Harper's Magazine: C/D

Anyone interested in Lapham's Quarterly? The inaugural issue comes out this fall. $60 for 4 issues is a little steep, but I took the plunge.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

-----
States of War
Volume 1, Issue 1
will be available Autumn 2007

Featuring an introductory essay
by Lewis H. Lapham

and new commentaries by
preeminent historians and writers.

Other featured authors in “States of War” include:

Queen Elizabeth I
John Mueller
Pope Urban II
Shakespeare
Bertran De Born
Napoleon
Tecumseh
Mark Twain
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Julia Ward Howe
W.H. Auden
Mary Jemison
Ulysses S. Grant
Yamamoto Tsuenetomo
Tim O'Brien
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Homer
Tacitus
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov "Lenin"
Saint Augustine
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sultan Selim I
General George S. Patton
Richard Nixon
Leo Tolstoy
Ryszard Kapuściński
e e cummings
George Orwell
Osama bin Laden
Albert Einstein
Herodotus
and dozens more...
--------------------

About Lapham's Quarterly

LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY sets the story of the past in the frame of the present. Four times a year the editors seize upon the most urgent question then current in the headlines - foreign war, financial panic, separation of church and state - and find answers to that question from authors whose writings have passed the test of time. The method assumes that profound observations of the human character and predicament don't become obsolete. An issue addressed to the glory of military empire might open with the writings of Homer, proceed to contributions from Thucydides, Tacitus, and Marie de Medici, move forward in time to passages from the works of Dante and Shakespeare, come nearer to the present with the notations of Twain and Freud and Virginia Woolf, eventually arrive at the table talk of Adolf Hitler and the faith-based initiatives of President George W. Bush.

Abridged rather than paraphrased, none of the texts in Lapham's Quarterly will run to a length longer than five or seven pages, some of them (a love lyric, the recipe for Queen Mab pudding, a cure for the Bubonic Plague) to no more than five or seven paragraphs; literary narrative and philosophical commentary as well as letters, diaries, speeches, maps, charts, landscape painting, photographs, bills of lading, writs of execution.

The necessity of an undertaking along the lines of Lapham's Quarterly stands as proven by the all-too-numerous instances of an historical consciousness gone missing from broad sectors of the American mind. Within the wind tunnels of our high speed electronic media, the data shreds or blows away, and the time is always now. Not only do we lose track of our own stories (what happened yesterday, last week, three months ago), our elected representatives forget why sovereign nations go to war. As a consequence we have before us the catastrophe in Iraq, as well as a plurality of fellow citizens who don't know how or when or by whom they were given a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.

In answer to the problem of disappearing context, Lapham's Quarterly discovers in the uses of history both a natural resource and an applied technology. Some things change, others don't, but absent a knowledge of which is which, where then do we find our bearings in the gulf of time, and how do we not become orphans, marooned on the islands of the dream-ridden self?

Cicero framed the thought as an aphorism, "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in junk science, totalitarian politics, and quack religion. The general states of amnesia cannot sustain the promise of individual freedom or the practice of democratic self-government. A knowledge of history arms us with our best weapon against the will to ignorance and the joys of superstition, makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton once called "the arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

Yeah, tell me how it is! I thought the price was a little prohibitive.

This month's issue is depressing.

Issue of Harper's that is. Only thing I know that's depressing about Lapham's Quarterly is the price.

did you read the naomi klein thing about the new "disaster economy"? good but damn did that thing seem to go on like 3 pages longer than was really necessary.

I just finished reading this month's issue a few minutes ago. The Klein article was maybe a tad too long, but after finishing an issue of the New Yorker it didn't seem too bad. I actually read the Klein article the night before the news about the banning of Blackwater in Iraq came out, which was weird.

The Congo article was really, really good, I thought.

HAHAHAHA the Klein thing is a whole book....I mean, the article was adapted from her whole book, Friedman Sucks Balls in a Lockheed-Martin Exurb.

lapham is too turgid for me, doubt i'll get the quarterly.

The days...lapham away with a new JOEK Quarterly! Text to 2553 for your FAVORITE extended essays!

