Published: December 01. 2009 2:00AM
By Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Every once in a while, I like to blame computers for some things I'm not happy about. I understand the blanket of responsibility is a big one, that people are making decisions about what to read and how, but the general decline of the local newspaper industry and the recent closing of Gourmet magazine really seems to warrant ranting.
Or some other evangelical gesture.
It occurs to me that there are some fabulous magazines out there besides TALK Greenville (which I must praise here for continuing to value a local writer's column on books, a local traveler's features on traveling, etc.) that the readers of TALK might not have heard about. Magazines survive on subscriptions. This being the holiday season, subscriptions make fantastic gifts. I can remember very happily going to the mailbox as an elementary schooler (the mailbox! The mailbox is still a wonderful place to send your children) for my latest issue of Ranger Rick that my grandmother renewed for us every birthday. Same grandmother renewed my mother's Southern Living such that it arrived years after her death, a somehow incredibly poignant role for that particular lifestyle guide to take. But truly, there is nothing like the mildly guilty pleasure of sitting down right inside the front door to leaf through glossy pictures, scan articles you may or may not read later, and devour something that arrives on a regular schedule.
The big one, for me, is The Oxford American. Now based in Conway, Ark., the OA publishes theme-based issues on Southern food and music, film and art. It publishes short fiction and poetry by great Southern writers and art photographs by great Southern artists. With your subscription, you get the annual Best of Southern Music issue, and the accompanying CDs have gone directly to my car and played there for years. You can find the OA at www.oxfordamerican.org. Every literate Southerner of conscience should have a subscription.
Nationally, there're the people of McSweeney's. McSweeney's is a big West Coast outfit run by Dave Eggers (author of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) and friends, essentially involved in every significant form of the written word you can imagine, from literacy movements to book publishing. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is basically a subscription to four anthologies a year of some of the finest fiction writers here and abroad, and packaging is quirky and imaginative. One issue came in a box, one was Icelandic and one looked like a pile of mail. The Believer is a monthly magazine of essays, interviews, book reviews and columns by people like Jack Pendarvis and members of the Sedaris clan. My most recent issue features an article about vampire tourism in Romania alongside a poem by Derek Walcott. All things McSweeney's can be found at www.mcsweeneys.net.
When you look at these Web sites, you can find a good bit of the magazine's content online; at the very least, a healthy taste of the aesthetic. And so you have to ask yourself, what's the difference between screen and print? The experience is different, just like the experience of reading or writing a letter is different than an e-mail and having lunch with a friend is different than a phone call. And if we stop having these experiences, they will disappear.