Literature in Spain is an industry that takes itself very seriously. I’d never come across people arguing not just about the content of a book, but the book as an object before. Layout, typeface, the weight of the paper are all things that readers and critics value. The paperback revolution never really happened here in the 60′s so there’s still a certain sense of the book as, if not high art, then something not to be messed with too much.
With the rise in independent publishing that’s all changing though, there is a growing number of people releasing deliberately lo-fi photocopied zines containing poetry, short stories, and reviews.What’s surprising about all this, is not that they exist, but that they’ve managed to get such exposure. Over the last 2 months the mainstream press has begun to publish articles on the subject. Of the three fanzines mentioned in every article -El Jugete Rabioso by Jordi Carrion, 5000 Negros by Violeta Puig and Mapache- the one I’ve had the most contact with is Mapache. That’s because it’s the zine that I do with my girlfriend.
Just before Christmas we enrolled in a night school course at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra. The course was called Cultural Journalism in the 21st century, and for the most part it was an epic waste of time. We were both always too busy and too shattered to do the reading and it was odd for both of us to be back amongst college students. About three classes in, we decided to miss one and stay at home making a Fanzine. Mapache 001 was called “A Guide To Surviving Nuclear Radiation” and was the fictionalised transcript of an argument we’d had the night before tied in with everything that was going on at the time in Fukushima. We did a quick collage of a mutated Julio Iglesias picture for the cover, and got it out the next day.
The idea was to do one a week, quickly put together ‘manuals’ on whatever we felt like at the time. It was nice to work on something together, and also create something that was an antidote to the pretentiousness of the literary scene. But I think the main reason we did it was the need to have something on paper. Both of us run blogs, and although I grew up making and reading zines, I’d been focused on publishing online for the last few years. It was good to remember the feeling of coming back from the copy shop with a stack of zines under your arm, and seeing someone flick through something you’ve made yourself is way better than standing over someone’s shoulder while they stare at a screen.
All of this is interesting on a couple of levels, firstly as a reaction to screen burn, and the consumption of culture online. Simon Reynolds just released a book about the retro nature of modern culture where he speaks of the internet as an enormous instant archive of everything. That I guess makes it very hard to get someone to look at something you’ve done as unique. Making a fanzine sidesteps that, and though you’ve got to get it in someone’s hands (and of course there’s no guarantee that they’ll like it), there’s the definite idea that a zine is original, independent, and special.
We’re on our 5th issue right now, it’s about MDMA.