Author: Hans Eisenbeis

Apropos of Pete’s comments yesterday, I have to admit I haven’t looked at many New Times papers in recent years. I think their impulse to be politically contrarian is a good one (which is a much different thing than being anti-liberal, but that’s a whole ‘nother conversation–of course, anti-liberalism usually IS more or less disguised conservatism, but not always) for a lot of different reasons, but the nationalizing of a sensibility and actual content is obviously troubling.

The Onion is, of course, in a class all its own and not really an alt-weekly in any meaningful way, although one could make an interesting argument that it is to alt-weekly print what Jon Stewart is to network news. I think their only opportunities for profitability are national ads (they get a few of those, but may be too edgy to get a lot more) and local listings ads (hence the expanded arts coverage). Editorially, they could never replace the City Pages of the world. As a business, they surely could, if the world of paper has any survivors in the next 20 years.

Alt-weekly news is some of the most vital journalism happening today (although not always the most entertaining or interesting, in my humble opinion–again, another separate question), but eventually I fear these big chains will follow the lead of even the most respected dailies (i..e. McClatchy) in quietly requiring mid-level editors to sit in on business meetings that are not about news but about news readers, not about what’s in the paper, but about who reads it. And, maybe more to the point, how much that paper costs (that is, the newsprint itself).

The announcement yesterday about the Village Voice and New Times merger was interesting. All concerned parties–that is Mike Lacey, Jim Larkin, and David Schneiderman–are awfully defensive about charges of “selling out,” but then they’ve been hearing that for years, so their protests have always landed on my ear just a touch too loudly.

I personally don’t doubt that all the papers in the new stable will continue to do what they’ve been doing for a while, even after the merger is approved. (Fans of local, independent, lefty alternative papers may be surprised to find themselves rooting for the Federal Trade Commission on this one, in hopes that they’ll nix the deal. But that would be terrible; it would be little else than confirmation of the Man’s bias against the lefty press. Mainstream newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, billboard companies, and concert promoters are merging all the time. If you think the FTC is worried about alt-weekly monopolies, but not any other type of media monopoly–well, you see what I’m saying.)

If the New Times people are as smart as everyone says they are, then they’ll be content to sit back and count their money– after, you know, tamping down the imminent rebellion at Cooper Square. I think the argument, enunciated by Lacey (who has never lacked for a full voice), that this was “to make the papers stronger” is, I think, a little disingenuous and revealing at the same time. It’s clear that he sees this as a personal triumph, and it’s also clear that he personally doesn’t need the money. On the other hand, Village Voice has not been financially robust ever since the investment group was cobbled together to purchase the company from Leonard Stern. Official reports say that “no money changed hands,” whereas early leaks suggested that David Schneiderman would receive a seven figure bonus for forging the deal. Anyway, I’ll take their word for it, and accept the implication that New Times is in a position to strengthen the crumbling footings of Village Voice Media–also recognizing that “Village Voice” is undoubtedly the stronger, hipper brand.

If either of these chains were more concerned about making bank than doing good work, they might have made some radical adjustments a long time ago. For example, with the rise of the internet and the temptation modern alt weeklies have felt to write a substantial portion of their content to the national and international opinion scrum, you could argue that there is overwhelming duplication of effort across all markets. Throw in the regular critical coverage of movies, CDs, games, and even theater that is in national release, and it starts to look like you’re paying twelve pretty good film critics where one excellent one would do. Indeed, if you want to really guage where this merger is going, and catch them in the act of radical profiteering, watch for your local VVM alternative to become a sort of repeater tower for Musto, Hentoff, Lacey, Sinagra, Berger In many of these markets, of course, there are no strong competitors–and if City Pages one day became The Village Voice’s City Pages, and finally The Village Voice–Twin Cities edition, what would be lost, really? (A lot, of course: especially the farm system for developing great new writers. But there is not any money to be lost in the deal.) Indeed, the new directive to create the bleeding edge VilliageVoice.com may indicate the thin edge of a wedge to nationalize alternative journalism. That, by the way, was the brilliant idea behind the expansion of The Onion–which doesn’t give a toss for the individual glory of local editors, reporters, writers, or critics. The Onion qualifies in more ways than one as the first truly national alternative publication. Area Man Reads Fake News, Laughs, Still Gets Local Listings.

