I’ve talked a bit (a lot) about the digest, and I’ve talked a lot about pulp work, but I really oughta give my love to the granddaddy of the genre, the full-on glossy magazine. C’mon Harper’s, accept my writing please. I swear it’s good. I’m a good writer. Please tell me I’m a good writer, please.
I single out Harper’s Magazine because it’s almost the icon of this sort of stuff. Founded in 1850 by what is now HarperCollins, it’s the longest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. It takes its inspiration from the North American Review, which takes its own inspiration from the early journals published in Great Britain like the Edinburgh Review or the Spectator. Magazines are the descendants of a long literary tradition of finding other talented people and publishing their work for exposure and peanuts.
Of course, that’s only a small dig at the medium. I really do love magazines, I swear. They’re an important part of the discovery of so many of our high-brow writers. T. S. Eliot’s first poem, one that is near and dear to my heart, was first published in 1915 in the Poetry magazine. O. Henry, the great American writer, and one of the few titans of literature this country produced in the pre-war era, published his works through a magazine as well.
It’s important to have those magazines, because they provide a way to get work out there, but they also, fundamentally, hold a literary standard to everyone. I praised the digest for letting anyone write, and yes, anyone should be able to write, but we should have places that are standardized, edited, looked at, drawn and rewritten and analyzed and edited, and made perfect as well. Not all art deserves a publisher and a publishing company, but all art deserves an editor, and magazines provide that in a way no other medium could.
And if you goof up? Well, at most wait a month and try again. In some cases, a week! They can’t all be bangers and you have opportunities to try and try again.
That’s what’s important about magazines, and as the medium continues its steep decline, what’s important about compendium style works is that they’re the best way to get a wide sweep through a medium. Sure, I can read a book in a month, but in that same month, eight short stories mean I’m learning about eight writers, and thinking about what they, individually, could do.
And yes, much of this is the same thing I said about digests and pulp. You discover new authors and it’s a dime rag to read on the train and hope nobody looks at the filthy art on the front.
But Harper’s isn’t embarrassing. The NAR isn’t either, and Poetry, well, Poetry is an icon of Chicago.
These are the sort of things that drive discussion and discourse, that allow for the fundamental growth of these ideas, because magazines, well. You go to the digest stand for a cheap thrill. You buy a copy of the Yale Review to make yourself more familiar with the workings of a complex and difficult to parse world.