For Dru

Linked at Blog of a Bookslut (and I just wrote Jessa adding my plug for Quimby's as somewhere to buy the things), Chicago Tribune: A new twist for Chicago zines: Success:

Launched as improbable experiments, Chicago's small-press journals range from [Marshall] Sahlin's austere, type-only polemics to the most recent, all-poster issue of Select magazine -- which aims to inspire an "interventionist art" of utopian street propaganda and peace activism.

Blowing in from various precincts, the journals share a certain common ground -- a schoolyard freshness, an outsize ambition and a refusal to be defined by what you've read before. Seizing their place at the interstice between art and politics, several find themselves unexpectedly tipping toward financial stability.

[. . .] Chicago is a kingdom of these fussed-over labors of love. And if this burgeoning industry has a local epicenter, it is Quimby's bookstore, at 1854 W. North Ave.

There, self-published journals are stacked in bright rows on wire racks. The offerings morph constantly. One shelf groans with thick zines that review and digest other zines.

Well, I'm going to say Zineguide even if they don't.

And SPEC Chicago.

Which is starting to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about, which of course I don't, but don't I fake it terribly well?

Actual links, as the Trib couldn't be arsed:

• whitewalls
• TENbyTEN
• Stop Smiling Magazine
• The trigger-happy, mother-fuckin' LUMPEN
• The bruised, battered, burned to the ground and scarred but hard Baffler
• Bridge

And I'm going to mention a shout in the street because, I can. And I rather liked the issue I bought, even if I have no idea where it is now. . .

This has been your literary content for the day.