HAHAHAHA the Klein thing is a whole book

well der, but believe it or not an adapted essay from book can go on for too long. The problem was that she wrote it too well. It made its point clearly and concisely, and then went on for a few more pages after that.

By the way,

Oh, and I guess Blackwater is back in business in Iraq:

From the NYT:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 21 — American diplomats today resumed travel in Iraq in convoys escorted by Blackwater USA, the private American security contractor, less than a week after the Iraqi government banned the company following a shooting in which at least eight Iraqis were killed.

I'm not even through the Readings section yet, but this month's issue is already a winner for the following exchange, excerpted from an interview with a contractor that used to work in McMurdo Station in Antarctica:

JOHNSON: You spent a lot of time in Antarctica. Why did you stop contracting there and go to Iraq?

NERO: When I first went down, McMurdo was still like a fire-swept mining town, full of rust, canvas, and barefoot hillbillies playing fiddles in their tents. It was a portrait of struggle, of the odd and the rustic. Strange events blossomed without scripts in a landscape of decay, dirty machines, and whiskey-soaked mustaches. Men were piled into old military tents on the side of the mountains far from the heart of the town. It was the only place I had been where at night you lulled yourself to sleep pretending that the noise of half a dozen men whacking off was actually a group of thirsty dogs lapping at a water bowl. As cum-soaked socks hit the floor with gentle thuds, the heavy breathing was followed by the click of Zippos, and I would grab my blanket for comfort in the darkness. Simple pleasures: watching a line of pale white zombies lined up at Sunday brunch waiting for a slab of bloody beef to be hacked from the shoulder clod and placed on their plate. A bearded man sits alone in the corner with a half glass of milk mumbling words unheard. We had stepped back in time to a place where you would never bring your mom or your sister - a primate working-class culture in the harshest of environments. Anything seemed possible.

---

I want to hang out with Nero.

Yah dude that Antractica thing was fucking fantastic, tho having only seen the continent in "The Thing" I am having a hard time imagining it as this new yupster socialite place.

I'm having a real hard time getting into the Romney article. Somehow that guy just exhausts me with don't-give-a-fuckness (apathy isn't really the right word here).

Mine hasn't come in yet ;_;

"The Spy Who Came in and Was Cold" from last month was incredible.

Disaster Capitalism was very good. I think it was the comparison of New Deal bowling in America to paranoid future state instead of to blank familiar unseen middle, which actually ends up being much closer to the latter.

Paranoid future state is actually the opposite of what I mean. It's being numb to things that are odd but have only to be mentioned to be quite possible, such as going on a cruise to avoid a natural disaster.

i just got my first (paper) issue in the mail the other day!
i got stuck at the picture of a mink tho on like page 5 and couldn't stop laughing. sorry 'friends of teh animals' time to get a new marketing guy

oh it was on p 19
i'm sure i will read a few of the articles eventually

"my plan to disappear from station and live in a snow cave at winter's end fell through disastrously; I was found facedown in front of the fridge clutching a half-eaten five-pound summer sausage"

Yeah, I'm desperate to read the entirity of that interview.

Where is my Harper's?

Meanwhile, I bought the Atlantic Monthly's 150th Anniversary edition and read a bunch of those "American Idea" essays on the PATH. Eughhhhh - so fucking inane.

i got stuck at the picture of a mink tho on like page 5 and couldn't stop laughing. sorry 'friends of teh animals' time to get a new marketing guy

otm

I bought the Atlantic Monthly's 150th Anniversary edition and read a bunch of those "American Idea" essays on the PATH. Eughhhhh - so fucking inane.

does this mean i should cxl my subscrip to atlantic y/n

I don't know - I haven't read the Atlantic in a long time, but I generally don't remember most of it being anywhere near as bad as the FOB stuff in the current issue. Even the rest of this particular issue might be better.

I just subscribed for the last issue and it was kinda ok. I wish Harper's was that long, but then I suppose qual would decline.

that mcmurdo thing is some of the worst post-gonzo bullshit
whoever nero is, he's sure to write a well-timed shit of a bestseller

I also just resubscribed after many years away, and also got a bit stuck on the mink. I thought he was a cute enough mink, though.

I want to cut out that dotted line bit and tape it to my collar.

