Consider these page-turners for your next beach vacation: a transcription of all the weather reports from a radio news station recorded over one year, a re-typed issue of The New York Times, a chronicle of the utterances made by one person for an entire week, a similar account of every bodily gesture the same man made over the course of 13 hours, or 600 pages worth of words with rhyming r-sounds. Understandably, you’re probably not tacking these texts onto the bottom of your holiday wish list, much less considering them as notable for anything other than how boring they sound. But Kenneth Goldsmith—an avant-garde poet, experimental radio personality, and professor—considers these litanies to be poetry. In fact, the list is a small sampling of his published works.

“My books are better thought about than read,” Goldsmith said in an interview with The Believer. “They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports ‘on the ones’ (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I don’t. But they’re wonderful to talk about and think about.” The thing to think about, specifically, is whether this type of writing should be considered literature.

Although he’s more apt to call one of his volumes a reference book or a thought experiment, Goldsmith argues that there’s something experientially interesting that comes from reading an Almanac-like text. “The moment we shake our addiction to narrative,” he says, again in The Believer,

and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something ‘meaningful,’ we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning.

We live in an information-sodden age, one in which processing is sometimes mistaken for reflection.

“With an unprecedented amount of available text,” Goldsmith writes in The Chronicle Review, “our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists.” When it comes to artistic content, we’ve made and eaten a Thanksgiving dinner’s worth of verbiage. To continue the metaphor, the challenge, then, is how to burn off all of the calories and look good at the office the following workweek. “How I make my way through this thicket of information,” he argues, “how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.”

In addition to “writing” mind-numbing-slash-mind-exploding poetry, Goldsmith was a DJ at New Jersey’s WFMU radio station, teaches a class on “uncreative writing” at University of Pennsylvania, and spear-heads an avant-garde arts website, UbuWeb.

UbuWeb is a radical depository of donated and stolen art of various media, a “completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.” Much of the website’s content will appeal only to the few high-conceptually inclined art geeks. In an interview with BOMB (which, in a very Goldsmithian way, is reproduced verbatim on the magazine’s website), he explains UbuWeb as “a way of flaunting all the rules, somewhat safely.” Avant-garde, it seems, has been waiting its whole life for the Internet. He continues:

I’ve actually found a major loophole in copyright culture, literary culture, in distributive culture which happens to be, for lack of a better word, the avant-garde—which nobody can understand. It’s so hard for people to understand this stuff. And number two, it’s really got no commercial value whatsoever. It has great historical and intellectual value, but people lose money when they try to release this stuff so most of it goes unreleased. So it’s been this, kind of, really beautiful grey area where it’s all out in the open and it’s all in front but you get a pass on it in a way that legitimate economies don’t give you that latitude.

Goldsmith’s work has garnered him some acclaim of late: He was invited to recite some of his work at a White House poetry event in May. If you ask him if the work is making a difference in literature, though, he’d probably respond cryptically with a handwritten list of all the nutritional information in a supermarket aisle and call it “Serving Size.”

Sources: BOMB, The Believer, The Chronicle Review 

Image by Meredith Waterswaters, licensed under Creative Commons. 

There are plenty of people who wear morbidity and fatalism as an aesthetic pose—hello, goths, zombies, Diamanda Galas, and black metal fanatics—but after reading Marc Katz’s essay in The Believer about the 1880s literary movement known as decadence, it becomes clear that most of them are mere dabblers in the dark arts. 

Consider the protagonist of “the bible of decadence,” the 1884 novel Against Nature, by J.K. Huysmans. Duke des Esseintes is a wealthy, burned-out opium smoker who, tired of hosting funeral-themed dinner parties, holes up in a villa and “spends the novel in pursuit of a final thrill: creating an aesthetic domain so self-contained that it suggests a tomb”: 

He starts by ordering specialty items, including a damask cope from a defunct guild of weavers in Cologne, several blue fox pelts, and an aventurine-studded box containing “Pearls of the Pyrénées”—candied lozenges made of orchids and “female essence,” used to enhance his sexual memory. He also covers a live tortoise with a pattern of occidental turquoise and cymophanes. He then lets it roam around in the semidarkness to throw off glints of color, until it asphyxiates in a corner under the weight of the jewels. 

Katz’s essay traces the sociopolitical factors that led up to Against Nature—among them “satiety, colonial overreach, and an increasing inability to imagine the future convincingly”—as well as the book’s brief but intense influence on Europe’s creative classes, among them Oscar Wilde, who so loved the doomed elegance of Against Nature that he brought the book along on his honeymoon and used it as an inspirational backdrop for The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

And no wonder: For a writer prone to flights of linguistic fancy, the elaborate descriptive language of decadence was a macabre wonderland. To many others, writes Katz, 

Decadent taste takes some getting used to, though. Writers like Huysmans worked right at the edge of oblivion, with symbols that were ethereal and obscure: serpents twined with human hair; fields of hemlock; succubi; monstrous, purple-draped catafalques; syphilitic flesh; stagnant lakes engulfed by shadows. This wasn’t mere morbidity. The decadents found spoilage to be exhilarating, so long as it could be used to creative advantage. 

After decadent art became something of a sensation, writes Katz, Huysmans found it hard to shed the baggage the novel brought him, and he went in the opposite direction, taming down his writing, undergoing a religious conversion and ending up in a cloistered abbey—an unexpected course, to be sure, but a kinder fate than what his acolytes wanted, which apparently was for him to share the fate of the jewel-encrusted tortoise. 

