Category: Blog Post

Inexplicably, I’ve been obsessed with sailing—right here in the heart of winter in Minnesota. Well, there is a reason, but it’s not what you think… just a new personal obsession, originating here and here. In my ongoing effort to reverse a previous decision never to reread a good book (so many other classics I’ll never get to, for shame!), I picked up Moby-Dick again. For years now, I’ve called it the all-time best American novel. But looking back—and attempting a re-reading— I realize now why it took a graduate course in theology to force me to finish the book on a schedule. All those victorian flourishes and bygone references, they become goads, not impediments, when you are reading a book for an elective credit. It may no longer be the best American novel—probably Twain deserves that honor, I guess.

So, anyway, I’ve just finished reading the chapter on mastheads on the Pequod. Apparently, the word did not come into regular usage until the 1740s—when whaling was beginning to become one of the world’s most vigorous commercial enterprises. There have been masts, and the heads of masts, since boats were first equipped with sails (Jonah was thrown from a sailing ship, you know). But no one thought to stand at the top of one until it became a useful perch from which to spot whales spouting far off in the distance. (Pirates, seeing other merchant mariners as plunderable whales, no doubt manned the masthead too.)

So how did newspapers and other publications come to use the term as it is used today—to let you know who all the fine folks are that are responsible for creating your favorite magazine or journal? Some etymological sources say that the masthead on a ship is where you fly the flag—thus the “flag” (in a newspaper sense) is flown from its masthead. But that is a tautology. Why is the flag in a newspaper called a flag? (We’ve stopped using that word in the magazine world. We call the flag the “logo.” Stubborn newspapermen persist, as ever.) I don’t really have an answer, other than the rough guess that it originated with some broadsheet of shipping news. The first newspaper in America was Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick in Boston, in 1690. There could not have been a newspaper in the American colonies that did not concern itself with shipping and mariners and the like, and most likely on the front page, over the fold.

I like the association, actually. It’s neat to think of every little publication as its own ship, on its own journey, with captain and crew steadfast and loyal at the helm. We may not really compete with the Titanics and Lusitanias and Disney Cruise Ships of the world, but we have our own white whales to chase. Personally, I am not afraid of heights, and I don’t mind being on the lookout for ice bergs and pirates and friendly trade winds. Avast!—The Editor in Cheese

We noticed in the Sunday Times magazine a twenty-five-page advertising supplement promoting the Times’ “Arts & Leisure Weekend.” That would be this coming weekend, and it would encompass hundreds of events across the country (even spreading to Europe). What type of thing are we talking about here? Mostly it is theater and art shows, but also includes—somewhat oddly, we thought—restaurants, spas, health clubs, and “attractions.” It’s fun to browse through the supplement to learn what is going on in your own neck of the woods—but also to learn what other necks of other woods the New York Times seems to occupy throughout this bitterly divided land. The supplement constitutes fully a third of the issue, so it must be a big deal. (Paid for, apparently, by four full-page ads in the pagination by “Weekend” presenters Volkswagen, Mastercard, UBS, and Microsoft.)

Lots of publishing companies are trying this sort of thing, including our own little enterprise here at The Rake. Surely the Times is trying to fight the same weight as the New Yorker, which has quietly cultivated the New Yorker Festival into the gold standard in this particular area of the publishing biz. And the NYer Festival has merely been the locomotive at the front of a spiffy train of similar events and services that complement the book, and no doubt account for the magazine’s celebrated return to profitability last year. The New Yorker’s events and marketing department today is a wide-ranging juggernaut of brand-extension. (We noticed, for example, an advertisement in last week’s issue for a new service at Cartoonbank.com, the New Yorker’s online store, that resells New Yorker comics. The ad was promoting a new feature: Licensing cartoons for corporate reports and presentations. Go, Bob Mankoff, go! When will you return our call?)

So what is the story with every little festival accosting the good readers of America? You kind of have to make allowances for a huge diversity of offerings–from the shite “home tours” to the cerebral book signings to full-blown parties—but basically they are of a piece. The “branded editorial event” is the sort of marketing and “brand-extension” operation that can do two things. One, it “leverages relationships” with potential advertisers. Two, it offers interesting real-life opportunities to readers. Without offering both of these things, though, we feel like these things are a tremendous waste of effort—not to mention a possible distraction from a magazine that might improve its position in the world by merely being a better magazine.