How many people even wear fur these days? I thought ermine and the color violet were the province of kings alone. And Prince, of course.

There was some sort of retro pro-fur movement a while back, a sort of reclamation of the right to wear carcass, a few years ago, or so the NPR-ish media told me.

The Bush administration's forbearance as Gen. Pervez Musharraf proclaims, like [vainglorious monarch], that [famous megalomaniacal statement] recasts [open Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to any random page, close eyes, plunge finger into text, and insert here a précis of incident described therein] as opera bouffe. The sham outrage teases forth memories of the contortions displayed by [famous Ottoman acrobat of the 15th century] or the prevarications of [obscure three-fingered gangster of the 1930s] as the Katie Courics and Wolf Blitzers of their day distracted the starving masses with [celebratory ritual performed by an island-based indigenous people] and competitions to mimic the cry of the mighty [extinct animal from the Cretaceous period].

Lewis Lapham Mad Libs! How to write the sentence he has been redrafting for 40 years.

his column on how "Iraq is just like the housing bubble" was so awful.

Even when I first subscribed to Harper's in college and was still in awe of anything liberal I hated Lapham.

Has anyone read Lapham's Quarterly?

That Mad Lib is fucking golden, as are the mailing instructions.

I think the guy is o-kay.

The column is spot-on. No one else uses so much erudition and learning to say so little.

I'll try to condense his stuff:

St. Andrews:
Although arranged like St. Andrews, the course at North Berwick presents a wider variance of hazards, and possibly because of the names of the holes ("Gate," "Perfection," "Pit"), what little I could remember of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress came suddenly to mind in the elegiac light of a slowly ebbing sunset. I played the round in the company of two other solitary golfers on the hole ahead and the hole behind, three wayfarers set forth on the Scots' equivalent of the road to Canterbury, each of us in turn raising the flag of hope for the fellow pilgrim who maybe had come thus far without having fallen afoul, at least not yet, of Worldly Wiseman or Giant Despair.

Condensed:
St. Andrews golf course left me in reverie.

I had a hard time even parsing this one:

Extended King Richard analogy:

When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

Condensed:
You can't eat things totemically, esp. if the qualities you want aren't there in the first place.

"Pretensions to Empire" excerpt:

The train from Paris to Brussels passes through fields sown for 2,000 years with the seed of war, and on the way north last February 1 to the opening sessions of this year's European Parliament, I was reminded of the brightly beribboned armies—Saxon, Roman, Norman, English, French, Spanish, Austrian, German, and American—that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory.

Condensed:
I thought about a lot of dead people on a train.

"Choir of Prostitutes":

When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero's hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes.

Hilary & Guiliani – oh, you two!

i have a real hate/love for this guy

"Brightly beribboned armies [...] that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory"
He's actually Terry Pratchett, isn't he?

got renewal notice in the mail (why don't they just email? eesh. maybe i check 'no' on that box?) and considering that i have put my last few issues of the mag in a pile of 'to be read' i had to think a little abt renewing. then i remembered that the reason i subscribed in the first place was b/c of the online archives. and right now i am reading an article about 'social life in russia' from 1889! it is great! so ok harper's you have yr renewal.

Fuk, yeah the archives. I totally haven't taken advantage of those and now I've been thinking about not renewing. I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]" covers. The last straw for me was the contagious Tazmanian Devil cancer that will kill us all.

bahahahahahahaha, that is kind of true. But they always have something fun and unexpected, too, like that recent thing on the Magic Olympics.

WHY (poitician running for office) WILL FUXOR TEH WORLD. Glad you took on Giuliani and Romney in the past year – mad challops, bros.

This makes me want to create a Harper's Mad Libs.

The article on South Sudan adopting English as its official language is AWESOME.
I am working my way through it slowly.

Looking forward to reading that.

My wife, who reads a lot about health and medicine, thought the starvation article was super-interesting.

why no ipad app harpers, not talkin abt stupid zinio neither

the starvation cover story is so inane and thoughtless i can hardly believe it actually got published. here and there you got bits of a potentially interesting story about the long, weird history of fasting as a medical treatment, but you had to wade through the writer's drawn-out take on his own fasting experience, from which he seems to have concluded that extended fasting is actually really totally awesome and harmless and FUN, and the only reason we're not all doing it, all the time, is that we've been brainwashed by a conspiracy led by the pharmaceutical industry. uh.

