Author: Hans Eisenbeis

I’d still prefer to be riding the bike, of course, even in this beautful and deadly snow, but it’s a crazy week. We are shipping the new issue of the magazine today, uploading it to the website, there are school conferences for the kids (one of whom is having a cavity filled today), there is a birthday Thursday, and the week-long wind-up to the Birkebeiner is in full swing. So today I was on the Interstate behind a school bus. It had just come on the entry ramp. I drove in its wake, which was a dazzling wind-blown banner of snow flakes, a sort of glittery con-trail. I kept pace with the bus, trying to stay in its magical sphere. My daughters would have recognized it as a cloud of fairy dust. On the seat next to me, there was a print-out of David Carr’s thoughtful appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson in today’s Times.

I read something yesterday that was striking, and I thought about it now: great writers–in fact, great artists of all kinds–are usually marked by their curiosity, their unquenchable desire to see new things, meet new people, go new places, find new ways to use the language and new facets of truth. I think of this as having “hungry eyes.”

How do you know if a writer has “hungry eyes”? I think it shows in their work by a certain comfort level with leaving things unfinished, or at least unresolved, being OK with a sustained mystery, leaving questions unanswered intentionally (rather than accidentally, which just looks sloppy)–that, after all, is the human condition. Writing that I am not very interested in is usually stained by a kind of blind, self-assured arrogance that has no sympathy for the undecided, only pity and disgust. (Like, say, the me-first neo-cons over at Powerline.) Most people are undecided about most things, and to belittle them is to insure that your work will be instantly forgotten except by pedants and thugs.

I am not sure whether Hunter S. Thompson was part of the problem, or part of the solution. I do know that he had deep reservoirs of courage and enterprise as a reporter, and these are rare enough nowadays. On the other hand, there is certainly no shortage today of righteous indignation across the political spectrum, nor the narcissistic compulsion to make every story revolve around its writer.

By far the majority of editors I’ve ever dealt with are liars about this. In private moments, talking amongst themselves, they gripe bitterly about how Hunter Thompson and Lester Bangs ruined journalism and criticism (respectively) because they inspired legions of bad imitators. This is a little like blaming the Beatles for ruining pop music. What’s worse: in public, these same editors lament the passing Golden Age–where are the Thompsons and Bangs of today? Well, they are out there, but no one is willing to take the risk of cultivating them. They complain about the weather, but do nothing about it.

Due to some strange, unforeseen circumstances, I found myself driving several different cars in the last twenty-four hours. Yesterday, I finally got around to some domestic responsibilities that included tightening a hand rail that had loosened under the constant attack of children. These same children were being scalded by a leaky hot-water tap in the bathtub. I keep a small box of washers and springs and valve seats on a shelf in the basement. Each time there is some sort of plumbing job, I retrieve this, and within about twenty minutes of fiddling, I discover that I do not have any of the parts I need, so it’s off to the hardware store.

I drove the wife’s car, and I happened to catch “On the Media,” NPR’s meta-media radio program that is often quite good, but not good enough to compel me to turn on the radio of a Sunday afternoon. Yesterday made me reconsider my weekend blackout on media. Though they had not yet heard of Hunter Thompson’s passing, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield had a brilliant triangulation between Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein’s key anonymous source in their Watergate reporting, and “Inside Deep Throat,” the new behind-the-scenes movie about the first hardcore porno flick. I had not realized that the movie opened and the Watergate break-in happened in the same week, in 1972. To my slightly touched mind, these coincidences tend not to be coincidences at all, but representative moments. Now, thirty-three years later, we find ourselves at a similar moment. Who could have guessed, three decades ago, that we would find ourselves fighting the same battles as if they’d never happened—arguing, as those nitwits over at Powerline are wont to do, about whether Watergate was “no big deal, afterall” and giving the FCC wide-ranging power to put media companies out of business for perceived obscenity violations.

