...in which Jeff Somers plucks his head out of his own ass for a moment to explain why he wishes all the reviews he got were bad reviews

I AM NOT a proud man. I've begged for my drinks. I've crawled on the floor looking for loose change. I've begged people to read my zine^[1]. Lord knows there isn't much I'm ashamed of any more, and pretty soon I expect all that residual shame from childhood to be burned out, leaving me as some sort of Homo Superior, ready and willing to take charge of this planet. Until I evolve those Jedi Mind tricks, however, I bide my time publishing and contemplating the world around me. And drinking^[2].

Not being a proud man, I've never worried much over reviews. A zine is usually such an idiosyncratic production that it cannot, by nature, achieve a large audience. That's why movies and bestselling books suck so badly: in order to appeal to that many paying customers, the Entertainment in question has to satisfy a broad range of tastes and expectations. In other words, in order to appeal to that broad an audience, most stuff has to be bland, obvious crap. It has to suck. Zines, for the most part, are far too personal, and far too specific in their appeal, to ever garner nationwide love^[3]. This usually means that even in the relatively small world of zine publishing it's hard to please a large number of people, and even the most well-regarded zines or ziney-writers have their detractors^[4].

Add in the fact that everyone in zinedom seems to be reviewing everyone else_and I mean everyone_and you're pretty much guaranteed to receive some bad reviews in your time. I, for one, don't view this as a bad thing. I like bad reviews. I prefer them, actually. Good reviews are nice and all, but give me a snappy, well-written bad review and I'm much happier. The reason for this is simple: bad reviews offer much more by way of snappy advertising slogans. Like Matt Dillion's character Cliff in Singles says: all this negative energy just makes me stronger^[5].

The best bad review I ever received is easily from Vic Flange on the web site fleshmouth.co.uk. This inspired little gem went: "Inner Swine is a site about a zine about something or another, and unfortunately tries to be a catalogue for various publications, plus a sampler, plus a web site. There is much that suggests this should be good...but it tries too fucking hard to stay on the right side of mass appeal. So what does that mean? It means it's wank. Come on, stick your fucking necks out. You have nothing to lose but your fucking heads." It gives me the instantly memorable slogan The Inner Swine: It Means it's Wank! The second-best bad review I ever got appeared in Ten Things Jesus Wants You to Know: "This is an honest zine, so I will be honest. Most everything in here I didn't need to read." This gives us the equally snappy The Inner Swine: Most Evereything in Here, You Don't Need to Read. See how this works? Good reviews, while heartwarming, don't offer up this kind of advertising fodder, and lord knows accolades don't pay the bills. I mean, a slogan like The Inner Swine: Not Bad for a Jersey Zine just isn't snappy, dammit, and The Inner Swine: Jeff Somers is a damn fine looking man just sounds made up^[6].

Plus, good reviews are wasted on a smug bastard such as myself, because they simply meld in with the chorus of congratulatory voices in my head, singing Oompa-Loompa songs which rhyme zine with keen^[7].

What I really enjoy about bad reviews are when they're wrong. Not about the quality of my writing or of my zine, which is wholly subjective, but about actual facts. Checkable things. Like once a reviewer from maximumrocknroll got all bent out of shape because the `fake letters to the editor' weren't very funny. This was best explained by the fact that they weren't fake^[8], which I think would have been obvious to a gas huffing moron. Or when the reviewer for Punk Planet recently worried over the DIY nature of my zine because it's distroed in Tower Records, when Punk Planet itself is distroed in Tower Records. Things like that made my day, because it gives me an opportunity to be sarcastic. Nothing gives me greater joy in life than being sarcastic^[9].

It's one thing if a bad review discusses specifics in an intelligent and critical manner_I've had plenty of bad reviews I can't really argue with. It's the smug, no-substance reviews that boil down to "I didn't like this because I got a bad feeling from the cover, so I didn't actually read it, and you shouldn't either" that bring me joy, because quoting them in big block letters just makes the reviewer look bad. Joy! I mean, how hard is it to do basic factchecking with zines? Okay, considering that most of our zine publishers pack up and move every three months, I guess it could be kind of hard to factcheck a review. Of course, you could actually read the damn zine, even if you were handed twenty zines and asked for reviews in three days. But then, I suppose having the correct information and informed opinions goes against everything that zines stand for. They certainly go against everything my zine stands for. Until next time, friends, treasure your bad reviews. Paste them in big letters on the front covers of your zines. Print up vinyl stickers at stickerguy.com with choice phrases. March into your local libraries and shout them out at the top of your lungs until the cops drag you away. Be proud of your bad reviews, because you can measure how cool you are by how many people hate you.