Now, the New Yorker has a delicate and valuable brand that automatically lends any event a certain class and panache, a certain attractive world view. We suppose the New York Times does too, but it is interesting that they brand this event as a particular section of the newspaper. Each section of the paper surely has its own identity and voice, and this is probably a good thing—for the paper, but not necessarily for a festival. We wonder what the “Week in Review Weekend” would look like. Lots of events celebrating short-term memory? A movie marathon of “Memento”?

There’s a lot of cork in this particular wine, but if you’re lucky enough to live in New York, you may drink long and deep. From our point of view, the real value of the “Arts & Leisure Weekend” will be the limited number of Manhattan events that really flex the muscle of the brand. The “Times Talks” series, tacked on as the last page of the supplement, is where New York readers really luck out. We here in the Twin Cities can go to Gold’s Gym any day out of the year, with or without the imprimatur of the New York Times. But if you’re in Manhattan this weekend, you could see Times reporters interviewing Kiefer Sutherland, Billy Joe Armstrong, Chuck Close, Bill Murray, and Amy Tan—and that’s just in the first twenty-four hours. Blue-chip advertisers like Microsoft, Mastercard, and VW probably don’t care about these tiny little first-come-first-seated events at the City University of New York. But without them, they’d be underwriting a whole lot of events that would go off just fine without them or the Times.

And that is ultimately what the print-media festival is about. Coincidentally, it is precisely what print advertising is about: You are an advertiser, and you want good customers. So you associate yourself with a brand that already has them. All that’s left to be sorted out is who pays whom for the privilege. And whether readers actually get something they didn’t already have.—The Editor in Cheese

Well, I never did find Jim Romenesko ice fishing, but I found the flu. So last night abed, I had two friendly companions—the DVD player and a magazine. I’ve had a copy of the movie “American Splendor” gathering dust on top of the TV for months, and I grabbed the latest issue of the New Yorker. It was an interesting coincidence.

To refresh your memory and mine, “American Splendor” is about Harvey Pekar, the Ohio working stiff who authored a famous comic book series of the same title. During one of those times when comics and graphic novels become fashionable, Random House published an anthology of the first numbers in 1986—ten years after American Splendor No.1 was pulped. In the normal course of publicity glad-handing and ass-grabbing, and glad-handed ass-grabbing, Pekar was invited to be a guest on David Letterman’s popular television show. Letterman found Pekar a raw, entertaining, and combative guest, and kept inviting him back.

Pekar never had much patience for anyone, and it didn’t take long for him to rebel against “the American Dream” which Letterman believed he was offering Pekar—in other words, anomic midwestern working stiff gets rare opportunity to become world-famous TV star, not unlike the Ball State graduate himself. It ended badly between the two of them, in part because Pekar just doesn’t like people that much, and because a few TV appearances with the cynical, mocking David Letterman shows just how devalued the Warholian “fifteen minutes” of fame has become. Also, Pekar seems to prefer his life of relative obscurity and subterranean credibility. It’s both his muse and his material. He couldn’t stop being himself just to be a celebrity.

Here in my sickbed, I say it was a coincidence, because now I am looking at last week’s New Yorker, and in it there is a nice little comic feature by R. Crumb and his wife Aline. Pekar and Crumb were old friends from Cleveland, and it was Crumb who originally encouraged Pekar to write comics, though Pekar had (and has) no facility as an artist.

As “American Splendor” makes clear, Crumb was an underground sensation as early as the mid sixties, making a decent living, hanging out with bohemians, moving to San Francisco, and generally being himself a substantial, life-supporting satellite of that whole Merry Prankster, Summer of Love, hippy-dippy cultural moment.

And now, forty years later, he makes the pages of the world’s greatest magazine.

Am I the only one who finds that a little depressing? I realize Crumb has been in previous issues, and I realize that the New Yorker has hardly been sitting on its thumbs–having within the past twelve months published full spreads by, for example, Chris Ware. (Credit Bob Mankoff with being a true hero of the revolution, though we’re not sure anyone has noticed, even when it is a National Book Award winner. I mean, you know, like who really cares about the “graphic novel” category anyway?) So it certainly is not the New Yorker’s fault–nor even David Letterman’s fault. But there is a persistent, aggravated tension between mainstream media and comic artists, and I wonder if it can ever be fully overcome.

