The Believer

One of the few things I managed to find in the London bookstores was a copy of The Believer Magazine, the new lofty lit mag from Dave Eggers. I got the June issue and I must say, in spite of my disdain for pretentious lit rags, it's a really good publication. I enjoyed nearly every column and article, especially Tom Bissell's article about reality TV. At one point he even makes the case for it being much like pornography:

It is a dodgy form of entertainment indeed when its victims are literal, and Reality Television is filled with victims, however willing they often are. This sense is, I believe, precisely what fills one with unease about Reality Television. The whole genre leaves one both vaguely unnerve and completely dissatisfied, for it does not even attempt to explain why anyone would want to do to him- or herself what Reality Television so often asks people to do. Maybe I am naive, but money is not an answer enough. Neither is the dark black asterisked sort of fame one garners from appearing on a Reality show. The scales do not balance. Reality Television ask everything of its subjects and nothing of its audience but that it watch. This makes it identical to, among other things, pornography. That what Reality Television depicts is basiclly real, that it happened, is finally not compelling enough. Things "happen" all the time: the banality of reality.

Another good piece is an interview with David mnftiu Rees. I also really like the idea share column which has a few interesting ideas for the creative set. The Tool column is a wonderful visit with arcane and wacky tools for the more literary engineers.

One of the more entertaining and curious bits was a small block of text called "A Query":

For a book about the alphabet and its uses, we are looking for authors' experiences with the following letters: Y,T,R,I,Ø,F,U,N,W,H,P,L,B,J.

For a brief period, we had saisfactory entries for the above letters. However, many were revealed to be hoaxes, jokes, or both.

Bonnie Demby-Lyons and Jennifer H. Thoms
P.O. Box 471108
San Francisco, CA
94147

Damn, if only they needed an essay about the sublime K! :)

One of the writers is apparently working on a 'cultural history of demolition' to be published sometime next year that I'll have to look for.

It's a spendy mag at $65 per year [ no foreign subscription info but it would likely be double that price ] but the quality is very good and there are no ads anywhere. Maybe I'll subscribe and have my mother send it to me every quarter.