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    'Zine
    'Zine
    'Zine
    Ebook190 pages38 minutes

    'Zine

    By Pagan Kennedy

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "An important artifact from the underground past...an inspiration for any aspiring artist or anyone else who has ever felt trapped by mainstream society." -- Amazon Customer
    A unique and hilarious autobiography of a pioneer of the 1990s zine movement, containing all 8 issues of "Pagan's Head."
    A young woman named Pagan, having just graduated from a writing program at a very prestigious university, is left with a single burning question: Now what? She then takes an unusual step by deciding to invent her new self—the one the public will know—by starting her own magazine, one that will be written, created, and star none other than herself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSanta Fe Writer's Project
    Release dateJun 1, 2014
    ISBN9781939650160
    'Zine
    Author

    Pagan Kennedy

    Pagan Kennedy has published eight books. Her biography Black Livingstone was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her novel Spinsters was short-listed for the Orange Prize and was the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, the Village Voice, Details, the Utne Reader, the Nation, and Ms. magazine. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for 'Zine

    4/5

    35 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I received an earlier book by Pagan Kennedy from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, The Dangerous Joy of Dr Sex, and enjoyed that very much. This one is even more original, imaginative, funny, poignant, and engaging. She may be presenting her 'zines all about herself (and her hair) but it is not the least bit self-absorbed. Instead, Kennedy manages to include all manner of things that life throws at all of us, and she does it with wit and good writing. Thanks to Sante Fe Writers Project for providing the book for review. I look forward to reading more!p.s. makes me want to make my own zines!
    • 4/5
      In many ways, reading Pagan Kennedy’s Zine was like a trip down memory lane. The author and I are the same age and I fondly remember the 1980’s as a time when my friends and I all had vaguely artsy ambitions. I even tried my hand at quasi-feminist collage art pieces that I sent out anonymously to total strangers in an attempt at mail art. And while I never created my own zine, I was certainly a fan of the genre, frequenting Untitled, a shop in NYC’s Soho, to pick up home-made chapbooks, illustrated periodicals (my favorite being the postage stamp sized Public Illumination), underground comix and zeroxed zines. So it’s definitely cool that this book includes the entire run of Kennedy’s zine, Pagan’s Head. Issues of the zine itself (in all its amateurish glory) alternate with chapters describing what was going on in her life at the time, offering some fascinating insights into how some of her more depressing experiences manifested themselves in the work. Ultimately I found myself more interested in the expository material written specifically for the book, which is much more personal and less cloyingly glib than the zine itself. Groovy as it was as the time, a lot of that stuff hasn’t really aged all that well. Early on, Kennedy claims that the zine-writer Pagan was a persona who wore madcap outfits and enjoyed being the center of attention everywhere she went, as opposed to the “real” Pagan who was more reserved and mundane. But over time, it seems like the two versions of Pagan came closer together as the zine begins to focus less on quirky, arcane subjects (like her teenaged obsession with The Partridge Family) and more on her real-life experience of burgeoning celebrity. The ultimate convergence between the two different Pagans occurs when she devotes an entire issue, in the style of a graphic novel, to a personal medical misfortune. Pretty heavy stuff indeed.Zine was originally put together, in the exact same format, when Kennedy was only 32 years old – a mere year after the final issue of Pagan’s Head. This is a re-issue of the same book. My only disappointment, in an otherwise engaging and fun book, is that the current publisher didn’t opt to include a final Epilogue written by the now 50+ author. I think it would have added an extra dimension if the reader could get an insight into her feelings about the work with a twenty year perspective. But still an entertaining (and frankly, envy-provoking) read.
    • 4/5
      This was great. A little bit of everything and ALL of it Pagan. I'd not heard of Pagan Kennedy before reading this reissued zine collection but reading it is like joining a club -- a fun, silly, earnest, handmade, and compelling club. The intro before each issue gave context and helped fill in the gaps between original publication. There are some good drawings and some really bad ones, lots of photographs, and many reports about Pagan's hair.I couldn't help but compare 'Zine to blogs, but (and it's probably because of my age) there's something about a carefully cut-and-pasted and photocopied book that feels more real to me than some typed words and images uploaded into a shiny blogging template. Me, sentimental? YES. I recommend this book regardless.But augh, some portions of text are so tiny and difficult to read!
