Ah, holiday gift crunch time. No matter how much planning you do, there’s always something of a scramble towards the finish line. Take a deep breath, Utne Reader is here to help with its 2009 Alternative Press Gift Guide. The best part of gifting one of these alternative publications? Not only will you sustain the intellect of the recipient, you’ll support the independent press. Plus: No wrapping and certainly no waiting in line at the post office! 

For the brainy new mom: Aptly subtitled “the magazine for thinking mothers,” Brain, Child speaks to moms interested in lively discussions about motherhood and child-rearing, with personal—and political—stories that always expand the conversation. 

For the bibliophile who’s wondering where all the book reviews have gone: The elegant, oversized pages of Bookforum are filled with reviews that consistently pack the depth, personality, and variety that most newspapers and magazines gave up on years ago.

For the budding writer: Give a bimonthly dose of inspiration and support in the form of Poets & Writers, the magazine of the eponymous literary nonprofit. Its tools for writers are invaluable, and it’s a must-read for anyone who cares deeply about the big picture of books and literature.

For the tinkerer who rarely leaves the workshop: The name IEEE Spectrum may not sound like the a great read, but the official magazine the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers consistently publishes fun, readable, and fascinating science writing. When your uncle looks at your DVD player and says, You know, I can fix that, this magazine could keep him occupied.

For that funky friend who kicks it old school:  Wax Poetics digs between the grooves of the coolest soul, jazz, hip hop, and rap recordings on the planet. The best of the bi-monthly’s audacious visuals revolve around underground album art and priceless archival footage from the cool to the psychedelic. The swaggering prose, which focuses on the music’s roots, is unapologetically geeked out. 

For the silent soldiers of the bicycle army: That’s what Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac calls daily bike commuters, and this pocket-size pub targets its pedal-pumping demographic with literary-minded essays, poems, and interviews—a distinct and welcome change from the product-pushing focus of mainstream bike mags. On a more practical tip, Bicycle Times does the gear thing but keeps it real with actual rubber-on-road testing instead of high-touch photo spreads. This upstart publication from the makers of longtime mountain bike mag Dirt Rag also delivers news and features on the bicycling lifestyle.

For the cousin who doesn’t not believe in God, but just can’t get with the dogma: Geez magazine, which prides itself on making “holy mischief in an age of fast faith,” takes aim at the pious and the politically-motivated moneychangers and says “Amen” to community, contemplation, and big, open-ended questions about the meaning of it all. True believers, agnostics, and wary atheists are all welcome—as long as they don’t take themselves or their belief systems too seriously.

For those who revel in the esoteric: From the Pitch Drop Experiment to the workout machines of the 1800s, Cabinet digs up some of the most esoteric, hyper-intelligent, and strangely compelling ephemera in the independent press.

For the foodie who already has enough recipes: Gastronomica is a quarterly journal of food and culture that is sure to sate the appetite of the culinary-inclined person in your life. Each issue serves up an eclectic array of food-related musings on everything from edible cockscombs in Italy to eating with your hands—all with a healthy side of literary panache.

For Your Arty friend: Esopus, published by the non-profit Esopus Foundation Ltd., is a visual playground for anyone more interested in images than words. This twice-yearly art journal provides a free-form space for a wide variety of visual artists to display their work. Esopus is a work of art in itself, experimenting with paper stock, pullout posters, booklets tucked away in a sleeve on the page, and a CD glued to the back page. In the latest issue, a button in a bag is glued to a photo of a box full of buttons in bags.

Australian Professor Thomas Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment has been occurring since 1927—just ever-so-slowly, and unseen by anyone. Cabinet reports that the professor wanted to illustrate to his class that even though some substances seem to be solid, they may actually be fluid, so he rigged up a glass container with a heated sample of pitch, a petroleum substance, and let the magic begin. Unfortunately, none of his students have been able to observe the lesson. It took eight years for the first drop to fall through the funnel-shaped container, and subsequent drips have taken between seven and 12 years to fall. Eight drops have fallen so far, and in 2000, “the viscosity of the pitch was finally calculated to be roughly one hundred billion times that of water.”

“The closest anyone has ever come was in April 1979 when Professor John Mainstone, who now maintains the experiment, came to work on a Sunday afternoon. He noted that the pitch drop was just about to touch down, but he did not have time to say and watch. On returning the following morning, Mainstone saw, much to his chagrin, that the drop had fallen. Even modern technology has been foiled in its attempt to capture direct evidence of the pitch’s clandestine maneuvers; a video camera placed to monitor the experiment happened to fail at the very moment the eighth drop fell.”

Source: Cabinet (article not available online)

Image by AMagill, licensed under Creative Commons.

When you write do you need to sit at a desk? Or, are you a lie-on-the-bed, laptop-on-your-chest kind of writer? George Pendle writes for Cabinet that when Gustave Flaubert declared “One cannot think and write except when seated”, it so inflamed Friedrich Nietzsche that he attacked Flaubert in his book Twilight of the Idols: “There I have caught you nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”

Nietzsche’s rant against what he perceived as cultural decadence sparked a debate about the ideal physical mode for inspiration that has spilled into our modern ideas about work. Hemingway proclaimed that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” He was joined by Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll in his Nietzschean preference for active creativity. But Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Truman Capote liked to write while lying down. Indeed, Capote called himself a “completely horizontal writer.”

In 1968 designer Bob Probst unwittingly echoed Nietzsche when he bemoaned the grid-like layout of American office spaces, which “blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.” So, he designed the Action Office System, whose moveable partitions were intended to inspire workers to stand and move around. When it came to the link between creativity and physical engagement, it seemed, Nietzsche was right.

However, the ideas behind the Action Office System were quickly co-opted into a means for cramming as many workers as possible into one space. The dream of active work turned into the dreaded cubicle. Sedentary inspiration, it seems, has prevailed.

Sources: Cabinet, The Rumpus (reprinted original article, which is otherwise not available online) 

Before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, Genesis says they “were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Once they gained knowledge of good and evil, they immediately covered themselves with fig leaves. This shows, according to Alan Jacobs in Cabinet, “Even fear of God’s wrath must be set aside so that the shame of nakedness can be removed.”

Adam and Eve’s reactions to their own nudity reveal the human connection between nudity and shame, Jacobs writes. Both of them tried to deflect the wrongdoing onto someone else: Adam onto Eve, and Eve onto the Serpent. This is a different reaction from feeling guilty, where one feels more personal responsibility. Shame is all about the exposure of wrongdoing. Jacobs writes, “Guilt must be learned; shame, it appears, comes naturally.”

Colors. They define and characterize our lives. But so often we fail to recognize their impact or unpack their individual stories. As I type this I’m surrounded by no less than three shades of gray, and that saddens me. The quarterly arts magazine Cabinet has a piece in every issue that tells the unique story of a single color or a writer’s personal experience with that particular hue. The pieces are sometimes powerful, sometimes academic, and sometimes pretentious, but always engaging and illuminating.

—Erik Helin

Image by Steve Ryan , licensed under Creative Commons.