Source: The Believer (full article available to subscribers only) 

Most people assume that because I graduated college with a degree in journalism and English, that I read two books a week, and that I have a reputation for the occasional sharp turn of phrase, that I must be a wizard with word puzzles. But much to my embarrassment, I’m dreadful with letters when they’re presented outside of a tidy little paragraph. Last night I won my first game of Scrabble in literally five years—and only because I was playing with a teammate. So when I read about a clever crossword puzzle author or another such wordsmith, I’m doubly dismayed and awestruck. Add to the list Barry Duncan, the world’s only “master palindromist.”

Duncan regularly writes palindromes—words or phrases that are spelled the same backward as forward—that are more than 1,000 characters long. One particular palindrome, a climate change-themed composition more than four hundred words long, is the product of nearly 90 pages of notes and months of dedication. Duncan is a savant, you must be thinking, as I imagined reading through Gregory Kornbluh’s intriguing profile of the palindromist in The Believer. Or a polymath. Or curiously, hyperactively dyslexic. Or paranoid schizophrenic. But it turns out that Duncan is just a passionate eccentric with a gift for reading words in both directions at the same time.

Although palindromes are an old type of puzzle, Duncan has done pioneering work in the extremely niche field. Dare I say it? You might even call him a thought leader. And being the expert, Duncan gets to write the terms of the discourse. “[Duncan’s] also identified some guidelines for palindrome-writing,” writes Kornbluh,

One cardinal rule to which he always returns involves “doubling in the middle,” which he calls a “near-fatal error” and the mark of an inexperienced palindromist. As he explained in our first conversation about palindromes, “If I say to you, ‘straw,’ and you thought, well, ‘straw warts,’ that’s a palindrome, but the w is doubled, so it only calls attention to the palindrome. What you want is for some letter to be the reversible hinge. So if you said to me, ‘straw,’ I would think, ‘straw arts.’ And then that w is removable, and it could be ‘strap arts,’ ‘stray arts.’” Still getting my bearings, I asked whether the embargo on a doubled middle was a general rule, something that all palindromists know. “I know it.” But how does he know it? “I know it because I know it, not because there’s anybody who said anything. I know it because it’s been my experience.

The profile doesn’t take a side on whether or not palindrome writing has any practical application for humanity at large, which Duncan seems to understand—and disregard. “I mean, I’m writing palindromes all the time,” Duncan told The Believer, “but it’s really unprecedented, the length of the palindromes, the speed with which I’m writing them. I feel like I’m taking this further and further, but I don’t know where it will lead me.”

Source: The Believer 

Image by fdecomite, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt-weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year, we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Wednesday, May 18, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in San Francisco. From now until then, we’ll post the nominees in all of the categories on our blogs. Below you’ll find the nominees for general excellence, with a short introduction to each. These magazines are literally what Utne Reader is made of. Though we celebrate the alternative press every day and with each issue, once a year we praise those who have done an exceptional job. 

Since 1932, The American Scholar has provided a forum for the spirited exploration of ideas. The “venerable but lively” quarterly, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, enlightens and provokes readers with thoughtful prose on public affairs, history, science, and culture. 

***

An arts magazine with a decidedly literary bent, The Believer covers books, film, music, and pop culture with barely contained intellectual glee. Part of the McSweeney’s empire founded by author Dave Eggers, it constantly finds new ways to showcase the creative impulse. 

***

The Western United States is a key battleground for many environmental issues, and High Country News is your experienced and knowledgeable correspondent from the front lines. Its watchdog coverage of mining, ranching, logging—and simply Western life—is unmatched.

***

Since 1976, the folks behind the investigative nonprofit Mother Jones have relentlessly and reliably delivered “smart, fearless journalism,” transcending the day’s political spin to unearth stories on everything from global climate change to torturous foreign policy decisions on both sides of the aisle. 

***

The most literary of environmental magazines, Orion takes a big view, touching on spirituality, philosophy, and the arts in its gorgeous pages. Thoughtfully provocative columnists keep it from drifting off into the rapidly warming atmosphere. 

***

The Sun is the best of so many things—philosophy, spirituality, photography—but what always stands out is the writing. In essays, fiction, memoirs, and poetry, this ad-free, independent magazine lets all of its content shine brightly, whether it’s a story about a recovering alcoholic finding redemption in a new family or a poem about the sweet things we leave behind when we die.  

***

A labor of love, the Brooklyn-based Wax Poeticsis a geeked-out fanzine dedicated to unearthing the grittiest funk, coolest jazz, and smoothest soul ever pressed into a groove. The writers proselytize, the editors keep the mix fresh, and the archival album art and concert footage is beatific. 

***

YES! Magazine, a magazine of “powerful ideas, practical actions” published by the nonprofit Positive Futures Network, gives us information and tools to build a more sustainable, just tomorrow. Readers cannot help but be inspired by the quarterly’s celebration of human potential and community well being.

See our complete list of 2011 nominees. 

Image by .reid., licensed under Creative Commons.

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt-weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year, we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Wednesday, May 18, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in San Francisco. From now until then, we’ll post the nominees in all of the categories on our blogs. Below you’ll find the nominees for best writing, with a short introduction to each. These magazines are literally what Utne Reader is made of. Though we celebrate the alternative press every day and with each issue, once a year we praise those who have done an exceptional job. 

Since 1932, The American Scholar has provided a forum for the spirited exploration of ideas. The “venerable but lively” quarterly, published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, enlightens and provokes readers with thoughtful prose on public affairs, history, science, and culture.

***

An arts magazine with a decidedly literary bent, The Believer covers books, film, music, and pop culture with barely contained intellectual glee. Part of the McSweeney’s empire founded by author Dave Eggers, it constantly finds new ways to showcase the creative impulse.  

