Annie's Magazines and Journals: 2012

The current list of what I am reading:

Harper's
Atlantic
New Yorker

Kenyon Review
Paris Review
Manoa
New England Review
Granta
Tin House
McSweeney's
Glimmer Train

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
Asimov's Science Fiction
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Fantasy and Science Fiction
One Story
Clarkesworld Magazine
Lightspeed Magazine

Foreign Affairs
English Historical Review

And whatever new magazine I read and like... Harper's is the newest addition.

And I am pretty sure I am missing something. So I will edit.

Now... looking at the list - that might explain why I am so behind on some of those.

And you have time for books???

I did mention that I am behind on magazines, didn't I? :) Every time I want to cut something, I remember why I get it regularly...

Travels and waiting at lobbies help on the magazine reading...

Anniemod, I love your reading list..but where is Ploughshares in your small lit package? I've just read from the Pushcart Pressthat Ploughsharesis the most represented of all of the small literary magazines. And recently I discovered that you can get the magazine really cheap in the Kindle store. I would love to read Glimmer Train and Tin House because they were very much cited in the latet Best American Short Storiesseries. Tin Housesounds like an amazing journal, but they are really expensive to purchase.

I did mention that I am missing some of my regular ones... I had been reading it for years -- actually the first 2 US magazines I started reading after the 5 genre ones were Ploughshares and Glimmer Train.
I need to check my old subscriptions and see what else I get (I switched to single issues awhile ago when I moved

Tin House is usually very very good. It is usually ~$11-12 on Amazon... Which is pretty close to any literary journal really...

Which isn't expensive when you think of the cost of a regular paperback, and these literary journals are usually beautifully produced. I'm just afraid it's a slippery slope if I start to buy them. I did have a subscription to Granta for a year but I stopped it.

2. Harper's February 2012 - Part 1 (#1 is Harper's Jan issue -- but it is back home so I will post about it when I am back there).

"Easy Chair: Act of Contrition" by Thomas Frank

I am not entirely sure why this was not under the Reviews section. It is a nicely written essay/article about Jack Abramoff's new memoir Capitol Punishment. The essay covers the career of the author and a long list of books from the same genre but they are used to prove the author's point about the book and what the author actually wrote the book for. I doubt that I will read the book (although I tend to read the weirdest things in the weirdest times so I won't say never) but reading this piece was enjoyable enough.

The Readings section is the usual mix of interesting and not-so-interesting pieces.

(essay)"The Elusive American Century" by Andrew J. Bacevich is taken from The Short American Century: A Postmortem which is getting published in March and is a collection of essays edited by Bacevich. If I should guess, this is probably the introduction although it might as well be one of the essays in the book. The essay is trying to determine what is the American Century and did it really happen. Well written, very readable and makes me wonder if I want to read the whole book... and it was not even close to my list of books I was looking forward to.

(dialogue) "What happened in Vegas" from The Lifespan of a Fact is an amusing piece of dialog (thus the section...) between an author (John D'Agata) and an intern in the Believer that was tasked with fact checking on D'Agata's article (Jim Fingal. If the newspapers were checking their fact in this way, we probably would have had much better press around the world. I am not sure what I was amused more from - the intern that was really trying to get the fact cleared despite the animosity of the author; or the author's almost reluctance to help with the fact.

(advice) "Fit to Sprint" from "Safety Tips for Covering Occupy Wall Street" by Judith Matloff. If someone is not aware what the whole thing is, just reading the tips would make them believe that there is a Civil war somewhere or at least a rebellion. And yet - they are practical and I could not find one I would not agree with. The whole short piece is one of those things that make you smile when reading them even if it is not really creative or special - it is just what it promises to be.

(recollection) "Head Trauma" is a transcript of a part of deposition for a trial I never heard of before - which obviously finished with a $1 mln awarded. Another one of those short pieces that are just there -- real facts, taken from life and just being there.

(commissions) "Solo Show" is another one of those. If the inmates of a supermax prison are allowed to ask for whatever art they want, what will they choose? Some of the entries are heart breaking, some are... weird; some are borderline creepy.

(criticism) "Beat to the Punch" by William S. Burroughs is one of those letters that people wish they had never written... and yet they had. The reason for publishing the letter now is of course an upcoming book with letters (Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974 but it does not make it less hilarious. The fact that it is unknown if it was ever sent does not change it either. The book that Burroughs calls "dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker" and which author he believes will never write anything good? Try to guess and then press to get to the work.

(grievances) "Bad Wrap" is a collection of people's opinions about one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects. I had never been a fan of that kind of "art" so I was not overly surprised from these. And I like reading Letters columns -- and this kind of reactions are pretty much the same thing.

