Harper's Magazine: C/D

I think the guy is o-kay.

The column is spot-on. No one else uses so much erudition and learning to say so little.

I'll try to condense his stuff:

St. Andrews:
Although arranged like St. Andrews, the course at North Berwick presents a wider variance of hazards, and possibly because of the names of the holes ("Gate," "Perfection," "Pit"), what little I could remember of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress came suddenly to mind in the elegiac light of a slowly ebbing sunset. I played the round in the company of two other solitary golfers on the hole ahead and the hole behind, three wayfarers set forth on the Scots' equivalent of the road to Canterbury, each of us in turn raising the flag of hope for the fellow pilgrim who maybe had come thus far without having fallen afoul, at least not yet, of Worldly Wiseman or Giant Despair.

Condensed:
St. Andrews golf course left me in reverie.

I had a hard time even parsing this one:

Extended King Richard analogy:

When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

Condensed:
You can't eat things totemically, esp. if the qualities you want aren't there in the first place.

"Pretensions to Empire" excerpt:

The train from Paris to Brussels passes through fields sown for 2,000 years with the seed of war, and on the way north last February 1 to the opening sessions of this year's European Parliament, I was reminded of the brightly beribboned armies—Saxon, Roman, Norman, English, French, Spanish, Austrian, German, and American—that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory.

Condensed:
I thought about a lot of dead people on a train.

"Choir of Prostitutes":

When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero's hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes.

Hilary & Guiliani – oh, you two!

i have a real hate/love for this guy

"Brightly beribboned armies [...] that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory"
He's actually Terry Pratchett, isn't he?

got renewal notice in the mail (why don't they just email? eesh. maybe i check 'no' on that box?) and considering that i have put my last few issues of the mag in a pile of 'to be read' i had to think a little abt renewing. then i remembered that the reason i subscribed in the first place was b/c of the online archives. and right now i am reading an article about 'social life in russia' from 1889! it is great! so ok harper's you have yr renewal.

Fuk, yeah the archives. I totally haven't taken advantage of those and now I've been thinking about not renewing. I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]" covers. The last straw for me was the contagious Tazmanian Devil cancer that will kill us all.

bahahahahahahaha, that is kind of true. But they always have something fun and unexpected, too, like that recent thing on the Magic Olympics.

WHY (poitician running for office) WILL FUXOR TEH WORLD. Glad you took on Giuliani and Romney in the past year – mad challops, bros.

This makes me want to create a Harper's Mad Libs.

I've just gotten tired of the formulaic "THE COMING CRISIS OF _____ [detail from Garden of Earthly Delights]"

Yeah I tend to ignore them and just do the Readings and Fiction and Criticism sections. Sometimes the Postcards section is a real gem too, like that one from a couple months ago about the crust punks floating the Mississippi.

the Notebooks vary widely from STFU dumbass (the one about paying taxes to blow shit up) to OTM (public deference to high office)

Still better than when they were all written by Lapham, I guess

Ach, the newest issue (Jan. '09 – THE FUTURE) is kind of the worst. A 3-page index of reruns about George Bush, and all the articles are bleak retrospectives about "damn if the past eight years weren't balls p.s. the world is going to end & we're fuxored). Oh shit was it the worst issue.

As Rick Johnson once wrote, "Avoiding what subject?"

the article about Saakashvili + Georgia was good, i thought? as someone who knows very little about the region. i can't even look at that Bush + the economy infographic, though; it makes me want to die.

i liked reading the dfw eulogies in the 'readings' section

i mean didnt "like" but appreciated

yes i liked those, too; saunders made me tear up. so did delillo, actually.

ya. i hope i can have ppl who are as articulate and intelligent speak at my funeral.

also good source to mine for my modern authors fanfic

"damn if the past eight years weren't balls p.s. the world is going to end & we're fuxored

this is every issue of the last year and a half imo

I'll def have to stop at the bookstore & read the DFW pieces though.

Agreed on the suckage of latest issue.

