My Secret Shame…
I went a bit overboard this year. I went and bought myself some extra reading matter for this vacation back to the Homeland. Even though there is already reading galore on most every table and table-like surface in this house. Even though some of this consists of books I’ve been meaning to read and even though I have a pile of books at back at my apartment in Beach Town that I’ve also been meaning to read, as well as a book that I brought with me, a good one -- a borrowed one -- that I’ve been making teeny wee dents in since before this month began.
It’s not that I don’t like these books. It’s that, well, gosh darn it, there are so many good magazines out there right now. That’s right, I said it. I went into Giant Bookstore and came out without a single book. Instead, I had copies of ReadyMade, Venus, and Kitchen Sink.
“I’m on vacation,” I told myself. I probably also told myself, “No one back in my MFA program has to know,” though that last one wasn’t exactly conscious. I got home, sat down at the dining room table and immersed myself for what turned into a couple of hours - in articles, short stories and essays by some really good writers, doing exactly what I want to make my own living doing.
…I Lived for Month-Long Affairs !
It was when I was lying in bed that night, devouring the latest Kitchen Sink, that I found it. The payoff. An article by a writer named Jessica Hoffman called “Better Than Books: Or, How I Learned to Stop Fronting and Love the Magazine.” Hoffman writes of an experience eerily similar to mine earlier that day: Going to a giant bookstore with a friend. The friend come out with two books, Hoffman with like, three or five magazines. She’s a bit embarrassed before she blurts out basically that Okay, maybe she just likes magazines better than books, all right??
And while I wouldn’t go as far as to completely prize periodicals over so-called “real” literature in my own affections, Hoffman’s arguments in favor of the magazine are compelling:
One is the relative freedom from corporate and consumer whim: be it a short story or an essay-piece, a new, provocative or unorthodox writer is far more likely to find publication in the monthly (biweekly, whatever) format. Well-edited, independent magazines and journals are cropping up all over the damn place out there right now. From McSweeneys to Punk Planet (my choices here), you can find a range of experiences and writing styles in the pieces within, some of which book publishers, obviously, cannot afford to take a chance on. You might find a writer you come to love who’s never had a book published, Hoffman points out. And who won’t, for years to come. Why miss out?
Hoffman makes a few more stellar points; Conciseness, for example. Having worked as a copyeditor, she says she’s seen too many books get padded way the heck down with excessive prose just so the buyer can leave the store feeling good having shucked out 24 dollars. And there’s more, but you should just read the article. And those of us who get our greatest kicks creasing back the new covers of Bitch and The Believer, can feel better just saying so.*
*(And feel better too, claiming that such writing is our goal, when it is. While, for example, correcting our closest relatives, politely, for the billion-dozenth time, when they tell their church friends at a Christmas party that, “Alice is in school to write the Great American Novel!”
Ahh, not quite.)
I went a bit overboard this year. I went and bought myself some extra reading matter for this vacation back to the Homeland. Even though there is already reading galore on most every table and table-like surface in this house. Even though some of this consists of books I’ve been meaning to read and even though I have a pile of books at back at my apartment in Beach Town that I’ve also been meaning to read, as well as a book that I brought with me, a good one -- a borrowed one -- that I’ve been making teeny wee dents in since before this month began.
It’s not that I don’t like these books. It’s that, well, gosh darn it, there are so many good magazines out there right now. That’s right, I said it. I went into Giant Bookstore and came out without a single book. Instead, I had copies of ReadyMade, Venus, and Kitchen Sink.
“I’m on vacation,” I told myself. I probably also told myself, “No one back in my MFA program has to know,” though that last one wasn’t exactly conscious. I got home, sat down at the dining room table and immersed myself for what turned into a couple of hours - in articles, short stories and essays by some really good writers, doing exactly what I want to make my own living doing.
…I Lived for Month-Long Affairs !
It was when I was lying in bed that night, devouring the latest Kitchen Sink, that I found it. The payoff. An article by a writer named Jessica Hoffman called “Better Than Books: Or, How I Learned to Stop Fronting and Love the Magazine.” Hoffman writes of an experience eerily similar to mine earlier that day: Going to a giant bookstore with a friend. The friend come out with two books, Hoffman with like, three or five magazines. She’s a bit embarrassed before she blurts out basically that Okay, maybe she just likes magazines better than books, all right??
And while I wouldn’t go as far as to completely prize periodicals over so-called “real” literature in my own affections, Hoffman’s arguments in favor of the magazine are compelling:
One is the relative freedom from corporate and consumer whim: be it a short story or an essay-piece, a new, provocative or unorthodox writer is far more likely to find publication in the monthly (biweekly, whatever) format. Well-edited, independent magazines and journals are cropping up all over the damn place out there right now. From McSweeneys to Punk Planet (my choices here), you can find a range of experiences and writing styles in the pieces within, some of which book publishers, obviously, cannot afford to take a chance on. You might find a writer you come to love who’s never had a book published, Hoffman points out. And who won’t, for years to come. Why miss out?
Hoffman makes a few more stellar points; Conciseness, for example. Having worked as a copyeditor, she says she’s seen too many books get padded way the heck down with excessive prose just so the buyer can leave the store feeling good having shucked out 24 dollars. And there’s more, but you should just read the article. And those of us who get our greatest kicks creasing back the new covers of Bitch and The Believer, can feel better just saying so.*
*(And feel better too, claiming that such writing is our goal, when it is. While, for example, correcting our closest relatives, politely, for the billion-dozenth time, when they tell their church friends at a Christmas party that, “Alice is in school to write the Great American Novel!”
Ahh, not quite.)
Labels: travelin'
posted by Alice at 11:54 PM
2 Comments:
And I'll be increasing my own magazine consumption twelve-fold when I can read me some Alice-prose, you can bet.
I love magazines, too--The Oxford American, No Depression, Bitch, The Sun, and many more--and I don't think there's anything lightweight about them. When something is good, it's good, no matter its genre. If I want me some moving or incisive or lyrical prose, there are many places to find it.
That's funny about your family and the Great American Novel. It's taken my own family years to acknowledge that 1) I'm a writer; and 2) I'm never going to write prose or pen a bestseller. After almost nine years out of my MFA program, they're finally thinking of me as a poet. So give 'em time! They'll eventually get that you're not gonna write no damn novel. About the time they're loading themselves down with armfulls of bright, shiny, exciting magazines with an Alice byline.
Aw, garsh, Mel!
You are sweet as ever, Ms. Chickadee Epic Poet of the Ages. It won't be long; I promise. I just need to get off me holiday rump and get moving. Sending in submissions and even getting those prized yellow slips, in some cases, is, after all, a lot easier than constructing gingerbread replicas of Kant's residence.
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