We’ve been urging anyone who will listen to go back and either read “All the President’s Men” or see the film. It is an edifying thing to do for a number of reasons. First, as a palliative against the widespread suspicion that newspapers and reporters are “on the make” at all times, either literally or figuratively. As Gladstone and Garfield pointed out, the last thirty years have been hell for politics, government, and the social fabric in general—but they have been very good to the press, because it has been the press that has revealed the unpleasant truth about so much ugliness from Vietnam to Iraq. That process has now reversed; politicians and corporate marauders grow more comfortable and more arrogant as they “discredit” the press, or at least convince the general public that there can be no news without a liberal slant (unless it is owned by Rupert Murdoch). Nicholas Lehmann, in last week’s New Yorker, seems to have picked up on this irony—that neo-cons are, interestlingly enough, hardcore relativists when it comes to the news. It’s all a snow-job, unless its in the Bible.

Today, we have snow emergencies around town. The deputy editor, who is on vacation in New York this week, put her car in my charge for just such an eventuality. It was safely parked in my driveway, but I got a call early this morning from my old friend DK, who happens to be in New York this week, too. He had two cars parked in the tow zone—so off I went, on an errand that would involve three different cars across two counties. And plenty of radio. So I learned that Hunter Thompson had died, and he too reminded me of how times have changed—but also stayed the same.

While today there is plenty of raw material for a fearless writer like Thompson, I worry that our culture and our institutions have been stung too many times by great, insightful, truthful journalism, and that the reading public has grown innured to it. Great journalism is, in one of its modes anyway, supposed to “speak truth to power,” but power is presently winning the contest. It is doing this by cultivating a very sophisticated and cynical understanding of media, and manipulating it. By contrast, Hunter Thompson was a hero to all earnest and poetic truth-seekers who could tolerate his selfishness long enough to see the inner workings of whatever subject he trained his sights on, no matter how irreverent or unorthodox he wished to be in telling the story. I have no idea why he might have decided to commit suicide, but I do know that it comports with both his personality and the times he was now forced to live in. (It is telling, I think, that my favorite Thompson composition was this memorable obituary of Richard M. Nixon; it is a highly useful adjustment of focus for those of us whose view of those dark times has grown fuzzy or sepia-toned.)

Anyway, there will be plenty of obituaries that are far more telling and eloquent than anything I could say about Thompson, but I did want to take this thing a little further in a different direction. “On the Media” had a long segment on the Watergate Deep Throat and efforts over the years to identify who that source may have been. A journalism professor named Bill Gaines conducted a class that asked its students to pore over all available information—primarily the books and articles of Woodward and Bernstein— from Watergate to determine, as scientifically as possible, who Deep Throat was. Gaines and his class believe that they have, beyond a doubt, identified who that anonymous source was. Bob Garfield pressed Gaines on the ethics of this exercise. As a journalism proferssor, shouldn’t he be teaching his students the sanctity of keeping a source anonymous? Gaines, in a most disngenuous way, said that Woodward and Bernstein had already identified the source by leaving all sorts of hints along the way. If they had been serious about protecting Deep Throat, they would have let him remain strictly on “deep background”—that is, not only anonymous, but entirely unsourced in print. But this is unfair and insincere. Watergate was the single biggest most celebrated triumph of investigative journalism of the last fifty years, and it would not have broken without Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein have been harrassed about the identity of their source from the day they begain investigating that “trivial little break-in.” The fact that they have managed to keep Deep Throat’s identity secret from everyone except the redoubtable Bill Gaines and his class is the only defense they need.

And so, in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, we have to ask—is this what journalism is about today? Has it devolved so far that it must eat its own, to keep itself occupied? To speak truth only to the truth-seekers, even when it is an irrelevant and a counterproductive exercise in navel-gazing? How depressing. We hear there’s been a lot of snow in Aspen this year—or was that merely the ashes of Harold Ross floating lightly on the air?

We are still enjoying our unique new radio station quite a lot, but we are disturbed that the signal is not nearly as powerful as we’d like. Which explains all the contraptions and random wires strung across stacked boxes around the office—watch your head. Oops, look out for the beer bottles there. We removed a long piece of lamp wire from the antenna of the TV, and wound its frayed end around a bit of wire hanger that serves as the antenna for our small transistor radio, which until now has been the radio with the best reception in the entire office, despite being tabled next to our humidor, our furry black shako, and our Apple II in this little lead-lined, roofless echo chamber we call the office.