In the paltry details of yesterday’s announcement, to my eyes, one thing stood out like dog’s balls: It is proposed that all editors will report not to their own local publishers, but to the national commanders. Is this another stormy petrel of to a nationalized alternative press? That wouldn’t be a horrible thing, although as I’ve said before, I think the alt-press could learn one thing from mainstream newspapers, and that’s the compulsion to evolve with its readership, or cultivate a different one. The dailies have gone much too far in their chasing after vacuous, quick-read, second-person service journalism. But the alt weeklies have for twenty years coasted on the usefulness of their listings and their sex advertisments.

I’d love to see this new brain trust dedicate some energies to reinventing the alternative press for a new twenty-something readership, but these people have all acted like Generation X would be the last generation to read for pleasure and entertainment and political edification, and they will follow that readership to the grave (even though that readership stopped using the listings–and thus stopped reading the paper about ten years ago). Maybe they’re right, but the last time I checked, kids were still being taught how to read.

It will be very interesting to see how long the Powers That Be can keep their butt-pickers off the local editorial. I expect to see them make the dumbest mistake right out of the gate–tweaking local design to comport with their papers in other markets. I won’t blather on about it here, but design is one of the things that is absolutely murdering the alternative press, and it is such a simple thing not to do. Heavily templated content is like receiving every Christmas present in the same wrapping, with the same ribbons and bows, with identical greeting cards. Eventually, you’d rather sit under someone else’s Christmas tree than have to open yet another Red Baron-themed raft of presents, no matter what treasures you might find within.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I freelanced for City Pages over the years, and several staff members here have worked at City Pages–including our publishers, who founded City Pages.

You might have thought I was in Puerto Rico at that glamorous American Magazine conference, but no. I don’t think I could afford the gas to get to the airport, much less leave the country. But I see my old friend Wonkette is there stirring things up a bit. It’s been a few months since she was pinging loudly on my radar screen, needling powerful media people in expensive offices–Jon Stewart briefly took over that role in her absence (finishing that novel)–and now she once again enjoys another upswing in the Tao of celebrity. Good for her. She must be in galleys.

I do envy all those magazine big-wigs down in the Caribbean, even if they were in the path of the world’s largest hurricane ever. This year’s conference seems to have been topically pretty interesting, from an editor’s point of view. So often these trade pow-wows are an excuse for all kinds of expense-account flapdoodle, and the only meaningful work gets done by the same people who already know how to play while they work–the business folks on the advertising, marketing, and publishing side. Editors and writers are the real culprits who view such events as paid vacations in every sense of the word–moral, professional, and personal.

But I see where the chiefs of ASME have issued a new set of guidelines to shore up the eroding walls between editorial content and advertising content. I keep a copy of the old guidelines at hand, although most of the rules are simple in spirit and in practice. A little magazine like ours is not going to attract a lot of attention if we DID mess with these rules (for example, no advertising on the cover–not even a sticker that announces advertorial content inside). Indeed, our two main competitiors tamper with the limits all the time–and not just the ASME guidelines, but the US Postal service guidelines governing media-class postage, ad-to-edit ratio, and so forth. It is for precisely this reason that we wished ASME had a bit more sway at the local level, so that advertisers and potential advertisers had a better understanding of what editorial credibility is, what it’s value is, and why there should even by third-party audits and ajudication. In a lot of ways, ASME guidelines might seem quaint or dated, and as a supposedly young and open-minded provacateur of the publishing industry, I like to think about how we in the publishing industry can innovate in both the edit space and the ad space. You gotta pay the bills, and you hope you can do it with great content and great ads, and you trust that each must excel independently of the other. I hear all the time from people, especially the smart and engaged people we most like to reach with our magazine, who are in some state of disgust over editorial content they see in various places that is tainted by a direct commercial interest. As I say, I am not a stodgy old-school cynic about these things–the church/state divide is, to me, more of a saturday/sunday divide. One follows the other, they have equal value, but they are clearly separated by midnight.

Thus, we went on the record with the whole New Yorker/Target flap with basically a two-word assessment: Big deal. True, it was a minor violation of the ASME guidelines, and this was talked about down in Puerto Rico… not that Target bought every ad in the magazine, but that there was no editorial statement in the magazine that explained (excused) the sponsorship, and reassured readers that the firewall had not been breeched. For the New Yorker, this must have been a bit of a conundrum, because it is not a magazine that, in its edit space, allows for a sort of loosey-goosey editor-to-reader bedtime prayer. The closest they ever come to this sort of thing is the legal fine print required by the postal service, usually found in the last handful of pages. As I mentioned before, I’m pretty confident that the New Yorker’s readership can without much difficulty identify and distinguish advertising from editorial content. (Now, whether there was any Target influence on the cover art of that issue is an interesting potential consipracy theory.)

