Category: Blog Post

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 were saddened the Mark Dayton won’t be running again for the Senate. Oh, we didn’t harbor any illusions about his winning. He would have had a six year record as an unapologetic liberal to run against, he’s not the best speaker in the world, and he can’t finance his own campaign this time.

Although the national Dems would come to his aid, he’d still have to raise millions to fight off the anticipated Republican flood of money. And he hates that…probably because he quaintly believes being a Senator is not about where the money is coming from. As a friend of mine who used to work for Dayton once told me, “He’s a really good senator and a really lousy politician.”

So, whoever is the DFL candidate, and we think it will be Mike Hatch, he’ll have a relatively open field ahead of him, and the ability to run against Bush lapdogs Gil Gutnecht or Mark Kennedy. I really hope it’s Kennedy. That creep has to answer for what he said about Patty Wetterling on earth before he lands in the eternal fire which will be his eventual reward.

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…

The Editor in Cheese beat us to the punch today in commenting on Verlyn Klinkenborg’s essay in the NY Times on the Iowa brain drain.

Klinkenborg blames it a lot on the state’s encouragement of industrial farming and the resultant slaughtering not only of pigs, but also the family farm and all the real jobs that went with it.

The only part of Iowa I know well, where I grew up, is the example of exactly what Klinkenborg describes. The downtown, which used to house all local businesses, including two department stores, a mens clothing store owned by my girl friend’s father, a record store where you could actually listen to the record before you bought it, and an appliance store where the owner would wait on you personally and give a deal on a portable stereo to an impoverished college student who had once dated his daughter (after the clothes store daughter dumped me.) There was a movie theater that had a Saturday kids movie club for 35 cents a ticket, (Disney movies were 50 cents,) and another movie theater across the street that had a short life as an “adult” movie house before becoming a teen concert venue briefly before being torn down. The tallest building in town–at six stories–was full of doctors and dentists and lawyers.

The upper floors of that building are now condos. The main floor, is now home to a “loan” business. There’s one new office building built several years ago for an agricultural insurance company which was run into bankruptcy by its corporate controllers, destroying the pensions of their employees while enriching themselves. There’s a forlorn four-plex movie house at one end of the erstwhile retail mall, which received government subsidies to supplant the local merchants, then failed itself.

The rail yards which used to handle the farm produce have moved north and west, mostly to Nebraska, where they got a better tax deal, no doubt, from a state that turned Republican before Iowa did. The local food processing companies have long since sold out to Con-Agra. Immigrants were imported (no kidding) to fill the jobs the native Iowans didn’t used to want.

There used to be three funeral homes near downtown. Now there is one big one–part of a chain that has bought them up all over the Midwest. Here, dying is big business.

On the far edge of town, there is some economic activity: a new mall full of chain department stores and, you guessed it, a Wal-Mart. But, the biggest industry in town is now gambling. Like Pawlenty here, they saw gambling as the solution to their economic ills. A lot of jobs were created in the three big casinos, but you know the sort of jobs we mean–the sort that employs the locals to sweep up, make change, deal the cards and clear the buffet tables. The management talent comes from Vegas, and the profits go back there, less, of course, what they cosmetically donate to civic projects like the community college where they train their next generation of food service workers.

All evidence suggests Iowa is the next state about which someone will write a book like Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” The state turns conservative at the same time it is turned into a third world natural resource and labor supply for the corporate grist mill. The sweet smell of the freshly fertilized rolling corn fields has been replaced by the sour mountains of pig shit from the pork factory farms. The sound of the train whistles I could hear from my bedroom window late at night is drowned by the clinking of the slots.

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.

It’s been some time since we offered anything on the subject of David Brooks, so here is something at last. Today in the Times opinion pages, Brooks modestly offers to assist President Bush, after the Prez’s State of the Union offer to listen to “other people’s ideas on how to fix social security.” (We wonder why President Bush would start listening now. Is this his idea of consensus-building—an eleventh-hour olive branch to all persons outside his sphere of absolute certainty and infalliability? Have his “mandate” and “political capital” so quickly evaporated in the wake of his train-wreck budget—a modest proposal that will have Republicans eating children for decades to come? Never mind, live for today!)

Now, just as a light-hearted prelude, let’s just consider how modest Brook’s offer of assistance really is. Considering that President Bush doesn’t even read newspapers—it seems possible that he doesn’t read at all—that’s a good one. Ha ha!

But we’re a little disappointed that Brooks’ thinking on this subject isn’t really up to snuff for the Times. In fact, it’s as fuzzy as his whole impressionistic “Bobos” daydream, and we’re surprised an editor didn’t catch it. In an effort to refine the whole idea of personal retirement accounts as a way to fix the unbroken social security system, Brooks dredges up the old idea of KidSafe. This was a bootless bipartisan taradiddle from the dark ages (the 1990s) that proposed establishing a $1000 savings accounts for all American children the day they are born. This amount would be tendered from the government, but—accforing to Brooks’ interpretation—it would be “invested in a limited number of mutual funds, but it couldn’t be withdrawn until retirement.”

