Harpers magazine C/D

"Pop Music in the Shadow of Irony (Variations on a Descending Theme)" by Thomas Frank

and the Wallace piece...

"Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage"

I think the first Harper's I read had Delillo's Pafko at the Wall in it.

For all of its self-proclaimed defiance of formula, Alternative was also a fairly transparent fake, a caricature of the "independent" rock world that had arisen in the aftermath of punk in the late 1970s, and as long as Alternative cavorted and growled on the national stage it was handicapped by the fact that it was aping, and in considerable detail, something that had happened years before. All pop music, of course, is fabricated to a greater or lesser degree by the music industry, but Alternative was of an entirely different order of fake than, say, the concoctions of Phil Spector. What gave independent rock the modicum of authenticity it had was not its practitioners' fondness for goatees or some special way that they played their guitars but the fact that it did not appear on major labels, that it did not assent to or participate in the machinery of celebrity or star manufacture. Alternative adopted indie's anti-fake postures and noises as a way to capture its authenticity but simultaneously dropped indie's anti-industry bias, thus becoming something bizarre: fakeness at a second remove. The mainstream media's fawning coverage of Alternative bands such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jane's Addiction--bands it pretended to find genuinely surprising and in whose snarls and styles it affected to discover something self-evidently authentic and refreshingly different from the usual mainstream offerings--pushed the whole discussion to a third remove of fakeness. And then came Alternative's obituaries, produced so soon after its discovery that in many cases they bore the byline of the same writer who introduced readers to this daring and fulfilling new form back in 1993. These articles blamed Alternative's demise on the fact that it wasn't authentic enough, that it was too quickly commercialized--in other words, that it was too quickly written up by the writers themselves! Here was fakeness at a fourth remove.

This is where Chris Holmes came in. The race to anoint a successor to Alternative was on in rock theory, and a phalanx of more-or-less imaginary movements was flickering across the anxious pages of industry trade journals. There was, of course, "post-rock," with its predictable diagnosis of paradigm exhaustion and its even more predictable celebration of cross-genre experimentation; but let us not forget "cocktail nation," with its hints of swinging suburban intoxication; or"lo-fi," with its funky repudiation of technology) or "slo-core," with its . . . slowness. Chris's qualifying lap had gone well, and Atlantic had every reason to believe that this son of Lake Bluff could deliver the authenticity product that would bring middle-class America back to the malls in search of its soul.

The cultural-economic logic that has permitted shoppers at the Piggly Wiggly in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to buy infused vinegars and has brought microbrews to every hamlet in Illinois has erected an enormous lifestyle palace called Piere's ("The Best in National Concerts") in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and when, one Friday night in August 1996, Chris Holmes and his curious vision of pop music were summoned there, I went with him. At the time, Piere's was a lone, brave outpost of Alternative Nation, a vast theme park of a bar occupying an entire corner of a Fort Wayne strip mall where the authenticity-products of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were trucked in and ladled out to the ravenous consumer heartland. A closer examination of the place, after we were guided in by cellular phone and had unloaded Chris's van, revealed that Piere's was, in fact, five separate bars, each dedicated to the safe pursuit of whatever subcultural practice appealed to one's particular demographic. The main hall, where Chris was to play, showed signs of having only recently been converted to Alternative: banners advertising a local Alternative radio station--96.3 THE EDGE: FORT WAYNE'S NEW ROCK ALTERNATIVE--were everywhere, but a little detective work in the hall revealed tattered stickers for a less urbane pop paradigm--ROCK 104: KICKIN' ASS!

This piece, as much as any other I've read, defines the '90s for me (also see the excellent Hermenaut "Fake Authenticity Issue").

I don't know that Frank is on an authenticity-or-die trip; I think he's as confused as the rest of us people who readily admit they're products of their own time but still feel a sense of melancholy and curiosity about this Good and what it must be like. If it's suffocating, it's just reflecting its environment.

Sorry; forgot to mark this as a quote in the last post.

