"Before it was possible to connect with strangers around the world instantaneously, they would sometimes appear erratically, intermittently, and mysteriously, in print...."

Writes Hua Hsu, in "American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through Zines/Zine-making is a tradition shared by the young and alienated, people enamored with the fringes of culture. Can a museum exhibit capture its essence?" (The New Yorker).

"[A] lot of young people are returning to a seemingly outdated form of self-expression; it seems that there are more how-to workshops and zine fairs than ever before. These efforts exist in a space that’s out of the Internet’s reach. Any one of us has access to a global megaphone. But maybe what we seek are smaller, out-of-the-way conversations, forms befitting minor histories. Zines... allow us to feel like we are still sketching the outlines of our true selves. They are work, but not an onerous amount, just enough to make the endeavor seem a path of slight resistance. That friction—between doing something yourself and choosing to do nothing—is where politics emerges. I still keep Snotrag on my desk, along with a few other zines that retain a sense of mystery for me...."

Typing "zines" in the box to add tags to this post, I was amused to see "zines" in "laziness" and surprised to see I had never made a tag for "zines." In the pre-blogging days, I cared about zines. Not that I had a zine, but I had a lot of hand-drawn/hand-written notebooks that I imagined distributing on a poignantly small scale. That's part of this blogger's backstory.

There, I created a new tag and added it retrospectively to 5 old posts.