The TV is a small black and white job that literally receives one station, which is Fox—not the Fox News Channel, thank god—and this is hugely gratifying, since Fox now owns the contract to televise the State High School Hockey Tournament, the sole reason and justification and explanantion for the existence of this television. (We think they still own this contract. We hope they do. Otherwise, we may have to listen to the tourney on AM radio. If this proves to be impossible, our exit strategy will be set in motion—which involves buying a toga and running away to join the Polyphonic Spree.)

So anyway, we ran the other end of that lamp wire into the keyhole on one of our filing cabinets, with the probably mistaken idea that reception is a function of how much ferric metal one can marshall to the cause. If there were any exposed plumbing in the place, we’d wire that into the bargain too, and then we’d consititute a pretty good fire hazard in case of a lightning strike. All this effort has so far resulted in the persistence of very bad reception.

Now some of us have been reduced to streaming our new radio station on our computers, but this aggravates the Big Boss as he meters company bandwidth, and it is also a useful procedure for making the staff insane, because these streams of audio are not synchronized, and unsynchronized streams of the same music are twice as disturbing as having two entirely different stations tuned in. With five or six computers tuned to the stream, it is a little like being stuck in the creepy time-travel sequence of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” without the consolation of Gene WIlder’s bug eyes and the river of molten chocolate, and the Oompah Loompahs paddling doubletime, hell bent for leather.

We are sure you will be relieved to learn that we have finally received our copy of the 80th anniversary New Yorker. We have not had much chance to crack it, beyond the usual elements—the table of contents and Talk of the Town, although we noticed a long memoir by Roger Angell about his stepfather, E.B. White, for which we have secretly and selfishly prayed for years now. (We’ll get to it when our own gala anniversary issue is finished, today or tomorrow—with any luck.)

We have several initial impressions which we wish to dash off right now before we get back to the coal mine. First, has anyone ever done a study about who gets their issue of the New Yorker first among we the rustics here in subscriber country? We are convinced that the tonier neighborhoods of the Twin Cities get their copies before we do. In fact, we feel like we are among the last to hear that particular plop on the porch, just before the dog goes ballistic for the mail carrier.

It is probably not so much a conspiracy as a broad-ranging effort to “platform” the circulation, first to the people who matter: the tastemakers, the buyers of diamonds, jaguars, and durable goods, the poet-philosophers, the small-engine repair shops, the dental hygienists, the art students, the barristas at national coffee chains, the city impound lot, the outhouses of non-winterized cabins, and finally—The Rake’s front porch.

One other quick point—coming! We’re coming, hold your horses—we enjoy it when The New Yorker dwells self-consciously on its own history. In recent years, this has typically been expressed as a trip into the archives to dig up great old covers and to assign art essays to contemporary staff writers. When these sorts of things get published as separate stand-alones, we really get enthused; here, they’ve salted the issue with this material.

There are not very many periodicals that can get away with publishing art covers—even the New Yorker must bow to the marketplace and wear an explanatory wrap on its newstand copies, a kind of terry cloth robe bearing like initials the most prestigious bylines in the present issue—Harold Ross would be appalled, of course. The Stranger (great) and Chronogram (so so—boy would we have loved the chance to edit this high-potential placeholder, in a parallel lifetime) are the only others that come immediately to mind—but neither of these offer pure art covers either, being slightly tainted by the irresistible urge to constantly bait readers with words, banners, and suchlike crumbs of bread leading into the wilderness of words within.

Much has been made of how the Daily Show is capturing the young, 18-34 year old demographic which newspapers would love to get their hairy palms on. For some reason, the big newspaper companies across the land think the way to do this is to print bigger pictures and fewer words and vulgar jokes. If possible, they’d like to reduce the paper to a lot of grunting. The main reason they insist on this tragically misguided approach is that, being big, they are also incredibly arrogant and corrupt with personnel issues. It makes no sense to hire a forty-something, mid-level company man or woman to edit a paper supposedly designed to attract a twenty-something reader, and yet that’s what they’re doing in Chicago, Denver, and elsewhere.