    • 4/5
      Finding this book was a bit like waking up from a bizarre and confusing dream to discover that the real world was just as surreal as the dream!For a start: "You mean there was a 'zine scene in the '90s?"Not for the first time in my life, I felt the familiar sensation that I had completely missed what was going on for yet another decade in my life (Ref. Growing up, this reader had only a vague disembodied concept of what was fashionable during the 1970's, what bands were important or what was going on generally for much of the time! For the '80s and '90s simply rinse and repeat...).However, flicking through this book made my jaw drop. You see, as isolated as I remember growing up to have been, I now recall producing a number of self published works which I tried (usually unsuccessfully) to peddle at school. These bore a striking similarity to 'Pagan's Head' in that they were photocopied original works filled with my rants and lavishly embellished with hand rendered artwork (Proof of a convergent social evolution occurring, perhaps?). I even had a luxury version where I hand colour washed some of the images to produce a special colour issue. The same technology as early colourized photographs and Georges Méliè films. I'm not sure if even Pagan Kennedy was that self indulgent?This book is your chance to catch up on something you may have missed!Join Pagan in her appreciation of the Partridge Family, catch up on her gossip and experience her road trips to - nowhere in particular and for apparently no real reason. It's fun, quirky, kookie even!It is likely that the creative energy of this most narcissistic of creative outlets did not die, but evolved to the personal website craze of the '90, when every ISP encouraged it's users to develop their own personal websites - an often complex and tedious pastime which, in the beginning, involved learning at least the rudiments of coding html. This hardly ever sufficed to satisfy a person's 'creative vision', leading to ever more exotic coding solutions and the inevitable weeks and often months of debugging - following reports that your pages were falling apart across different browser versions on different platforms.All this before the streamlining that social networking promised, promoting unsuspecting and often well meaning individuals to instantly post to millions of their personal 'friends' their most abstract and ill-conceived meandering thoughts, and in the process erode friendships and damage family relationships (a reminder why diaries should remain private!); not forgetting the larger threat that this personal access to your most intimate thoughts could now be surreptitiously stored, catalogued and finally turned against the individual in later life by a bigger more carnivorous breed of narcissistic parasite: politically driven, power hungry and selfishly driven to exploit these naïf on-line diaries made by more trusting individuals (who still worried about the potential misuse of introducing identity cards, whilst caught up in their own on-line journey of self discovery) unaware of the predators scheming their eventual downfall by destroying any fledgling careers they may wish to one day make for themselves.The grim legacy of what started, innocently enough, as something harmless.(Pagan Kenedy, on the other hand, seems to have pulled through alright)
    • 5/5
      Self-publishing is a weird old thing. Why go to all the effort of creating something that often will only be read by family and friends, but takes you weeks or even months of effort to produce, then costs you too much money to get printed, and then can be incredibly difficult to distribute to complete strangers? Why not just do it electronically or just try and get it published properly? It’s surely just pure self-indulgence…Well yeah, in a way it kind of is. And I say that as someone who has been happily, and not cheaply, indulging his silliest ideas for about five years now. I am struck with a deeply silly idea (what if I wrote something like “Roy of the Rovers” but from my own perspective of not caring or understanding a single thing about the kicking game?) that makes me chuckle and then doodle it down and hope it makes someone else laugh as much as I did (if you want to find out if that person is you, by the way, the resulting “Roy of the Rovers” parody is called “Johnny Kickfoot” and can be found in “The Common Swings Variousness Spectacular” available from, well, me). So in many ways it’s, yes, indulging myself in a very real way. But it’s also a wonderful way of spontaneously taking an idea and getting it down on the page very quickly. To me this is one of the most profoundly wonderful things about zines and mini comics: it’s quick to produce and is frequently (once you get the hang of doing them) pretty much