Is there something inherently anti-social about serious, adult-oriented comics, something that causes an inevitable backlash and fall-out and back-slide into obscurity? That prevents the final big breakthrough into mass culture that seems to be the forever just-out-of-reach apotheosis? (And what would that look like, anyway? A Dan Clowes page in every newspaper and magazine in the land?) It’s a wonderful and unique art form, but can it be a billion-dollar industry like film or video games? We’re tempted to say that its greatest naturalist pioneers—Crumb and Pekar—were too steeped in hippy paranoia and politics to ever allow themselves to be embraced by “Big Media.” Or maybe they just have not translated to other mechanical requirements as gracefully as others.

Well, the fact that I am watching a major motion picture about a filing clerk from Cleveland should tell you something. That I am reading a three-page feature drawn by R. Crumb in the world’s most prestigious magazine is also another clue. We call it the First Corollary to the Thermodynamic Law of Pastry Acquisition and Consumption (alternate, informal name: Letterman’s Razor): In rare cases, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too—but you may have to do it without anyone else noticing or caring.

On the other hand, y’know, comics are still basically for kids, right?—The Editor in Cheese

Sitting around the office yesterday, we had noticed the proliferation of little pamphlet-sized magazines in our fair city—in fact, in cities all over the country. These are neat little publications, not because of anything that is in them, necessarily, but just because of the way they are. The format is fun, easy to pick up, maybe tuck into your back pocket—if your back pocket isn’t already occupied by a wallet full of ATM receipts which represent cash that very briefly occupied that same space.

There are a couple of competing titles here in the Twin Cities. One is the clunky, unfortunately named “The Cites,” which has some kind of pronunciation bar over the “e.” (Note to self: simple puns rely on simple recognition. The sights? The citations?) For about six months, we read this as a typographic error in their very logo, rather than a device of surpassing cleverness. We hear through the grapevine that “Industry” is a knockoff started by a band of disgruntled “Cites” mutineers. (We hope this revolution was started by a righteous copy editor, but we have our doubts.)

Neither of these magazines has an editor, per se, which is fine because neither really has much editorial content to speak of. This is alright by us. The pictures are certainly pretty, the paper is heavy and white, and there is a certain sassiness to the design that must appeal to the twenty-something audience that palms these little magazines in the lobbies of strib clubs and martini bars.

As it turns out, a lot of serious Big League magazines are now toying with this sort of format, particularly in Europe. A couple years ago, Conde Nast-Europe began publishing pocket-sized versions of GQ and one or two other titles. In fact, the paractice goes way back, at least to World War II. One of the secrets of the New Yorker’s massive success was their “pony edition” which they published during the war, without advertisements, for the leisure of American soldiers abroad. When those GIs came home, they were easily converted into a massive inflow of subscribers to the full-sized, ad-enhanced version of the magazine.

One can never think too literally about media, especially about the way people actually use the TV, or a CD, a book, or a magazine. What does it feel like in your hands? What is the actual, concrete experience of using this form of entertainment? In the magazine world, we frequently talk about “heft” value. How heavy is it in your hands? (Warning to all self-respecting editors: this, sadly, bears no relationship at all to the “substance” therein. Those perfume inserts are great scale-tippers though!) Part of this is down to nothing more than advertising. More advertising equals more pages. More pages equals more respect. Advertisers are pack animals, and they tend to gather where other advertisers have gathered. As our friend Dave Pirner once said, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

And yet, we think it is more than professional jealously that compells us to say what we must now say: It is possible to have TOO much of a good thing—whether it is ad pages or edit pages. There is nothing as easy to ignore as a 400-page issue of Vanity Fair, as great as that magazine is. And we very nearly missed Dave Eggers’ disarmingly restrained story on Monty Python in the “Winter Fiction” issue of The New Yorker, just because we find these fat theme issues off-putting.

We look at our so-called competitors here in Minneapolis/St.Paul, and we are exercised. We strain our back picking these door-stoppers up off the floor beneath the mail slot, and we are just overwhelmed by hundreds of pages of… well, nothing much at all. (The size itself is annoying. But what is infuriating is how little they do with how much they have. There is a special circle in hell reserved for the idle rich.)