***

Brick is published biannually, and the wait time between issues is agonizing. In 2010, the Canadian literary magazine published pieces by emerging writers alongside prose by giants Robert Hass, Geoff Dyer, and Mark Doty. The editors’ mandate is “to create a beautiful product,” and they succeed twice a year, every year.  

***

Oversized and stuffed, The Brooklyn Rail opens with an eclectic blend of cultural discourse and political debate, then segues into an engaging array of reviews and down-to-earth interviews with both up-and-coming and established artists.  

***

The stories told between the covers of Creative Nonfiction are not the confessionals that dominate chain bookstore shelves; they are thoughtfully told narratives that present a universal sense of experience. Through its consistent publication of quality nonfiction prose, as well as essays examining the genre more closely, Creative Nonfiction has helped give the genre legitimacy, continuing in the footsteps of writers like Mailer, Wolfe, Capote, and Talese, who paved its way.  

***

There are few university magazines that, like Portland, can be described as simply profound. At its core, the University of Portland’s beautiful publication is a Catholic endeavor, but faith isn’t so much the subject matter as the fuel for essays and reportage that challenge and inspire.  

***

The Sun is the best of so many things—philosophy, spirituality, photography—but what always stands out is the writing. In essays, fiction, memoirs, and poetry, this ad-free, independent magazine lets all of its content shine brightly, whether it’s a story about a recovering alcoholic finding redemption in a new family or a poem about the sweet things we leave behind when we die.  

***

Thirteen years ago, the founders of Tin Houseset out to create a journal “tantamount to being guest of honor at the greatest literary house party ever.” Mission accomplished. In its 10th year, Tin House is wildly delightful, showcasing a roster of writers both emerging and established.

See our complete list of 2011 nominees.  

Image by karindalziel, licensed under Creative Commons.

DMX—the alias of the vitriolic, platinum-selling East Coast rapper Earl Simmons—has more problems than he can rhyme about. Simmons has been in and out of jail for much of his life, despite his unprecedented commercial success. Negotiations between his record label, lawyers, promoters, investors, publisher, and manager are byzantine and slow-moving. Marijuana and cocaine exacerbated an over-the-top celebrity lifestyle. On a spiritual level, Simmons has had trouble reconciling his penchant for excess with a hunger for Christian meaning in his life. Really, reading the biography of rapper DMX is like watching a man fastened to a post at the intersection of a crossroads by a giant rubber band—every time he tries to venture down a fresh path, he’s disastrously yanked right back to the center. Or, as Niki D’Andrea exclusively reports for City Pages, it’s

 like watching someone punch himself in the face repeatedly. One can easily picture a cherubic angel sitting atop one of the big guy’s shoulders, telling him not to snort that line of coke or skip that appointment with his probation officer. But on the other shoulder, he’s got a horned red devil prodding him with a pitchfork, urging him to just go ahead and do it.

Like politics, the world of hip-hop and rap suffers from media oversaturation—Simmons’ delinquent behavior, issues with chemical dependency, and financial headaches notwithstanding, his ongoing struggles for renown, oblivion, and salvation can’t be understood apart from the omnipresent, reproachful eye of media.

Pharoahe Monch—an artful, underground MC recently interviewed by The Believer (and pictured above)—explains another dark current in hip-hop music brought on by pervasive media influence: the self-imposed suppression of experimentalism and echo-chamber-like proliferation of radio-friendly beats and rhymes. “A colleague of mine played me some stuff from a guy who gave him a CD and was like, ‘This is my group. And this is what we do,’” Monch told The Believer’s Adam Mansbach.

And that shit was cool; it was cash and rims and coke. But then the same guy was like, ‘Here’s the CD of what I actually do outside of them, because I’m on my own shit.’ And we were fucking blown the fuck away. You feel pressured to do what you think the public wants, when in actuality the sales aren’t reflecting what the radio is doing.

Forced paternalism is another institutional limitation stifling creativity in contemporary rap and hip-hop. “These days, you don’t get development,” says Monch.

When new artists come out and they’re not being cosigned or some company doesn’t have a stake in it, or someone’s not getting paid under the table to produce the whole record or bring it to video, the artist really suffers. You’ve rarely got an artist that’s not being chauffeured into the business by some huge-ass names. Before, it could be like, “Who the fuck are these cats Ultramagnetic MC’s?” “Oh, they’re from the Bronx and they’re insane and this is what it sounds like and this is what they’re bringing to the table.” Now, unless somebody who’s already eleven thousand times platinum is like, “We’re ushering this project in,” it’s not really gonna pop commercially.

Not to be confused with a doom-and-gloom prophet, Monch maps out a plan for young rappers to rekindle their own innovation: get back to your roots.

I had a conversation with Nas a couple of years ago and he was saying, “Yo, you remember when such-and-such song was out and we would go and see them perform and there would be this energy and this electricity?” The virtual shit has deadened that actual transference of energy somewhat. When people can create a professional-level song without really having to test it and perform it, they lose: they don’t have the experience of seeing how an audience responds, and learning how to implement that shit into the record. This is why you have these veterans lasting.

Sources: The Believer, City Pages 

Image by miss.libertine, licensed under Creative Commons.
 

Radical playwright and occasional essayist Wallace Shawn was recently interviewed by The Believer. Although the interview covers similar ground as former Utne Reader Senior Editor Jeff Severns-Guntzel’s podcast, Shawn shares interesting insights into literary criticism, American theater audiences, and playwright Harold Pinter.

