The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data

Abstract

The Little Magazine in the World of Big Data Sven Birkerts (bio) What I want to talk about, in the narrowest sense, is the place of the literary magazine in a culture that has, in terms of information and communication, as well as many other things, completely transformed itself in the last forty years—in the span of my adult lifetime. The fact that I’ve been present and interested for the whole duration gives me a vantage to speak from. This context of decades is important, since the literary magazine today, existing on paper and online, is still completely shaped by the idealism of its origins in the pre-digital world. I can try to characterize some of that idealism—or was it my idealism?—by looking back at what these journals were like when I was first coming up as a literary wannabe. At the very end of the sixties I lived in suburban Detroit, where we were served by a good public library and two decent little bookstores. I frequented both, knew their stock inside out. But it was not until I was seventeen that I first saw a lit mag. That happened not in my suburb but in downtown Detroit, near Wayne State University, in the beatniky area that my friends and I fled to whenever we could. We would go there to find coffeehouses, record stores, what were called head shops (do I need to gloss that?)—and it was there, in the far back of one of those places, on a revolving metal rack, that I saw my very first copies of New Directions and City Lights books, and my first literary journal—the Evergreen Review. I pause here to try to get back inside the moment. For it remains completely distinct in memory. That one magazine, thin as an average trade paperback, with a photo cover that I can’t quite recall, except that it was completely existential, that being, in my small circle, code for sophisticated, radical, against the mainstream, creative. The thing was, as they say, auratic; it was completely unique to me, as itself. It also became—in the way things could more easily happen before complete informational ubiquity—a doorway into another kind of culture, another way of living and looking at the world. It’s hard to imagine a correlative for this in our day, when everything is available, and a single search cue can put you on to the most arcane materials. For one consequence of such saturation and ubiquity is the complete erosion of that idea—and feeling—of the other. Which I will maintain was, those four decades ago, one of the distinguishing features of the little magazine. It was other. At the same time, or maybe for that reason, it had [End Page 224] an air of transgression. It seemed that it might give the real inside view of things that the mainstream media had airbrushed. This is subjective reminiscence, but I’ll stay with it for a bit. I jump forward five years to the early seventies. The counterculture has by now had its impact and is already waning. I have finished college and am living in the minor literary Mecca of Ann Arbor, Michigan, working in a bookstore, more keen than ever to find my way into the writing world. With the flourishing of good bookstores (it was the era of the first Borders) came the flourishing of the magazine culture—or so it seemed in that big college town. Alongside the staple mainstream publications you could find magazines like Ramparts, Rolling Stone, Creem, a renovated Esquire. And also new (to me) a whole array of very exciting little magazines: Paris Review, of course, Antaeus, Salmagundi, the Iowa Review, Kayak, Stand, a few others. They exuded independence and intensity—they were in the most seductive and covetable way literary. Some part of what I was picking up, of course, was my own projected obsession: I so wanted to be in one of those magazines, to be part of a table of contents, to be typeset, to be broadcast far and wide on paper. What could be finer than to be listed as...