They seem to think–and we’ve heard their editors say—that they are creating papers for people who don’t read papers. But that is a much different thing than creating a paper for people who CAN’T read papers. (We think the reason the kids aren’t reading the newspapers is that they are more critical and savvy than their parents, and their parents’ friends who edit newspapers. In other words, the editors of youth papers are reducing the product to the purest form of what turns OFF young, smart readers.)

It is also an old prejudice and stereotype that, because a newspaper is cheap or free, then the content has to be compatibly low in value. (They’ve been hearing it for so long from advertisers that they actually believe it; why shouldn’t they? Advertisers are paying the bills, not readers! But if your publication is worth a damn, the readers pay the advertisers to pay you. See?)

But we’re not going to let the kids off the hook here. There is real risk in putting the kids in charge. We note with horror a few recent misfires, and we have some sound advice earned the hard way. Listen up, children: Humor does NOT work if you don’t care, in your heart, for your target. The difference between good satire and bad satire is this simple smell test—if the humorist lacks compassion or interest, it will show, and it will suck. Make fun of the things you care about. If you care about money and power, get out of the humor business now. (Hint: The Daily Show is genuinely funny because Jon Stewart cares.)

This is, by the way, a corollary of the longstanding Taking Candy From a Child principle. It is not funny to make fun of the weak, the infirm, the powerless, the dead, or the unloved. It is just mean, and you will go to hell where no one will ever laugh at you again.

We have always had mixed feelings about Michael Wolff, the media critic and self-appointed expert on the nexus of Internet, media, and business. His main credential has always been his spectacular failure at publishing on the web, so it has always seemed odd that his judgment is considered golden when it comes to all things related to media. (The things we admire about Wolff: He’s a pretty good stylist, and he is fearless about skewering sacred cows in the media business. When you’ve been burned like he has, and still have the bank book he has, you know there’s an invulnerable safety net of some kind under the man.)

In his remarks to some convoluted conference on information, transcribed today at I Want Media, we started to realize precisely what it is we don’t like about him: He is a black-hearted cynic and a crab. Today, the tune he is singing goes basically like this: “Information wants to be free. (By the way, I was the first one to coin that phrase, y’know.) That is a truth that will kill media companies, because it devalues information across the board. If you are in the information business—as all media companies are—you are in a dying industry. You’re like the farmer who keeps planting corn after the industrial revolution.”

Here, we’ll let you read a few telling points for yourself:

“In the marketing and information business, there’s always a balance of power. In the magazine business, because there was this other revenue stream that allowed the magazine people to maintain what was commonly referred to (but what is almost never referred to anymore) as this church and state separation, we can do this thing. We can put out our product and we can have a marketing relationship with your product at the same time. It’s a sort of a parallel relationship.

“…As soon as you got rid of the subscription side, that parallel relationship started to change. And what you had was a marketing relationship, which almost in every case — certainly in the magazine business — took over the information side. And so in all but a few cases magazines have become marketing vehicles.

“…Why can’t anyone hold an audience? Well, people can’t hold an audience because there’s lots of competition and lots of other things to do. And media companies can’t hold an audience because what they produce is shit.

“…they just turn the dial or throw the magazine. We’ve created a situation of such high disposability of information that, of course, the value is going to drop.”

By way of illustration, Wolff suggests that the Wall Street Journal “stopped mattering” after it started charging for its content online. We’re not sure what this means, considering that the WSJ is still one of the most widely respected, profitable media companies in the world; if it is not the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, it is its second-largest. Wolff admits that the product did not change in any way—and he admits that it is still one of the greatest periodicals around. So what does he mean when he says it does not matter anymore, merely because Dow Jones clings to the silly idea that people will pay for their content online? If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say he’s talking about the elusive, evanescent quality of “buzz” that is primarily an inert gas that changes the voices of publishers, editors, and media critics—and that’s about all. (In the best case, ad buyers begin to huff the stuff, and then it’s Katie-grab-your-guns.)

See, the basic problem here is that Wolff reduces all information to a commodity—at the same time insisting that the media biz is dying because it provides a steady stream of “shit” for content. He gets moralistic about media content when it suits his grumpiness, but this is logically inconsistent, because he seems to believe that all content is interchangeable—it’s just ones and zeros, afterall. The steady move toward free content has, in his mind, compromised the line between marketing and credible editorial content.

