The Believer Magazine - New Issue with Free Covers Comp.

It's the whitest thing on earth!

Some people who like McSweeneys (like me, ferinstance) aren't scared or rap or loud rock or things that are more than some dude with an acoustic guitar (or a girl with a harp for that matter).

Actually, inside the actual magazine, there's a Douglas Wolk article about The Fall, and Carrie Brownstein interviews Karen O.

Although Wolk on the Fall might be pretty sweet.

Why couldn't Spin give that column to David Foster Wallace?(1)

(1) This is my footnote about David Foster Wallace

P.S. PASTE is not bad. It's a certain demographic... get over it.

Also, what's the deal with Hornby? Am I the only person who liked Songbook? Is it his taste or the way he actually writes about music that pisses people off? Examples, please. Plus, his reading column in the Believer is pretty solid.

As for "This is so pandering to the McSweeney's reading yuppies it makes me sick"...

It makes you sick that a magazine that's largely consumed by McSweeney's reading yuppies would organize a CD full of songs that would also appeal to that demographic? Next thing you know, Kerrang! is going to put out a CD of a bunch of metal songs tailer made for tribal-tattooed metalheads! Blargh!

And the claim that "He was placed on this earth by dark forces to destroy the world of literature" is just insane, unless you're exclusively a huge fan of the big publishing houses. However you feel about his writing (which I am mixed at best on), the inroads that he has laid and doors he's opened up for small publishers over the last 10 years are irrefutable.

what demographic likes SHITTY WRITING?

the only explanation for eggers hate is jealousy/envy or ignorance.

x-post

re: Hornby.

Dude just has bland taste. Nelly Furtado? Aimee Mann? Ben Folds? Jackson Browne?

I could go hang out at a Starbucks if i wanted to hear rich people babble on about how much they like Badly Drawn Boy.

P.S. Dan... OTM re: Eggers (enough for me at least)

Dude, Stalin started out on the little guy's side. STALIN!

Hopefully it's not exactly new to ILX that comfy-strummy indie music is popular in this segment of the literary world, or that Believer music issues have traditionally run in about this direction; if you think this is so horrendous, you should think hard about how a lot of music folks look when they start talking fiction. We all have our fortes.

Whiney's right, though, that there are plenty of Believer readers who spend enough time with music to kind of toss aside their occasional music forays. This is why I've been pleased to see Douglas in there a few times, especially since he's written just as effectively on non-music topics. They have music stuff, some of it by dedicated music writers and some of it by lit-writers; and really, if music writers here think they could cover different artists in a way that fits the mag's style, there's no excuse not to get in touch and try to make it happen.

That's Scientology talk! I'm sounding the alarm about this shady character, the people must know!

Ben Marcus: "Well, I rose blank from my slumber-peanut and ran transluscent liquid over my flesh-leather. Then I placed an animal-slice in my disgestion-hole and processed it there until I emitted it, like a gentle earth pepper. Then there was blackness, and deafening noise-breath. How about you?"

Heidi Julavits: "We got Aimee Bender to agree to interview Terrence Malick."

Although, of course, Malick would be the one who'd have to agree to be interviewed, not the other way around.

Consider this a casting call for Joe Pesci.

this love of good sentences, btw pisses off a poetry-writin friend of mine with valid chips on his shoulder vs. lots of experimental poetry which doesn't mean much coz he doesn't get how i can be just "yeah, but i just skim it for parts that are pretty!"

clunky but functional sentences in the service of plot are like average sounding guitars in the service of "melody" or something.

which is to say that applying popist values to lit doesn't give you the demographic equiv of poplit.

i mean also i got a LOT from sarah vowell's musicwriting for salon back in the day, maybe just coz she was where i got it from first, and i don't mind the sappy dramatic in musicwrite either.

& ok the problem with someone that talks about native tongues or at least what they get called out on ISN'T generally that they don't know the rest of the native tonguesalike crowd, but rather that they've got a whole STORY about golden ages and retrogression and etc. that goes with it, and that's why they value the native tongues stuff in the 1st place and etc. and that's just sorta false.

and honestly the equiv smug lit STORY that exists generally somehow invokes the mcsweeny mafia & co (who, let's not forget, in the guise of metafictionality, honesty, sincerity, and aw-shucks-earnestness and gosh-darn-pleasentness are constantly engaged in massive self-promotion-for-its-own-sake)

i mean tho partly the nature of the beast is that authors aren't
EXPECTED to be social beasts and the DEFAULT value for lit-genre fiction is a singular and unique vision and etc. so musiccrit is all about big ubernarrative visions of progress and etc. normally but generally authors are expected to be in less dialogue, tho they may tap difft. "traditions" &c.

so yeah if whoeverever writes a GOOD essay on the who or springsteen or sleater-kinney or paul mccartney i'll be pleased as punch to enjoy it. but the question is, do the sort of institutional structures producing these things today tend to cut against the possible quality of such essays? the answer has to be, for the moment, at least empirically, probably yeah. but if someone wants to send on some really good links to the contrary, be my guest.

