"Ben Wikler's rise to Democratic stardom has a very Madison backstory."

A nice article in the local paper, The Cap Times.

I especially liked the part about The Yellow Press, which was sometimes edited right here in the house we now call Meadhouse:

[In high school,] Wikler and his friends had founded a satirical publication called The Yellow Press.... The newspaper... dovetailed with the rise of another Madison-area satirical publication, The Onion, where he later worked part-time as a headline writer. But while The Yellow Press included [silly topics] and occasionally rankled an administrator or two — an article titled “Prom Night Is Such a Romantic Night to Get F-----” landed the kids in hot water — the paper included serious subject matters. ...

"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"[A] lot of young people are returning to a seemingly outdated form of self-expression; it seems that there are more how-to workshops and zine fairs than ever before.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. 

"There’s a classic Gen Z nihilism. My generation has spent a lot of time in a sort of destabilizing, regressive wave."

Said Rayne Fisher-Quann, 22, "an independent writer focused on girlhood and identity."

Quoted in "Goodbye, Feminist Blogs. Hello, Gen Z Content Creators? Young women are more feminist than ever, as are big brands and Hollywood franchises. But what happened to the online community blogs and zines once offered?" (NYT).

Also new at the NYT today: "Jezebel, the Oral History: 'There Was This Riotous Sense of Fun'/The site defined an era of feminism for millions of readers. According to its editors and writers, it was also an exhilarating place to work."

I can see how efforts to maintain a "riotous sense of fun" would tend to devolve into "a destabilizing, regressive wave."

"Flattery (also called adulation or blandishment) is the act of giving excessive compliments..."

"... generally for the purpose of ingratiating oneself with the subject....  Historically, flattery has been used as a standard form of discourse when addressing a king or queen. In the Renaissance, it was a common practice among writers to flatter the reigning monarch, as Edmund Spenser flattered Queen Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare flattered King James I in Macbeth and Niccolò Machiavelli flattered Lorenzo II de' Medici in The Prince.... In the Divine Comedy, Dante depicts flatterers wading in human excrement, stating that their words were the equivalent of excrement, in the second bolgia of 8th Circle of Hell.... Plutarch wrote an essay on ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend.’ Julius Caesar was notorious for his flattery. In his In Praise of Folly, Erasmus commended flattery because it 'raises downcast spirits, comforts the sad, rouses the apathetic, stirs up the stolid, cheers the sick, restrains the headstrong, brings lovers together and keeps them united.'"

From the Wikipedia article, "Flattery."

I'm reading that because I was looking up "Flatter!," which I'm doing because I'm getting rid of the piano, and, emptying out the piano bench, I found this:

"Gharib often forces herself to make a zine in five minutes, and she used that same approach when creating chapters for her book."

“The challenge and the beauty of the [comics and zines] format is practicing extreme restraint,” she said. “I had to condense down what I was trying to say in a set of words and meaningful images.'... You’re busy. We get it. But you can use small pockets of time to create. Gharib, for example, molded omelets and other foods out of leftover clay during work meetings. “If I don’t have any art materials and I get bored, I try to interact with whatever I have on me in the space I am in,” she said. “Sometimes I pick flowers and leave them places, or tear tiny bits of receipts or trash in my purse and write tiny messages on them and leave them around the city for people to find."

I was reading "How to Draw Yourself Out of a Creative Funk/Malaka Gharib, the author of the coming-of-age graphic memoir 'I Was Their American Dream,' shares her tips" (NYT) on my iPhone, where the Instagram images didn't display. I made a mental note to write a blog post titled something like "Littering?! The NYT endorses littering?" But this morning I'm on my desktop and I'm seeing the images and — is it just Morning Me versus Late-Night Me? — I'm presenting the Times text uncritically and clicking "Follow" at Instagram and thinking this littering is like the small category of graffiti that I'm happy to see.

View this post on Instagram

#5minutezine

A post shared by malaka 🥀 gharib (@malakagharib) on Jun 3, 2019 at 1:37pm PDT

"We talked to them and they’d be like, 'Why am I not getting notified when people vote on my stuff?'"

"And we’d be like, 'Well, we wouldn’t want to do that 'cause we might send you, like, 50 notifications that you got 50 of your friends to vote on your card.' They’re like, 'But that’s what I want.' "

Said Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc., which makes an app (Wishbone) aimed at teenagers. He's quoted in a NYT article titled "App Makers Reach Out to the Teenager on Mobile." How old is Jones?, you might ask. I did.

Mr. Jones, a 40-year-old Gen Xer, has tracked youth culture since the grunge ’90s, when he started a magazine called Elixir as a University of Oregon sophomore. This was back when teenagers went to bookstores in search of small-circulation “zines.”...

Back in his day, they didn't have the internet. They didn't have apps. You couldn't carry your phone around with you, and you couldn't write to anybody on a phone and you couldn't see pictures on a phone, and you couldn't, like, vote on pictures on a phone. We had these things called zines. 

"If you don’t ever have 'bad' sex, then you probably haven’t been looking hard enough for the really great sex."

Writes Annie Sprinkle, reviewing Chester Brown's graphic novel "Paying For It" (the purportedly true story of his giving up romantic sex for sex with prostitutes):

Brown documents his sad, curious and disappointing paid encounters — always amusing — along with his abundance of sweet, satisfying and successful ones. He appears to be relatively nonjudgmental, like a person who can equally relish both junk food and a gourmet feast....

At the end of “Paying for It,” Brown provides 23 meticulously drawn appendixes, most of which are devoted to deconstructing just about every argument you can think of against prostitution. He presents the typical objections (e.g., “Prostitution is wrong because it gives a man sexual power over a woman”) and counters with utterly rational and incisive responses (“Prostitutes aren’t passive puppets, and most johns aren’t dictators”), backing up many of his points with observations from sex workers themselves. In the process he makes as convincing a case for the decriminalization and destigmatization of prostitution as anyone I’ve ever come across in the prostitutes’ rights movement.

Sprinkle is "the author of 'Dr. Sprinkle’s Spectacular Sex,' is an artist, activist and ecosex educator. She worked as a prostitute for 20 years." Ecosex educator? That jumped out at me as a dubious occupation... from a list that includes prostitute!

I'm going to buy "Paying For It," because I like Chester Brown. (I've read "The Playboy.") The page you can click to enlarge (over at the first link) looks excellent. I used to consume a lot of these graphic novel things, back in the time period between the publication date of "Maus" and the publication date of "Understanding Comics." I had to look up the dates to figure out when that actually was. It was to 1986 to 1993. I was interested in zines then too. Pre-internet.