(hospitality) "Terms and conditions" is one more of those curiosities that you can find online and then resend the link for days through messengers and facebook and mails (and get it back a few times) - this time it is the list of conditions that Richard Stallman (of GNU fame) had mailed in 1984 for his appearance for speeches and the like. Had it been online, a few people would have received the link :)

(fiction) "Five Stories by Diane Williams from a collection in progress. OK... I like short stories. I read more short stories than anything else and I am non-discriminative - I can read pretty much anything. And I found this story utterly disjointed, uninteresting and pointless. The language is there and most of the sentences work on their own, sometimes passages work... but the whole thing just did not work. At least for me.

(poem) January 13th by Joe Brainard - not exactly my type of poetry but not bad either. Won't make me his fan but I finished it - which I cannot say for some poems...

In the Report section, Barry C. Lynn is talking about "Killing the Competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets".

The article is informative, interesting and shows a total misunderstanding of the way the software business operates (at least in regards of employment and human resources). Thankfully most of the article deals with other types of monopolies and the definition of open market and so you can almost forget the weird part about the software ones - he even has good points there but the example he chooses to show the bad parts of it is flawed. A software corporation letting go a lot of people after a big project is finished is something normal in the industry - in a lot of cases these people are hired for that project or are contractors or had been warned that there is nothing else big coming down the pipe. And no amount of overtime will change that - if anything, the management might decide that these people had burned their creative potential. Yes - it is cruel but this is how it works - especially at the end of huge projects. Don't get me wrong - the software industry is full of monopolies and problems -- but this example does not show either... nor it does sound like something that is researched. Admittedly, it comes from the mouth of someone that had been there... and may be biased. But the same is true for all other stories and all the rest sound at least credible. It might be because this is the industry I work in - but it just clicked wrong. The rest of the examples are about producing of goods (chicken, beer) and he goes through history and laws and regulations. And finishes into the book publishing business.

(Part 2 in a few minutes - this post will be too long otherwise).

2. Harper's February 2012 - Part 2

There are two "Letters from (insert a city/country)" in this issue: Letter from Lima: "All Politics is Local: Election night in Peru's largest Prison" by Daniel Alarcon and Letter from New York City: "Some Assembly Required: Witnessing the birth of Occupy Wall Street" by Nathan Schneider.

The article about the Peruvian prison Lurigancho is the most interesting one in the whole issue. The elections from the subtitle are not the general country election or something like that. The author paints a portrait of a prison where prisoners have more control than the guards and still the system succeeds... where the population of the prison is split in blocks and cliques and the rules in each of them is different. So far - not so different from a lot of third world prisons. Except for Block Seven. Who rules the Block is decided by election... and it had been decided like that for longer than Peru had hold elections. And when the author says election, he does not use the word instead of a better one - they have debates and voting, campaign and counting of votes; dirty tricks and everything you can see in real world elections. And the contrast to the rest of the prison is there - the reader hears enough stories from outside the block.

The New York City article is for "Occupy Wall Street" - what else would you expect (and no only because of the subtitle). But it is not yet another rehashing of what happened or yet another writer's attempt to write whatever they want on the topic. Actually the article finishes just when what is now called "Occupy Wall Street" starts. And it is not a study of the politics and the crisis that led to it. It is a study of the people which organized the beginning; of the various movements, ideas and sometimes quarrels that led to all of it. I am tired of reading about it everywhere and yet I enjoyed the article. Because it is more a description of the way processes work nowadays than a real OWS article.

The Story section contains "Old Mrs. J" by Yoko Ogawa (translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder).

I started reading this story twice. The first time I fell asleep somewhere between page 1 and 2. Now - I was tired so it was not just the story but it does start awfully slow... Then I started it again - and even though the beginning was as slow, the story managed to lull me into reading it. And all the way until the last 1/3rd of a page it was an ordinary story about every day life. The end came unexpectedly - the author makes all she can to give you the story and make you not expect surprises and then something happens. And to top it all, the last sentence turns the whole story and changes it into something that you would not had seen. At the end of the story I loved it. And to think that I almost decided not to read it after the first attempt.

The Reviews section contain 3 essays/articles (4 if you count the opening one that should have been here as well...

In "New Books", Larry McMurtry is talking about Diane Keaton's Then Again (and admits to like both her and the book), John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life (my first reaction was "George Who?"... now I want to read the book...) and Winston Groom's Kearny's March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846-1847 (with the almost same results for me - I had never heard of Kearny before... and now I am interested). The reviews are not just reviews of course - McMurtry injects enough of hist thoughts and knowledge of the subjects to make it a very enjoyable read.