He is probably right in the main, but this should be seen as an opportunity for contrarians. Just because the trend is toward free content does not mean that content has to be shit. The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are not crap publications because they make no money from their readers—nor because their cover price is but a laundering operation to defray the high cost of distribution. They are good because they are good.

Being a free publication ourselves, we have a few ideas on this subject. It is certainly true that readers have come to expect a great deal of information for free—both on the web and in the analog world. But the widespread availability of information does not automatically equalize all information, nor “devalue” it. (One could ask a very telling question from the other side of the equation—does the ubiquity of advertising devalue all advertisements? Maybe—but that just means there is pressure for advertisers to produce more memorable, higher quality ads, not fewer, less memorable ones. ‘Twas every thus: Quality is judged by, well, quality.) The existence of blogs does not compell us to set aside our dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, nor does our rereading Moby-Dick prevent us from checking up on our favorite blogs.

We’re honestly kinda tired of this widespread dyspepsia that reduces the human mind—and the human attention span—to a sort of closed-economy with only so much warehouse space. The attention economy is merely the normal, longstanding human transaction of making quick, precise judgments as to what is worthy, and what is not. The vehicle of delivery, and the price of delivery have merely been distractions from which Wolff has fashioned a very lucrative punditing career indeed.

In yesterday’s Times Book Review, A.J. Jacobs was allowed a rare privilege—he wrote a review of his Times reviewer, the alleged humorist Joe Queenan, and it was better than the original review. Heck, it was better than Jacobs’ book.

You may recall that A.J. Jacobs was a front-of-book editor at Entertainment Weekly and then at Esquire. At one point during his illustrious rise through the magazine world, he proposed a very funny article—he would attempt to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in one year. That article then became a book, with the tongue-in-cheek title “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.”

We’re green with envy that Jacobs was granted this sort of favor (we assume his claim to have received the meanest review in Times Book Review history carried some water with editors there; this guy has made a very handsome living indeed on hyperbole. Watch your back, Neil Pollack!). Especially after he admits that he’s had quite a ride on a PR shimmy-shimmy that included our humble little magazine. We were tempted to leave it at that, because there is nothing more pathetic than a writer complaining that his tea is not sweet enough.

But we went back and re-read Queenan’s review, and we’ll hold Jacobs’ coat on this one. The hemorrhoidal Queenan accused Jacobs of writing what he calls a misguided, juvenile, tired book just “to fullfill his book contract.” What a grump!

If there is one thing that is harder than writing humor, it is writing about or reviewing humor. It is an old adage of editing that a humorless piece about humor is less fun to read than the phone book. Couple that with an assignment you’re not crazy about (making fun of the weak, a wicked path indeed), Queenan is certainly projecting. He either can’t stand other humorists (yawn, how predictable is that?), or he was pissed at his editors at the Times for charging this book against his account, or he’s just an ungracious, unfunny jerk. Among humorists, the biggest cause of spleen-inflammation is a fat wallet, maturing irrelevance, and jealousy of youth.

As a young friend of mine once said, “We will bury you.” Depending on how long you intend to live, it is probably wise to cultivate sympathy for your pallbearers.

James Rainey writes in the Los Angeles Times today about bylines—the credit writers receive at the top (or the bottom) of their work. It’s an interesting world of arcana, and one of those professional vanities we afford ourselves. We used to think that most readers frankly don’t give a toss about bylines, and we still think that—generally speaking. Like anything else, if the product is good, people want to know the brand. If it is unremarkable, they have no reason to care.

The common line among journalists is that readers DO care, because they develop a taste and loyalty for particular writers. It’s a nice thought, but probably delusional. We have wasted many words in this particular space identifying and describing writers who we think are tops—but we’re writing for ourselves and for a small minority of obsessive-compulsives who want more inside dope on the magazine and the magazine industry.

If readers DO develop loyalties based on byline, there are two points we wish to make: First, we sincerely hope that byline readers do not disqualify writers they don’t recognize. Second, they surely end up favoring just a handful of writers—how many favorite writers can one person have at any one time? (Incidentally, we think the number is around six—also, this number is counterbalanced by about six bylines that really do send us quickly to another page.) So is it worth publishing a hundred bylines in order to please six readers desperately seeking six writers?