To be perfectly fair, the January issue of Vanity Fair—traditionally one of the thinnest of the year, advertisers having blown their wads in December—always sets records for uninterrupted edit pages, this year something like 80 straight full-pages of feature stories and jump pages. We find this nearly unreadable too. It’s just too much. We prefer to invest that much time into a good book with a sustained subject and voice. Or a video game.—The Editor in Cheese

Michael Miner can be forgiven for his rather unimaginative wish for the New Year—that more people will start reading newspapers. Why should they? We’re tired of this perennial kvetch, especially coming from Chicago, where just about every trick has been tried other than improving the quality of the actual newspaper.

We were reminded the other day of the fact that Chicago, during the Gilded Age, used to have more than thirty daily newspapers. (We’re also reminded: That’s a helluva lot of tinder set at the feet of old Mrs. O’ Leary’s cow. A purifying fire, to be sure.) Even up until 1960, the windy city had eight major dailies.

In almost every other field of publishing, the drift has been clear: toward specialization and away from generalization. You find enthusiasts and you service them. You stop worrying about quantity in your demographics and start worrying about quality. This, it seems to us, is where advertising departments have been light-years ahead of editorial departments. THEY’LL be glad to tell you the unique selling proposition of their publications, while the editors sit on their thumbs and send around instant messages carping about this afternoon’s “business seminar.” But newspapers are the last great holdouts of the Bigger is Always Better school.

In a curious way, editors and advertisers are the idiots in this equation. It is the advertisers—well, more often their knucklehead media-buyers—who distrust the smoke-and-mirrors of the media kit. They like to see raw, audited circulation numbers, and hang the rest of it. Editors, too, distrust “reader profiles” and the endless smorgasboard of pie-charts and bar-graphs that purport to isolate every minor buying habit of their beloved reader, from a vague intention in the next fiscal quarter to buy a refrigerator from Southest Asia, to which direction they put the toilet paper on the roll. This skepticism is understandable, especially if you are an editor who has no clear picture in your own mind of who your reader might be. One does not create a reader from a collection of purchasing habits. One creates a reader with the imagination. (This is the real failure of the Chicago “reds.”)

We have no real quarrel with our own advertising people. We love them. They dress beautifully, they’re smart, they’re quick with a dirty joke, their pinkies are in the air almost as often as our own, and so on. Most important, they understand that the editors’ committment to a ~certain kind of reader~ is inviolable. And that this a bankable asset.

Newspapers should not wish to be widely read. They should wish to be more thoroughly and passionately read. Consider it a matter of public safety.—The Editor in Cheese

Yesterday, the people who organize the Gay Pride parade in the Twin Cities filed a complaint against the Star Tribune. This one could sting: They are complaining to the Minnesota Commission on Civil Rights because the Strib apparently refused to publish an advertisement for the parade that showed two men kissing.

Many interested readers who pay attention to the subtleties have been piqued by the Strib in recent years—in fact, ever since Keith Moyers took over the paper. There have been some real brow-raising moments, particularly on the publishing side of the paper. Last summer, for example, there was a widespread rumor that high-ranking ad executives were avid followers of Luis Palau. Thus had his ballyhooed “Twin Cities Festival” not only got sweetheart status in the sales department, but the edit department had also bowed to the will of the Lord and published numerous odd features that could only be called fawning.

Then this fall, the paper refused to publish an advertisement that had no images at all— in fact, it was a piece of poster art depicting a bunch of numbers. It was a mathematical compendium of the lives and limbs lost so far in Iraq. (An advertisement we subsequently published in The Rake, incidentally. Of all the consipiracy theories, we like the one that suggests the Strib has something against simple math. It certainly seems to be catching in the newspaper industry.)

So what the hell is going on with the Newspaper of the Twin Cities? We doubt whether there’s truly an emergent Christian fundamentalist impulse taking over down on Portland Avenue. Like most of these things, the real story is found neither on the front page nor the ad pages nor even in the op-ed pages, but in the McClatchy spread sheets.

It is just barely possible that the Strib is hoping to outflank the Pioneer Press’s alleged play to the right (going for all those wacky Woodbury readers with backyard bomb-shelters, you know). What is more likely is that the business is simply responding to a certain neap tide of community sentiment. While the city’s liberal core has been just as loud and outraged as ever, the Christian right has—as they say—been emboldened by what we in the Big Bad Media have made of them in the past 90 days.

