Fungible Convictions

by Andrew Whitacre

Imagine, say, the R&D folks at an automaker tell their boss, “Market research shows our potential customers hate orange. We are therefore launching a new line of orange cars, and only orange cars, until our customers come around.” Insanity, yes? But this is an insanity shared by literary magazines: each lit mag is published precisely because no one wants to read it.

Sure, there’s also the ego of the founding editor, a moral sincerity, communal desperation, or sustained glee. But a motive all lit mags have in common is a belief that certain stories—and not others—should be pushed in front of the eyes of otherwise indifferent readers. It’s an industry dedicated to breaking entrepreneurship’s first rule: you can’t create your market. The market’s there, lit mag folks insist, people just don’t know it yet!

Year after year, though, magazines fail because they couldn’t convince people to care. Continue reading

The two past evenings I’ve had the pleasure of, first, seeing Sarah Vowell speak at the Ford Forum at Northeastern (following, strangely, in the footsteps of prior speakers Malcom X and David Duke) and, tonight, attending the release party for the new issue of AGNI.

With regard to Vowell, whose new book is Assassination Vacation, an account of the tourist industry surrounding American presidential assassinations, there’s not too much to be said that you couldn’t read in her book. The Q&A session that followed her reading, though, presents the opportunity to enumerate some rules for questioners: Continue reading