In 1999 I wrote two short, topical essays a month for the Web site FEED. I thought, then, that I'd re-examine these pieces a year later to see what had been on my mind and to see if I still agreed with what I'd written. Here they are. Take a look at my 1999 Journal for this month, below, and join me in the Wicked Pavilion to discuss it.

October 15

"You don't have to like or subscribe to the mainstream to find yourself caught up in the desire for acclaim," explained Darby Romeo, the editor of the long-running zine Ben is Dead, in the publication's recently released final issue. Romeo was speaking generally about celebrity, the latest and final theme her publication has tackled (in typically obsessive eight-point type, with over 150 newsprint pages, largely devoid of white space). But as always she was also talking about herself. Romeo, you see, believes that publishing something she wants to read is the whole point of being in publishing. In a world where each issue of every newsstand magazine is pre-market-tested to death, such unflagging dedication to self-obsession has garnered her plenty of acclaim. So what does it mean, after 30 issues in almost 11 years, that Ben is Dead is finally dead?

Ben is Dead—whose amphetamine-fuelled coverage of everything from disinformation to '80s pop culture, not to mention all things Sassy, should earn it a prominent place in any dictionary definition of "zine"—is the canary in the coal mine of the moribund "zine revolution." If it goes under, its compatriots probably will, too. Those few naifs who still think self-publishing has any value whatsoever are doing their thing online now, where production and distribution costs are low, and where one's chances of being discovered (and recognized for one's efforts) are even lower. As long as there are Xerox machines and glue-sticks zines will always exist, but the few stalwarts who've struggled to raise production values by selling ads and printing glossy color covers are rapidly disappearing. Moreover, the dinosaurs who edit attractive and intelligent borderline zines like Bunnyhop, Mommy and I Are One, Giant Robot, and Bust just don't seem to realize how extinct they already are.

Traditionally, high-performing self-publishers like Darby Romeo have staggered forward against the gale winds of corrupt and bankrupt distributors, a seemingly infinite number of bounced checks, and a reading public barely interested in Granta, much less Bananafish. These crusaders have been fueled, more than anything else, by a shared contempt for the world of glossy newsstand magazines. "It's so easy to throw a mainstream magazine away," Romeo said in a phone conversation, "because they're all just trying to fill a space, one they think will generate money. I don't ever throw zines away." True, figures like David Eggers, an ex-editor of both the independently-published Might magazine and mainstream Esquire, have become increasingly adept at keeping fingers in both pies. (Eggers appears twice in the current issue of The New Yorker—once as the wacky self-publisher responsible for McSweeney's, and once as a respectable memoirist.) But Romeo aims for a different combination of recognition and independence. Though she yearns for acclaim—and she has, in fact, been temporarily famous for masterminding the one-shot I Hate Brenda newsletter—she's never been interested in mainstream approval. That's why her next project is, yes, another zine: but the old-fashioned kind this time, the kind where you get a friend at Kinko's to run it off for you after hours.

To outsiders, zines seem hedonistic, for too many zines are dedicated to sex, drugs, and Royal Trux. But for true believers like Romeo, zine-publishing is hedonistic only in the strictly philosophical sense: While publishing a well-written, well-edited, well-produced zine won't necessarily help you achieve pleasurable goals in your life, the activity of self-publishing is a pleasurable end in itself. Maybe that's why, when asked to describe Ben is Dead, Romeo says, "It wasn't a 'music magazine' or a 'pop culture magazine,' it was 11 years of my personal growth. It was me wanting to die only after having made a magazine because it was the best way to save my life at the moment."

October 29, 1999

Peter Beinart, the editor-elect of The New Republic, is "a journalist's journalist and an intellectual's intellectual, at once at home with grand ideas and alert to stubborn little facts." So enthuses head honcho Martin Peretz in the magazine's 85th anniversary issue this week. Clearly the "stubborn little facts" bit is a dig at ex-editor Michael Kelly, on whose editorial watch Stephen Glass pushed the epistemological envelope. As for the rest, perhaps the 28-year-old Beinart is being compared with Walter Lippmann, the Young Intellectual who helped found TNR in his late 20s. So what exactly is Peretz suggesting about the magazine's intellectual direction at 85? Only Leon Wieseltier Knows! Why else would the Hades-like lord of the back of the book choose to publish, in this particular issue, a long meditation by TNR senior editor James Wood on "The Myth of Sisyphus," an essay Albert Camus wrote... at the age of 28?

Although Camus was born the year Lippmann published his first book, the similarity between the two young intellectuals is striking. They shared an obsession with "drift," Lippmann's term for the tendency of people to move aimlessly through life. And both men believed that the antidote to drift is the substitution of conscious intention for unconscious striving; only by taking personal responsibility for our choices, they insisted, can we become fully human. But here they part company. Lippmann wanted to substitute "mastery" for the conflict and disorder of modern industrial society—which helps explain TNR's enduring belief in the possibilities of social control, and its longing for an instrumental state run by experts. (John Reed poetically described Lippmann as one "who wants to make the human race, and me,/March to a geometric QED.") Camus, however, was no technocrat. In "The Myth of Sisyphus" he describes the desire for a world in which rationality, justice, and order prevail as nothing but "nostalgia."

Wood's essay concludes that the myth of Sisyphus—who Camus suggested was liberated from his rock-pushing prison by recognizing its absurdity—is "movingly useless" as a metaphor for how to live. Had Camus ever read The New Republic, he would assuredly have responded in kind. "Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification," he wrote. "But after the absurd, everything is upset." Unlike Lippmann, who would have counseled Sisyphus to leave the boulder-management to the experts, Camus urged us to recognize that "chain of daily gestures" that constitutes a life of unwitting repetition, and to rebel against it. How? By opposing the world's inherent meaninglessness, not with "mastery," but with "our revolt, our freedom, and our passion."

"Change is constant in the world of Peretz," Michael Kelly has said of his former boss. But in recent years there has been a horribly comic repetitiveness to The New Republic's masthead follies; Beinart will be the sixth editor of that magazine in just a decade. Drift, it seems, has firmly established itself in the very place where Lippmann once reigned. Perhaps, then, instead of blaming editor after editor for TNR's accelerating loss of journalistic and liberal credibility, Peretz should recognize the absurdity of life, take responsibility for it (without trying to "master" it), and urge his new editor to do the same. Now, that might result in a magazine worth reading.