Posts By: microcosm

Grow!

Grow: How to Take Your Do It Yourself Project and Passion to the Next Level and Quit Your Job is a practical field guide for creative people with great ideas for independent projects who want to achieve success and sustainability. Whether their projects are based in independent publishing, music, food, art, craft, activism or community work, Eleanor Whitney enables readers to clarify their project vision, get organized, set goals, create a plan, raise funds for, market, and manage their do-it-yourself project. The book is full of real-life inspiration and creative business advice from successful, independent businesses owners and creative people with projects that began in the do-it-yourself spirit.

This is Portland

This is Portland is a first hand look at a city that people can’t seem to stop talking about. It’s a guidebook of sorts, but not to restaurants and sightseeing. Alexander Barrett details the atmosphere of Portland, Oregon and how fun, beautiful, and ridiculous it can be. With it’s approachable, often hilarious tone, this book is perfect for anyone who wants to learn more about the city they’ve heard they should like.

 is a first hand look at a city that people can’t seem to stop talking about. It’s a guidebook of sorts, but not to restaurants and sightseeing. Alexander Barrett details the atmosphere of Portland, Oregon and how fun, beautiful, and ridiculous it can be. With it’s approachable, often hilarious tone, this book is perfect for anyone who wants to learn more about the city they’ve heard they should like.

Microcosm (is) Totes (awesome!)

In our latest effort to flirt with you, we’ve designed these tote bags. They are lovingly made by the woman-owned Envirototes in New Hampshire (yes, like all of our things, actually made in the U.S.). Then they printed our name on one side and a fancy graphic proclaiming about how reading and ideas change the world on the other side. These bags are specifically engineered to make it easier for you to flirt with other people on the bus or your bicycle. Erik (pictured here) is quite tall so the bags are larger than they appear. We tested and the largest book in our store fits in there (and it’s like bigger than any book I bet you own—it’s a box set of two oversized Gary Panter hard covers). And since we can’t think of anything else worth carrying around besides radical literature, you should be all set with one of these! Totes awesome!

Maps to the Other Side

Part mad manifesto, part revolutionary love letter, part freight train adventure story—Maps to the Other Side is a self-reflective shattered mirror, a twist on the classic punk rock travel narrative that searches for authenticity and connection in the lives of strangers and the solidarity and limitations of underground community. Beginning at the edge of the internet age, a time when radical zine culture prefigured social networking sites, these timely writings paint an illuminated trail through a complex labyrinth of undocumented migrants, anarchist community organizers, brilliant visionary artists, revolutionary seed savers, punk rock historians, social justice farmers, radical mental health activists, and iconoclastic bridge builders. This book is a document of one person’s odyssey to transform his experiences navigating the psychiatric system by building community in the face of adversity; a set of maps for how rebels and dreamers can survive and thrive in a crazy world.

New Girl Law

When Moore, a writer and independent publisher, brought her experience in the American cultural underground to Cambodia on the cusp of the global economic meltdown, she intended to share a skill that would allow young people the opportunity to archive their own stories. Instead, the second generation of Khmer Rouge survivors she worked with ended up rewriting history.

The Cambodian Chbap Srei is a 17th-century book that intended to establish a code of conduct for young women. Staunchly traditional, but repressive and frustrating, the first large group of young women in Cambodia decide to rewrite it with Moore. The year-long process culminates in a grand discussion of human rights and gender equity, and a hand-bound book for all participants. Tragically, the completed book was banned and censored in both Cambodia and the U.S. But what these bold young women learn next about when they are allowed to speak, and to whom, is chilling.

Here at the ‘cosm …with the CIA.

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope all you lovers out there were out lovin’.

We’ve been active around here lately. Tim is heading down to Austin for Staple, our store continues to evolve, we’ve got lots of bright ideas for the future, and we’re adding lots of new titles on the website!

If you haven’t read the new CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting yet, you should. It’s creepy. It’s disturbing. It’s angering. Some parts are downright sickening. But it’s also exciting, enticing, and undoubtedly interesting. It contains minimal speculation and maximal research. Much of the content is admitted by government officials and operatives themselves. And the book compiles it together to let you see more of the big picture. And it’s not a pretty one. Not only does it bring un-skewed history to light, it’s a time capsule that you can send to friends and family to provoke thoughts and conversation. Even if they don’t want to believe most of it, it’s provocative so they can’t help reading it anyway. If you’ve read the original zines, you still want this, because it’s all been updated.

