Literary Fan Magazine

King Wenclas of New Pop Lit has revived his old print zine Literary Fan Magazine!  I quite enjoyed the original, so I applaud its return.

On a sidenote, I wonder if there will be a return to print now that many Internet companies are censoring content (Wenclas's revival has nothing to do with this by the way as far as I know).  Regardless of the creepiness of the content they are yanking down, freedom of speech as a principle generally is only for speech we don't like since no one has a problem with speech they do like.  The answer to bad speech is good speech as always, not trying to erase the bad speech.  People tend to think bad thoughts whether they feel free to express them or not.  The expression can actually be healthy as the cognition will emerge at some point, probably in a less pleasant manner if it's been repressed for some time.  Conversely, it is wise to pay attention to nasty speech as it is often the precursor to nasty action.  Anyway, I never liked the social networks much.  There was too much garbage on them, and they were creepy in general (I thought this long before I saw the interesting Social Dilemma movie).  I deleted most of my accounts a few years back.  A blog may be so 2003, but it's also a lot more fun.  Since I own my own domain name, even if my webhost took this site down, I would just pop up elsewhere.  Maybe I would even have fun experimenting with running my own server.  As the old line goes, freedom of the press belongs only to one who owns one.

Anyway, back to the King!  He asked me to contribute something, so I wrote a new "What Wred's Reading" for him.  I will let you know when the zine is published (keep in mind that zines publish irregularly, so it might be a while).  It's nice to see the King still publishing.  Many of the other old zinesters have faded away, not publishing in print or online (in some cases, this is a good thing, however).  That makes sense because many zinesters had a particular need to publish and once that need passed, so did the publishing.  Some of us are lifers though.  Fortunately, most are the interesting ones (alas, some are not).  I'm about halfway through my rereading of my Zine World collection and about to the point where I left the staff to concentrate on writing The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, and at that time, there was a big debate about online publishing (one bonehead even strangely hijacked a staff meeting, which was basically a zine itself, to complain about the dissertation I wrote that explored how electronic publishing was affecting zines, and it was clear that she nor any of the others she roped in didn't actually read the dissertation).  It is interesting to note that the most strident voices against publishing online then have almost all disappeared from publishing in print or online with only one exception I can think of (but he's been boring readers since 1969 or something).  The people who saw online publishing as yet another interesting tool in the toolbox, even if they took a while to come around to it, such as Wenclas, seem to be more likely still publishing.

In any case, I look forward to the King's new venture!

If you can't wait to read my contribution to the King's zine, then please read my latest novel, Edna's Employment Agency!