Here’s a choice passage on theater as a source of amusement:

Believer: Do you get exasperated by theater’s limitations and the limitations of reaching an audience? In My Dinner with Andre, your collaborator, the director Andre Gregory, describes his loss of faith in theater. It seems that for you, too, there have been moments where you’ve challenged what theater can be and maybe lost faith in it. Perhaps that’s wrong.

Wallace Shawn: Well, no, certainly in the late ‘80s when I was writing what eventually turned into The Fever, I was thinking, I have had it with theater and may not do it anymore. I was almost obsessed with the fact that anything you put on a stage was interpreted by the audience as an attempt to divert or amuse them in one way or another. A musical was diverting and amusing in a very direct way, so that people would walk out and say, “That was so delightful,” and a serious play was amusing and diverting in a slightly more indirect way, so that people would walk out and say, “Oh, that was shattering,” or “That was so disturbing.” But really, shatteringness or disturbingness were simply other forms of amusement. Being tickled on your toes rather than being tickled in your stomach. It was just a different form of amusement. Whereas what I wanted was something else, maybe something more like the communication between friends or lovers, something more intimate, so that, for example, if a friend or lover says to you, “For god’s sake, could you carry that bag of garbage into the street?” you don’t react by saying, “That was a very amusing remark,” you react by saying, “Yes, I will do that,” or “No, I won’t do that.” The remark is not there just for amusement. I suppose I wanted something more like that. 

Source: The Believer (article not available online)

As pull quotes go, this one from The Believer’s interview with anthropologist Robin Nagle is pretty golden:  “Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything.” I’d have been even more delighted if Nagle had dispatched with that qualifying “future,” but then I’m a curmudgeon, not a scholar of rubbish in the strictest sense.

Nagle’s obviously got a rich stomping ground for her studies—if you’ve ever wandered Manhattan’s streets in the wee hours you’re familiar with that city’s Sisyphean relationship with garbage disposal—and she also more than established her bona fides by working a sanitation route in the Bronx. In this wide-ranging conversation with Alex Carp, Nagle discusses, the archaeology of household waste, the lives of sanitation workers, dirt, garbage flow, our cognitive issues with trash, the topography of landfills, and her own Sisyphean attempts to create a Museum of Sanitation in New York.

Nagle’s rambles are smart, funny, and full of lots of serious food for thought; for some reason this interview did more for my own garbage consciousness than a hundred earnest jackhammer pieces on recycling, righteous greenery, and carbon footprints.

I’m also seriously excited about the commercial possibilities for a line of stylish “Future Trash” t-shirts (I’m calling dibs right now).

Source: The Believer 

The latest issue of The Iowa Review has a fascinating interview with Michael Silverblatt, host of the nationally syndicated radio program Bookworm. Silverblatt talks about his reading habits and how he’s trained himself to plow through the complete works of the guests on his show. Here’s a great slice:

Sarah Fay: So, have you been teaching yourself to read more deeply over the years?
Michael Silverblatt: I’ve been teaching myself how to have the stamina to sit still. When I’m starting a book, I try not to read in bed. I read a hundred pages at a time and don’t get up. At the end of a hundred pages, I’ll go and have lunch. But I feel that it takes a hundred pages to be gripped by a book, so I try to read them in one sitting.

SF: How did you discover that?
MS: Trial and error. I didn’t know anything about it….I left graduate school before I had to take an oral exam, so I never had to find out if I could do concentrated stints of more-reading-than-is-humanly-possible. It wasn’t until I had the show that I read voluminously, and that was how I trained myself. First, a hundred pages at a time. Then I would see if I could read two hundred pages a t a time. Then I’d see if I could read War and Peace in four or five days, because wouldn’t that give me a really thrilling and unusual aerial view of the whole of the book, a book that many people stretch over an entire summer vacation or two or three months? I thought that would really give me a sense of the shape of the novel. I’m aware that my experience as a reader is not like other people’s. I don’t know how someone carries a book in his or her mind over the period of several weeks to a month. I get too hungry and excited.

The Believer also has what appears to be part of the same interview by Sarah Fay at the University of Iowa if you’re dying for more.

Sources: The Iowa Review(article not available online), The Believer

Image by wrestlingentropy, licensed under Creative Commons.

Just imagine how America’s foreign policy in Iraq might have been different if the public had access to military intelligence before the invasion was finalized. The country could have avoided an expensive war and the deaths of many soldiers and civilians. Unfortunately, that information was hidden in plain sight, blacked out on official government documents.

As much as we abhor when the federal government acts clandestinely, we should at least know that it doesn’t always wickedly withhold information from citizens. In fact, the bureaucrats removing information from federal documents are probably bored to death by the Byzantine laws of redaction. *Note: Some government officials are capricious, contradictory or just plain evil. Or so claims The Believer’s Michael Powell in an extended cultural, aesthetic, and psychological history of two things that go hand in hand: the black Sharpie marker and government document redaction.

Redaction is a far more mundane and much less capricious process than we popularly imagine. “The redaction process is not part of a secrecy law,” writes Powell, “but an information-access law.” You’ve heard of it—it’s the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). *Note: We regret to inform you that FOIA requests result in an FBI-tail and 100-point hit to your credit score. Sorry. With arduous and exactingly thorough procedural manuals, codified techniques, and legal imperatives, most FOIA requests return documents with all the information that can be lawfully released. Nine legal exemptions are in place, the most controversial among information-freedom wonks being “national security,” that will impel any given bureaucrat to break out that infamous marker.

Black Sharpies occupy a nether-zone in the writing utensil-sphere. “Unlike the pen, a symbol of free thought’s transparent expression, or the sword, a symbol of free thought’s oppression, the black marker of government secrecy exists somewhere between these two places,” Powell writes.

