Gather Children #4 / Half-Sized / 24 Pages / gstar@antisocial.com /
I had talked to this individual for a decent period of time before actually seeing their zine. After talking to them for such a long period, the context of this zine begins to make sense. Utterly disjointed and manic in its nature, Gather Children is not an easy read. Starting off fairly linear with a very Jello Biafra-esque faux ad for genetic modification of pregnancies, the editor goes and attacks an article that ey had seen on a website, not reprinting any of the text but rather putting the link. This is slightly problematic for two major reasons: first, a large portion of the population has no access to computers, and secondly, the diversion to jump online really interrupts any flow the magazine may have accumulated up to this point. Describing the problems that the issue ran into while it was being formulated, the editor rants about stretching ey’s ears and the tendency for people to ask whether or not they can stick their finger through the hole left by the stretching. Copping an article about a famous writer investing ey’s own money to figure out who exactly is Jack the Ripper from the local newspaper, the issue begins to gradually spiral into less and less coherent thoughts and more into brief stanzas of poetry, covering over half of the second part of the zine. WHat exactly these blurbs of poetry are about can be virtually anything, since the vast majority of them don’t have a specific focus.
