Docs: The Journal of Microbiography Issue #2

PO Box 26183
Baltimore, MD
21210
USA

The purpose of Docs is kind of strange. It has a very strict format in that each contribution is four pages long: a title/index page that lists who/what is being written about, and three different "documents" that somehow relate to that entity. When I read the first issue of this zine I had absolutely no idea what was going on, as the "documents" can be anything (photos, screenshots, excerpts), don't have to be what was listed on the index, and the people described don't actually have to exist.

And so you get three pages of seemingly random stuff, that is considerably more interesting because you assume there must be some connection to it, that it must mean something, that it somehow describes someone who may or may not exist. You struggle through multiple pages of text with no paragraph breaks, you stare at pictures of leaves, you try to decipher a bad photocopy of a crumpled piece of paper, and all the time you wonder how these three things possibly describe the entirety of a person, or if that's even possible.

Huh, so apparently I am somewhat enamored with the idea behind this zine, even if the content for the most part doesn't totally grab me (even bizarre, mysterious poetry/lyrics don't interest me that much). My favourite section from this issue was about the world squirrel, who's lived from infinity to infinity, and whose documents consisted for an excerpt from a "truly evil" Swedish black metal band's biography, an interview with a restaurateur, and a screenshot of a .WAV audio file. Fantastic! Somehow this does describe a mythical squirrel.

Docs Issue 1

PO Box 26183
Baltimore, MD
21210
USA

I'll admit, I wasn't really sure what I was reading until I got to the final page of this zine and read the guidelines for people who want to submit to future issues. So what is Docs? Well, it's brief three topic/page biographies of people: living, dead, or entirely fictional.

And by "biography" I'm speaking pretty loosely, there are pictures, and sheet music, and weird stories, and to be honest I really didn't have any idea what I was reading the first time through. Where these true? They didn't really seem to be...

But then I hit the final "biography" in here (Hrtumt Slitte by F. L. Smith), and even if it still confused me to some extent, it read like the sort of collection of ephemera that I love and I didn't really care that I didn't really "get" the rest of the zine". Each page of Hrtumt Slitte is clearly part of a larger piece that does not exist. The table of contents (with footnote) seems to have no relation to the other pages. The first page is a description of Kid Kinney ("a loathsome creature") from someone who hates him. The second page is a series of TV show proposals that all finish with everything unraveling. But the final page was what clinched it for me. A description of someone exploring an abandoned building that features a hidden message amongst the text _and_ stops midway through a sentence with no resolution? That sounds like something that I'd write! (No wonder nobody reviews my zines...)

I'm not sure what the next issue of Docs will contain, but I hope it has more content like that final biography.