[1] please read my zine

[2] Jack Daniels, yum

[3] which is not to suggest that zines cannot suck, because many_oh so many, and probably yours_do

[4] even I have my detractors, which is shocking to me every time I think of it

[5] Matt Dillon is one fine-looking man

[6] which it is.

[7] Charlie and the Glass Elevator is the little-known sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, on which the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was based. Little known because it sucked.

[8] though they were right about one thing, they weren't very funny

[9] except buying liquor and cigarettes for underage kids, of course

...in which Jeff Somers ruminates on people believing anything he writes in his zine to be the total, unadulterated truth.

Friends, I've written a lot of crazy shit in my zine. It's my zine, and I have fun with it, and the people who actually come back for a second issue usually enjoy at least some of the shenanigans. I've written about being paid billions of dollars by Microsoft for the rights to my zine. I've written about forming a worldwide Organization of Evil modeled on James Bond villains, with me securely running the show from a secret underground bunker. I've often exaggerated my boozing to truly heroic levels that would have left me dead long ago if they were true. From pretty much page one of every issue, with a few shining exceptions, I am piling on bullshit in a breathtakingly brazen manner. I'd think it would be obvious.

And yet, people believe a lot of it.

Not the Organization of Evil, of course. Even the dimmest people reviewing my zine ignore those sorts of things, often with thinly-disguised contempt. People often believe the binge-drinking, the loss of my pants on a regular basis, the arrests for public urination or lewdness. Certainly if I had any pride to speak of I'd be insulted that people so readily believe that I spend all my time passing out from liquor and wetting myself. That's supposed to be funny, damn your eyes. While it's true that I enjoy the occasional dignified entire bottle of Jack Daniels in one sitting, and it's also true that once or twice I've lost my pants under mysterious circumstances while out living the high life with The Inner Swine Inner Circle (TISIC), neither happens as often or as egregiously as I pretend in my zine.

And yet...

I get reviews sometimes that take everything said in the zine WAY too seriously. Now, I'm not upset that people don't appreciate the humor. Every zine is a unique snowflake and not everyone is going to like it, and I've already discussed how I love bad reviews (see It Means it's Wank #1, XD#9). What bothers me is that I can write the most ridiculous bullshit and people just take it seriously. And what really bothers me is when they chastize me for the Error of My Ways. Here's a quote from one of my favorite emails on the subject:

"You "May not" live long enough....although you should. Alcohol is wonderful for slowing down your never ending thoughts of the moment as well as the next 20 years. The best relaxer ever invented for the thinking man. Especially at night when your brain will not shut off and let you sleep...It's not so much a crutch for you as a tool, however it can get out of control and will during your youth....Pay attention to your body signs and read up on the subject... it is a life and death matter! I did not have blackouts till I was close to 40 yrs old, lots of tolerance over my 20 years of Harley riding and non stop drinking in the Navy. It was an accepted way of life at the time."

Wasn't that fun? The incoherency aside, I really enjoyed the fact that he completely missed the joke. Now, I know that it's almost a cliche in zinedom (and other artistic cliques) to write about being a hard drinker, living on the razor's edge, punishing yourself for your brilliance, yada yada. I often have reviewers mention that fact that I write about being drunk in dismissive, been-there-done-that tones. This bugs me, because it should be the effectiveness of the joke, or the quality of the writing that gets judged, not whether or not I'm the millionth zine writer to delightedly describe his puking habits in public toilets. The question should be, do I describe my public-toilet puking habits more entertainingly than the rest of you bozos.

In my zine, Your Humble Editor is a persona. Many, if not most, perzines are pretty raw and honest, and you can usually assume that there is minimal filtering. If they're writing about being beat up in school, or dying slowly at their day job, or drinking too much and yakking on a public bus, you can usually assume that events and feelings described are pretty true to what really happened. This may be where the trouble starts: lazy readers assume certain things about all zines, and certain things about all perzines_like you can believe everything in it 100% because, heck, it's a perzine. While my zine is often described as a perzine, you don't get much honesty from it. A lot of times there are true, actual events and honest feelings at the base of the essays in each issue, but it's all buried under layers of sweet, thick bullshit. To get to Your Humble Editor, you have to imagine me, then take away any sense of responsibility or restraint, pickle in booze, and come up with a special effects budget. It's about as far away from me as you can get and still be recognizable.

I guess if someone isn't amused by the persona, it's natural that they give me a bad review, and that's fair, and fine with me. All I really ask is that people realize there is, in fact, a persona. If it amuses you to imagine that I lose my pants on a regular basis, fine; I'm only here to amuse you, anyway. Bastards.