Coincidentally–and to bring this full-circle–I have been in the magazine-geek’s cognitive equivalent of Puerto Rico for the last two weeks: I bought the complete New Yorker DVD set, and have been catching up on all my old favorites from the Ross and Shawn years. I have to admit that I bought this in a hurry, because it is not entirely a clear cut ‘n’ dry legal issue as to whether the New Yorker has the right to republish and resell every issue ever printed, and (for strictly personal, selfish reasons) it would suck to have this particular archive deemed a violation of individual copyright. For years, I have spent long, frustrating, expensive hours at the microfiche machine at the public library, and I have bought expensive, damaged backissues piecemeal from eBay, and I have coveted the impossibly rare bound volumes that exist like authentic splinters of the True Cross in a few libraries around the country. So this… this was quite a moment.

Sorta busy this wet morning, but I couldn’t help myself from weighing in on the Strib redesign, over at MNSpeak, so rather than fritter away more time, I’ll do the really gauche thing, and quote myself:

Everyone can agree that newspapers are losing readership, but the basic problem is believing that management can think (or focus-group) their way out of the mess. It seems to me that media managers are too busy looking at other media–TV, web, radio–and too covetous of form.

Reporters and others on the front-line of journalism have been losing the battle of form over content for some time, and it is demoralizing, I think, to look at the results of the Readership Institute study, which seem to suggest that readers need to be pandered to. That every story must have some service-related lede that immediately tells a reader how she can USE this information in her own life. Just another step toward all-consuming narcissism. The thing is, it turns out readers tend to get bored with being spoon fed precisely what they think they want and expect from their media. It’s like having a jukebox (Or an iPod playlist) that never gets updated.

If newspapers begin to be run like commercial radio–i.e. strictly a number-crunching science about “what most people want”– then that leaves very little to the imagination of editors OR reporters.

I have a vested interest in the “art” of print media, so I’m biased. If you want to be cynical about, you could ask how many new members The Current REALLY has– how many serious music-heads willing to put their money where their REV-105 was.

My problem with what I see of the Strib’s redesign is a) the page-layout editors have won, and are effectively running the newsroom; b) how many outer-ring soccer moms do they need to add to the circ, and are there that many more of them than traditional, old-fart readers who actually enjoy and appreciate a newspaper with some hard news in it? Do they not run the risk of alienating their most loyal customers–if they haven;t already lost them? (Good reason to believe this is already the case, judging by the number of “media professionals” I know in this town who admit to glancing at the Strib maybe once a week or so.)

On a positive note, I’m really looking forward to the online redesign, since that’s really the only way I read the paper anymore. It has been a bit of a mess for a long time, and it could be so much better about equating better with the paper version. When you read the NY Times in paper everyday, as I do, then glance at the website, there is almost perfect parity, and I find that reassuring. The Strib is the opposite of this, in my view.

ALSO: I just read over at Romenesko that the Chicago Sun Times is considering shutting down their tabloid newspaper the Red Eye Streak, now that the Chicago Tribune has decided to make the Red Streak Eye free. I was a little taken aback at publisher John Cruikshank’s bald cynicism–he has no qualms about saying the whole thing was merely a financial play, a counter-check to the Red Streak Eye. And he wonders why it didn’t gel with readers. No, I guess he doesn’t. It is certainly his perogative to protect market share, and if that means launching a facade (like the fake desert town they built in Blazing Saddles), I guess the conclusion is that you can pay people to do just about anything. Cruickshank says Red Eye Streak succeeded, because it was only supposed to prevent Red Streak Eye from gaining paid circulation. Right-oh. I thought the idea was to capture young readers, to develop the next generation of newspapers, to get out there on the bleeding edge of print media where you might get a glimpse of the future (if any)–but no. See, here’s the basic problem: no real editorial insights, just desperation in the marketplace. What the real goal might have been, one should think, would have been to simply make more money by capturing new advertisers, and on this score Cruickshank is, under his breath, conceeding to the Red Streak Eye– which HAS succeeded in lining up plenty of advertising.