I really liked the short story this month.

^ hey which one was this, abbott? i have been dipping into Harper's way more successfully than I've been reading the longform stuff, I would give a story a whirl though. I couldn't work out whether you meant March or April.

also, does anyone have any fav long ponderous essays from the archives? i think i worked through a bunch itt a while back upon subscribing. i'm interested.

I put myself through a book of Lewis Lapham's essays last summer; he makes Gore Vidal look like E.J. Dionne.

oil photo-essay v affecting

^ hey which one was this, abbott? i have been dipping into Harper's way more successfully than I've been reading the longform stuff, I would give a story a whirl though. I couldn't work out whether you meant March or April.

also, does anyone have any fav long ponderous essays from the archives? i think i worked through a bunch itt a while back upon subscribing. i'm interested.

― blossom smulch (schlump), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 8:28 PM (2 months ago)

This was Thief by Jess Walter in the March issue

linky linky http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/03/0083833

I'm behind on my reading with these. Still reading the June issue. They really only get looked at on the toilet. Takes me a couple of days to read an article. I liked the Brooklyn Zoo one, nice little vignettes about zoos plus some eugenics history thrown in. I also liked "My Old Man," I found it very affecting: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/06/0083933

hey ty, crabbs. i will catch up with those couple articles. the bathroom thing is otm, harper's just doesn't fit into my life so having recommendations or exclusively reading the index & any photographic essays is what the only way i can get through any of it.

http://harpers.org/blog/2012/10/monopoly-is-theft/?single=1

^^have not read but looks intersting

A cover story on Prince just at the exact emotional moment when I would need Harper's to have a cover story on Prince. To the day, no less. Thank you, Harper's.

The story on Prince was very good; I can tell because it cheered me emotionally and made me listen to a lot of Prince. Admittedly neither of those is the hugest feat but it feels like one of those nice surprises that keeps me subscribed to this magazine.

yeah there is way more in this issue that i'm gravitating towards; i hadn't realised a 900 page richard brautigan bio had come out (this kinda feel like the spiritual-opposite approach to writing a richard brautigan than the one i'd expect, but that's okay); & i'm not finished w the prince piece yet but i'm all interested. i mean i never knew jamie foxx was a comic. i read this online which limits how much i dip into the lil findings sections, which are often some of the best bits i think.

Yeah the Brautigan bio piece was a surprise to me, too! Not done w/that yet. I wonder if the book itself is worth the commitment? I was once such a Brautigan maniac that I tried to dress exactly like him and everything (teenager).

You'd think I'd try to dress like the LADIES on his cover, but: no.

Brautigan's death bums me out so bad. His stuff meant so fuckin much to me back when

ha ha no dressing like RB is way better. tbh i feel like everything other than affecting the half-haunted expression is a sideshow though; i have a picture of myself outside the presidio library & all it does is enumerate the differences between us. i haven't looked at the review, yet (i dug up a times piece, too, cause given that i'm not about to sit down with a 900 page book & make headway with it i might as well soak up some stuff other people have skimmed from it), but i had weird experiences with the other couple of Brautigan bios; his daughter's was the one i took to best (though never finished), just cause she got with the write-endearingly-like-Richard-Brautigan-did thing, not even in voice but just in vignette & drift. i don't know if i want to read a really long brautigan bio or not.

his last couple books of poetry, the sad japanese stuff (partic june 30th, june 30th, & that last novel that i can't remember the name of (wait, an unfortunate woman?, right?), where he isn't even trying to map any fictional distance onto the life he's writing, are so so sad. there's so much empty space in them. all really great, just kinda hard to work through, particularly with how funny anything earlier is.

