Little mag gives ivory towers a little tweak

December 11, 2002

BY SANDRA GUY STAFF REPORTER

Academia takes itself seriously--too seriously for Sarah Vogel's taste.

Vogel knows first-hand the meaning of information overload: the Ann Arbor, Mich., native is a fourth-year student at the University of Chicago.

She found ironic the expectation that students accept with great seriousness the massive amounts of information they are given.

"Some of it is more amusing," she said. "It's even productive [to think of it] that way."

So Vogel and friend Julia Crothers, who has since graduated, assembled bits and pieces of the information bombardment to create an absurdist magazine.

The content plays on a tradition of esoteric intellectual jokes and pokes fun at people's adherence to that very tradition.

The zine, titled AntiDown after a type of quark, is made of collages of unrelated bits of information, everything from short stories to inside jokes to textbook illustrations to fake book reviews.

Two recent editions included an offer of a scholarship to art school for anyone who could copy a sketch of a man's face (No Tracing!); a fill-in-the-blank description of a "Spivak Mad Lib" deconstructive lesson, and a "news" article headlined, "Horror Strikes Famed Russian Amusement Anthropologists, the 'Drs. Zosima'--Relatives' Flesh Eaten Unwittingly," with footnotes to Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Edwin S. Hall's The Eskimo Storyteller.

Vogel got help from college professors. She submitted her idea to the Arts Planning Council, a university-backed group that encourages students to find enrichment in the arts, and the council granted Vogel one of five $1,500 grants to create her zine. (For more information about the council, go to www.uchicago.edu and click on the link to "Art, Culture & Athletics.")

"Most of all, I'd like people to be amused, to get the weird jokes that are in the zine," Vogel said. "Confusion is good as well."

The zine, which Vogel distributes around the South Side campus, comes in two sizes: One a letter-sized sheet folded in half, and the other a tiny version that is stuffed into an empty cigarette packet with a small magnifying glass and dispensed from a vending machine that once dispensed cigarettes.

The idea of the mini-zine in a cigarette pack was born of necessity. Vogel would have been forced to move the machine from the Regenstein Library basement if she hadn't made use of it.

"Have you ever tried to pick up a cigarette vending machine?" she asked.

Vogel was surprised that her friends and family pitched in to save their empty cigarette packets and give them to her. They found their own absurdity in the donations, which became a way to make their smoking seem more productive.

She has also found ready contributors among her fellow students, who donate their class papers or come up with their own quirky submissions.

For Vogel, who is considering attending design school, the act of creating the zine is her reward. She prefers to be engaged with the material rather than creating a more finished version on a computer.

"I like how my work shows through," she said.

Douglas Baird, a law professor and member of the council that awarded the grants, said Vogel's project had a nice element of whimsy and, by its nature, would affect people throughout the campus.

The goal is to ensure that university students get out of their books and enjoy the arts, music and each other, he said.