Frank doesn't really seem to know what he wants to argue: did he think that Chris Holmes should have been one of the country's economic/political/cultural mandarins, as he would be his fate in generations past? Are the shit-kickers Holmes plays in front of morons, or victims? Are people who like Kansas City jazz BAD, or what?

The Village Voice did a hilarious little piece on it that basically said: Chris Holmes? A VICTIM of the culture industry? Why, he's the schmooziest motherfucker in Chicago! The bunny suit was of a piece with the rest of his career -- he'd do ANYTHING to be famous! Also...Tom Frank invokes the intentional fallacy in a completely self-serving way in front of an editor of a libertarian journal (how embarrassing) here; Suck spares him no mercy here.

Tom Wolfe is another reason I distrust Harper's, btw. THEY PUT THAT FUCKING HACK WHO GOT LUCKY ALONGSIDE MARK TWAIN ON THEIR ANTHOLOGY FOR CHRISSAKES!

That's not what I got from the piece at all; I felt that Frank was sort-of-impressed-sort-of-repulsed by Chris Holmes' vision/string-pulling, but I think he paints him as this one guy in the middle of the mid-'90s whirlwind of crackpot intentions and mad marketing schemes, not a genius or a victim, just a part of the corporate culture.

Are the shit-kickers Holmes plays in front of morons, or victims? Are people who like Kansas City jazz BAD, or what?

No, they're just people. They're not dumb, or hyper-"authentic" or anything, they're just Americans. I think Frank pretty much succeeds at keeping his condescension in check. His point is that here is regular perfectly normal Culture A, and the alternaboom/cyberculture is at such a critical mass among people who care about that sort of thing (Culture B) that it's become this 800-pound mutant corporate gorilla (Culture C) and Culture C has stomped into this market where Culture A is actually quite content with its cowboy hats and classic rock and doesn't need Yum-Yum.

It's like:

Culture C: "You want this!!"
Culture A: *shrug*

The piece shows why Culture C in many ways failed to reach the all-important Culture A, and why even Culture B eventually gave up. And Chris Holmes was caught somewhere between B and C, which I think makes him a great and fascinating subject.

Frank neglects to point out (and I'm sort of glad -- we get to create the punchline ourselves) that Yum-Yum's Dan Loves Patti is completely unremarkable and forgettable.

Has no-one given luv for Harper's Index? I love the hell of of Harper's Index.

I don't see the problem?

Lapham's pomposity is a few orders of magnitude more obnoxious than Hertzberg's - so Hertzberg wins.

I actually applied for one. I didn't get it, but I think I was in the running. The application process is very rigorous, very research-intensive (or at least it was in 1998). I'm not sure what's so spectacular about the internship itself, though...

This is like a quoting a guy talking about computer hardware saying "this videocard can display anything from sunflowers to pornography" and going -- "Look! He's erasing the moral distinction between sunflowers and pornography!"

The whole article is like one long beating by an obvious stick.

I'm generally not terribly interested in its arts coverage.

You're wrong though, because although Wallace is historically a SNOOT/prescriptivist, he's not insisting descriptivism is any kind of plague on academia. The point of his article (if you'll allow me to be really obvious for a second) is that it's a review of this usage guide by this language authority named Garner. Garner is, like Wallace, historically a SNOOT/prescriptivist, but his Dictionary of Modern American Usage is notably more democratic-minded than any major prescriptivist usage guide that has come before it -- this is urgent and key to DFW's argument. Wallace lauds Garner for his ability to be "extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist putdown."

Wallace goes on to talk about descriptivism -- he's still unpacking his argument by insisting Garner's being too charitable to descriptivists, but Wallace is playing devil's advocate in order to prove himself wrong later in the piece (when his "ethical appeal" to his black student comes back to bite him in the ass and he finally capitulates and admits that It's Not That Simple).