...in which Jeff Somers considers the folly of talking back to a bad review.

Shockingly, even mega-talented hipster-doofus Zine publishers who look good in tight pants, like me, get bad reviews sometimes. I'll give you a moment to recover from the shock. Now, I've already discussed the proper response to a bad review: Take it like an adult and use it as ironic advertising fodder. Or, simply ignore it with the serene confidence of cult leaders and geniuses alike. Sure, reading that you write like your ass chews gum^[1] is no fun, but the words lose some of their power if you just smile mockingly and let it slide over you. It's even better if you take no notice of reviews at all, aside from the aforementioned advertising-fodder. Life's too short to be worrying over what other people think of your stuff. Unless, of course, no one is actually reading it, and you're greeted by the calming noise of crickets in the night whenever you release a new issue. That's a problem, I'll grant you, much worse than bad reviews.

Sadly, a lot of people can't seem to control themselves, and they spend a lot of time and energy responding to bad reviews. They write indignant letters to the reviewing publication, they post angry rebuttals on their web sites. This is not only silly, it's counter-productive. Like playing tic-tac-toe with a huge supercomputer, there is no winning, only degrees of losing.

First of all, for the most part the people reviewing zines are doing so because a) they think their opinions are worth hearing or b) out of a sense of serving the zine community. While I think a lot of zines use reviews of whatever they can think of just to fill some scary white space in their idea-challenged zines, a lot of fine publications review zines earnestly, and there is certainly a value to these reviews, especially if the reviews come from a respected place like, say, Xerography Debt or Zine World. Or even maximumrocknroll, which has never given me a good review, ever. A good review gives you an idea of the content and tone of the zine in question, and a decent recommendation of whether it's worth your dollars in the mail. After a while you get to know which reviewers you find to be reliable, and can make decisions based on their opinions. This is all a Good Thing. None of these people are getting paid to review zines, I don't think. There's nothing in it for them but giving honest opinions.

So why bother complaining? One of the most entertaining aspects of Zine World, for me at least, is the pathetic letters in the beginning of each issue complaining about bad reviews. The indignant protests! The insults! Every time I read these letters, I hear a baby crying in the background (but I'm prone to these sorts of audio/visual hallucinations, so that's not too surprising; sometimes entire issues of my zine are dictated to me by a small Leprechaun named McEgo. So what? Doesn't make me a bad guy). Same thing goes for screaming updates to web sites which hurl vitriol at the shadowy conspiracy of reviewers bent on undermining people's hard work and genius_they resemble all too well the pathetic flame wars you witness in chat rooms, forums, and newsgroups. No one wins, no one admits being wrong, and everyone else just killfiles the idiots.

First of all, complaining about a bad review just makes it seem like the reviewer hit a sore spot. It's like admitting that people have been telling you that your writing blows since third grade, and you can't take it any more. People get testy about things they're insecure about, after all. If you're confident about something, you can accept criticism about it serenely, sure that everyone else is a moron if they don't like your work. Complaining about a review, in my opinion, just confirms that the reviewer got something right about you.

Second, arguing about an opinion is ignorant and a waste of time. If someone thinks your zine sucks, that's what they think. It's like arguing over their favorite color. Don't waste your time.

Finally, and most importantly, it's useless. The reviewer is not going to publish a retraction. They are not going to apologize. And, most likely, you're not going to change anyone elses mind about your zine. Chances are the readers of the reviewing publication are familiar with it and have learned to trust it's reviews_they have a relationship with it. If they're not already familiar with your zine, they have no reason to believe anything you say, and since you're all pissed off and self-righteous about a bad review, it's doubtful they'll take you seriously anyway. All you'll probably do is convince them that the review was right. Complaining about a review will, most likely, just embarrass you.

Obviously, since the world is still a madhouse and I have not yet been named the Poet Laureate of Hoboken, New Jersey, with the associated liquor and beer stipend, no one is taking what I say very seriously. That's probably for the best. Still, I think if people would listen to me on this one thing and stop bitching about bad reviews, we'd have a better world. Plus, that liquor and beer stipend would be good, too.

...in which Jeff Somers considers the horror of a paucity of reviews. And indulges in some postmodern-lite footnotes, like David Foster Wallace, natch.

THE only thing worse than a bad review, really, is no review at all. I remember the first issue of my little zine: I printed up about 50 issues, mailed them out to whoever I could think of (mainly friends, family, and my seventh-grade teacher who once advised me that I was ruining my life by quitting the crossing guards^[1]somehow I don't think the zine thing convinced her otherwise). There followed a Great Silence, wherein you could detect, if you listened very closely, the faint sound of crickets.