UPDATE: D’Oh! Katie McCollow writes to say, “Maybe readership is down because journalists can’t be bothered to get simple facts straight.The Chic Trib puts out the RedEye. The Sun Times puts out the Red Streak.” Duly noted and corrected. Never could keep these papers straight. Strike that Streak, Eye Eye! (11/23)

For what it’s worth, it is (to my mind) a significant leap of vision and faith to convert to controlled circulation. In a world where the New York Times is free (more or less) to anyone in any cafe in the country, where many of the classics of Western literature are available through Google, do people really equate price with quality? Did they ever? Is Lucky magazine better than the New Yorker, because it costs more? Do you seriously think Minneapolis.St.Paul magazine is a better and more substantive read than City Pages? If you do, y’know, I hear there’s a bridge for sale in Brooklyn…

I try to avoid these sorts of political ramblings, but sometimes it just becomes unbearable–the sin of silence, we call it, during Yom Kippur. It is marginally related to media criticism, so spot me one here.

The tone has become noticeably conciliatory over at Power Line these days. True, the local detachment of the 42nd Fighting Keyboarders long ago perfected that dulcet melody of false reason, the perfectly balanced timbre of the thoughtful populist who won’t insist, but would appreciate it if, at some time in the future, when it’s convenient, of course, their traitorous liberal friends stopped beating their wives. (Anti-war activism is ipso facto anti-Americanism; intelligent design is a “controversy among scientists;” Bush didn’t, y’know, cause Katrina or Rita, are you stoopid?)

They are too clever by half. The nation’s number one bloggers probably see the writing on the wall, and do not wish to be splattered by the manure lagoon presently being emptied on the heads of their party. Despite the brilliant repartee over there, particularly when it comes to legal issues and to Israel, they tend to avoid stories that aren’t amendable to their worldview. Thus begins the prelude to a long, long period of commentary from the trenches of a party that has willed itself into permanent minority status. Watch how in about one year dissent will suddenly become a virtue again.

Today, though, they could not help themselves from lapdogging for Tom DeLay, which might be a mistake (as Republicans are saying to themselves everywhere, I suppose.) I don’t have a lot to add to this, other than to say that media outlets that stick strictly to the facts–House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been indicted on a single felonious count of conspiracy, period–get merits, and those who waste a lot of ink on DeLay’s public excuses, whining, and ad hominem get demerits. I used to wonder why it was so important to all Republicans at all times to rush to the defense of each other, to argue the facts and the media long after the spin cycle is over and done and the public has made up its mind and moved on. (Sheesh, some of them STILL argue not just about Blanco and Nagin, but Vietnam and Richard Nixon. Guys, your team lost one or two or three. No one ever accused Republicans of being good sports, and there’s nothing worse than a sore winner.) But one technical point in the flap about DeLay: What I cannot understand is how the most brilliant, idle legal minds of their generation seem to willfully ignore the fact that it is not just DA Ronnie Earle who has indicted their idol, it is a Texas grand jury. I know these love-the-company-of-men bloggers are smart, and they’re underemployed lawyers and all that, but I suspect that grand jury down in Texas knows a thing or two about the law and the facts in this case. If they can’t argue the point intelligently, then one would really expect Power Line to more graciously fall into lockstep with the Grand Poobah, President Bush, when he says hold your tongue and let the legal process take its course. Trust, people! Gotta work on that–you could start by trusting your Commander in Chief, at least on this point.

In the Times yesterday, David Brooks mused on this form of groupthink, and formulated his own sort of lukewarm apology for Tom “The Hammer” DeLay. Brooks said,

“He’s actually a modest, decent and considerate man. But he is willing to sacrifice all else for the team.”

Now, one could certainly argue that, in private, Tom DeLay is the Great Pumpkin. But there is one thing that is exactly wrong about Brooks’s statement. There is one thing DeLay won’t sacrifice–himself. And “the team” may well suffer for it. Here is why: Like so many of his colleagues, DeLay has become expert at weaponizing language (you know, the whole “framing” thing–brazen profiteering and selfishness, pronounced “tax relief”). But the one argument he is never going to win no matter how he frames it is that someone attacking him is doing so for strictly partisan reasons. No one will ever take seriously a man who has made an uninterrupted career of putting his party before all else, including the welfare of Americans. (His PAC, Texans for a Republican Majority–the name says it all. Priorities!) To charge the Texas grand jury and DA with partisanship strains credulity and patience, and the Gods are getting angry. You know, pride–fall–and so on. Americans do not longer want to hear what the pot thinks of the kettle.

