toastykitten

I have been obsessively reading the New York Review of Magazines. Which apparently is different from The New York Review of Magazines. I read mostly the stuff on the first link, which has a Magazine Death Pool blog, and reviews of other magazines such as Jane and Wondertime. It also featured a story on the now-defunct IPA, which was the distributor for many indie magazines, who folded in the wake of its bankruptcy. (Kitchen Sink and Clamor shut down because of it.)

Anyway, it's a pretty interesting read (at least for me), but also kind of snarky when they shouldn't be. For example, they bitch about being able to find most of Entertainment Weekly's content online in other forms, and imply that this means that the magazine is probably going to lose circulation over time because their subscribers can get it for free. That's faulty reasoning - a lot of people don't go online in the first place, and it's easy to read a $2 magazine on the train. Magazines are in this weird space right now - there's more and more magazines being launched everyday, but also more folding as they find out that they can't keep up with the Internet or find enough advertisers to support their content. On the flip side, there are some magazines that manage to defy the odds and actually increase circulation and pickup. The recent launches like Good and Geek seem to be doing okay, and magazines have started branding themselves in order to stay in business - such as Readymade and Dwell. It's a trend that I don't like, but which seems inevitable. (I mean, I saw Dwell-branded sheets in freaking Macy's at high-end designer prices - they look nice, but do people actually buy sheets based on a magazine they read?)

Hmm, I just had a thought: magazine publishing industry similar to the garment/sweatshop industry?

I'm still reading A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. I'm almost done with it, but I keep having to stop, because it gets really tedious sometimes. It's not that it's boring or hard to read - it's written in a very familiar tone, but she says the same thing over and over again. I also think she gives way too much credit to Buddhism. (It's not as simple or as bloodless as she seems to think it is.) I don't know how much she studied Buddhism before reading this book, and she doesn't mention it that often, but the implication is that people would be much better off if they approached religion as Buddhists do. It's weird that she keeps interrupting the history of Western conceptions of God with mentions of Buddhism, because it's totally distracting. Other than that, the book itself divides chapters into different conceptions of God - God of the Philosophers, God of the Mystics, etc. And now I'm on the one where maybe God is dead.

I LOVE this time of year. Mark gets red envelopes, too, which always makes me happy. Anyway, I drove up to Oakland at eight in the morning for our vegetarian breakfast and we took the kids - nieces, nephew, and Kaitlin to the Oakland Museum, where they were having a celebration for the new year. There were taiko drums, lots of arts and crafts, and we all got free pens and water bottles. They all had a good time, and I really enjoyed hanging out with them. They are so freaking adorable, and they say the funniest stuff, too, like:

"Give me some sugar, Bubba!" (As far as I know, this kid has never watched Evil Dead or knows who Bruce Campbell is. I was informed by her sister that "she says it all the time at home.")

"My name is Butt-Butt."

I finished a few books last week. I'm so surprised, especially since it took me for-fucking-ever to finish Foucault's Pendulum, which I would describe to most people as the "most boring thriller ever with a really stupid ending". Anyway, the books I've been reading:

Go Ask Ogre, by Jolene Siana

Jolene Siana was a huge fan of Skinny Puppy growing up, and she decided to write to Ogre, one of the members in Skinny Puppy (an industrial band), over a period of a few years. She made art out of these envelopes and journals and used the art and writing as a way to work through her depression without even realizing it. At the end she says that she realizes that this act of writing probably saved her life. Ogre kept all her journals, letters and artwork, and gave it back to her after nine years. The work itself is really, really raw - it's almost painful getting through it because of how thoroughly honest and candid the work is. She writes about her dysfunctional family, trying to find a place in the world, and cutting herself. At the end, we see a change of voice as the older Jolene reflects on her experience of re-discovering her younger self, and it's fascinating to see how much she's changed, yet still the same person. I sort of recognize where she's coming from - it's really easy to see why she kept writing to Ogre, even though he only wrote back a few times, and why she kept writing things she didn't feel she could admit to her closest friends. It was a way of working out her confusion and depression - and it feels good to know that someone else knows what you're going through. I don't think I was ever depressed in the same way she was, but I used to write to Mark all the time and it was really cathartic, but I would freak him out sometimes with the intensity of what I wrote. And what's funny is that I wrote to forget - as soon as I committed those words to paper I had worked through whatever angst I was going through and I felt normal again, or sane enough, at least.

There's a new Skinny Puppy CD out if you're interested.

The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong

This is the memoir of an ex-nun and her experiences after leaving the nunnery and trying to find her place in life. It's really funny, poignant, and interesting. She writes about how she goes into the nunnery in order to "find God", leaves, gets misdiagnosed by a psychiatrist, fails out of college, tries to get away from religion only to keep bumping into it. She writes in an engaging and careful way about religion, and finds herself getting angry with "God" and religion, and then eventually finding a way to meditate on "God" that is meaningful to her. She frequently compares the rituals and acts of religion with finding solace in art, and makes the point that the main monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, are not actually about "right belief", but about "right practice" - doing good imbues the divine in you. The idea of believing in God Himself is irrelevant. It's pretty fascinating, and gave me a lot of food for thought. I'm not really religious myself (I would call myself Buddhist if pressed), but I know that eventually we're going to have to deal with the question ourselves (since Mark is Christian and slightly more religious than me) - of what we want for our future, of how we want to raise our kids, etc.

I started Snow Crash, too, but I got bored. Maybe I'll go back to it later.