Knowing that a piece of information exists and can’t be uncovered is worse than never finding out it existed at all, or as Powell puts it: “. . . any act of omission, while perceived by some as a grave injustice, cannot truly impact us until we finally learn that we haven’t learned what we had wanted to.”

Sources: The Believer

Image by JonDissed, licensed under Creative Commons.

The folks over at The Believer have awarded the fifth annual Believer Book Award to Percival Everett’s novel, I am Not Sydney Poitier. The book was picked from a short list of novels and story collections that the editors deemed “the strongest and most underappreciated of the year.” I’ve been thinking about the underappreciated thing. With so many books coming out, what does “underappreciated” even mean in the book world anymore? I sent this question in an email to Believer HQ and editor Heidi Julavits sent me this response:

Indeed, who in 2010 is not underappreciated? Even the appreciated are underappreciated. For example, the week after the Pulitzer Prize for fiction was announced, one of the two finalists was scarcely to be found in one of Manhattan’s most tasteful and typically on-the-ball indie bookstores (the clerk had never heard of it; she finally located their lone copy in an unfrequented and shadowy corner shelf).

Or take, as an example, Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, the winner of our 2007 award. That book was published by a big and powerful press (it was a Vintage Paperback original); it was even featured on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review. But astonishingly, despite that level of so-called appreciation, very few people—and by “people” we mean people we know personally, people who read The Believer and other books that we ourselves read, people who would seem to be the perfect audience for a book like Remainder—many of these people had never read the book even heard of it.

So by underappreciated maybe we mean that we’ve found a book that a certain sort of person should be appreciating, and based on our anecdotal and highly unscientific surveys, this book is not being adequately appreciated by those people.

Our library contains 1,300 publications—a feast of magazines, journals, alt weeklies, newsletters, and zines—and every year we honor the stars in our Utne Independent Press Awards. We’ll announce this year’s winners on Sunday, April 25, at the MPA’s Independent Magazine Group conference in Washington, D.C., and post them online the following Monday. We’re crazy about these publications, and we’d love it for all of our readers to get to know them better, too. So, every weekday until the conference, we’ll be posting mini-introductions to our complete list of 2010 nominees.

The following eight magazines are our 2010 nominees in the category of arts coverage.

A celebration of handmade objects and the people who create them, American Craft brings to life the work of glassblowers, woodworkers, jewelry makers, and artisans of all stripes. Published by the American Craft Council, it covers its inspiring subjects from workbench to gallery. www.americancraftmag.org

An arts magazine with a decidedly literary bent, The Believer covers books, film, music, and pop culture with barely contained intellectual glee. Part of the McSweeney’s empire founded by author Dave Eggers, it constantly finds new ways to showcase the creative impulse. www.believermag.com

The arts, culture, and fashion of the Middle Eastern region are fertile ground for the writers and artists of Bidoun, who traverse their territory with wit and irreverence. Whether they’re living in the region or are part of the diaspora, their dispatches are crucial intelligence. www.bidoun.com

Each issue of Creative Review is eye-popping, showing some of the best work from worldwide advertising, design, and visual culture. Its articles add depth to this dazzle, profiling scenes, people, and creative work that you wouldn’t hear about any other way. www.creativereview.co.uk

Esopus is a visual feast, showcasing the work of contemporary artists alongside critical writing, fiction, poetry, interviews, and even a themed CD. The very definition of “labor of love,” it comes out only twice a year, but it’s always worth the wait. www.esopusmag.com

Forget box-office battles and vapid celebrity chatter: Film Comment focuses its lens on cinema’s substance. Drawing on a deep, experienced pool of critics and feature writers, the magazine gets off the red carpet to explore the wonderfully diverse film omniverse. www.filmlinc.com/fcm/fcm.htm

Published in Ireland but covering the entire world of music, The Journal of Music uses actual musicians as writers. The resulting coverage, which runs the gamut from folk to classical to pop, is arresting reading for both casual fans and aficionados. www.journalofmusic.com

Poets & Writers is targeted at wordsmiths, yet appeals to anyone who loves to get lost in a bookstore. And if you’re yet another hopeful unpublished author—come on, admit it—you’ll find good advice on finding an agent and a deal. www.pw.org

The lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurring and giving rise to a new form “that we might call ‘true fiction,’” writes Alissa Quart in Columbia Journalism Review. Quart sees examples of this phenomenon all around, including Dave Eggers’ brilliant book What Is the What, which tells but also takes a few liberties with the tale of a Sudanese “Lost Boy”; the forthcoming graphic novel A.D. by Josh Neufeld, which depicts post-Katrina New Orleans; and even The Hurt Locker, the war film that is presented as fiction but is based on an original nonfiction magazine article.

Quart is quick to acknowledge that the fiction-nonfiction hybrid isn’t all that new, but she contends that writers well known for mixing the two, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, “imagined their work to be a certain kind of journalism.” Members of the newer breed, she notes, “seem to be backing away from categorizing things as ‘true,’ even as they are also rethinking what nonfiction is and can be.”

The new anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay, Quart writes, even makes the case “that some works long considered fiction are actually closer to this hybrid form,” and she quotes from a piece by the anthology’s editor, John D’Agata: “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?”

