has that feeling?
I like the site my old roommate Donna Kossy put up. Donna used to publish a zine called Kooks, in which she collected all sorts of ravings and conspiracy theories. Now she has an online Kooks Museum - but she's dropped the magazine metaphor. Instead of a table of contents, she has a lobby. She puts all the articles about medicine in the Hall of Quackery and all the ravings in the Schizophrenic Wing.So it's not really a zine. It's something else. I think the zine classification just doesn't work in the online world. The savviest online zines probably will stop calling themselves zines altogether.
So an online zine is not a zine at all?
Anybody who tries to use an old form with new technology is just not getting it. Like people doing hypertext novels. The whole point of the novel is narrative flow. I don't want to be handed a bunch of index cards and told, Here, shuffle these, and read them in any order.The things I've seen online, the sites that work - I don't even know what to call them.
Meanwhile, there's more of a zine aesthetic to books now. The cut-up, clip art look. Bits and pieces of text scattered all over the page in bite-sized, channel-hopping chunks.
Has the Web taken the place of zines in general?
No! Will it ever? No! FactSheet Five lists thousands of zines. In the early '80s, it was one or two folded-over pieces of paper. Look at that zine now. It's thriving. All different things can coexist.Harvey Blume (joel@ai.mit.edu) is co-author of Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (Dell) and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.