We don’t hear about it so much here on the far-left side of downtown—but then we’ve always tried to respect community standards in a kind of surgical way. (A smarter culture war!) But over there on the right side of Minneapolis, we imagine the Strib has seen a real spike in envelopes bearing a return address from the Holy Name Society. The Strib is undoubtedly the bellwether for this type of critical mass. On the opposite end of the publishing spectrum, we understand there are similar pressures. We hear through the grapevine that the Minneapolis office of the Onion is no longer accepting display ads for sexual services—in other words, pictures of boys kissing boys—and it sure as hell ain’t because they suddenly got Jesus.

One word, people: Circulation.—The Editor in Cheese

I found an old scratched-up CD of Nirvana’s “In Utero” in my desk drawer today, no jewel case. I put it in the tray, pressed play. Of all Nirvana’s records, I like it best. It is the most raw, the most punk rock. At the time it was released, I remember, it was kind of a middle finger to the mainstream radio stations and fans that had annointed the band some kid of voice of a generation. They’d hired Steve Albini to produce their sequel to “Nevermind,” and no one likes Steve Albini. (Don’t feel bad for Steve. He prefers it that way.)

Until In Utero, I was skeptical of Nirvana. I remember hearing “Smells Like Teenage Spirit” on the radio while I was in Boston, in graduate school. Between classes on medieval church history and Mesopotamian creation myths, I said to myself, “This will be huge.” In the world of rock music, there aren’t many sure bets, but you had to be pretty dense not to realize that song was going to make a few people very, very wealthy. Nirvana, as far as I was concerned, was never really “underground,” never really “punk rock” the way I understood it (and preferred it), even though that’s one of the things they most wanted to be. They were trying desperately to be authentic outsiders, trying to espouse noble causes, to pay obeisance to the saints of latterday punk like the Meat Puppets and Husker Du. But as far as I was concerned, they’d always been a commercial enterprise. They just sounded too good and pleased too many people. It was easy to see their endorsements and pronouncements as poses, as commodifications of the things I valued. (I realize now that no one was better equipped to recognize imitative, faux punk rock than a semi-privileged white kid from exurban Minneapolis, who wanted deperately to be a beer-swilling, heroin-shooting, bin-liner-wearing bloke, pogoing to the amphetamine beat of the Jam or Black Flag or the Minutemen. Now I see the diminishing value of belonging to a club where you recognize other members by their haircuts.)

Anyway, at about that time I started publishing a weekly zine. Yeah, weekly! It was insane, but I didn’t have much else going on. It was a weird little xeroxed pamphlet that I called “The Blue Reader.” It contained short little experimental stories, the type of thing that has come to be called micro-fiction or “short-short” stories. (After putting this thing together for about a year, I realized the much-loved writer Donald Barthelme had been doing the same thing, a helluva lot better, about thirty years previously. Ah me; there is nothing new under the sun.) But part of the fun was publishing this thing just the way I wanted to, without any real consideration at all for who might pick it up and read it. In my egotism, I assumed the brilliance of my stories would be self-evident. It was a very mannered kind of experiment; I refused to put page numbers or titles on the pages. The only way you knew where one story ended and another began was a sudden change in fonts. (Yes, the heady early days of desktop publishing. I loved my fonts!) A couple of friends began to write stories for The Blue Reader, and the way you found out who had written what was to look on the last page, where the stories were indexed by their first line, sort of like in a protestant hymnal.

Well, my grandmother, who died last Friday at the grand old age of 93, once got a hold of several copies of The Blue Reader. Her critical verdict? “Too many dirty words. Do you have to use those kind of dirty words?” As far as I know, she never looked at my work again. (I am at her funeral today.)

I realize now that there is a lot of value in thinking about your audience, thinking about who might pick up your little pamphlet or magazine or book. It is the final little shine you put on a story, it is the impetus for one last read-through and brush-up, make that cowlick behave, dandruff off the shoulder. What will an indifferent reader think of this? Have I made an honest effort to invite him in? If not, what am I trying to hide? Just how badly would this alienate my grandmother?

