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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. "

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    Monday, April 19, 2004
    9:32 AM
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    magazines II

    The online magazine Tekka recently caught my interest. It covers topics that are near and dear to me: new media, software, narrative... In particular, I was interested in reading Bill Bly's article on "artifactual fiction":

    'By "artifactual" I mean fiction made up not of simple narration but of objects, each of which has a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). The object may tell its story itself (as would happen with, say, a journal entry), or the object may have to be "read" -- analyzed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance can become clear, its story understood.'


    But I'm put off by the registration fee—$50 is pretty steep for a year's worth of access to an online magazine. "Writers have to eat," says the site, and I know that as much as anyone. I have no serious qualms about charging for content—even charging a lot for content—but if you're going to do it, you should at least do it right.

    The prime reason I'm resistant to coughing up the $50 is because there's no good way to assess the quality of what I'm paying for. If Tekka were an actual, physical magazine, I could go to a bookstore and pick up an issue, sampling the content for a low-cost, one-time investment. If I liked it, and thought that I might be interested in reading it regularly, then I'd be much more likely to put out the money for a subscription (especially if it would result in a savings over the newsstand price). Tekka isn't a physical magazine, but there are simple ways that they could mimic this model. They could make some articles available to the casual browser. Say, one feature per issue. Or just the book reviews. Or just the back issues. (Instead, they offer the first couple hundred words of each article—but the real "meat" of an article—what I most need to assess in order to make an assessment of quality—is rarely, if ever, found in an article's introductory passages.)

    Perhaps they could emulate the "newsstand factor" most faithfully by allowing people to purchase a pass to all the articles in one issue. There are going to be four issues of Tekka in 2003: I'd happily pay $12.50 to read the one with the "artifactual fiction" article in it.

    If we step outside of the "subscription paradigm" and the "newsstand paradigm" and think clearly about the qualities of data online, we can find other solutions as well. I've never bought a paid subscription to anything online—but I've bought individual articles online on several occasions. My most recent purchase was from the Chicago Reader archive, which charges $1.95 to $3.95 for an article (depending on length), a non-prohibitive amount. Data in an archive is, by its very nature, fragmented, nonlinear, and hypertextual—you can sell it piece-by-piece just as easily as you can sell full access to it. (Perhaps the back-end programming is trickier, but a magazine about "creating beautiful software" should be able to find someone who can manage this problem.) Our engagement with information on the Web is often context-specific, noncommittal, promiscuous, and specialized—given these truths it just makes sense to make your articles available individually, at an easily-absorbable cost, rather than asking, up-front, for a full year of pricey committment.

    I'd expect the people who are thinking critically and intelligently about new media to be the ones who understand that the most.

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    Thursday, August 28, 2003
    11:25 AM
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    dreams and places

    I've sort of given up formally reviewing zines over in the Invisible City Zines District, but since I still get review copies of things in the mail every once in a while, I figure here's as good a place as any to talk about ones that strike me.

    I really like An Inside Job, a tiny zine of dream comics by Eli "Hob" Bishop (who also does the weblog Weather Head). It adheres to the standard of dream comic excellence set by Rick Veitch's Rare Bit Fiends or Jesse Reklaw's Slow Wave.

    The other really remarkable zine that's come in the mail lately has been Here, a magazine archiving "the stories behind where you are." They sent me Issue 6, which features a heartbreaking article about the "Lord God bird," an interesting roundtable on gentrification, and little autobiographical sketches submitted by readers about the places where they live (in a style reminiscent of the reader-written section of The Sun).

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    Wednesday, February 26, 2003
    5:28 PM
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