I do love how David Brooks pulls his punches, only to make a below-the-belt grab. DeLay’s “team loyalty” is a misguided virtue; when Democrats indulge in it, it is “deaniac hyperpartisanship.” This is classic, fuzzy-logic Brooks. The intense partisanship that resulted in the impeachment of a president for getting his stuff puffed in the Oval Office, followed by six years of ruthless hubris and violence–that was all well and good, but that time is past. The rules have changed. Lefties who want a piece of that action are exhibiting a dysfunctional “need to rigidly hew to orthodoxy.” This is self-evident heresy when it is conducted by the wrong party.

As I’ve grown fond of saying, there aren’t a lot of deathbed conversions of liberals who wished they’d been more selfish, less sympathetic, who wished they’d spent more time saving money and hating the less fortunate and arguing for war and the elimination of social supports and building the federal deficit and devaluing the dollar and erasing the nation’s diplomatic credibility.

The only person I can think of like that is Sen. Norm Coleman.

I was surprised to see last week’s New Yorker, the Style Special, for a couple of reasons. First it was poly-bagged with a supplement called “Fashion Rocks” (more about this in a moment), and second, because it contains what I first thought to be one of the bigger flubs in New Yorker history.

Considering that New Yorker errors usually run to about two typos per year (“emnity” is the only one I’ve spotted in 2005), and a marginal dangler or two in a Lemann rush-job commentary, this one seemed a doozy. Pages 155 to 162 were published twice. Once where they belong, and again in the middle of the book, replacing pages 81-91.

Now, I don’t usually notice the pagination in itself, but it seemed odd to me that they’d suddenly plopped Nancy Franklin and David Denby into the feature well, along with the Postal Service boilerplate. I knew the jig was up when I saw the backpage caption contest in the middle of the book, and it was the same one that appeared at the back of the book. Editors hate when this happens. The sympathetic nausea set in. Being experienced in these kinds of capers, I eventually figured out that the error eliminated Shouts & Murmurs and the first couple pages of Peter Hessler’s letter from China. Knowing how we writers and editors all idolize the New Yorker, I felt especially bad for Paul Rudnick, who doesn’t get that many stabs at the humor page.

I asked David Remnick about this, and it was apparently the first he’d heard about it. I asked around here, and so far, I seem to have the only mixed-up copy, so that is a sympathetic relief. Here I was prepared to offer the cynical explanation that these special theme issues are so easy to set aside that no one but a truly pathetic magazine geek would notice. (Is your copy FUBAR? Let me know.)

This is no reflection on the quality of theme issues, per se. I just think it’s human nature to reject products that are overpackaged. There are huge sections of wonderful magazines and newspapers that I do not read, simply because I am annoyed to have to machete the cane breaks that tell me I’m about to wade into the “Arts Feature” or the “the World of Michael Musto” or a “Special Advertising Section on Head Trauma,” or whatever. Surprise me.

Other than the lingering influence of Tina Brown’s evanescent moment, it is not entirely clear to me why the New Yorker still publishes a dozen or so special issues per year. The fiction specials make a certain amount of sense, but beyond that–travel, food, style–they begin to devolve into mannered exercises in grouping vaguely related content, I suppose for the benefit of advertisers. We experience that kind of pressure around here all the time; salons and spas wish to buy ads in our special salons and spas issue, or our special salons and spas section. Can we please fax over our editorial calendar? And when we tell them we don’t have that sort of thing, they seem confused and concerned. (We believe they have been brainwashed by certain low-rent publications that are always promising to write about them if they purchase advertising.) It would be a useful tool for advertisers, I suppose, to know if we are planning any editorial content that would make their advertisments look especially good. But we don’t like to run a magazine just to satisfy advertisers, because that is inevitably insulting to readers, who begin to feel like a third wheel. The larger irony in my mind is this: Why do advertisers wish to congregate with their direct competitors in special issues and special sections? The whole point of advertising at this late date is to cultivate a remarkable, unique, “big bang” brand in an overcrowded media marketplace. Contrast. Juxtaposition. Innit?

I have not noticed a major inflow of advertising in the New Yorker’s special issues. Depending on how you count, and whether your issue is paginated correctly, this number is large enough to be perfect bound, but not exactly a bag-buster. But look at this: The sixty-page “Fashion Rocks,” an unpaginated glossy stand-alone that appears to have been seeded by Citi bank.

