Precious Is As Precious Does:

Tell It To McSweeney

Alterna-journal feature, 3/31/99

Hard not to like a magazine whose almost all-text cover starts out, “People, People—Stop blaming yourselves! Have you forgotten: Timothy McSweeney’s Blues/Jazz Odyssey? (For short, say ‘McSweeney’s’) Also known as: ‘Pollyanna’s Bootless Errand.'” This sort of quaint, literate entertainment doesn’t stop for the next 192 pages and back cover.

For decades now (even before TV’s ascendancy), left- and right-wing Puritans alike have bemoaned Americans’ supposed disinterest in The Word; when actually it’s been dull word-packages that’ve drawn all the yawns. If literary journals, political position papers, and highbrow essays could be presented with this sense of smart whimsey, the verbal marketplace could be a quite different landscape indeed.

The origins of McSweeney’s are somewhat remarkable. David Eggers used to edit Might, one of those San Francisco magazines that claim to be “regional” or even “national” in scope but which end up almost never writing about anything outside San Francisco. Might’s post-Spy brand of smug satire wasn’t all that hot in this reviewer’s opinion, but it generated enough impressive portfolio clippings that, upon its demise, Eggers shipped off to NYC to make his way in the “real” magazine racket. There, he plies his way through what he describes as mind-numbing day-job employment at dumb, audience-despising corporate publishing; while by night, from his Brooklyn home office, he puts out McSweeney’s and its associated web site, both as an outlet for his and other writers’ “real” work and as a low-budget example of how word-wrangling ought to be done.

The second McSweeney’s finally arrived in local stores, a little over four months after the first issue of the “Quarterly Concern” appeared. Worth the wait? Yeah.

Within the densely-typeset covers are slightly less densely-typeset interior pages, comprising a variety of pleasant and often insightful prose, fiction, and humor. Of particular note is “Hooper’s Bathhouse” by co-editor Todd Pruzan. It’s a neat, tidy, precise send-up of children’s adventure fiction (one of those genres frequently touted by self-proclaimed defenders of The Word as something we must force-feed our kiddies whether they like it or not), in particular the 1980s “choose your own adventure” subset of that genre. Some of the paths in the story (spread out throughout the magazine) lead to nothing but afternoon boredom. Some lead to afternoon boredom amplified by underage pot smoking. And one path leads to the child heroes discovering some real old-time sea pirates—who promptly slay the kids.

With such a perfect example of exposing the predictability of formula fiction, it’s almost silly to refer to the magazine’s factual stories as “stranger than fiction.” Yet that tired phrase well applies to Sean Wilsey’s “The Republic of Marfa,” a long, leisurely account of an extremely remote west Texas hamlet that got turned into one of those southwest art-colony towns more commonly found in New Mexico and Arizona, and which hosted an international conference on modern architecture whose visiting egos barely fit in the region’s wide open spaces.

Many other delights await within the second McSweeney’s. I’ll leave it for you to find them, in the magazine and on the website. Just remember two of the slogans on issue #2’s cover, “Have Pity,” and “Precious Is As Precious Does.”

Perhaps if it came out more often, I could get tired of the preciousness. But 4x/year, plus weekly-or-so online doses, works out just fine. Beyond the preciousness, though, could McSweeney’s help spur a revival of fine copywriting and editing, of reading for pleasure? Couldn’t hurt trying. Or, as the motto on the bottom of issue #1’s cover states, “We Mean No Harm.”