Coincidentally, it was a recent story by D’Agata in The Believer that left me confused about what was information and what was art. In “What Happens There,” D’Agata traces the final moments of Levi Presley, a 16-year-old who killed himself by jumping from the top of the 1,149-foot-high Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The writer does several things at once: In the guise of a reporter, he attempts to penetrate the wall of silence surrounding suicide in Las Vegas, which has the highest suicide rate in the nation year after year. Wearing a memoirist’s hat, he interweaves his own experiences in the city, where he briefly lived to care for his mother. And as a facile prose stylist, he attempts to vividly convey the sights, sounds, and smells that Presley might have encountered as he walked toward his deadly jump through the sprawling casino complex.

I was immediately drawn in by D’Agata’s deft, artful writing, and yet as the tale unfolded I was stopped cold at several junctures, mostly because as a journalist I had certain expectations about what I perceived as, first and foremost, a piece of journalism. To wit:

• The story begins with the glaringly vague time reference “one summer,” yet anyone with Google at his fingertips can learn that Presley committed suicide in 2002. Why not place the story’s main event in time for the reader? When is one of the six key story components in classic news journalism—components that are, ironically, the organizing principle of D’Agata’s new book About a Mountain, which includes the suicide tale.

• After meeting with Presley’s parents to discuss their son’s death, he writes, “At some point, it came clear while I was visiting the Presleys that in fact I had not spoken to their son the night he died.” I first read this as a jarringly understated admission, delivered almost as an aside, that he had misrepresented himself to the parents in order to meet with them. Ethical red flags were flying all over the place before I figured out elsewhere—via his book’s jacket notes—that D’Agata himself had believed he might have spoken with Presley on that fateful night. Maybe fans of the new “true fiction” will read right past this, but for me this was a major stumbling block.

• D’Agata pays a private investigator $400 for “vital information” about Presley that he’s unable to ferret out himself, and rather than praising the investigator’s ability to dig up these details, he feels compelled to coyly note that she “had a smoker’s voice, a barking dog and screaming kids and Jeopardy on in the background” when he called her. Yeah, and she probably was overweight and wearing ridiculous slippers and sucking on a Bud Lite. D’Agata clearly has a keen eye for detail, but extending it to someone who’s basically helping him report the story, with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge dose of classist disapproval, gave me a shudder of discomfort.

• D’Agata is able to get only one local official to go on the record about the suicide, county coroner Ron Flud. The coroner seems like a pretty straight-up guy—“a finder of facts,” he calls himself—who invites D’Agata into his office and expounds insightfully on the taboo of talking about suicide. But apparently this still isn’t enough for D’Agata. He calls Flud out for not answering a question about whether a suicide jumper is likely to lose consciousness in a fall, then proceeds to relay, in a self-serving writerly flourish, several things that Flud did not say.

• Someone who knew Presley hangs up on D’Agata when he asks personal questions about the deceased. But we don’t know who because the writer doesn’t tell us. The conversation is transmitted as a terse, paraphrased exchange with no context or explanation. Literary, yes, but mystifying.

• Finally, D’Agata appears to have never visited the suicide victim’s memorial website, which has been online since 2005. Here he could have gleaned several intimate details about Levi Presley—details not mentioned in the article—from reminiscences written by friends and family, and he could have learned the names of several sources to pursue for his allegedly hard-to-find interviews. He also would have learned from the entry by “Mom” that Presley’s mother called him her “precious Boomer”—from “baby Boomer”—not “Booper,” as D’Agata writes.

In the end, the story seems to be a case in which a creative writer took on a semi-journalistic task, in the process taking liberties that some audiences may enjoy (James Wolcott of Vanity Fair certainly did, calling the story a “show stopper”) and that others may find confusing, distracting, or journalistically dubious.

If we are indeed entering a new world of hybrid literary journalism—one in which, Quart writes, “we are seeing nonfiction freed from its rigid constraints”—I for one hope we remember that some subjects, like a teenager’s suicide, seem to demand a deep and abiding respect for facts and clarity. At first impression D’Agata appears to be honoring the memory of Levi Presley by speaking the unspeakable—yet by the story’s end, at least to this reader, he appears to have done just the opposite.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review, The Believer  (subscription required), Vanity Fair

Image by Marcin Wichary, licensed under Creative Commons.

In a literary experiment that perhaps only The Believer could have dreamt up, critic Justin Taylor accepts a challenge to review a book—stripped of identifying marks. Check it out:

A few months ago, the editors of this magazine asked if I would be interested in being part of an experiment in criticism. They were curious what would happen if we inverted the standard “anonymous review” formula—if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice—whether positive or negative, whether directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc.

I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds.: “No googling”), and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry.

What could I do? I began to read.

Intrigued? Read Taylor’s account of the anonymous reading experience that prompts him to conclude: “Every reviewer—every reader—should hope to be so lucky.”

Source: The Believer

Image by j/k_lolz, licensed under Creative Commons.

“In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise,” Chris Bachelder writes for The Believer. Meditating on the pleasure of the unexpected, Bachelder connects the “vivid surprises” of good literature with those of childrearing, fusing the two kinds of wonder into a delightful short essay. Behold:

Life with young children is full of such unusual associations and combinations, both joyful and disquieting. (I once clipped a tiny sharp crescent of my daughter’s toenail directly into my eye; my daughter once called a tampon a cheese stick; my wife once unknowingly spilled some olive tapenade on our daughter’s infant head and then thought, for a horrifying instant, that the child’s brains were leaking.) It may sound paradoxical, but these peculiar moments with my daughter often feel familiar. The reason, I’ve come to suspect, is that the vivid surprises of child-rearing seem so similar to the vivid surprises of good literature.

Donald Barthelme wrote that “the combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.” Is there a better one-sentence defense and explanation and manifesto of art? It is combinatorial agility—not just of words, but of sentences, paragraphs, images, objects, events, concepts, and characters—that generates, startles, and reveals.