When you sit down to create something, your first thought should not be about who you might offend, either intentionally or accidentally. But it should not be your last thought, either.-Jem Casey

If there is a holy trinity of writers who capture the spirit of what we’re trying to do here at The Rake, we would identify them as follows: E.B. White, H.L. Mencken, and Flann O’Brien. Much to the wife’s irritation, we have taken to hauling these three separate volumes all around the house, sort of juggling between the pig farm, Baltimore, and a Dublin pub. They’re paperbacks. Taken together, they are still less burdensome than “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” which wastes under the bed.

Last Friday, we were sitting contentedly by the fireplace shuffling through these three books, having a nip of whiskey. In the back of our mind, we thought we might set down the books and do something adventurous. Earlier in the day, we’d heard that Kid Dakota was playing a concert at a bar down the street. Now we’re sort of beyond the age of rock ‘n’ roll, and well beyond the age of voluntarily marinating in cigarette smoke and overpriced cocktails, but we like what we’ve heard about this Dakota kid. When the better half got home, she cast a disapproving glance at the tower of books presently in rotation on the sideboard. We received permission to check out the kid.

We’ve been hearing for a few years about Darren Jackson, the musician who calls himself Kid Dakota, who also dabbles in a few other projects, such as the Olympic Hopefuls (great name for a band!). When the local weekly posted an MP3 last week, we got hooked right away.

One of the ongoing, low-level frustrations of toiling as a writer: You go to see a brilliant young musician. You sit there passively; he works his magic under cover of stagelight and volume; he makes your own interior strings resonate sympathetically, powerfully; your throat catches, your eyes irrigate.

And, being a writer, you immediately convert this experience into professional jealousy. Your fear is that the medium in which you work—words—just cannot compete with this. People are not reading the way they used to read, because they are being enticed away by their other senses. Film, music, dance, theater, TV, even the web—these all engage several senses at once, and they can be taken in without much participatory effort, beyond parking your butt in a point of vantage and ordering a pint. The prospect seems so much more daunting to write a thing of beauty, that can really move a reader the way a good song or a good film can do, that doesn’t instantly become tomorrow’s fish-wrap. (I’m not saying it’s easier to write a great three-minute song; just easier to imagine that it will move your auditor.)

Over the years, several people have said something along the lines of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” (We prefer to attribute the saying to Frank Zappa, who seems the most credible candidate, and whose music was the most difficult to describe.) We see the point of this bromide. It is impossible to compete with the visceral power of music, and yet like moths to light, the music journalists—maybe more than anyone—are constantly trying to capture the numenous qualities of our most powerful art form.

And yet Zappa’s Razor has its limitations. It cannot really be applied to all writing, as you think maybe it should. Writing, as a medium, is most like visual art. It takes a certain willful act of participation from the reader. You have to be willing to spend some time in it, it could involve some work, you might not know immediately what you’re looking at. But in the end, you may be rewarded for your effort with a more memorable experience. You may even buy the damn thing for your bookshelf or your living room wall.

Still, we think we’ve hit upon the perfect new strategy: The party shuffle of literature. Pick three of your favorite books, and keep them in heavy rotation. When the going gets tough in one, move on to the next. Either come back and try again, or trade out the voulme. Listen while I tell you: You have nothing to lose but the sanity of your domestic partner. Begob, there’s my bus.—The Editor in Cheese

Especially clever readers
of The Rake know what we think of E.B. White. He is one of our pole
stars. When things seem to be getting a little too serious or ornery or
inhuman or just too damn wordy, and the readers are in trouble, we
refer back to the American master of the humane essay. Just last night,
we picked up our dog-eared, spineless, heavily highlighted copy of his greatest hits.
Like that old Bible trick, we let it fall open. And we reread White’s
wonderful little profile of Professor WIlliam Strunk Jr. , the man who
originally wrote “The Elements of Style.”

That book, of
course, is considered gospel today in most college composition courses.
But before White wrote this profile of Strunk for the New Yorker, “The
Elements of Style” was a tiny, self-published little pamphlet that had
fallen into disuse. (Strunk had been White’s composition instructor at
Cornell.) Shortly thereafter, White was asked to produce a new edition
of the book. Thus was it reborn into celebrity as “Strunk and White,”
its nom de guerre ever since. We keep it within reach at all times. We
think not enough people actually read it or take its chastening message
to heart.