😉
Stay safe out there!
-Jeff

  CIA book

2013 Slingshots are still here!

For those who haven’t seen a Slingshot, it’s a pocket calendar and day planner. It includes space to write your phone numbers, a contact list of radical leftist groups around the globe, a menstrual calendar, info on police repression, and extra note pages to record all your important revolutionary ideas. It also lists popular activist and alternative cultural holidays. The highlight is how to say key phrases in multiple languages; phrases such as “freedom and mutual aid” and “where is the library?” If this wasn’t enough, it also serves as a fund-raiser for the Berkeley radical newspaper, SLINGSHOT

CIA Makes Sci-Fi Unexciting: 1950-Today

These five case studies offer a chilling glimpse into the negligence, greed, murder, and at times comical disorganization behind some of the CIA’s most controversial secret operations. Science fiction could not have invented the influence the CIA had in the assassination of Martin Luther King. Jr, the AIDS virus, the killing of the leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, the PATRIOT act, and the Iran-Contra affair. Smith makes radical claims, but instead of coming across as a raving conspiracy theorist he uses facts to write a believable, accessible alternative to mainstream histories that helps readers to contextualize current events and the anti-American backlash worldwide.

outside the speak in tongues punk space in 1997 cleveland

Calling for submissions for the Scene History series!

Are you stoked about the history of your town? handwritten "clean up your mess" sign at Speak in TonguesDo you find out interesting nuggets by talking to those who came before you or by scouting out details on Google and Wikipedia? Do you want a reason to hunt out some people you respect and fill in the gaps?

Well, the Scene History series is an opportunity to do just that. Like our Simple History Series, we will publish a new volume each year of the Scene History series that tell the story of a particular city’s scene. (the series does not profile individuals, albums, or bands, and must be framed around a real scene, no fiction!)

Suggested length is 15,000-30,000 words. Get as creative as you find gratifying. Learn about your favorite places and how things developed.

Check out the existing Scene Histories here!

To pitch, just send a general summary of the scene that you are profiling, the years profiled, and your qualifications/interest to profile it! Will it be prose or comics? Do you have access to photos and images? Why are you excited to do this?

The most common trap that people run into writing for this series is that they want to write an encyclopedia—everything that happened in sequence, include all of their friends, and generally share every detail and almost immediately they spiral away from any kind of coherent narrative at all.
In any writing and especially for this series, it’s important to maintain a narrative structure—the scene is the protagonist and your story needs to show the scene changing as a result of resolving the conflict.
Create an outline for us to review—Intro, Chapters, Conclusion—with one to three paragraphs describing each section. Each section’s description should open by stating the main knowledge and skills the reader will take from that chapter, and giving us a little color about what sort of research, science, details, and/or examples it touches on. This isn’t busywork and typically becomes the frame and the actual opening text to each chapter. Even after work has been accepted, this exercise is the first step towards the editorial process.

Submit or ask questions to joe at microcosmpublishing daht com

Xerography Debt #32

Since 1999, Davida Gypsy Breier’s review zine, Xerography Debt might be best summarized as an obsession for all involved. Now maintaining three issues per year, the 32nd issue of Xerography Debt is still “the review zine with personal tendencies,” allowing its hand-picked cast of contributors to essay both the zines they love and where those zines find them in their lives. Joe Biel reports on the how the Dinner + Bikes tour has opened up zines to new audiences. Our editor Davida explains to her son that while his father’s friends are from college, hers are from zines. Al Burian ruminates on Peaches support of Pussy Riot and compares his own appreciation for Megadeth—despite their politics—to Paul Ryan’s peculiar endorsement of Rage Against the Machine. And let us not forget the large volume of zine reviews in here. Rather than spending time and ink bashing things or being forced to write about something they don’t care about, the reviewers hand-select what they want to write about the result is much more interesting. In an age of blogs and tweets, Xerography Debt is a beautiful, earnest anachronism, a publication that seems to come from a different era, but is firmly entrenched in the now. And they want to review your zines in future issues: Davida Gypsy Breier / PO Box 11064 / Baltimore, MD 21212

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