We occasionally are asked why we do things the way we do them here, with regard to bylines. (By the way, these questions have come almost exclusively from writers.) We do not put writer’s bylines on our cover because we don’t think enough readers care about bylines to justify the space dedicated to the ego of one person. As another twist of logic, we feel that selective bylines on the cover subtly devalue stories that are not pitched on the strength of the writer’s name.

There are a couple places inside the magazine where we don’t use bylines on editorial content. The first one is “Good Intentions,” the first item in the magazine. For lack of a better term, this piece is a sort of letter from the editor—although it is intended not to be a vacuous, self-serving exercise in self-promotion, the way most editor’s notes are in most magazines. Instead, it is supposed to be a substantive commentary on some pressing issue of the day—issued in the old-fashioned editorial “we.” The point is, this welcoming mat to the rest of the magazine is a sort of institutional statement that we want to reflect the personality and voice of the magazine, not any single contributor. (For what it’s worth, we—and by we, I mean I—write this piece each month. For certain technical reasons, we typically byline this piece when it appears on the website.) Big fans of magazines and magazine history will recognize a couple of inspirations for Good Intentions—most obviously, Spy magazine’s “Great Expectations” which served the same purpose, though it ran quite a lot longer and ranged more broadly into issues of the day. Might magazine also started this way. And the New Yorker of the thirties began “Talk of the Town” with “Notes and Commentary”—also an unbylined statement of editorial views and anecdotes, whose greatest practitioner was E.B. White.

Now, the other place where we don’t use bylines is in Broken Clock, the section that describes arts and entertainment events during the present month. The main reason we don’t use bylines here is that most of these pieces are very slight, and contributed by staff members who have their bruised egos salved by The Big Bucks. We wanted this section, too, to reflect the institutional voice of the magazine (we use the editorial “we” here as well).

Pragmatically speaking, this kind of section runs the very real danger of reading like a phone book, with all kinds of raw information—phone numbers, web addresses, street addresses, dates, and so on—so that we wanted to eliminate any extraneous distractions. (It’s the same reason we don’t print the record labels or publishing houses behind titles that we are recommending; how many readers choose their books and CDs based on the media company that produced them? We thought so, too. There are good reasons we might reconsider this policy though, which we won’t go into here.)

Now we have heard a great hew and cry from freelance writers about this policy, and we’re sorry about that. (Well, no, not a great hew and cry. There have been six complaints in three years, two from the same writer.) We feel their pain, but we also insist that the quality of the writing is far more important than the quality of the byline.

We hereby summarize a couple of Rakish get-togethers in the last two days. Last night, we made our way to the monthly writers’ round table with the usual wits, including a very punchy Irish lad, JC, who is touched with the gift of blarney, and occasionally joins us. Also, we were surprised to learn of a romance blooming in our midst, just in time for that upcoming hallmark holiday—how sweet! Well, just when we’d invited the general public to crash this monthly binge among Rakish regulars, the deputy editor gets a notion to move the whole operation across the river to The Times cafe. The Times is a fine joint, and we enjoyed the opportunity to hear our own CC take the stage and croon “What A Wonderful World.” With ace copyeditor (and chanteuse) LL,we briefly discussed the difference between karaoke and “open mic night.” Also, the present first-person subjunctive of “to be’. (If I were an all-powerful copyeditor, I would insist that one never write “if I was.”) As in all things, we deferred to her.

The suggestion to move the soiree had a rather demoralizing consequence: the Rakish regulars who are normally pleased to accept the generosity of the publisher were on their own, as the publisher had other appointments to keep. Tattered wallets and pathetic pocketbooks were brought out into the cold light of hard truth, upended. Change clattered on the table.

Also noted: There was an unfortunate scheduling conflict. CK’s brilliant storytelling series, On Tap, also went down last night at the Bryant Lake Bowl, and reports today say the program was very moving indeed.