By the way, Abbott, to answer your question from a year ago about Lapham's Quarterly, I LOVE IT. They keep getting better as they go on, and the latest issue, "Ways of Learning", is their best yet.

Nice!

guys i want a mag subscription, do i get

--harper's
--nyer
--atlantic
--other (suggest, plz!)

nyer has some good stuff sometimes but since it's a weekly it piles up all over the place but you feel guilty about just throwing away old copies so soon you have old copies of the nyer all over the place like some kind of urbane hobo

that is what happened to me with the economist

economist is pricey!! but the snide photo captions are worth it imo

i have some insanely cheap nyer subscription--like 29 bucks a year?--and i've had it forever, so i suffer from the urbane hobo problem, but i don't feel bad about it, since it's so cheap. i've had harper's, too, on and off, but their non-fiction just isn't as good as the nyers. though i think *generally* the fiction in the nyer is suckage.

if time is an issue (lol doctor gbx) i would suggest a monthly, like harper's? i dunno, depends on much time ya got

only one with cryptic now = harper's, so I vote for that.

vladimir-putin-in-tuxedo.jpg
Putin on the ritz

atlantic has changed so much in the eight years i've subscribed. william langewiesche's series on the unmaking of the wtc is what hooked me. he's long gone. david bradley bought it and it hasn't been the same--feels ever more bloggy, or like an expanded economist. the long articles aren't as long. there's at least one jeff goldberg or andrew sullivan "how to fix the world" article per, which doesn't do much for me.

yeah see that is the thing, the piling up, and the lack of time. :-/

my suggestion to you is no nyer, then :/

no more fiction in the atlantic either, though at least that means i never have to encounter christopher buckley again. c michael curtis has bizarre taste.

sandra tsing loh is always a treat.

i think the atlantic does a once a year fiction issue in august

so harper's, then, huh

yup. newsstand only. xpost

I cancelled my Harper's sub after the coup article a few years ago...it was getting too much like a left conspiracy mag.

yah i get that vibe from it too--why i never subscribed

but now lewis lapham has his own joint right?

assuming that kind of thing was coming from him...

the readings section in harper's and the fiction are the best parts, i thinks

plus if you subscribe, you get access to all of the back issues on line, which is awesome

The Atlantic works well as a bathroom mag, because the writing is generally pretty easy and lacking in insight, so when you finish your business and the article sucks it's no prob to move on. And since you prob don't use your bathroom very many times a day, it lasts a month. Good grief @ Sandra Tsing Loh; her articles drive me nuts. She had some thing about how she was getting divorced recently, and I was like, "really, that's a shock".

Lapham would write these long rants at the beginning of each mag too; I think the coup article was by someone else, but I take it Lapham commissioned or at least accepted it. If he's gone, I might go back, because yeah their archives are rad, and the fiction is nice.

new yorker, evan. i kind of hate harper's.

i had a subscription to the economist one year but it made me feel so guilty because i never read it and it came like every day it seemed so the piles of it i had lying around unread were physical testament to the many, many things i didn't know.

i couldn't even bear to start that article.

lol, I haven't read him in years but I feel like that was every "Easy Chair" (or whatever they called the editor's column at the time) he ever wrote. He seemed completely useless to me as a writer and thinker.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSlAnIbWoAAGoVF.png

smdh

"When journalists themselves wage campaigns to suppress the writing of other journalists, and intend to destroy a magazine for not toeing their ideological line, you can see how free speech truly is on the line." https://t.co/BjFbmBgqHJ

— Harper's Magazine (@Harpers) January 12, 2018

🙄

There are some judgments in that piece that bypass "right-wing columnist" and go straight to "failed human"

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

dud

the motives of these signatories aside, there's no attempt (by some) to establish thoughtcrime in the name of progressivism right now, huh? Check.

the motives of these signatories aside

sorry can't extricate letter from motives of signatories

which likely vary except in Wokeland

that's where i live

On the positive side, my homie wrote this one:
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/this-is-not-a-test-disaster-city-texas/