Over lunch yesterday we happened to be browsing
through the latest issue of a good local paper that publishes some of
our favorite writers, including some Rake contributors. But something
funny had happened to the copy. It had been run through some kind of
taffy-stretching machine. Where we expected a crisp bite, we got
several mouthfuls of soggy prose. Here is a random sentence that we
noticed: “I don’t know what the lens looking back at me reveals about
my thoughts on sex, but I imagined on the other side of the room sat a
lonely rotund businessman who called for a raven-haired hottie while
wiping his sweaty forehead with a filthy handkerchief.” The excerpt
made us feel a little sad, because we suspected that our friend the
writer didn’t have much fun writing this.

But speaking
mechanically, this is a good example of gilding the lily, of obscuring
the picture by trying to be too precise. Some of the best writing is
distinguished by what is left unsaid. It reminded us of one of White’s
most wonderful emendations to the Elements of Style. Under “Style Rule
Number Four” (“write with nouns and verbs”), he says, “The adjective
hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a
tight place.” We think this is exactly right. It is our constant
struggle to unhitch adjectives from exhausted nouns that are spinning
their wheels in swampy sentences. (No one is blameless, by the way.
That last sentence is way too wordy, for example. Practically roccoco.
We would have improved it, but we are conserving our strength for
print.)

So, we have a larger more interesting point to make. We
were also reminded of Garrison Keillor’s most recent novel, “Love Me.”
We liked that book about as well as any of his novels, which is quite a
lot. Maybe a little bit more than the others, because it was his most
directly autobiographical novel. It was sort of like Bill Murray in
“Lost In Translation.” The perfect autobiographical vehicle, even if it
was slow and uninteresting to anyone who isn’t a superstar in
literature or film.

Keillor, in the person of his pseudonymous
self, Larry Wyler, discusses his years at the New Yorker, and it’s a
fun read. But there were two bizarre falsifications. First, he made
legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn into a capering cad, whereas
Shawn (it is said) was actually a mousey, painfully agoraphobic genius.
We’ll chalk this one up to humorous inversion, though we’re not sure it
works.

More bizarre is Keillor’s sustained soto voce attack on
“Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.” At several points in the book,
it is a metaphoric stand-in for writerly indulgence and
wrong-headedness. Late in the novel, Keillor puts these words into
William Shawn’s mouth:

“I don’t want you to turn into a stylist
like White and devote your life to painting Easter eggs. Him and Strunk
have screwed up more writers than gin and scoth combined. You take the
Elements of Style too seriously and you’ll get so you spend three days
trying to write a simple thank-you note and you’ll wind up buying a
nickel-plated .38 and robbing newsboys out of sheer frustration.”

Now,
we can understand the contrarian desire to dismiss any formulaic
approach to writing—there is a strong sense among writers that the act
of writing is more like surfing than wood-working. So reducing the act
to a handful of rules is offensive in principle. White knew this and
wrote about it. He said trying to analyze good writing is like
dissecting a frog; it won’t hop any more, and the innards will interest
only the scientifically minded.

But we can hardly think of
another writer who better embodies many of the principles of Strunk and
White. Few writers are as concise and fluid as Keillor, few writers are
so parsimonious about their structure, few writers make every word
count the way Keillor does. (Corollary: Comedy is HARD!) And few
writers have had the spine to leave the New Yorker as a result of having even higher standards of style and simplicity.

Strunk
and White would have been proud of Keillor, we think. Despite Keillor’s
odd dissing of the masters.—The Editor in Cheese

Last night, we stayed late at the office in order to crash a
party upstairs. We were finishing the new issue, too. Needless to say,
we were thirsty. Someone here in the art department (always the
hipsters at any magazine) had received an invitation to the WEA/ADA
office holiday shindig up on the seventh floor.

WEA is Warner Elektra Atlantic, and ADA is the Alternative Distribution Alliance.
In other words, the music biz—or at least Time Warner’s local folks
whose main job is to make sure Best Buy and Target stores get their CD
inventory. We’re told that Best Buy and Target are today the two
largest retailers of music on the planet, followed closely by Wal-Mart.

Now,
we’ve seen our fair share of music-biz hipsters on elevators, and we’ve
gibbered about Pavement and Modest Mouse enough to know how to inveigle
our way into a high-buck party in a swank office with leather couches
and atomic sound systems. We made our way up.