the equivalent of opening up your head and allowing the ideas to plop out directly onto the page.And the delight of it all is… you don’t have to care or worry about what readers might think about it. You’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it for you. No second guessing. As long as it’s not entirely self-obsessed, boring navel gazing that you’re producing (that’s what blogs are for, surely) you’ve got a good chance of finding someone who finds what you do enjoyable. I’ve had many baffled looks at my zines, but I’ve also found that one thing usually appeals to each person who reads them. Just one thing. And it’s usually the most unexpected thing in the world. My wife’s favourite was a kid’s book idea I basically knocked up on the spot about a vain pony called “Carl the Splendid Horse”. Just mentioning it sends her into giggles and I have no idea why. And I don’t’ think about it too much either, because by then I’m usually trying to think of another silly gag to make someone else chuckle.This is a roundabout way of saying that I understand a lot of the world that “Zine” comes from. I may not have been creating an autobiographical, mainly text based zine like Pagan Kennedy did, but by golly did this book resonate with me. Kennedy started “Pagan’s Head” as a way of not trying to second guess what other people – and Pagan herself - expected from her attempts to write the Great American Novel ™. This was the Great American Novel’s idiot, carefree brother who just gadded about on the sofa and watched the telly while his precious sibling vexed for hours pondering how many times is too many when it comes to saying “said” on one page. In other words, this was a spontaneous, slight, silly, wildly creative outlet for the kind of ideas that she deemed unusable for her “proper work”. And before she knew it, that spontaneous, slight, silly and wildly creative outlet had actually become, in many ways, as important – if not more so - as the Proper Novel itself.And that’s because a zine is like a dialogue. A dialogue between the creator and the reader. It’s a letter to people you initially know and then, hopefully, some you have yet to meet. It’s a bulletin straight from your brain. And having Kennedy’s insights into the creative process – and then being able to see that creative process itself – are fascinating. In many ways the quality of the zine itself is not important (although, handily, “Pagan’s Head” is a great read as it moves slowly from self-indulgence to finding a very real and confident voice, as Pagan moves towards the more themed issues: it’s a lovely companion piece to something like John Porcellino’s “King Cat Classix”, a similar collection of juvenilia slowly becoming bolder and more adventurous as the writer and artist grows in confidence in using his skills) – it’s the story of how it got there that really holds the attention.Because in many ways zines, mini comics and the whole world of self-publishing are more about the journey than they are about the destination itself. Many novels suffer from being so focussed on the destination, they don’t take the time to enjoy dawdling and take in the view on the route. In the hurry to say something important about the human condition, writers don’t suddenly get waylaid by a comical cat or an unusual street name. The zine writer absolutely thrives on those tiny details. Most zine writers and mini comic writers couldn’t give a stuff about the destination. Some of them have barely left the house. Some of them could probably knock out ten issues of something based purely on their front door. Which is why they’re so wonderful. They’re entirely the work of a creative mind wanting to scoop out the overflow from their brain and pin it down on the page. Even the dullest zine or mini comic can contain something uniquely brilliant and vivid. And to read someone’s story about how they progressed along that route makes it even more wonderful. A great, great book.
    • 4/5
      What does an authentic voice mean when by the end of this look back at her 20s and her creative experience, Kennedy is talking about her expressed personas as Pagans 1-4? Many of the reviews I've seen were written by the fellow "Gen Xers" of the author who expressed recognition and nostalgia for the times. I found that my experience as an early millennial was also heavily influential on my reading of the collection, so that its narrative seemed simultaneously terribly dated and universal. The frequent references to paper correspondence and long phone calls made me nostalgic for meaningful communications that I hardly ever experienced, but my teenage years were full of chat rooms and instant messaging and my 20s full of social networking. Access to heavily-mediated expression to a large, loosely-connected audience has almost always been available to me in a way that was pretty novel when zines hit the scene in the 90s. However, striving for a sense-of-self and creative success are universal drives to which anyone can relate.Kennedy's writing throughout is enjoyable to read, but I especially enjoyed the introductions to each issue of her zine. Peering behind the curtain and having the tricks revealed before each issue, did seem to break the spell of Pagan's zine persona, and I sometimes flagged in the longer pieces in the tiny text. Even well-written, entertaining navel-gazing can become a little tiresome upon extended exposure. This was an enjoyable introduction to part of the zine culture of the 90s and to Kennedy's writing.