On Tuesday night, we were back in the old digs—the Titanic Room—for Raking Through Books. Sheila O’Connor was our guest as she read and discussed “Where No Gods Came,” her award-winning novel of last year. Now, during discussion of the book, one of our incredibly smart readers asked O’Connor to confirm or to deny the rumor that her book had been repeatedly rejected by publishers for being “too literary.” What does that even mean?

We all understand the tremendous pressure publishers are under to produce books that become massive best-sellers—and there is no surer way to do that than to print a book that peddles some new snakeoil about how Americans can, in ten easy steps, lose weight, get smart, get rich, have sex, tone up, turn on, and so forth. Also, really crappy books about fake international conspiracies written by trained monkeys with typewriters seem to do pretty well. But how can these publishers look at themselves in the mirror in the morning? How can they pronounce the words, “I love this book, but it will never sell. It is too literary”?

We’re not saying what you think we’re saying. Every self-respecting publishing house, big or small, has a process of triage. When a manuscript or a book proposal comes in the door, they instantly know if it comports with the book list they already publish. Some publish literature, some publish complete shite, but even their summer interns know the difference. What we’re driving at here is one of our lifelong crusades against disengenuity in the literary industries. It is not possible for a book to be “too literary” in itself. It can very easily be too literary for any particular publishing house, and they should either say so out loud, or they should send it along to their own literarture departments through the pneumatic tubes or the homing pigeons or the US Mails or the coke bottle in the ocean or whatever method they prefer presently. (Book publishers are forever denying the existence and facility of email, we’ve noticed, and seem to have a strange love affair with SASEs, which they never use but apparently hoarde somewhere.)

And you thought you were going to escape this little monologue without a sermon! Begob, there’s our bus…

We’ve never understood what, exactly, Verlyn Klinkenborg did to land on the Times editorial board. Besides, what kind of a name is “Verlyn”? Anyway, it becomes clear from his editorial today that his main achievement seems to have been moving from Iowa to California in 1966. Ever since then, he’s been hopscotching around the country taking fellowships and visiting professorships and writing soft-focus expressions of the rural life for people who consider the lawn a somewhat threatening form of wilderness.

We kid. We kid because we love. Actually, Lyn—can we call you Lyn?—finally made us proud to have once dropped his class at St. Olaf College. With today’s solid if unstylish essay, all is forgiven. The meritocracy has been paid off in full.

So, anyway. Lyn writes about Iowa’s new proposal to eliminate income tax for everyone under the age of thirty. This would be an aggressive attempt to put a stop to the “brain drain” that takes Iowa’s finest away from Iowa to places like Minneapolis and California. The problem is serious but the strategy is kinda dumb. As the Klinker points out, South Dakota right next door has no income tax whatsoever, and their brain drain has been just as bad—stemmed only by poaching Minnesota and Iowa businesses away from Luverne and Cedar Rapids. (A fact that has got outstate neo-cons all aroused in recent years.)

No, the real problem is Iowa’s complete immersion in “industrial farming”—the kind of petrochemical agribusiness we’ve been bitching about for years now. But what really compounds the problem is that no one seems to care. Owing to the emigration of Iowan artists, writers, professors, entrepreneurs—even publishing geniuses from Council Bluffs—to greener pastures, there is literally no one left to point out the obvious. This is why we’re half serious when we say Verlyn’s main achievement was moving away from Iowa as a young man. The drain has been going on for fifty years, and that makes a serious, thoughtful, well-networked literary writer originally from small-town Iowa a rare thing indeed.

And let’s just say this, as long as you’re still listening. The Plain People of America would probably profit more if the Borg moved back to Iowa as an example to his countrymen. Scribbling his best work for the indigo pages of the Times, he may as well be writing on the bathroom walls of a Whippy Dip.

On the other hand, we welcome all Iowans here to Minneapolis. We urge you to turn out the lights, and move to Uptown. We have arts! Music! Theater! We have visiting professors! We have SuperTarget! To ease you through this exciting transition, we wish to inform you that it is possible to continue working in agribusiness while you get your bearings here; there are plenty of jobs down the street at Cargill, where through the magic of GPS-enabled technologies, you can remotely spray soybeans and kill hogs and mismanage manure lagoons in the depopulated farming territory formerly known as Iowa.