So pop music gives you Little Richard and James Brown and the Beatles and Eminem, and pop lit gives you people named Kellerman and Koontz and Nora Roberts. It's a really untenable comparison.

There's tons beyond just pop versus not: there's depth of taste, there are issues of identification and identity, there's paying attention to the avant-garde or the underground, there are all sorts of values we push on musical taste that we'd be uncomfortable having pushed on out taste in other places. As well we should be, because no, they're NOT just easily comparable -- they're completely different, yes! But in both instances I think we could stand to lay off imposing these abstract overarching values on people's tastes and just try to engage with how people like what they do.

Anyway focusing in as if the only options are bestsellers and canonical high- and post-modernism is maybe exactly the kind of thing I was trying to point out.

someone that complains about ppl. only liking male pop but doesn't read female authors isn't yeah whatever, but a hypocrite. or at least probably may want to expand their reading?

the problem is also "overarching values" have everything to do with why ppl like what they do.

which is not the same as saying ppl who like certain things lack certain values. or as saying that ppl liking things should be offensive to OUR values (neccessarily that is).

also i think in lit there's less DISMISSING other types of lit, maybe? or maybe i just don't talk to enuf ppl. about lit?

I think that's true. But circling back to the original issue here, I think a lot of the objections leveled at Eggers/Hornby/Moody has to do with exactly that -- how they like what they do. To reverse your argument, they have a tendency to impose standards and conventions of meaning and form on music that (I'm guessing) they wouldn't tolerate someone placing on literature. They don't seem to be particularly interrogating their own ideas about those conventions in the way that they probably reflexively do when thinking about literature.

I was about to say for the record that I think the equivalent of indie types not liking pop isn't to do with best-sellers -- it might have to do with high-minded lit boys not paying attention to people like Jamaica Kincaid or Louise Erdrich. But my larger and original point was just that, above -- that it's not entirely fair to ask everyone to have incredibly refined tastes in everything, because it's rare for people to find time and energy in their lives to get refined about even one thing, and that's more or less fine and human. It's one thing if they're mouthing off like they do have refined tastes, but I've never personally observed that being a major streak in the Believer. (And I brought the whole thing up weeks ago because I have seen music snobs mouth off across to literature as if their intelligence and refinement in one medium automatically implies their brilliance in all others.)

"Smart." They're actually calling it "Smart." Maybe they ought to call it "Smug."

... When asked if the story was at all autobiographical, Maroon replied, "We do a lot of driving around ourselves, so we definitely take some of those experiences and put it into John's Journey. I think you'll like it, it's going to be quite a ride." He then asked me who my favorite authors were, and I thought I'd sound like an idiot if I gave the honest answer (a bunch of rock critics), so I lied and said Pynchon and DeLillo.

(For the converse in action, see Ben Marcus's great Harpers article on Franzen and "experimental" fiction, in which a few total boner music references sink the whole thing -- he uses a Britney vs. Silver Jews analogy that, from what I can tell, should really have been more like Silver Jews versus Nurse with Wound. But he likes Smog, so what are you gonna do?)

Listen, I'm all for barebones recording and lo-fi sound or whatever, but this was just awful. They ruined a good song. This is the kind of shit I'd put on if I were trying to traumatize a small child.

-- richard wood johnson (fws...) (webmail), September 26th, 2005.

Why do people log out to give this sort of vitriolic criticism? Are people really that scared of the reprecussions of not liking a band?

(Time to take this to ILBks.)

on the believer comp: i've still yet to listen to it a second time. i really did like the first general comp that derby put together for them though.

http://cynthiagmason.com/

she's one of my favorite local artists, btw.

This is just kind of a passing off analogy in the article (and one that's not going to look off at all to 99% of its readers), but it relates to the kind of thing I've been harping on in this thread.

Carrie Brownstein interviews Karen o_O

I think Nabisco was, perhaps verbosely, right: one kind of taste need not map onto another; one can have 'advanced' taste in music and not in literature; and vice versa; and etc. People's tastes are potentially a jumble, and / or uneven and inconsistent, and this is OK. Anyone who grows up a little probably realizes this, unless I have just grown up the wrong way, and am mistaken.

Like him I think the magazine is probably OK too (though the feature just mentioned doesn't sound good to me), but that may be because I think it is nicely designed, and because of my memory of Stevie showing me their Pat Benatar interview in about 2003.

I haven't been able to find The Believer since I moved to London. Does anybritish know a bookshop that stocks it here?

yep: http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/