    • 4/5
      This book was a delight. All eight 'Back to Pagan' zines are collected here, with short supplementary essays from Kennedy detailing the context of their composition. The juxtaposition of the two - youthful and vibrant zines, and more reflective, world weary essays - works brilliantly to evoke a woman assessing and processing the people she used to be in order to better grasp who she is now. So, as autobiography it works startlingly well, and for all Pagan's wry self-deprecation, 'Zine' is postmodern life-writing at its best. The only thing that has stopped me from giving this book the full five stars is, unfortunately, the general layout and presentation. Though SFWP should be lauded for faithfully reproducing the original zines, they have shot themselves in the foot by not opting for a larger canvas to do it on. Often the font is so small that most readers will need a magnifying glass to decipher it. This is a shame, because Kennedy writes with such antic exuberance, and composes in such a discerningly ramshackle manner, that her work deserves to be seen up close and a lot more clearly that it can be here. Nonetheless, however much it might hurt your eyes to read it, 'Zine' more than rewards your efforts - whether that be in Kennedy's tale of a road trip through non-place America, reflections on her Southern ancestors, her moving and indignant account of the medical establishment's attitudes to women, or - most importantly of course - the current state of her hair.
    • 4/5
      Reissued by the Santa Fe Writers Project, this is Kennedy's book from 1995 (did I read it then? The reading journal archives, alas, began in 1997) with no extras, just reprinted with a new cover. It has several full issues of Pagan's zine, "Pagan's Head" reproduced in all their typewritten, cut-and-pasted glory, plus narrative about how and why she started and continued it, and life events as the axis of her life shifted from writing and room-mates and hair and thinking about getting a car to more serious matters when her father fell ill and she had to face fairly serious health matters herself.The free-form format of the zine and the accepting world she inhabits mean that the zine can mutate and change direction as she goes, and this book still reads as fresh and is a useful contemporary documentary of the zine scene. One First World / Ageing Reader problem - because the presumably A4 zine was reproduced in a smaller-format book, some of it was pretty hard to read, requiring strong lighting and the occasional peering over or under my glasses. Readers over 40 - to whom this will necessarily appeal - be warned!
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this much more than expected. I liked the introduction preceding each zine which explains what was going on behind the scenes in Pagan's life and helped to enrich each issue. Due to her style of writing, and despite the fact that the zines themselves were reproduced in excruciatingly tiny print, I often found myself unaware of whether I was reading an intro or a zine. She captivates. My copy has many page corners turned because something she wrote about was so striking that I wanted to read it again and tell others about it: her thoughts about her slave-owning ancestors, her father's battle with cancer, her own battle with healthcare, and, yes, the feminist popcorn recipe! My favorite entry was Tearing Up the Highway which is lengthy but ended much too soon. Although a zine, it rivals any "across America" travelogue, one of my favorite genres. I now have several other Pagan Kennedy books on my wishlist. This is a gem I am glad to have discovered thanks to LT Early Reviewers.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this book and the zines it contained, made me want to find more zine written like Pagans.
    • 4/5
      Fast and furious read of one of the forerunners of zine culture in the 1990s. Each chapter is a flash-pan biography of her work in writing and zines, broken up wonderfully by actual reprints of her Zine. Delightful, engaging hilarious stuff, especially for anyone that has been involved in creating one of their one little masterpieces. You really can see yourself in some ways in her. It really is fascinating to see the growth of zine culture from her perspective, and comparing it to "real" publishing. A lot of what went on in the 90s with zine culture can be seen today in the localization of small presses, music, everything - D.I.Y.baby!. Fascinating to think about. Some complain that this work is too self-absorbed, they missed the point. My only complaint is that those reprints are so TINY in the words they can't be read easily.