Source: The Believer

“If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, what would their 1970s albums have sounded like?” asks  David L. Ulin in the 2009 music issue of the Believer. “I’ve been asking myself this question off and on since I was a teenager.” There’s no answer, of course, so he invented one.

Any invented record has to make sense as a Beatles album, to reflect the amalgam the band was, the formulas on which they relied. For all their innovations, the Beatles were formulaic as well, building albums that had a standard architecture (one or two songs from George, a balance of John and Paul, and a quick dash of Ringo). You can’t forget that when considering what they might have done.

After taking readers on a tour of post-breakup Beatle solo albums, Ulin fashions four hypothetical Beatles albums. Here’s one:

Too Many People

SIDE ONE

Imagine (John)
Crippled Inside (John)
It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo, cowritten with George)
Teddy Boy (Paul)
All Things Must Pass (George)
Another Day (Paul)

 SIDE TWO

Too Many People (Paul)
Jealous Guy (John)
Gimme Some Truth (John)
Awaiting on You All (George)
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (Paul)
Monkberry Moon Delight (Paul)

We needed to hear this hypothetical blockbuster, so we brought it to life over at imeem. Enjoy:

Image by Chamko Rani, licensed under Creative Commons.

 Alt Wire  is a digest of spoon-fed inspiration curated by our favorite editors, journalists, artists, and visionaries. Today's guest is Believer editor Andrew Leland.

I first used an internet search engine around 1994, when as a 13-year-old I had a dial-up Internet connection and my own home page, "Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack," which featured SNL- and Simpsons-derived jokes, done up in rudimentary HTML. This was pre-Google, of course, but once I'd gotten the hang of using Webcrawler or Lycos or whatever engine I was using, I began performing what I immediately recognized were impressionistic internet searches. This is to say: rather than searching for relatively utilitarian subjects such as "Tutankhamun," or "Matt Groening biography," I'd feed the Internet strings like "feast of sadness, whispered pumice vampire, jiggles milk" or whatever shards of language I happened to be "feeling" at the time (and as a 13-year-old, as now, these emotional, surrealistic phrases regularly surf into my consciousness—usually on a board carved from hormones).

And then I'd delight in seeing what the rowdy, teeming, brand-new World Wide Web could spit back. (In this sense, the experience resembled a psychedelic, doors-blown-off version of chatting with Eliza, the early "interactive" Freudian psychoanalysis bot.) Most of the hits my impressionistic searches returned would be pages, usually hosted by computer science departments at large research universities, that simply listed (for some arcane database-related reason) every word in Webster's. These pages were interesting enough (at least knowing they existed, and wondering why), but if I refined my search a little, down to just, say, "feast of sadness, whispered pumice," then real strange treasures would wash ashore. These usually came in the form of fan fiction (I recently discovered, for example, the wealth of online erotic fan fiction devoted to Xena: Warrior Princess), full texts of inscrutable books, and heated discussion boards for topics I'd never otherwise have the pleasure of running across—places where text accumulates in eccentric formations.

Bio: Andrew Leland is the managing editor of The Believer and founding editor of Uncle Andy's Giggle Shack, which we would link to if we could.

Just in time for summer, The Believer recommends eleven essential nonexistent books for your reading lists. Perfect for anyone who’s looking to either not read or imagine to read. Here are a few hilarious examples with descriptions:

1) Fibre Strands of Luxurious Abrasion (nonfiction), by Simon Gaspeth. “Surfaces—cheap carpet, a linoleum countertop after bread has been sliced, wet Astroturf—are what interest Gaspeth, an essayist and lecturer in material culture at King’s College London.”

2) Whole Hog (nonfiction), by Arthur Allens. The author “shows his willingness to stare his meat in the face as he follows a single Iowa pig from his first day’s suckling, through his corn-dosed adolescence, to his ultimate fate: divvied up among Korean wholesalers, makers of artisanal bacon, and an agribusiness conglomerate that serves what’s left of him back to his brethren.”

3) The Men Who Pour Cement (fiction), by Kimball MacAleese. “MacAleese is the great also-ran of the twentieth-century American letters, behind his contemporaries Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—whom he once challenged to ‘write about your own g-damn country, and let the matadors and spaghetti-eaters write about theirs.’”

4) Workshop (fiction), by Nick Lowey. “MFA students writing—and failing to write—form the subject of Lowey’s debut...Lowey displays an enviable judiciousness and a keen eye: a box of cheap wine is described as ‘a store-brand Lethe, a vermillion river of solace and forgetting.’”

Source: The Believer

How much does it cost to spread 650,000 pennies on the floor in a delicate wave pattern, atop a bed of oozing honey? Including the tableau attendant and accommodations for the sheep, about $13,791.36. (1989 dollars, of course.) The installation in question is Anne Hamilton’s “privations and excess,” which The Believer details in the latest installment of Creative Accounting, a series that’s plainly perfect for those among us who love both the arts and getting down and gritty with the details. Ahem.

In past issues, the magazine has unpacked the fiscal details of an unnamed Flaming Lips album ($158,338.53); a modestly-made indie film ($15,4800), and a less-modestly made yet nonetheless indie film ($18 million), which kicked off the series last March.

 Source: The Believer 

Image by kevindooley, licensed under Creative Commons.

Fans of John O’Connor’s brilliant travel account “The Boil,” which appeared in Utne’s Jan.-Feb. issue, should check out this other lovely—and somewhat cringe-inducing—tale he penned for The Believer.