I have the habit of looking at magazines backwards, from the back cover in, and as I browsed the separate supplement, I had two thoughts–this could not possibly have been put together by New Yorker staff. Two, it looks and reads like a Rolling Stone feature well from about 1998, featuring one-on-one style-related interviews with rock stars like David Bowie, Gwen Stefanie, Nelly, Duran Duran (Duran! Duran! My god) and so on. Indeed, I haven’t seen such a relentlessly sycophantic and ephemeral group of soft-focus celbrity “profiles” for almost a decade, having thought the glossy form died long ago and was buried in the local newspaper.

Great moments in music journalism revisited (and these are just the leads:

“When Joss Stone landed a record deal at the age of 14, she made one thing clear to the label brass: The clothes stay on.”

A quick glance at the masthead–have to admit it is surprising anyone would actually want to take the blame for this unfortunate enterprise–reveals that
a lot of people are either calling in favors or working on a third mortgage. It is like a time machine back to The Nineties at Wenner Media. The buck stops at the top of the masthead with Bob Love, the longtime, genteel, but aged editor of Rolling Stone who was displaced by rampant Ladism, but it passes through the hands of a kind of Love Boat cast of nineties “rock journalists” who specialized in the longform kissup–Jancee Dunn, Danyel Smith, David Wild, and so on. I have nothing against any of these people personally (indeed, I composed a few real stinkers myself back when), but the exposure is frigidly dated, and calls to mind an old adage: Never do anything just for the money. Also: You’re only as good as your last byline. Also: Script faces and faux xerox faces went out of style about six years ago, and do not yet qualify as kitsch. (Okay, now I’m being mean.)

In fact, the Fashion Rocks supplement to The New Yorker shows so little actual substance or style that it cannot possibly have passed over the desk of any editors at the New Yorker, and I wonder whether the publishing side even got a peek at it. Perhaps it is so bad because its chosen parameters–rock stars who wear or sell or talk about their own fashion lines–are inherently lame. It strikes me that the relevance of, say, P. Diddy and Scott Stapp and Boy George to the sartorial world is inversely proportional to their relevance in the music world. In other words– diversify your brand while you can, rock star and rock writer. There are advertising supplements waiting for you.

True, I am such a hopeless and idealistic magazine dork that part of me believes this messed up issue of The New Yorker will somehow be collectible, like a mis-struck coin from the mint, or a Dewey Defeats Truman headline–if only I hadn’t torn into the polybag and forever devalued it. That Fashion Rocks supplement, though. Unfortunately, due to the high gloss and clay content, I can’t even use it for fish wrap. But I may keep it around anyway, as a sort of professional warning, or an idol to mammon.

P.S. If your copy of the September 26 issue was screwy, before you sell it on e-baylet me know, and I’ll pass along the info to Remnick. They’ll probably be glad to know what the exact damage may be.

Amid all the news of the End Times, you may not have noticed that the New York Times Magazine introduced a new department last Sunday. They are calling it “The Funny Pages.” They are not funny.

The most obvious attempt at what would normally be called humor was Elizabeth Gilbert’s confessional essay on yoga, in which the author describes a yoga class she’d taken while living in Tennessee–the first time, she says, she’d ever lived in “the South.” She is obliged to overcome her yoga purism, which is a backward way of saying she thinks her Southern Belle instructor is an idiot, and this of course is funny in the traditional “Y’all talk funny down here!” line. The juxtaposition might be a humorous one in the hands of an actual humorist, but Gilbert really manages just one laughline, which she isn’t convinced y’all heard the first time, so she repeats it. (“Work them BOOBS off, y’all!” Would have been funnier if she’d said “tits,” but I don’t see the Times, or Elizabeth Gilbert for that matter, going there.) I like Elizabeth Gilbert fine–she’s done some really nice work, particularly when she’s following the wise instinct to write about other people. A few years ago, in speaking about her first book, “Pilgrims,” she told Ploughshares, “I did not want to write a thinly veiled, autobiographical, memoirish book. I wanted to tell stories about other people besides myself, stories about the kind of people I love and feel for in this world.” That is surely an admirable and rare instinct in a writer, and I don’t hold this yoga business against her. It just feels like a piece that had been lined up as a palliative evergreen for the terminally maudlin “Lives” department. I’d be more convinced by a piece from a practicing humorist like, say, Garrison Keillor or even Neal Pollack, or better yet, Jeff Johnson.