    Book preview

    'Zine - Pagan Kennedy

    www.sfwp.com

    ’Zine: How I spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally…Found Myself…I Think. Copyright 1995 by Pagan Kennedy. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

    Library of Congress Catloging-in-Publication Data:

    Kennedy, Pagan, 1962-

    Zine : how I spent six years of my life in the underground and finally found myself­— I think / Pagan Kennedy.

    pages cm

    Originally published: New York : St. Martin’s Griffin,1995.

    Summary: Back in print after over a decade, see how Pagan Kennedy’s career got started in this hilarious autobiography from the pioneer of the 90’s ‘zine movement, and the current New York Times design columnist. A young woman named Pagan, just graduated from a writing program at a very prestigious university, is left with one burning question—now what? She then takes an unusual step by deciding to invent her new self—the one the public will know—by creating her own magazine, written, created by, and starring none other than herself — Provided by publisher.

    ISBN 978-1-939650-10-8 (trade paper : alk. paper)

    1. Kennedy, Pagan, 1962- 2. Zines—Publishing—United States—History—20th century. 3. Literature publishing—United States—History—20th century. 4. Underground press publications—United States—History—20th century. 5. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 6. Publishers and publishing—United States—Biography. I. Title.

    PS3561.E4269Z467 2014

    818’.5403—dc23

    [B]

    2013030171

    Published by SFWP

    369 Montezuma Ave #350

    Santa Fe, NM 87501

    www.sfwp.com

    Find the author at www.dangerousjoy.com and

    www.pagankennedy.net

    ISBN 9781939650160

    Prologue

    Back to Pagan

    Pagan’s Discovered to be Seventh Partridge

    Gossip!

    Pagan’s Ancestors Speak Out

    Tearing up the Highway

    The Big Car

    Men

    Books, Boyfriends, Oophorectomy

    Epilogue

    Other books by Pagan Kennedy

    Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s

    Stripping and Other Stories

    Spinsters

    Living

    The First Man-Made Man

    Black Livingstone

    The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex

    The Exes

    Confessions of a Memory Eater

    FOR SIX YEARS, I published a magazine all about myself. In it, I documented everything from my dreadlock hair-care tips to the antics of my roommate’s pet pig to my travails as a struggling fiction writer. Pagan’s Head (as the magazine came to be known) was just a little Xeroxed, stapled-together thing that I handed out to friends and acquaintances—but it changed my life. I began publishing it in an effort to procrastinate, to trick people into liking me, to get dates, to turn myself into a star, and to transform my boring life into an epic story. And the scary thing was, it worked.

    I did get fans, friends, and dates—people responded to the Head with far more enthusiasm than I had ever anticipated. More to the point, the magazine imparted a surreal, cartoony quality to my life; during the years when I published Pagan’s Head, I existed on two levels. On the one hand, I was just another out-of-whack, directionless woman trying to muddle through her late twenties; on the other hand, I was the star of my own story, a story illustrated by cheesy clip art and half-assed cartoons and photos chosen because they made me look like I had high cheekbones. On the one hand, I was a frustrated writer, receiving rejection letters from The New Yorker for my short stories; on the other hand, I was a publishing dominatrix who demanded my readers send me money, toys, and fan letters—and I got them.

    My Pagan’s Head phase lasted from the time I was twenty-five until I was thirty-one. Now I’m thirty-two and I think I’ve come out the other side. I seem to have lost the urge to live on two levels; nowadays, just dealing with ordinary life seems complicated enough. I look back on the Head years With bemusement and some shame. What the hell was I thinking? A whole friggin’ magazine all about myself? Geez.

    I suppose I did it because I was shy, frustrated, and fucked up. But, really, I remember those years as mostly happy, suffused with the candy-colored glow of a Saturday morning cartoon. A time when all that mattered was adventure. A time when art could still save my life.

    ONE DAY in September 1987 my friend Billy, a bassist from the band Hell

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