March 1, 2006
"D'Ambrosio's dark, intense prose drives these stories like coffin nails."
Seattlest used to subscribe to The New Yorker. Actually, Seattlest still does subscribe to The New Yorker, but since late September we've barely managed to keep up with the cartoons each week, let alone more substantial content.
So we feel a bit guilty that someone else had to tell us that the March 6 issue features "The Bone Game," a story by local author Charles D'Ambrosio. Here's how Publishers Weekly summed up the story:
"The Bone Game" follows Kype, the listless heir to a huge fortune made in a forgotten past, and freeloader D'Angelo as the two drive west to spread Kype's maverick grandfather's ashes. When they pick up a Native American hitchhiker and detour to her Reservation, Kype's dissipation-as-coping-mechanism takes on a harsher, and deeper, cast.
The story's first paragraph, to whet your appetite:
They’d only taken a simple wrong turn somewhere—taken a wrong exit off the freeway, then got caught downtown in the maze of Seattle’s one-way streets—but to D’Angelo it was as if they’d travelled back in time to the nineteenth century. He looked out the Cadillac’s tinted window and saw, through a haze of watery green, a few Chinese men in loose slacks, old coolie stock, it seemed to him, struggling up the steep hill, stooped over as if shouldering the weight of a maul. “Look at those Chinks,” he said. “I bet they laid some track in their day.” Kype finally found the street he wanted and steered the car north through Pioneer Square. An Indian sat on the curb with his head in his hands, tying back two slick wings of crow-black hair with a faded blue bandanna. A pair of broken-heeled cowboy boots lay in the gutter while he aired his bare feet. D’Angelo rolled down his window, waved a gun in the air, took a bead, and dry-fired. The hammer struck three times against empty chambers, but in his mind D’Angelo had dropped the Indian, right there on the sidewalk. He raised the barrel to his lips and blew away an imaginary wisp of smoke."The Bone Game," along with seven other stories, will be collected in Dead Fish Museum, due to hit bookstores on April 21. Per Publishers Weekly, it's "a gemlike set of eight stories in which wayward, self-deceiving characters set out to make order of their customary chaos—and realize they are more likely to find unhappy company than catharsis."
In the meantime, you can read 2005 interview with D'Ambrosio; a 2000 short story, "Her Real Name"; and Christopher Frizzelle's review of the 2004 essay collection Orphans, and his subsequent critique of other publications' reviews.
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Pff. The New Yorker.. my ass. If you took The Stranger and published in a magazine with a glossy cover and charged five buck and issue and sold it nationally it would still be a better read than the New Yorker. In the internet age people that still subscribe to dead tree self-righteous magazines like the New Yorker are tools of a dying paradigm.
Did the Stranger stop printing on paper recently? Why don't we have a post about that?
And I subscribe to at least 8 dead tree magazines. Apparently I'm content to be the kind of tool I am.
Yeah, Jake, normally I enjoy your other-side-of-the-Sound commentary, but come on. I just restarted my subscription to Harper's, and you can have my copy when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Magazines, by their nature, allow in-depth views you can't get in weeklies or online. They fund really good writers and editors. And last but not least, I still dig those New Yorker cartoons.
This tool of a dying paradigm subscribes to a lot of magazines, the New Yorker included.
No the Stranger still is publishing a physical newspaper.
I can’t remember when was the last time I was actually impressed by an old fashion dead tree magazine.
My parents read the New Yorker despite the fact they live in West Richland Washington. I have never been impressed with it and since most paper magazines are owned by a media conglomerate and are written to a lowest common denominator, are confined to the available page space, they are dated as soon as they are printed and are based on moving physical dead tree paper around. I would rather curl up next to my fireplace with my iBook and RSS Reader than some publishing relic of the nineteenth century.
No the Stranger still is publishing a physical newspaper.
I can’t remember when was the last time I was actually impressed by an old fashion dead tree magazine.
My parents read the New Yorker despite the fact they live in West Richland Washington. I have never been impressed with it and since most paper magazines are owned by a media conglomerate and are written to a lowest common denominator, are confined to the available page space, they are dated as soon as they are printed and are based on moving physical dead tree paper around. I would rather curl up next to my fireplace with my iBook and RSS Reader than some publishing relic of the nineteenth century.
If this were a paper magazine I would be reading this a week or so after it was published and mailed and my comment letter might be published a week later. It is just so Victorian.
Oy vey, Jake. Get over yourself.
Last time I checked it was 2006. Children born in 1990 will be eligible to vote for the next President of the United States. That 18 year old does not remember a time before the Internet and CDs. How important do you think paper magazines are going to be when that 18 year old grows up?
I loved reading Nicholas Negroponte’s (http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/ ) dead tree book Being Digital and his theory on what literacy is going to mean in the twenty first century.
So your point is what? Because magazines will eventually disappear, we're obligated to stop reading them right now?
My guess on print magazines in 10 years: less important than they are now, more important than you think. But I'm not reading magazines 10 years from now, I'm reading them now.
We're all tools of dying paradigms, which is why it's important to settle in with paradigms you enjoy.
In fact, I was curled up in bed last night with this past week's issue, and it had: a compelling profile of Alberto J. Mora--the former general counsel of the United States Navy--on the record for the first time ever about his dissenting opinions on the Bush administration's stance on torture, a fantastic piece on how the southern coast is consuming Louisiana at an alarming rate, and a witty short from Sedaris on his family's art "collection" activities. I'm still a huge fan of this magazine, I really don't know of many other publications that have the quality of writing that the New Yorker does these days. And it would suck on my iPod in comparison, I'm still a sucker for the glossies.
Well if you are still into distribution of dead tree editions of time sensitive periodical media then go ahead and enjoy them. As a collector of old Nintendo games I can see your desire for retro media.
Strange to be having this discussion with folks that run a web publication.
OK, I'm weighing in one more time and then shutting up. I don't see the two as mutually exclusive, Jake. Are you done with books, too? I don't want to get too Edward Tufte on you, but the format and resolution of oh-so-last-century glossies is still far more desireable from a casual reading perspective, especially if I want to sit down, drink something and actually read for a while. The web is great for quick, shortbit consumption, but magazines and books are still superior for actual READING.
I still read dead tree books because most digital books use some idiotic DRM that is platform specific and not future compliant and the selection is bad. I have no problem buying DRMed Apple iTunes files because the DRM can be easily defeated and turned into future compliant and platform neutral MP3 files.
A book is supposed to be much more permanent than a magazine while your typical magazine issue has their articles as long as the average American can read on the toilet having the average poo. Books and music are supposed to last. Magazines are meant to be disposable.
But there are whole kinds of virtual books that I have read and massive amounts of on line text. But the whole concept of disposable distributed paper media does not click with me anymore.
I'm waiting until I have the magazine to read this.