Descriptivists, on the other hand, don't have weekly columns in the Times. These guys tend to be hard-core academics, mostly linguists or Comp theorists. Loosely organized under the banner of structural (or "descriptive") linguistics, they are doctrinaire positivists who have their intellectual roots in the work of Auguste Comte and Ferdinand de Saussure and their ideological roots firmly in the U.S. sixties. The brief explicit mention Garner's Preface gives this crew--

Somewhere along the line, though, usage dictionaries got hijacked by the
descriptive linguists.(16) who observe language scientifically. For the
pure descriptivist, it's impermissible to say that one form of language is
any better than another: as long as a native speaker says it, it's OK--and
anyone who takes a contrary stand is a dunderhead.... Essentially,
descriptivists and prescriptivists are approaching different problems.
Descriptivists want to record language as it's actually used, and they
perform a useful function--though their audience is generally limited to
those willing to pore through vast tomes of dry-as-dust research.

--is disingenuous in the extreme, especially the "approaching different problems" part, because it vastly underplays the Descriptivists' influence on U.S. culture. For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively--via "freewriting," "brainstorming," "journaling," a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today's socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmentalist movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males(17) and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonics. Think of the involved contortions people undergo to avoid he as a generic pronoun, or of the tense deliberate way white males now adjust their vocabularies around non-w.m.'s. Think of today's endless battles over just the names of things---"Affirmative Action" vs. "Reverse Discrimination," "Pro-Life" vs. "Pro-Choice," "Undercount" vs. "Vote Fraud," etc.

He's pretty harsh on the descriptivists (and I agree with most of what he says, but that's a different post for a different time), and that fact does contradict his case for Garner's even-handed approach -- but he does talk about ways that non-standard English can be useful (where the colloquial usage seems to make more grammatical sense than the standard usage), and he emphasizes that SWE is ONLY ONE DIALECT out of many, so he's willing to make some allowances, obviously.

But DFW doesn't impress me and Lapham is easily not as cool as Hertzberg.

Ebonics was a culturally bizzare outlier made up for the purpose of a grant application and black/latino california race politics rather than indicitave of some "education trend" but Wallace picks up the mediascare just like everyone else and uses it to try and prove his point. Also if he understood the "Ebonics" controversy at all, he'd recognize that even the schoolboard wasn't asking to make special concessions to nonstandard dialect but rather hamfistedly trying to get money to help teach standard english with the recognition that the students weren't coming from that background -- i.e. in a skewed way exactly what Wallace was saying and actually slightly LESS racially problematically than how he presented it in his class.

Well, it was a "culturally bizarre outlier" at first, but the debates certainly didn't end there -- it doesn't matter anymore that the idea was concocted as a way to get grant money, because once it was a news item it got EVERYBODY talking about things like whether it was even correct to assume that there was a single "black dialect" that could be used to compare it with SWE when teaching.

In an era when great capitalists built railroads and Horatio Alger fables were read straight, the natural career choice for a young man with the abilities, education, and social standing of my friend Chris Holmes would have been corporate management or perhaps the law.

As for condescension:

To party with the Pierites on a Friday night was to realize both their distance from the dainty rebellion of all the urban bohemias and how effectively their cultural lives had been reduced to acts of pure consumption...Their Midwest wasn't about prayer or hard work, conformity or Main Street martinets, and it was even less about the clever commentary of pop ideology. It was about drunkenness, cocaine, and copulation; it was about that sense of futility that Hamlin Garland and Theodore Dreiser knew so well, that acid midwestem nihilism that sends one back Friday after Friday and that, for a brief moment at least, made the growling pseudo-nihilism of Alternative the winner in the local authenticity sweepstakes.

A closer examination revealed the buildings to be elaborate false-front exteriors constructed for the 1996 film Kansas City, Robert Altman's decidedly unironic homage to the underworld of the Thirties; the sign was an artifact not of some beautifully uncorrupted and ultra-authentic bohemia of 1936 but of the pathetic modern day longing of an American filmmaker and his white, suburban audience to participate vicariously in such a subculture.

