Musezine

Musing Musezine

In any venture, whether thats a business, a novel, a film, it always makes good sense to do a bit of etymological research. Does the title of your groundbreaking narrative translate to shit in Azerbaijani? Is the name for your high-tech startup already incorporated as a humble irrigation company? Did you dream up a cracker of a brand, only to find out some fucker already has the domain?

How could we have been so short-sighted then, to assume Musezine was an untapped moniker? It’s no exaggeration to say we are only the latest in a storied series of iterations. We were in a stupor when we came up with it, dazed by our own brilliance. It was so charming and cute, but obviously deeply intellectual and serious of course. Just enough self-satisfaction to not warrant that background check… “I wonder if anyone else has come up with this?”. I might also add that the overeager purchase of this domain for a £10 fee - per year, per petuity - did much to cement the name. The dot com was out of my budget.

[Aside]

Z: I was already speaking to you - the audience - but now I am taking you aside to speak even more plainly and directly! How the fuck do domains work, who is selling a musezine.com domain for $2000 (plus $10 per year in perpetuity). I’m sure theres some technological reason BUT it seems a tad high right. But in truth .net and .org seem more in spirit with zine-ideology, so all in all, very happy with it!

Here is an amusingly inexhaustive (hopefully there aren’t much more than these) list of other Musezine:

Where does this leave us?! We are far from the first, and clearly will not be the last, to come up with Musezine. If names had an Aristotlean essence, this one’s would be whorish. In the spirit of generosity, it’s lovable. Either way the name has many qualities we are sadly and desperately in love with. It evokes the Greek muses, to amuse oneself, to muse about something, and of course the museum. For the time being - or at least until the expiration of this domain - we are sticking with this name and feel no guilt in doing so. Sure the space seems crowded, but that’s only because I’ve gathered them all in one place. This is a network of distantly connected texts, separated by vast cyberspace. We would need a very large telescope to see eachother’s islands.

Apollo and the Muses

Apollo and the Muses, John Singer Sargent

Stay tuned for our first zine, coming who knows when!

- Z 29 May 2025