In "Never Such Innocence: The afterlives of Philip Larkin", Giles Harvey is talking about... Larkin. He is technically talking about the last of the books published about him (Letters to Monica) but in order to get there he talks a lot about Selected Letters of Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion's biography Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. And of course about the poetry itself. Somehow I had never read Larkin before - never heard of him actually which surprises me. The timing of the scandal around him might explain it partially but... it is still weird. So the article was quite informative and interesting. Especially considering the fact that the author's main thesis is that art and life can be different and art should not be judged based on the life of the author.

In the last review, Jennifer Szalai wraps up the non-fiction cycle (we already had the autobiography, the history book, the biography, the financial and letters book) with a review of a current events book Tangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff by James B. Stewart in "The Banality of Avarice: Why the finance industry never had to lie". The author uses the review and the book to write an essay of the financial crisis, how it was allowed to happen and who is to blame (ok... this start getting old...). Oh - she does review the book - but she almost manages to make the same thing that she is blaming Stewart for - she uses examples and data that does not prove her point. If the non-review part of this essay was published separately, it would not have lost anything from its message. But probably it would have not been published either.

PS: Long, I know :) Sorry :)

Long, I know :) Sorry :)
Informative. (Informs me that I couldn't cope with another magazine.) Expect it took awhile for you to summarize. Has some overlap with the New Yorker. The Peruvian prison would be interesting.

A software corporation letting go a lot of people after a big project is finished is something normal in the industry
Yeah. Normal. I had to fill out a job application for... something... and the "why did you leave?" section consisted of: project was completed, project was cancelled, division was eliminated, company ceased to exist... For boom and bust cycles, see architecture. Not only mass layoffs, but when it happens, there's nowhere else to go.

There is some overlap with New Yorker - yes. On the other hand Harper's have a different voice so they complement each other. Harper's is also a monthly (and not a weekly) which gives them some more... distance and changes the tone a bit.

Truth is, it took a lot less time than I thought to type all that above. I was just going through the pages in order and typing what was on my mind...

>For boom and bust cycles, see architecture
:) Yep - I used to work on an outsourcing company (on the receiving jobs side) - they would hire 20 people, do a huge project, let them go and then... rinse and repeat :). Sometimes I am really amazed that people expect the people management in the creative world to be the same as in a factory. Not that IT does not have enough non-creative positions -- but for the most part the project-participating people are on the creative side. And there the rules are different. As for job applications... yeah... I can imagine. Especially if you are looking for a contractor job or a job that is getting moved from contractor to in-stuff.

3. Apex Magazine 32 - January 2012

Fiction:
"So Glad We Had This Time Together" by Cat Rambo
When you turn on your TV, you invite the artists in your home. A saying that we all had heard. But noone is thinking about it.
I did not see the end coming. At all. Nicely done. :)

"Sweetheart Showdown" by Sarah Dalton
A nicely crafted story about a beauty contest in the future... which would have sounded much better if I had not read Hunger Games. Don't get this wrong - the story is different in more than one way but a lot of the plot main points are the same and the feeling is the same - even if in the story the main character to be non-reluctant to do it or the whole thing not to be forced. Still an interesting read though.

"The Prowl" by Gregory Frost
The Slavery and the supernatural. I had read the story before and yet, I reread it. This should say enough I guess. It is like reading Uncle Tom's Cabin but written with the voice of a man that sees the different; a supernatural story that reads almost as history story.

Non-fiction
"Writing About Rape" by Jim C. Hines is exactly what the title tells you it will be. It has a hilarious start showing what to do if you want to do it wrong followed by advices how not to screw it up. All of them sound logical and anyone should have figured that out on their own if they are writing... except that having read enough bad rape scenes, I guess such articles are needed...

The second non-fiction piece is an Interview with Gregory Frost -- about his work, about his story in the magazine (which is tying a real story to a real myth... when in real life they might not be that connected) and about writing in general. Nothing groundbreaking but not boring either.

Overall - another decent issue from Apex. If someone is curious, the full magazine can be read for free: http://apex-magazine.com/ (click on Free Content -> Fiction and look for the January stories if it had already rolled to the Feb issue on the main page). Or you can choose to support them and buy it :)

This is great stuff Annie --

I don't get the mag so I can't read the piece on Christo -- was there anything about 'process' as the artwork? Not the outcome so much? I've thought for awhile - since the Miami piece - that really his work is raising awareness of 'art', and of making people cooperate over something 'non-essential' and yet important.... it changed my view of his work quite a bit.

The day we went to NYC to see the gates we also got to see the hawk, Pale Male, that lives on 5th ave catch a squirrel and fly off with it. I can never thank Christo enough for that glimpse of 'urban wild'!!!!

>12 sibylline:

Not really - it was just people's reactions(short ones at that) - mainly their concerns about the nature and what will happen after the big thing gets removed... and all the trash remains behind. It's a very short piece - all of the Readings are...

4. New Yorker - Feb 13 & 20, 2012

No, I am not up-to-date on my reading. I just decided to skip ahead, read the current issue and then to backtrack.

