Zines: FIFTH ESTATE Spring 2009, Vol. 44 #1 (#380)
'Subtext, Subversion, Sabotage'
"Subtext, Subversion, Sabotage" is an interesting, lively issue of this longstanding anti-authoritarian magazine. It is unusually rich in fiction, and that makes it one of my favorite FE issues so far. Each of these fiction pieces are hard to describe without bleeding away their beauty; they are concerned not so much with events as they are with the spaces between them, the liminality of everyday existence.
One story that has stuck in my mind is "The Jumper," in which a narrator describes a young girl being taught to jump from a moving vehicle. It is a skill she may need one day, if she is ever 'caught female'; or perhaps the story itself is told by the woman who she grows up to be, or perhaps it is told by the man driving the car. All roles merge into a simultaneity; it doesn't matter whether this particular girl is ever kidnapped, because it is the very event of preparing, of knowing of awful possibility, that inflicts the wounds upon the psyche. Preparation and tragic event, protector and kidnapper become one.
Rachel Pollack discusses the radical courage required to transition to another sex, Gavin Grindon discusses "second wave situationism," and Peter Lamborn Wilson contributes Seven Subversive InstaSonnets.
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Zines: FIFTH ESTATE:'The Radical Imagination of Ursula K. Le Guin'
I had not heard of Ursula K Le Guin before I picked up this issue of Fifth Estate; that was last month and I've read five of her books since then. This issue is dedicated to this prolific science fiction writer who has used the genre to communicate hundreds of alternate worlds, each reflecting a bit of ourselves back to us while opening us up to the space of possibility. Le Guin, who is now 80, discusses her own work amidst a bevy of articles admiring and examining her novels in the context of neoliberalism, feminism and gender diversity.
Le Guin, in her excerpted essay "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be", discusses utopia; she articulates the trouble with utopia as partially an excess of "yang," the energy associated in Chinese philosophy with a "bright male energy." She poses the possibility of "yin utopias" which might not be utopias at all in the way we traditionally understand them, as they are not overly concerned with perfection, control or progress.
She says, instead: "To attain the constant, to end in order, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, retracting, and cold...If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in the same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already."
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 Fifth Estate
Fifth Estate is the longest-publishing Anarchist / anti-authoritarian mag in the US. It's a full palate of anarchist imaginings, exploration, thought and feeling, with updates from struggles mostly in the US and Latin America. Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) is a frequent contributor.
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