Sounds pretty damned condescending to me. At best you could say that the first passage is a pox on everyone's house, the "heartland" and it supposed alternative. (It also happens to be both cutting AND maudlin, quite a feat.) And Jesus...the scene where he wrinkles his little nose over Holmes' record collection!

"Some say the cause of WWI was economic. [gives some reasons] Some say it was political. [gives some reasons] But all these explanations are too simplistic and in fact the causes were a combination of both."

Like two silly reductionist arguments that nobody really makes and ooh! he sees good and bad points to both and therefore is sooooooo smart.

Perfect material for making you feel like you've learned something without actually telling you anything.

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

i thought i had a snappy one-liner for this but i kinda just feel dead inside

this thread is making me want to launch a magazine tbh

would have been worth going to hang out with harry evans imo

you guys should all write for it

and Kazin, the Trillings, Sontag, etc.

xpost

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:14 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lmfao, this is symbolic of something i cant quite put my finger on

I Love Everything would be a good name for a magazine imo.

let me review tv for ur magazine horseshoe i will start beef with nancy franklin

i support max over nancy franklin

once when i was working at the daily beast i found a guest list for an intimate dinner party tina brown was throwing in the photocopier. barry diller + diana von furstenberg + adam gopnik + his wife. and someone else. awful.

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:14 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

she wasnt throwing the party in the photocopier, i think she was throwing it in her apt probably

― max, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:14 PM Bookmark

xeroxes of this rogue's gallery of asses would indeed be awful

if there was only some outlet for max to start a beef w/nancy franklin in *sigh*

omg yes! i relinquish the nyer tv job to u, btw, max <3

that makes it sound like i'm secretly nancy franklin. i'm not, you guys!

sure sure

it is so agonizing to think you might be mistaken for nancy franklin

max can review tv shows and vegetable oils

nancy franklin still better than troy patterson. slightly.

nancy franklin is as humorless on twitter as she is in tny

I want to play the role of SFJ, only I will review things like kiltie bands, early music ensembles and german artsong singers for the now crowd instead of the other way around.

aw i like troy patterson

the thing abt sfj is that im already annoyed w/e he is writing abt wasnt something given to alex ross (although he barely writes anything but mostly mozart heads-ups atp)

i like the new yorker a lot, i subscribe to it and am really behind

what i really like is their anthology of profiles

i fucken love tha tbook

and you know i understand the gopnik rage but his piece in that about his psychiatrist 'guy goes to see a doctor' is really good

http://books.google.ca/books?id=ik0uYgetE3oC&lpg=PA483&ots=f4CrthogXb&dq=max%20grosskurth&pg=PA482#v=onepage&q&f=false

fyi

i like the new yorker a lot, i subscribe to it and am really behind

what i really like is their anthology of profiles

i fucken love tha tbook

― google street jew (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:40 PM

had no idea this existed but it looks dope! thx

well-timed thread. we subscribed to tny, harpers, and vf like three months ago. knew what we were getting with vf--it's hilarious. tny has been mildly disappointing to me--i admit i'm awful at keeping up with it but it hasn't really been justifying the density-per-issue with actual good articles that i remember a week later. most recent one i read: article about american marathon coach (decent but factoid-y and dinner party material), lonnnng article about elvis costello (jerk), article abt the woman who wrote the play that tyler perry just made a movie of (actually pretty sweet, glad i learned something about her).

i'm really taken with harper's though. i love readings and the index so so much and there has been at least one fantastic article per issue.i'm coming to appreciate their style too--i guess i wasn't sure if there was any deliberately difficult magazine writing left, and i'm glad there is.

Just subscribed again -- fuck it. Cheap, and I'm bored of just having TNY.

speaking of aimless, his thing on the cyber war was basically nothing

Yeah that was super disappointing. So directionless. I wondered if he'd been pushed into that story by someone.

