Did you say your name is Rambling Rose?

Greetings from California. I am currently on vacation in this paradisical state, mostly just hanging out all by my lonesome, which is nice, except that I'm far too pensive and moody and could use some good chat. I'm trying really fucking hard to maintain a positive attitude about life and shit like that, but I don't think it's in my nature, and the past week has been a sucky suckfest. But you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear: what ever happened to that earnest guy who loved to translate Petrarch and hide his condoms in obscure places? Well, I'll tell ya, I don't think I'll be calling this guy anytime soon. I present to you the bizarrely passionate e-mail he sent me. No, not passionate towards me, or towards the cause of peace, or towards Led Zeppelin or something I could understand, but towards a little magazine called Harper's.

We were e-mailing short conversational messages (a la "hey, I was in Vermont, it was so much fun...") and then I didn't hear from this guy for like a week, and then, this. It's in response to what I meant as a throw-away comment about a publication I don't like.

harper's is run by the Dead White Men's Club of New England. it's overbearing in its elitism; i prefer a lighter touch to gawking.

OK, maybe these are fighting words? I don't know. His response:



Elitism and gawking.. unlike... the New Yorker? [Last issue's
contents: a clucking piece on Hot 97 and the man "whose hip-hop name
is Gravy" (bringing immediately to mind their similar hip-hop-gawking
foray puff pieces on Eminem and Jay-Z), "Blue-collar Gold" -- can you
believe what these blue-staters laugh at?, in addition to a
have-you-heard - Mike Wallace actually going _barefoot_! this is in
addition, of course to the usual hacky politician-focused articles that
might as well be in the Nation where at least the readers contemplate
doing something about it.] Elitism and gawking, eh?

and this is just the last issue I happened to pick up.

I don't know how to define eliteism. I suppose featuring experimental
writers and contemporary art is now de facto eliteist. But the past
few cover articles -- post-oil-crash future, Spiegelman's piece on
offensive cartoons throughout history, real-estate ownership as serfdom
so politely praised, the regimented business spin insidious in
education reform. these are eliteist and gawking?

I don't know that they are.. I do know, though that they're ideas.
ideas that could possibly matter. it took a while before I came to
understand that this is not the best lure for a steady stable
readership of Upper East Siders, who would like some stories about
people, or food, or a chance for shaking their head at those silly
hip-hop artists or the coopting of corrupt politicians, all before
forgetting their issue on the glass tabletop when fretting over which
new restaurant over on Madison to choose this night -- maybe that one
mentioned in the New Yorker last month?

It took me a while to realize what the New Yorker really is. Sure, the
New Yorker has issue pieces. The New Yorker has politics, art,
science. Well, sort of. Actually, if you read iit it won't be
politics -- it'll be a politician. It won't focus on the science,
it'll investigate the personality of the scientist who scienced it.
Always the story will hone in on the artist (or the framer or the
curator) more than the art. You realize why the New Yorker (never the
more-dicey Harpers) shows up at the dentist's office -- right next to
the People. The New Yorker is all about people. Nearly every story is
biography and gossip in disguise. The New Yorker is People for People
who read (and who don't want People seeing them reading People.)

So, take the last two issues at random and tell me, why exactly is it
that Harpers is the gawking one? Or do you mean historically? Are you
talking about Barbara "Dead White Male" Ehrenreich's nickel and dimed
piece? The article five years ago about growing up poor on the
Mississippi and the evil effects that muddy river has? Where is it?
The vietnam article? The flashmob story (gawking perhaps, but gawking
at Williamsburg.) The superbowl article? The piece on
slaughterhouses and pig farming? (the new yorker, by contrast, sent
some person boar-hunting. much less depressing.) Ben Marcus' defense
of experimental fiction? -- you might wish the New Yorker treated
fiction half so seriously.

Happy I would be to go through whatever New Yorkers or Harpers I can
find and count. Count the pages before I hit some gawking -- at the
balefully naive and simple midwesterners, or the dumb, gullible
Southerners (inch by inch stealing our center of gravity). You want to
bet that happens earlier in the Harpers?

I suppose, in the end, I have mixed allegiances, really. It's true, of
course, Harpers is the One Magazine no Proper home should be without,
but true, now and then there have been good articles, the kind you wish
you wrote and are glad you read, in that other leading worthwhile
general-interest magazine. To be fair, though, I think in the end, the
important fact is that you don't have to pick one or other, you don't
need some blinkered allegiance to only one. You're allowed to pick
both! You can get both. So yeah, maybe I really should get that
subscription to the Atlantic.

It's sad, because I kind of liked this guy, but I feel that we're not yet at the stage in our relationship when he can go crazy because I don't like the same periodicals as him. (I only read the Emily Dickinson Quarterly and Barely Legal, I don't know why he keeps going on about the New Yorker.) Farewell, Earnest Guy. We hardly knew ye.