There were
beautiful boys and girls everywhere, and there were framed records on
the walls, and there was a spread of salsa and hummos and celery
sticks, and a god-awful lot of liquor, beer, and wine. We tried to
chit-chat with the powerful people, but the powerful people were
standing back with arms folded over name tags, avoiding eye contact,
trying to make sure—we guess—that no one set the place on fire.
(Smoking! Inside the office! When was the last time you saw that? Rock
‘n’ roll!)

We were overwhelmed by the memory of working more
directly with the music industry, the way we did a few years ago. Any
setting like this is always a study in extremes. You have very
powerful, very wealthy executives in tony offices, with unlimited
expense accounts, surrounded by starving artists and prestige laborers.
That is, the music industry is a star-making industry that attracts all
sorts of good-hearted people who will work
for peanuts as long as they can be in an office that plays cool music,
and allows you to wear leather pants and tee-shirts to work. (The
magazine business is not dissimilar,with one minor difference: We don’t
get filthy rich. Also, leather makes our butts sweat. We hate that.)
The neatest trick is when big money gets paired with a brilliant idea,
and deserving people receive their just reward—from an ingenious
A&R guy, to a cutthroat distribution manager, to a superoriginal band that represents the future of rock ‘n’ roll. It does happen.

This
is a neat trick because it is the rare exception. Money tends to be
conservative, hunger tends to be desperate. It happens just often
enough to be maddening—powerful people with equal amounts of money and
curiosity, willing to take a risk on creativity.

We mention all
this, because we ran into an old friend at the party, Simon Peter
Groebner. He is now comfortably installed in a permanent position with
the Star Tribune, where he writes about music, and god bless him for
it. We’ve known Simon Peter for almost ten years now, and he’s been
through a lot. The life of the writer and editor can be a difficult
one, especially if you can’t pick up and move to another city. Back in
the day, we used to run into Groebner at places like the music
conference SXSW, down in Texas. It was not uncommon to find that Simon
had hitchhiked the whole way, and was sleeping on whatever floor of
whichever record executive’s hotel room he could weasel for the night.
That was certainly rock ‘n’ roll, and we always felt a pang of guilt
for being—at the time—at the front end of the gravy train.

Anyway,
Simon Peter at one point took one of the coolest jobs in the Twin
Cities. He became the editor of FATE magazine—an awesome, pulpy,
salacious little publication that explores the supernatural and the
conspiratorial. FATE is one of the oldest magazines in the Twin Cities,
having been launched back in the forties. In the 1980s, Carl Weschke,
the wiccan head of Llewellyn publishing in St. Paul, bought the
magazine. It seemed like a match made in, erm, a parallel universe. By
the late-90s, Simon Peter was working on the magazine, and quickly rose
through the ranks to become its editor in chief.

This was
right at the peak of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files. The time
could not have been better for FATE magazine to boldly go into new
markets, and capture young readers. Simon Peter, in his first job as an
editor, put together one of the finest business plans we have ever
seen—laying out just how he and his team were going to take FATE where
it had never been taken before, into the big time and into the
mainstream.

The main problem with FATE was that it remained
inertly earnest. It was a magazine locked in the 1950s. It ran stories
about UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters without acknowledging the exploding,
post-ironic world of pop culture. It spoke to its audience as if time
had stood still for them, too. In other words, FATE was comfortable
with a fringy readership that could not tolerate any real skepticism,
or tongue-in-cheek irony, or even the mainstream popularization of its
subject matter.

Llewellyn at the time was totally cashing in
on the phenomenon, becoming the world’s largest publisher of “occult”
books, especially a series about witchcraft specifically for teenage
girls. It was pretty cool.

So. Everything was perfectly in
place. A brilliant young editor with a great idea and a solid business
plan, and plenty of money at his disposal. The only thing missing was
the go-ahead, the nod of confidence, the “damn the torpedos, what are
we going to lose, money? We can always get more money!*” kind of
entrepreneurial spirit. (*Those, by the way, were the actual words,
uttered three years ago, of our own publisher. Yes, we know how lucky we have been.)

Alas. Llewellyn took a pass, the magazine was downgraded and eventually sold to an old-school FATE steward,
and Simon Peter moved on. Today, he’s a made man, but we can’t help
looking back with deep regrets at what might have been, if his bosses
had had any adventurous spirit at all.

Maybe they could see into the future, and they didn’t like what they saw. Fate can be such a bore.—The Editor in Cheese