A reader starting from the back of “the Funny Pages” will find the first installment in a serialized novella called “Comfort to The Enemy.” Elmore Leonard, of course, is a great, unusual, underrated American writer. (So good, in fact, that he apparently has one of those coveted “no-edit” clauses in his contract with the Times, which led him to give his protagonist an honorary discharge from the Navy, rather than an honorable one; or maybe Carl has gone AWOL unintentially.) It is certainly a good thing to see Leonard writing in the popular press, and it reminds me of Stephen King’s awesome back page in Entertainment Weekly–an example of why great writers can make just about anything fun to read. I have to admit, though, that Leonard’s first chapter was an exhausting strafing of nouns. Also, it was not funny.

What may be the most obvious or literal feint at a “funny page” is Chris Ware’s page, a serialized panel in the stoic but expansive style of Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth. It’s a nice gesture–and a symbolic one, the Times being probably the Last Major Periodical on Earth to publish serious adult comics. But a funny (weird) thing happens on the way to the printer. Given the otherwise relentlessly humorless context of the Times Magazine, the emotionally masochistic Ware is being positioned as humor– that is, as light, diversionary, experimental material–but this does him a great disservice and plays to the highly irritating, dated, and stereotypical misunderstanding that comics, especially “literary comics” or “graphic features” are necessarily funny, just like children’s books are always supposed to be moral fables, or a crime novel must always be a police procedural.

The funniest thing about the funny pages is probably the appropriation of Gen-X self-consciousness on the cover of the magazine, hawking the new department, which I can’t copy down for you, because I don’t have the thing in front of me at the moment. These antique stylings landed there no doubt at the gentle insistence of “Funny Pages” editor John Hodgman, and could have been lifted from McSweeney’s (a crush that has lately flowered publicly at the Times magazine, a couple years late, as befits the general Male Patttern Baldness of the Times magazine since Adam Moss left for, erm, New York). Editor Gerry Marzorarti may not be the hippest guy, but he eventually comes around to it. (He’s polite, though, and he apparently turns on the listening ears once in a while; Hodgman is a sort of second-string Dave Eggers who has been running the happy “Little Gray Book Lectures” for literary groupies in Brooklyn. Also, he knows how to roll logs for his friend Elizabeth Gilbert. She is not funny. Did we mention that?)

There is the possibility that the new elements are merely misnamed. As the editors themselves make clear, the new pages were inspired by a somewhat historic sense of the phrase “funny pages,” i.e. The American Weekly, a diversionary Sunday supplement slipped into Hearst newspapers during the Gilded Age. These sorts of things were really funny-weird as much as they were funny-ha-ha, but reappropriating that aesthetic to the twenty-first century is a little problematic, and feels more like hedging their bets against the notoriously brutal world in which professional humorists run.

Then too, it may be more an organizational issue than a content issue. If there is one thing that is most striking about the state of the art in American magazines today, it is that they take themselves far too seriously, and they read other magazines much too closely. There is little or no innovation. If the Times got one thing right, it is the impulse to look back through the yellowing stacks of the 20th century, and to see just how much has been lost. When magazines were the mass medium of entertainment, before radio, TV, and film, they were far more entertaining. Today, they either want to change the world or change your buying habits, but they figure you’ll entertain yourself someplace else. The Times magazine, to its credit, I think, has somehow managed to preserve the impulse (and, no doubt, the margins) to innovate and invent, and keep life interesting.

I realize that humor is a hard thing, but what’s wrong with, you know, the more obvious kind of funny-ha-ha humor? I’d guess that if the pages themselves don’t actually get funny before too long, in other words run the risk of being spectacularly unfunny (not precisely the same thing as being humorless) they’ll be dropped like a prom dress.

I see where there is a new biography of Mark Twain, and I intend to clean out the office to see if it might have arrived while I wasn’t looking. It is my shameful practice to deal with most of what I receive here in the mail by stacking it in small pillars that lean and topple until I can gather enough nerve to ask for help, like a drowning man, from one of the interns. I feel like I need to swear them to secrecy before they dig in; they may find obscene letters from angry readers, or bills from my wife’s cell phone. What’s worse, they may not realize that I cannot control what is sent to me. I did not request that exhaustive and exhausting tome on the timeless brilliance of Britpop, for example. I did not ask to be sent reviewer’s samples of four new scents of “personal lubricant.” I do not specifically remember requesting a PR copy of the new Suicide Girls DVD. (Actually, I do remember that, and I also know for a fact that it has not arrived yet.)

