Etsy Shop for thelalatheory

The La-La Theory No. 7, Nix Besser

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:35:24 -0500

$2.00
Okay, a new issue of La-La!

The La-La Theory is my serial zine about language. I studied linguistics in school and took it seriously, but this is a fun, imaginative, lay person's approach to the subject. In this issue I: talk about recent research on the connection between speech and music, report on an interesting lecture I heard about translating poetry, and play around with search engines and reverse dictionaries. And stuff. It's 40 pages long, and the cover art was drawn by the fabulous Jim Tierney: www.jimtierneyart.com.

Things I've Lost/Things I've Found split zine

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:11:11 -0500

$4.00
Okay, this little project is super limited-edition because of the beautiful screen-printed covers. 50 total were made, and I've got 25. Only 3 are available here on my etsy shop. Get 'em while they're hot!

I have always liked split zines, which is a book that reads both ways; when you flip it onto the back cover you find, to your great delight, that it is actually a second front cover. One half of this little book is called "THINGS I'VE FOUND," and it's all about good stuff I've trash-picked and found by the side of the road, including:

* a dollhouse
* a kitchen chair
* a paper prayer chain & a nun's office chair (found in the trash behind my old grade school)
* and other little oddball things.

The other half is called "THINGS I'VE LOST: By which I mean actual things, not, like, my innocence or whatever." These include:

* my copy of the book Please Kill Me
* one beige high heel
* knitted fingerless gloves
* etc.

I made this zine with the fabulous illustrator Helen Entwisle, aka Memo. She drew pictures of some of the things I wrote about, and she screen-printed the covers in black and mint green ink. Here is her website if you want to see more of her work: http://www.hellomemo.com/

As I say, Helen printed up 50 of these covers and sent me half of them. There aren't many of them in this world we live in, so they're kinda special. The innards of the book are done in good old-fashioned cut-and-paste-and-photocopy on pink paper. The pages have lovely rounded covers, too.

Fortune Telling Pack, set of 2 tiny zines

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:27:13 -0500

$1.00
A while ago I made a zine from one sheet of paper called A Perpetual Calendar of Fortunes For You. You can see a picture of it on the right there. I have always been very taken with the idea of the "perpetual calendar," which is an object I think has a poetic name. So, I resolved to one day write something with this as a title and the thing I wrote ended up being this loony little zine. It gives a different fortune for each day of the week.

Then recently I remembered about those fortune teller things we used to make out of a sheet of paper when we were kids. Did you do them too? We did a little origami-like folding and scribbled the secrets on the flaps of paper, then got a friend to play along and find out her fortune. I seem to remember that when we were around 12 or 13 the game always centered around which silly boy from school you were supposed to marry, but don't worry, that's not what this one is about. And also don't worry about the folding, as I have taken care of that for you. Again, see the pictures on the right.

When you order this Fortune Telling Pack you will receive both of these zine-type creations, along with an instruction sheet, prettily packaged just for you. Some of the "fortunes" are pretty eccentric but none of them are even a little bit negative or creepy. Just so you know.

Obsolete, an alphabet of poems inspired by dead words

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:18:13 -0500

$5.00
Obsolete is my first non-zine collection of poems. (Okay, it is something like a zine, though I mostly think of it as a book. These things aren't always easy to define.)

Anyway, I'm very excited about this book. It's small and square and it has a buttery lemony yellow cover. Most saliently, it's a collection of poems inspired by dead words of English.

There are a lot of words that people used to use that we don't use anymore. Sometimes this is because the things the words were naming no longer exist, like weird old machines, but often it's because ... just because. Because things die. Because language is an organic system that changes over time and tired old words sputter out and vibrant new ones get born. Many of these dead words were wonderful, of course—funny, pretty, perfect—and their definitions can still be found all printed up in the Oxford English Dictionary. They read like records of the words' lives; they're tiny histories like obituaries. It's awesome. So, I wrote poems about 26 obsolete words, one for each letter of the alphabet. Here are three:

Famelicose: often or very hungry
Murklins: in the dark
Xenodochial: hospitable

This book is about 5x5 inches big. It was typeset and designed by Noah Beytin and offset printed by Taylor Ball of Parcell Press. They both did a beautiful job and I couldn't be more pleased with it.

Here is an extremely typical response I received from a reader that might inspire you to read this book:

"Hello,

I read Obsolete while in Northern British Columbia at a tree planting camp. The cook had acquired a copy of the zine from an Australian friend, and I instantly needed to send a copy to my friend in Nairobi.

Please sell more!"

I've heard your demand for my poetry and I'm responding to it, world. I'm selling more.

love love love love Katie

White Blackbirds

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:14:45 -0500

$1.00
I just finished an amazingly awesome interview zine called:

"White Blackbirds: conversations with women who aren't married and don't want to be"

The title is from an old Irish expression that goes, "There will be white blackbirds before an unwilling woman ties the knot." The women featured in the zine are from the UK, Australia, and the US; they are straight and queer; they are single moms, writers, activists, and all manner of other things. They are even more fascinating than I thought they'd be, and so are their reasons for choosing to remain single.

The zine features 11 interviews with zinesters, artists, and writers.

White Elephants 3, Yard Sale Season 2009

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:32:06 -0500

$2.25
You know it's late summer when a new issue of White Elephants is out. You can practically make your vacation plans around it, I mean seriously, why don't you just throw out your calendar? You've got me to be your time-keeper.

All kidding aside, a friend of mine recently said to me in a letter, vis a vis a previous issue of White Elephants, that she likes different ways of marking time, and I thought that was really interesting. This zine *is* a way for me to mark time. When you read about all the yard sales and church rummage sales my mom and I go to in a given summer, you are reading about the weird high-heeled shoes, children's books, and vintage suitcases I buy, it's true. But you are also reading about our lives at this particular point in time - our dwellings, food preferences, crushes, accidents, thoughts on life. This issue gets a little personal at times (and it contains the occasional cuss word, just so you know), but it's heavily yard-saley, so as usual you'll learn lots and lots about the heaps of old junk I pawed through and the things I deemed worth taking home. Interesting stuff if I may say so. You never do know what you'll find if you make a project of looking.

This zine is half-size and 32 pages long + cover.

White Elephants, Yard Sale Season 2006

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:11:06 -0500

$1.25
—a 24-page quarter-size zine

My mom and I live just a few blocks from each other, and we spend a lot of time together. This zine is about the yard, garage, and rummage sales we visited in our neighborhood during the spring and summer of 2006. White elephants, of course, are castoff things, longtime attic and basement dwellers, other people's junk; you know, treasure.

All of the photocopied images in this zine are of things I found at the yard sales I wrote about: craft books, a funny note taped to a record, stamps I made from a rubber stamp kit, and a neat old photograph. On each copy of the zine I go through and add little bits of color with colored pencils.

White Elephants 2, Yard Sale Season 2008

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:37:35 -0500

$2.00
Okay guys I updated this issue. The content is the same as in the first "edition" but I changed the size and cover and added some pictures and things. If you're unfamiliar with the White Elephants series, it's an ongoing zine chronicle of the yard and rummage sales I go to with my mom, and the people we meet and the stuff we buy there. I have a lot of fun writing these yard sale diaries and I expect you will have a lot of fun reading them.

28 pages + cover, half-size, and illustrated with things I found at the sales