We've all been there. After a while, and about ten more issues, I started to figure out that there was an entire zine community^[2] out there, complete with review zines and such, and I started getting some reviews, some notice, and the occasional two bucks in the mail, quickly spent on liquor and forgotten. For a while my zine seemed to get reviews, good and otherwise, every few weeks. I became obsessed with it, for here was proof, finally, that I did actually exist, that I wasn't a spirit fooled into believing he was real. It also confirmed that I had actually produced a zine and mailed it out to people, that it hadn't all been a DTs hallucination, like that time I conquered the world with an army of winged monkeysdamn, I had some explaining to do after that bender, when I kept wearing the crown and commanding that people be executed on the spot.

I searched for reviews of my zine constantly, and began reproducing them in my zine for a bizarrely egocentric mirror-into-mirror effect that I'm still quite fond of^[3].

And then, around issue 25 or so, I stopped getting reviewsnot entirely, but it definitely throttled down a little.

The simplest explanation makes sense: Everyone had already reviewed the damn thing, and saw no reason to keep reviewing it. In my fevered brain, however, it quickly became an existential crisis: I'd been relying on a steady stream of reviews to prove to myself that I was actually doing these things. The sudden lack of reviews made me doubt my own existence. Anyone who's put out a zine and gotten no response back knows the terrible, black feeling that a lack of interest inspired within youthis is, in some sense, you that you're putting out there. Even if it's not a perzine, even if it's a zine dedicated to the study of tiny furniture craved out of soap^[4], it still represents a part of you. To have it coldly ignored is horrible.

Of course, there's not much you can do about it aside from getting the emergency bottle of cheap whiskey from the toilet tank and doing some hard drinking...um, thinking^[5]. Begging for reviews is undignified, and likely to get you nowhere fast, since reviews are provided not as free advertising for you, or as a stroke to your ego, but as a service to the readers out there with two dollars to spare and in need of good advice on how to spend it. The one spark of hope, of course, is that eventually it will all come back around to you, because there're always new reviewers out there, and sometimes veterans will re-examine your zine from time to time. The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul will end, eventually^[6].

This is why it's always a mistake to underestimate the power and value of reviews in zinedom. Not only are reviews a great way of getting info about new zines, and a great way to get some promotion for your zine, but they also serve as a barometer of the attention you're getting for your effortsand let's face it, if you didn't want attention, you whore, you wouldn't be putting out a zine. or at least you'd be doing something like putting out six issues to close intimate friends and burning the masters afterwards. A lack of reviews can be an invaluable indication of your penetration into the psyche of the reader, good or bad. Personally, I'd much rather get a ton of really bad reviews than no reviews at all. Polite, dutiful reviews which boil down to mere acknowledgments that the author received your zine in the mail are almost as depressing as no reviews at all...but not quite. The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul is a much blacker force in the Universe; if we could somehow harness the Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul and convert it into electrical energy, we could probably solve the world's energy problems.

Some zines, I suppose, move past the need for reviews, in a sense. I've heard that Cometbus is pretty good, for example, and I doubt people need one more review to convince them that it's a quality publication. Of course, people new to zines might not have the benefit of the previous twenty years of reviews moldering away in past issues of review zines, so new reviews always serve a purpose, and I want everyone to remember that next time you see Yet Another Review of My Zine and want to tear the page out and burn it, it makes you so mad^[7]. I guess the basic rule you can take away from this column is: Reviews, good. No reviews, Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

[1] True story: I was a crossing guard, which meant I wore a bright orange belt and helped the crossing guard manage all the younger kids. I thought it would be fun and they really dressed it up as an honor, but it was boring and I had better things to do, like drink blackberry brandy on street corners, so I quit. Looking back, I guess it was kind of the beginning of a downward spiral of sorts.

[2] No shitI had no idea I was putting out a zine. I had no idea so many other people had used sophisticated time-travel devices to steal my idea for `zines' and begin producing them decades before I was even born. I didn't find out about zines until long after that first issue, and was, of course, delighted. And litigous, but so far no lawyer will take the case.

[3] I briefly considered putting a review of my zine that appeared in Xerograghy Debt, and was subsequently reprinted in my zine, in this footnote, but that suddenly seemed too self-indulgent, if such a thing exists.

[4] Such a zine, to my knowledge, does not exist. But what a magical world this would be if it did!

[5] This kind of lame play on words is normally beneath me.

[6] The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul is, of course, a title of a book by Douglas Adams, stolen quite brazenly.