I like biographies, generally. THere has been some hue and cry around here about biopics (most seem to be agin’ ’em), but I don’t know about them so much. I don’t go directly to the biographies section at the bookstore, although if I wander in there, I often find myself stuck for a while. But panic inevitably sets in, and I decide not to drop the thirty bucks on a new book.

Biographies tend to make a person feel small. A really well written story about an important person’s life gives it a narrative arc that makes my own life feel like an insane, rudderless, anonymous cacophony of trivialities. Biographies tend to make a reader feel small, too, because the reader realizes this may be the one and only book on the subject that he will ever read, whereas the writer of a good biography should have a firm grip on just about anything that has ever been written by and about his subject. On top of that, a good biographer should have a working knowledge of most of the finest examples of his chosen genre. Inevitably, that pressure is experienced by the reader. You do not have to know what the ten best biographies ever writter are, but you cannot escape feeling like you really ought to know a few of them, since you have now gone on the record claiming to be a big fan of biographies.

I think I’d like to read this biography of Twain, although I am not very happy with WIlliam Grimes review of it. Grimes, I am pleased to say, does seem to have read the canonical biographies of America’s first great writer, which is the least we should expect from a book critic. But he is disappointed that Ron Powers did not aspire to cultivate more controversy about the person of Samuel Clemens. As an example, he suggests that Powers’ review of “Huckleberry Finn” is emblematic:

It is less than satisfactory to have Mr. Powers conclude, after canvassing divided critical opinion on the final chapters of “Huckleberry Finn,” that “nearly everybody agrees that it is one hell of a book.”

True enough. No argument there. And that’s the problem. A biography should give readers something to argue about. Mild, dutiful and inoffensive, “Mark Twain” declines to do so. It is, in the end, too much a Samuel Clemens.

Now, I think Grimes is confusing this sort of thumbs-up, thumbs-down brinksmanship with an earlier complaint that the book does not take enough leaps.

Mr. Powers has marshaled the data and organized and packaged it in a coherent, readable narrative, but the results are less than enthralling. If “Mark Twain” rarely stumbles, it never makes any leaps, either. Like the prairies surrounding Twain’s Missouri birthplace, it just rolls on and on.

Grimes himself is sort of spinning his wheels at this point, but the key to his own befuddled thinking is in his lead.

Throughout his judicious, coolly considered biography, Mr. Powers prefers simple explanations to the complications of psychoanalysis.

When I think back on my favorite biographies, I have a strong preference for works that try to do both things–marshal all the facts from a life, and then try to paint a sort of symphonic, three-dimensional portrait that includes an attempt at an interior, spiritual wire-tap– to speculate from the evidence what only the subject and the subject’s God really know, their unspoken motivations and obsessions and fears and so on. Biographers of highly prolific writers have an especially rich record to draw from. If you’re not too muchg of a post-modernist, and agree that there is some element of autobiography in almost everything the writer publishes, then a man like Twain isn’t so much an open book to be read by the biographer as an open library–for those who know the language.

One of my favorite biographys is Scott Elledge’s life of E.B. White. I don’t know if it is a classic in its genre, but I admire it a lot, because it is a very well written and researched, conscientious portrait of a complex man who led an interesting, taciturn life–but who wrote about himself endlessly, in fact claimed that he did not sympathize with anyone who wasn’t first and foremost interested in himself. So Elledge performed the neat trick of extrapolating from all of the writings of E.B. White, including the private papers and letter, who the man was, what he did, and what he thought about. (Published while White was still alive, White approved of it, though he thought it was too long. This is not necessarily a good thing, of course–to have the living subject of a biography approve it is, to a skeptical mind, evidence that it may be too sycophantic and uncritical. White, though, was undoubtedly wise enough not to quibble out loud, and in any case, there were sharply insightful sections of the book that must have made its writer cringe, knowing White would be reading it.)

The book left me with two strong secondary impulses of sehnsucht. First, I feel bad that an equally good biography has not been written about Katherine White (the one was written by a first-time biographer, and oddly focussed on her septuagenarian hypochondria, a subject that was finally redeemed by her son’s recent scribblings on the matter). Second, I wonder how biographies will be written in the future, now that the age of letter-writing has entirely died.

I suppose my own little life could easily be reconstructed, in its main shape, from my email inbox and outbox. Most of my short- and longterm memory is now stored there, but the boss has reminded me that bandwidth and server space is not endless, and most of this material is being deleted in six-month blocks going back a year or so at a time.