I haven't read them in a long time, and I wonder what I'd think now - but when I read Willard and His Bowling Trophies and Sombrero Fallout I loved them, a lot, and couldn't get why people thought he'd lost it. To me it seemed like his humor'd just gotten darker. Willard in particular could practically be a Coen brothers comedy.

oh man i haven't read willard. there are maybe ten of salinger's 22 stories i've never read, & i think i just like knowing that there's still some salinger out there for me in the world, once in a while when i think of him. a bunch of libraries i've belonged to have had reserve copies of the few brautigan novels i haven't read - the genre-y stuff, i think, hawkline monster, willard, &c - & i think it's just comforting knowing i can go drink from that well when i want to. i turn reading into such a sad aspirational hassle & to read one of his books is so pleasurable.

sombrero fallout is one of my favs. it's so funny. i have been thinking about this guy a little recently because he's the closest thing i have to the pile of records inseparable from past relationships; the books have figured pretty centrally w/most everyone i dated, either by describing things or else because of us reading the books together & stuff. i can't imagine having read him without fastening him to some part of my life.

you didnt know jamie foxx was a comic?!?!?!?

ha, no? like he wasn't on my radar until ray, he wasn't any part of the fabric of me growing up or watching tv or anything. jamie foxx as a person always kinda weirds me out & i'm still soaking up what this new layer of the onion means about him. if there are crucial jamie foxx '90s youtubes i should be watching let me know.

haha i guess the jamie foxx show wasnt as ubiquitous as had imagined at the time

i was in the uk, we were watching gritty dramas about the marital tensions of coalminers & their wives, there was no room for this humour about hollywood & crushing on prince

Guy who wrote the Brautigan book also wrote the book Angel Heart is based on, Fallen Angel, I think, and some kind of historical whodunit featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Kit Carson, maybe. Counterpoint is a pretty classy imprint, think I may have started a go-nowhere thread about it.

Falling Angel. Conan Doyle and Houdini.

decent piece from the publisher: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/03/obamas-real-political-program/

i really loved the ehrenreich excerpt

Doug Henwood's Hillary takedown is very good and fair-minded, although I'm not sure what it accomplishes since I feel like a lot of people already don't love her and will vote for her anyway in the seeming absence of other options.

The ISIS article is great, maybe best thing I've read on the topic so far.

technological workplace monitoring article freaking me out

i just subscribed to this
there is this kind of shimmering vein of newness, presentness, running through some of the best harper's things, something i can't find elsewhere
the list of asmr requests last issue, the piece on tech libertarians, just fragments
really a nice part of my month

&

did anyone read the Values-of-a-Solitary-Life article

i kinda found it simultaneously unbearable, for its outlook, & valuable, for its frame of reference

Solitude is overrated

Believe me

really feel you
kind of a hard piece to read occuyping some of the same spaces as the author without having made lemonade from them

i wonder just how many pieces lewis lapham has written decrying american politics/society with comparisons to the fall of rome (republic or empire, take your pick)

not that he's *wrong*, but it's a very specific and tiresome hammer he wields. mixed it up by going with the greeks this last time, at least

i couldn't even bear to start that article.

lol, I haven't read him in years but I feel like that was every "Easy Chair" (or whatever they called the editor's column at the time) he ever wrote. He seemed completely useless to me as a writer and thinker.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSlAnIbWoAAGoVF.png

smdh

"When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line." https://t.co/BjFbmBgqHJ

— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) January 12, 2018

🙄

There are some judgments in that piece that bypass "right-wing columnist" and go straight to "failed human"

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

dud

the motives of these signatories aside, there's no attempt (by some) to establish thoughtcrime in the name of progressivism right now, huh? Check.

the motives of these signatories aside

sorry can't extricate letter from motives of signatories

which likely vary except in Wokeland

that's where i live

On the positive side, my homie wrote this one:
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/

The October issue of Harper's has a cover story about big tech, which is represented by the logos of Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and ... The Atlantic?

https://store.harpers.org/cdn/shop/files/OctCoverStoreListing_900x.jpg?v=1726082935

Oddly, The Atlantic is not mentioned in the article itself. Someone asked about this and was told:

"The Atlantic, owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, is now, in effect, a subsidiary of Apple and a tool of OpenAI. While it’s true that other publications are also caving in to the power of 'artificial intelligence,' we’re particularly distressed by the submission of our historic rival, once a great voice of independent journalism. Placing the Atlantic logo under the Apple logo is a way of dramatizing The Atlantic’s sellout to big tech, and also to sound the alarm in general about Silicon Valley’s corrupting influence on the American media."

Okay!