In “Avian,” O’Connor discovers the handiwork of the loggerhead shrike, a.k.a. the Butcher Bird, which spends its days skillfully filleting prey on thorn bushes and then disemboweling their carcasses. The measures are gruesome, but necessary, because it lacks the talon-power of other predatory birds. It’s also facing declining numbers in North America.

O’Connor was particularly transformed by the chilling death of a tiny green lizard. After staring down the author, the bird made quick business of crucifying its tiny meal. O’Connor writes of the slain creature, “Its intestines, naked to the world, shone like cooked spaghetti…. I began to feel a grudging respect for the Butcher Bird. To see an animal overcome its genetic shortcomings in such dramatic fashion, supported by a brain the size of a lentil, well, it gives a man hope.”

The Believer was nominated for a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award for its arts coverage.

Source: The Believer

Image by Henry McLin, licensed under Creative Commons.

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 2008 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 sister who likes hipster culture minus the pretense: Venus Zine is chock-full great coverage on women in music, culture, fashion, and art. They also have a killer DIY section featuring recipes, how-to’s, and practical advice.

For the brother who’s totally over Rolling Stone: Formerly a Grateful Dead fan ‘zine, Relix has been putting out music news, reviews, and interviews since the 70s. Their tastes run the gamut from jam bands to Ryan Adams, always with an eye on new and exciting acts. Each issue also includes a CD sampler of featured songs.

For the aunt who always wants to hear stories about your life: Billed as a quarterly of true stories and original art, Fray is a new magazine full of compelling personal narratives organized around a theme. The newest issue contains stories of geekdom and obsession, including a pocket protector collection and one girl’s primordial love for naked mole rats. Deliciously humorous and entertaining as well as educational, Fray sates the hunger for a good story.

For the friend whose “artsy-ness” never fails to make you feel inferior: The Believer’s beautiful pages and eclectic mix of material covered is almost intimidating in its apparent high-brow ambiance. Your artsy friend is bound to extrapolate meaning from the artwork and essays that you could only dream to understand.

For the dog-lover (but not Dog Fancy-er): The Bark is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year as the “modern dog culture magazine.” What is dog culture, you ask? Everything from health nutrition information to pet fashion to new books featuring canine protagonists.

For the independent, sassy Jewish mom: When up against bigger Jewish-centered magazines like Moment and Hadassah, quarterly magazine Lilith stands out for its unapologetic (yet non-hostile) feminist stance and its commitment to ideas and stories that matter but have perhaps not made it to the mainstream.

For the Spanish-speaking wannabe: The monthly magazine Think Spanish is written in Spanish for English speakers, with vocab words bolded in the text and defined on the side of the page. The format allows people to read seamlessly if they understand the articles and learn new words if they don’t. The articles aren’t exactly hard-hitting, but they’re interesting enough to keep readers engaged. 

For the tech-geek in your office: The electrical engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum has been churning out some great issues lately. The magazine features plenty of articles on new tech-developments that could interest laypeople, and enough hard-core nerdiness to impress even the most jaded of computer dorks.

For anyone interested in psychological health: Psychotherapy Networker describes itself as a resource for therapists, but the cheeky bimonthly never fails to transcend its intended audience with broad-based appeal. From the science of happiness and mindful approaches to depression, to our cultural relationship with insomnia and new ways to approach sex, the articles are intellectually rigorous and provide fascinating into the human mind.

For optimists (or, curmudgeons who seriously need a lift): There isn't a better magazine than Greater Good, published by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Greater Good reports on innovative research into altruism and compassion. Far from wonky, its savvy editors fuse findings with real-world relevance, showing how "the science of a meaningful life" impacts everything from education to public policy.

For more great publications, check out the nominees for the 19th annual Utne Independent Press Awards, and Utne Reader's 2007 Gift-Giving Guide. From environmental to spiritual coverage, from best design to best writing, there's bound to be a perfect-fit publication for everyone on your holiday gifting list. 

Image by Cláudia*~Assad, licensed under Creative Commons. 

“I am, unabashedly, pro-fort,” writes Morgan Meis. Meis is a founding member of the New York City-based arts collective Flux Factory and a contributor to the 2008 Art Issue of the Believer, out this month. In his essay “Classified Report from ‘The Secret Clubhouse’ ” (excerpt available online) Meis opines on the artistic value of forts, be they minimalist sheet-and-pillow shelters or the decidedly luxurious structure built by his friend, which included indoor plumbing and electricity.

Who can forget the whimsy of entering a fort you’ve built from found materials around the house, transforming daily activities into clandestine operations of the highest degree? Meis and Flux Factory recapture that magic with their own creations, having famously occupied a room in the Queens Museum of Art for several months in 2002, building and rebuilding a gigantic fort.

Meis’ essay seeks to explain what creates this special connection to our forts: “Take two identical objects, one built to be a toolshed and the other built as a fort. They look exactly the same. But once you know that one is a fort, it transforms. You approach it with diffidence, with the respect of someone entering a sacred space….It is the same with works of art. You don’t treat them as mere objects even if, strictly speaking, there is nothing in their material makeup to differentiate them from mere objects.” Meis offers Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and Marcel Duchamp’s Prelude to a Broken Arm, which is simply a snow shovel, as examples of everyday objects we view as art.

Forts are not the only artwork covered in the newest issue of the Believer. You can also read articles about—among other things—passport photography, a bad-luck painting, imposing public art, and interviews with Global Seed Vault artist Dyveke Sanne, painter and printmaker Frank Stella, author Lynda Barry, mechanical-pencil artist Robyn O’Neil (full text online) and cartoonist Keith Knight.

Image by tastybit, licensed under Creative Commons.