So far so good. Sounds terrific. Except that for Brooks, this is a slam-dunk strategy for establishing the President’s chimeric “ownership society” based on the simple and absolute truth of “compound interest.” Brooks enthuses:

“Over decades, it would grow and grow, thanks to the wonders of compound interest, so that by the time workers retired, they would each have a substantial nest egg, over $100,000, waiting for them.”

Now, we count ourselves among the world’s most incompetent financial managers, and even we see a problem here. Brooks is apparently even dumber than we are. Compound interest is one thing, and a mutual fund operating in the open market is quite another. We can barely remember our own social security number, but we do know that putting money in a stock is not the same as putting it in a bank.

It’s a useful confusion because it obscures what they are really proposing: Bush and the people he will undoubtedly listen to most closely want more than anything to turn Americans’ money over to private concerns on Wall Street. As is always the case, Wall Street will take its cut, win or lose—the commission is the same whether you’re buying high or selling high, and the Plain People of America will leave their financial security exposed to the whims of the marketplace, with an equal chance of losing as much as they might gain.

We’ve said it till we’re blue in the face. It is not possible for 100 percent of Americans to be in the top one percent of taxpayers, and the sooner ninety-nine percent of Americans realize this, the better.

In yesterday’s New York Times, our friend Charles McGrath is up to his old tricks. In “Week in Review,” he considers whether The Paris Review can survive the death of its founder and guardian, George Plimpton—and at the same time considers the life expectancy of these tiny little “lit-mags” with circulations in the 10K range. McGrath points out that most titles of this sort will live about as long as a good dog—say ten years.

The Paris Review has managed thirty years or so for one reason: George Plimpton. He was an outsized personality with good literary chops and connections, and he had the charisma of a world-class editor and party-thrower, although he was mainly a great writer.

But the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Plimpton’s little vanity project persisted because Plimpton was willing to write big personal checks to insure that it did. And thank goodness for that. There are lots of good reasons to write and read that have nothing to do with making, keeping, or spending money. So there may be a direct relationship between the celebrity of the editor and the lifespan of the journal, and that’s no real surprise.

Further, McGrath poses the interesting proposition that Dave Eggers may be our generation’s George Plimpton—the respected literary superstar who uses his powers for literary good, so long as he is willing to write checks and lend his boyish face and soft hands to the miserable job of begging for financial help when necessary. (But this is easier than it seems, probably. We just finished a wonderfully written book that contains a nice description of the perpetual-motion-machine of celebrity: “You know you have passed through the magic looking glass when people pay you to do what you wanted to do anyway.” That, and the free drinks for life are also kind of a red flag.)

We’re reminded of Will Blythe’s thoughtful review a few weeks ago of Plimpton’s latest book, a posthumous collection of his unique brand of “gonzo” participatory journalism. In that review, Blythe proposed that Plimpton was a certain kind of archetypal loser—the American anti-hero, who made a career of failure and self-deprecation. Clearly, Eggers has done the same thing.

But Blythe wonders why the anti-hero can never quite achieve the apotheosis of the hero in American letters, and we think we know why: Anti-heroes are an inherently contrarian minority. (That’s why they insist, for example, on publishing literary magazines for a couple hundred readers. How Euro-faggy is that? And why, after all, did Plimpton insist on naming his New York-based journal after that other gay city?) What’s more, neither Plimpton nor Eggers ever really failed at anything—if they did, it was a glorious case of failing up. Both are essentially privileged upper-middle-class literary fellows who have been in a position to prank the literary establishment, and the literary establishment loves to be pranked by its chosen sons.

This story by David Sheff in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine about his accomplished but drug-addicted son is a cautionary tale. I don’t have anything to add to it, other than to recommend it and remember that “there but for the grace of God…”

There were two good pieces yesterday on the role of the press, or lack thereof, in providing information to our people so they can intelligently participate in their government.

Jack Shafer, who writes mostly about media for Slate, is one of my favorite columnists. His column yesterday is about what Bush has learned about media manipulation from his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jung Il. Not as far-fetched as you might imagine.

Columnist Mike Hedricks of the KC Star is more flippant when he puts the blame for the denigration of the press on Rush Limbaugh and his clones. But there is a smidgen of truth in there, too.

I won’t deny that Dan Rather, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and others played right into the hands of those who would bring this plague down upon the journalistic house, but when it comes to getting information about your government, whom are you going to trust? The government itself? There’s a disinterested and unbiased source for you.

I hope I’m not going to make this blog a magnet for fundamentalist Christians, (see the posts from Jan. 31 under the title “Try Flowers”) but I can’t help calling attention to this story from Tuesday’s NY Times.

I read about some recent Gallup Poll data in Editor and Publisher that public acceptance of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is below 50 percent in the U.S. What I’m waiting for is a poll that compares the people who subscribe to creationism to those who believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I’m guessing the groups are close to identical. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice and I’ll vote for you for President?