In "The Talk of the Town":
Comment: "The Debate Debate" by Hendrik Hertzberg - do we need more presidential debates or do we need less - together with some history of the debates in the US Presidential elections history. The reason for the article is John McCain's plea on the topic... and as a non-American I actually learned a few bits of trivia from the short piece

Campaign Trail: "Shoestring" by Andrew Marantz deals with one of the less visible candidates (Buddy Roemer) for the President race and his walk in the Zuccotti Park. And his grumbling about money, the party and the campaign. I am interested in politics but I am rarely interested in US elections enough to have had even heard of the guy. And for some reason a lot of what he was saying sounded way too familiar - almost as anyone that does not have the money to make the campaign they want so instead they declare money a bad thing. Or something

Odd Jobs: "Ay-Yi-Yi-Yi" by Ben McGrath is about a photographer that "connects" with dogs. Okey... No disrespect to dogs owner but in my book dogs are... dogs. Some details about the dogs themselves were interesting but probably my least interesting article this issue

Passing Through: "Troubadour" by Alec Wilkinson is about JD Souther (a name I had not heard for probably 10 years. One of those short pieces including mainly a conversation and observation about the big names of yesterday. Way too short if you ask me.

The Financial Page: "BlackBerry Season" by James Surowiecki - the n-th analysis I am reading in the last 2 years about what RIM did wrong with Blackberry and how they managed to loose what was essentially the top spot in the smart phones market. Nothing new in the article.

In "Reporting and Essays"
The Political Scene: "Attack Dog" by Jane Mayer is a story about the President's race (what else...) and about the power of the advertisement and about the PACs and about Larry McCarthy - a name I had never heard before. I had read about the PACs before although the explanations in the article helped to put them in the context but most of the mentioned examples from the past were unknown to me. Or to anyone that did not live through them or do not have a major in American history I suspect. A pretty informative article.

Life and Letters: "The Plagiarist’s Tale" by Lizzie Widdicombe. Do you remember the Q. R. Markham scandal? The guy that "wrote" a book by using paragraphs and sentences from other books and even managed to publish it? Back to the story - this time with the participation of the author who tries to explain why and how. Does not make him more likeable.

A Critic at Large: "A Rooting Interest" by Jonathan Franzen is taking a look at the novels of Edith Wharton (and at the author herself). If you had not read the novels, you might want to skip the piece -- it is a classical critic piece that tells you what happens and analyzes it. I rather liked it but then I never have issues reading books where I know what will happen.

A Reporter at Large: "Transfiguration" by Raffi Khatchadourian - the longest and the most interesting piece in the issue... and the one that can break your heart. The author is mainly talking about a man's miraculous operation but he backtracks and goes to the history of any similar ones and how everything went to there - both for the man and for the surgery. The surgery in question is full face transplantation. And even if I knew how the things had ended, reading about it sent chills up my spine.

The "Critics" is the usual mix of things that I had never heard of or I am not interested in: the books section which I always read (the longer piece is about M. R. James who I need to read now; the briefly noted books are a poetry collection (Nod House) that sound interesting, a crime book (#5 in a series I had never heard of) (Vulture Peak)- that's exactly what I need... a new series, a new book about the first trained American Egyptologist (American Egyptologist) and Anne-Marrie's Edde Saladin); a pretty good article from Emily Nussbaum on children television; a piece about some hip-hop singer that I did not even finish (the article is ok... it is just my disinterest in hip-hop); an article about Philip Glass (another name I had not heard for a very long time...); an article about John Osborne (a name I had never heard) which was informative; the cinema piece which I gave up on after a paragraph.

The Fiction was a nice surprise - a tale about friendship and the small moments in life that can mean so much written by Michael Chabon - "Citizen Conn". As the name would tell anyone that is interested in comics, comics will have something to do with the story and they do... in a way. But the story could as easily have been about any two human beings - it just happened to be about two old men who back in the days created some comics. And I loved the story.

The Poems were good enough so I actually read them to the end but nothing that blew me away

I don't read the "Goings on About Town" unless if a title catches my eye and nothing did this time around.

Some good cartoons, some weird ones that I either cannot get or I cannot appreciate.

And that's pretty much it for this issue. Now... backtracking :)

I am interested in politics
I am dreading a year of election analysis...

JD Souther (a name I had not heard for probably 10 years
Heh. I would've said 25...

it is a classical critic piece that tells you what happens and analyzes it. I rather liked it but then I never have issues reading books where I know what will happen.
I tend to get more interested if there's a plot summary.

I'm so glad to hear the Chabon is good.....

The Chabon was good, but I assume it is part of his new novel and I don't understand what can be left to tell in the novel since this story encompassed most of the story.