I don't get that Harpers is difficult. It's definitely more "literary" journalism writing tho, like Marilynn Robinson essays aren't out of place in it (or long Franzen screeds about the state of literature).

Can We Prevent Psychosis article is really great

This week's New Yorker looks great, fwiw.

<3 NYer and Harpers, although NYer a little bit more. Harper's features the occasional apocalyptic article about the environment, but tbh very few publications feature anything about the env. that's close to the scale of the problem, so I'm fine with it.

Most annoying thing about NYer is how the 2nd or 3rd paragraph always begins with "____ ____ was born in ___."

Yeah and first line is always like "In a campaign tent pitched on a grassy field in Bend, Oregon last July..."

I definitely prefer Harper's to the New Yorker, though I'm not sure why. The tone of the New Yorker always makes me feel like it's a club I'll never belong to.

Can We Prevent Psychosis article is really great

Also, this^

<3 NYer and Harpers, although NYer a little bit more. Harper's features the occasional apocalyptic article about the environment, but tbh very few publications feature anything about the env. that's close to the scale of the problem, so I'm fine with it.

Most annoying thing about NYer is how the 2nd or 3rd paragraph always begins with "____ ____ was born in ___."

Yes this is classic "profile" structure, it is pretty invariable

man yall were right that article on mental illness was the business

i enjoyed the delillo story in the latest issue too, but yeah the article about psychosis was a super compelling read.
getting my aunt & mother subscriptions tbh.

just started reading this month's issue -- the AA article is really great

Harper’s, one of the last bastions of old-line liberalism and a lonely defender of a certain idea of what literary culture should be, has long been supported by the largesse of its owner publisher and patron, John “Rick” MacArthur, an author and heir to a ceramics fortune who has long supported liberal causes. And now, in a strange, ironic endgame, MacArthur finds himself fighting against his own side: His staff has unionized.

The Harper's union has been locked in a bitter dispute with MacArthur since July. And now he's trying to lay off Harper’s' literary editor, Ben Metcalf, who’s worked at the magazine since the mid-nineties and who played a key role in the union drive — a move the union says is pure retaliation.

The current crisis began a year ago, when MacArthur fired the magazine's editor-in-chief, Roger Hodge. The two men had once been close, but their relationship had frayed as the red ink mounted: Newsstand sales dropped, MacArthur's appetite for losses waned, and Hodge tried to defend the staff from cuts. According to Harper’s' most recent tax filing in 2009, MacArthur invested $4.4 million into the magazine. (In 2006, his losses were only $2.9 million.)

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/01/whats_the_matter_with_harpers.html

"In recent months, we have made significant improvements to the magazine: we hired Thomas Frank to pen the monthly Easy Chair column and Zadie Smith to write the monthly New Books column.

Ok it has been 1 month and I have not gotten my subscription. Does that explain why?

It came.

I liked the piece about gold in French Guyana in a classic adventure story with global concern angle sort of way. Some good stuff in Readings as usual, especially the conversation btw Barry Hannah and Wells Tower (so awesome, esp. where hannah makes fun of movies about the South using slide guitar). Didn't really get the point of the main cover story (ad execs theorize about selling the govt to the people or whatever).

i subscribed before xmas for myself & a few family members, i haven't gotten it yet.. don't think they have either :(

from the archives:http://www.harpers.org/archive/1954/12/0006789

i enjoyed that cover story precisely because it was kind of random and frivolous

Zadie Smith's New Books column is really fucking good. I'm starting to look forward to it every month, and it makes me really want to read whatever she is talking about. Edward St. Aubyn is definitely queued up for post-bar reading now.

how the fuck is anyone supposed to do these damn puzzles

a question i ask myself without fail each month

Kalfus' Coup de Foudre about DSK was a really bold thing to try to pull off. Anyone else read it? I'm not sure how I feel about whether it was successful or a flop in the end, but it def had moments throughout, although a great deal of the suspense was admittedly "will this concept actually work" and in the end I don't think it managed to sufficiently elevate itself above trash journalism?