[7] Although I certainly won't. Remember it, that is.

...in which your intrepid columnist wonders just how useful a review is to a zine publisher, and ponders whether good reviews or bad reviews are more useful.

My zine got a bad review the other day. In and of itself this is not news, as my zine gets a lot of bad reviews, and the source of this particular review has never liked my zine anyway. And as far as I can tell, bad reviews of my zine are a fundamental building block of the universe, like quarks or light quantaubiquitous and necessary. Years from now, when super-scientists finally solve all the riddles of the cosmos and figure out what dark matter is, I'm sure they'll find it's made up of bad reviews of my zine. Okay, so whatTake it in stride, what's the big deal, all this negative energy just makes me strongerbut this particular review wasn't so much a review as one long insult directed towards me. You know the type of review I'm talking about; the review that basically calls you lame and boring seven different ways before wrapping up.

This got me to thinking: What was the value of that review? On a basic level it did it's job: It communicated the reviewer's opinion of my zine to the reader (in this case, potentially summed up with a pithy it sucked that would have saved time, paper, and energy). But that's about it; while a reader will know what the reviewer thinks of my zine, they don't get a lot of clues as to why the reviewer hated it so much. Maybe I ran over the reviewer's dog and they're getting back at me. Maybe they don't care for foppish alcoholic hipster doofuses and the humor they prefer (fey, giggling, and incoherent). Maybe they hate anything with fiction in it. Who knows? That's the point. No one knows. All you know is that they didn't like it.

Of course, if you've grown to trust that reviewer, that may be all you need. Much in the same way I trust the bartender at Stinky Sullivan's in Hoboken when they silently shake their head at the new beer I've gestured at and grunted for.

But a review is a tool, and like all tools you need to know a lot about its parameters before you can really use it. Assuming that the review itself at least contains some hints as to the reasoning behind the reviewer's recommendation, I started to wonder what the best approach was: Postive, negative, or a mixture?

The Good. Some reviewing publications only print good reviewsnot in the sense of liking everything that's sent to them and publishing useless rubber-stamp reviews, but in the sense of only printing reviews of zines they recommend. The commonsense theory here is that there's no reason to tell people what you hate; they're reading reviews in order to find something they want to read. The good part about this is, since you know that every zine in there is recommended by someone, you can quickly scan the titles until something catches your eye, and you know that it's being recommended to you. The value here is no wasted time, in the sense that reading about what not to buy is a waste of time, since you can safely assume that anything not in that publication isn't being recommended to you, thus saving you the trouble of sifting reviews.

The problem, of course, is the insular, clubby feeling such publications can get, when the lovefest gets a little thick. After dozens of pages of happy happy reviews, you can't help but wonder how high the bar is. It's like one hand clapping: If you can't see the bad reviews, how do you know there are bad reviews? In other words, how can you be sure these happy happy people dislike anything?

That's the problem: The Control. Everything needs a Control against which to measure, to make sure you're getting accurate results. A reviewer's positive review can be said to only be valuable if they can demonstrate that they do, in fact, dislike something. A reviewer who likes everything is useless. When a review zine only prints positive reviews, you have to assume there's a huge pile of rejected zines that would have gotten bad reviews. If you assume that, it still works, so the question becomes whether assuming something is a good way to operate.

The Bad. Other review zines take the opposite approach: They pride themselves in the harshness of their reviews. While not having bad reviews as an editorial policy, these reviewers take the stance that a tough standard means only truly amazing zines get their approval, while any sort of mediocrity or lackluster effort is punished ruthlessly.

Of course, snarkiness often becomes a goal in and of itself. Like at the lunch table I sat at during High School, insult-comedy quickly becomes a competition of wit, speed, and viciousness: Whoever got off the nastiest one-liner won. You read some of the harder-edged review zines, and you get the feeling the reviewers aren't really reviewing zines, they're scanning them for material for their pithy barbs. The bastards.

It seems pretty obvious that the only way to really know the value of a reviewer is to read both what they like and what they didn't like, and, most importantly, why they liked or didn't like something. I think the reason someone doesn't like a zine is often the whole point of a review. I mean, if someone starts off a negative review of The Whirligig by saying, "I don't like litzines..." you know the poor zine didn't have a chance, and that colors your appreciation of the review. On the other hand, if you've read ten reviews of litzines by that reviewer and they always hate them, and then they review The Whirligig and love it, that review tells you a lot more.

Of course, what I think would be total genius would be a review zine that only prints positive reviews of The Inner Swine. Oh wait...that is The Inner Swine. Never mind.