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disbelieving
About six months ago, I promised a rant on The Believer, then I got distracted by other things and never delivered.
At the time, I wrote that the "short version" was that I was "undecided," and there is some part of me that badly wants to love The Believer. I could justify this desire in a handful of simplistic ways: I could point out specific articles I found interesting in their pages in the past; point out how sometimes they publish authors whose work I enjoy. But when I come to really love a magazine, I'm responding to more than just the sum of its articles and authors taken together: I'm responding to the whole editorial ethos of the magazine.
So I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what The Believer's ethos might be, and I've come to conclude that it's characterized by a certain smug knowingness, a certain breezy dismissiveness.
This explains part of the appeal—after all, it's comforting to find yourself agreeing with a group of people who seem able to confidently reject individuals, aesthetic movements, entire schools of thought. These folks seem to have all the answers—who wouldn't want to be in their club?
And, of course, there's a value to reading writing by knowledgable people. But I find that the certainty that characterizes the collective tone of The Believer—smugness is the word I keep coming back to—begins to rankle me: I'd rather take the feelings of intellectual insecurity that comes with having to admit that I don't have the answer. I'd rather have the company of someone like Robert Creeley, who at his reading quoted Franz Kline: "When I paint what I know I bore myself; when I paint what you know I bore you; I try to paint what I don't know."
This problem is compounded by the fact that, often, what ends up being dismissed by The Believer are cultural developments (of one form or another) that strike me as politically / aesthetically / intellectually progressive. This can perversely be mistaken as "edgy," by the same sort of people who think it's somehow "daring" to set up and knock down various straw men labeled "politically correct." (VICE Magazine is also commonly guilty of aiming for "edginess" in exactly this way; functioning as a sort of street-level cousin to The Believer's ostensibly high-minded liberal-artsiness.)
I should not need to point out here that it's not daring to be culturally conservative. This is embedded into the very meaning of the words.
So if I was thinking all this six months ago, why the rant now? It's because The Believer recently ran an article ("Hyperauthor, Hyperauthor!") that touches on the Kent Johnson controversy and (predictably) dismisses the idea that Double Flowering might raise interesting questions and (predictably) makes the overall (conservative) claim that readers "need" an author. The article isn't online, but Typo Magazine has published thirty letters, many by poets, which criticize The Believer article and make many of the points I make here more succinctly and eloquently.
I like this bit:
"In the end, Atkinson's treatment of Johnson and Yasusada is just MEAN: he trots out the weirdo, calls him names, tells him that nobody will ever love him or buy his book, pulls his pants down, rubs his face in the snow, and sends him back to the other freaks: readers and writers of poetry who, despite Atkinson's pronouncements, DO read the work and DO get many, various, polymorphous and perverse pleasures from it. "
Labels: magazines, rants |
Monday, April 19, 2004
9:32 AM
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