Print is dead. If not dead, then dying. And if not dying, then alive, on the mend, and arriving at another heyday. So much attention has been paid to the many disappearing acts of print that I’ve started to lose the plot, feeling reluctant to follow this strangely religious attachment to announcing the swan song of a medium and then proclaiming its imminent revival.

Print isn’t any more dead or dying than DIY, which is to say that it is and isn’t and also who cares? All of this hand-wringing about what’s happened to print, who’s killed it, or what year it broke makes up its own dying discourse, and I won’t bother with it, because I’m way more into the undead and that spooky scene. I won’t get into the smell of old books, their careful craftsmanship, or how bookworms are better in bed, because that’s nonsense as well. Books aren’t vintage or sexy because they’re some remnants of a bygone era. Reading books doesn’t magically transport you to the good-ole-days (which were pretty awful), or gift you a secret insight into our similarly awful present. Books don’t even need

to be important to be around, and that’s alright.

Books are rad because they can be wicked smart and wicked stupid. You can fight about them one day and throw them out the next, and while ideally you wouldn’t, moving is the worst and books can be the first things to go (sorry, Feminine Mystique).

Releasing a book-themed issue of a zine-y webpaper seems to get at this logic of coexisting contradictions, which would signal the hybrid forms of the digitally tangible, intimately alienating, and living dead. When The Media declared its domain as fvckthemedia, posturing a bratty resistance to the would-be precedence of the objective over the multiple, it’d also meant to challenge the partitioning of the multiple into the bold-lettered columns of modern-day reporting: arts, food, politics, fashion, world. These categories seem convenient until they’re not, meaning that exceptions to the rule threaten to blur these divisive borders.

Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” is a good example of a

song that riffs off a literary work and then comments back on its source, providing, also, an excellent karaoke pick to inspire and frighten your friends. Patti Smith is a good example of a figure that similarly defies categorization, simultaneously embodying poet//musician//visual artist//punk, with the dominant strand difficult to define. This isn’t to say we should all aspire at becoming everything (unless you truly are the Patti Smith of your scene), but we also shouldn’t be disturbed when our identities spill over into foreign territory, outside interests, degrees, or self-determined niches.

A few years ago I worked at an independent bookstore that was not a bookstore. That this space would house, at given times, a zine library, a video production company, a show space, and a gallery would present the possibility of a dutifully promiscuous venue, where media and venue exceeded distinct and exclusive pairings. For the first time in what felt like forever, I also didn’t know where or how I fit in, or what ideas I was wedded to. And so my . . .