Bookazine

I'm willing to admit that my distaste for magazines in largely aesthetic and silly. And that whatever else it is, it is a personal preference. But maybe other people agree.

What I can't stand about magazine are two fold. Primarily it is that they are full of useless things. Before you storm my castle let me explain. There may be two articles in a magazine you want to read. Or one photo spread. But there is bound to be insane amounts of filler and even more ads. Awful.

I have a need for completeness. I want to start on page one and flip through all the way to page last. Now I know that sounds stodgy and old fashioned. And you can flip however you want through a magazine. I don't care. But I want every page to at least potentially be worthwhile. Every page to be somehow a part of the larger whole. Not some random disconnected blip that wants you to buy its jeans.

Now you could go at this in a number of different ways--that is if you bought into the fact that there is a problem at all. For me, I would want to maintain the implicit leisure in the magazine form. As well the ability to address a wide variety of issues and topics. What I want to see is a advertising-free, organized like a book, journally type of thing.

I know McSweeney's and Believer and any number of hit young journals probably accomplish a lot of this already. And I thank them even tho' they make me angry. But I think we can go further into the possible realms of magazines with this idea. We could go much more heavily into the picture heavy world. And all the while maintain that it has to function as a whole. It has to be choked full of things that we find interesting or useful.

I think it would be key, first to break the advertising stranglehold. And second to consider keeping more flexible deadlines or more reasonable publication dates. Like, quarterly. I know, McSweeney's again. Whatever. But the point being, it should never go out the door until it is sound as its own object. Always keeping in mind that you've bound the thing up for a reason, so it had best make sense for you to have bound the thing that way. It is an object in the world and even if its self is schizophrenic, it has a single self. Single and multiple. And therefore beautiful.