- Email: [email protected]
The Literary Marriage of Style and Substance
Seeing the Sites The Literary Marriage of Style and Substance Bob Persing, Column Editor Literary journals are often nonconformists when it comes to design and presentation, and literary e-journals are no exception. This column reviews some prominent literary e-journals, to see what design elements they are employing. Other sites that contain unusual or creative design ideas also are reviewed. Serials Review 2003; 29:43–47. © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All Rights Reserved.
tion and usually little discussion. Only the prediction of sitewide searching has come true for many titles, either through internal search engines or through external search sites such as Google. As in the print world, there is still a strong distinction between scholarly publishing—which tends to be strictly formatted and uniform—and the relative freedom of more “literary” publishing. Of course, much literary work is presented outside of the structures of e-journals, through author homepages and other free-form sites. There are, however, some online literary journals that retain the journal form while playing with the stylistic strictures inherent in structure. Comparing the literary merit of the contents of these e-journals is difficult; there are no fixed standards for judging “literary” quality. It is possible, however, to compare the forms that these journals take, and draw some conclusions about the marriage between those styles and the content they encompass.
If you grind all the individuality out of man, and make him but part of a machine, you are hastening the death of Art, for Art is born of individuality. —Elbert Hubbard1 Almost all design is bad, and on the Web, that percentage of terribleness rises considerably. —David Eggers2
The dialectic between form and substance in writing is nothing new. Presentation always has had the ability to complement or detract from the material being presented. The twentieth century, in particular, saw the rise of the “literary” journal, a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and images that often eschewed standard literary forms. These journals were frequently envisioned and led by dynamic and often dogmatic editors whose vision encompassed style and content equally. When the Web era dawned in the early 1990s, there were many predictions about the styles and forms that new online journals would take. Early predictions were that the new publications would lose some of the structures inherent in print publications. The concept of numbered issues often was predicted to be a casualty. Indexes would become obsolete when sites made all text accessible through search engines. Articles would not be static entities but rather would be continuously and dynamically updated. Surveying the field now, those early predictions seem overly rosy. Most e-journals today are online reproductions of print counterparts. Most still organize their articles into issues, in many cases to replicate the print version. The advent and acceptance of Adobe’s PDF format, which mimics an online photograph of a page, may have encouraged this maintenance of the old forms. Once published, most articles remain static with no modifica-
An Early Stylistic Innovator An early literary journal on the Web was Urban Desires, whose name and URL (http://desires.com/) imply a more salacious type of website than “literary journal.” Based in New York, Urban Desires is a wide-ranging literary magazine with a mixture of fiction, interviews, book reviews, and poetry. The designers of Urban Desires decided to be funky rather than formal. Its homepage (see Figure 1) features birds flying between horizontal lines (resembling a musical staff). The lines are designated “asphalt,” “crimson,” and “ether,” for obscure reasons. The birds use Flash animation to fly along the staff lines. (On computers without Flash installed, they just sit still.) Above them, instead of traditional categories such as “Issues,” there are three choices: Viewfinder, Tunnel, and Slide Rule. Only by trial and error will the user discover the article archive, which is under the Tunnel label. These same obscure categories occur as a header on all other Urban Desires pages.
Persing is Head of Serials, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6278; e-mail: [email protected]. edu.
0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S0098-7913(02)00264-2
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Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
who was most famous for “the medium is the message.” The “articles” in The McLuhan Probes actually consist of McLuhan-like aphorisms, resembling Zen koans set against related visual images. These articles are given volume and issue numbers, as if each were an issue consisting of one article. The substance of each “article” may seem to be slight, but in McLuhan’s philosophy that is precisely the point. • Electronic Book Review (http://www.electronicbook review.com/) is a site that experiments not so much with its contents but with the indexing of them. This journal has designed a very different table of contents. Using XML and metadata tagging, it creates a dynamic thematic index of all articles. Columns represent somewhat creative categories such as “music sound noise,” “image narrative,” and “internet nation.” Graphics underneath indicate which articles fall (even partially) into each category. This feature gives readers (most of whom are not interested in reading every single review) a quick comparative representation of the site content—an interesting approach for a review journal.
Figure 1. Urban Desires
Many of Urban Design’s articles contain multimedia elements. The “About” file, for instance, which is linked from the homepage, is actually two MP3 sound files.3,4 Many other articles contain motion graphics and sound accompaniments. There is an entire section called “Moving Images,” which (with the proper helper applications) presents short films and images. The archive is arranged with a “timeline” device that graphically shows the viewed issue’s position within the journal’s run. Innovations such as these, reflect the “new” ideas about e-journal design mentioned above. Urban Desires debuted in November 1994, in the heady days when these ideas first were being advanced. Yet the journal, although still fully accessible, did not survive. No new content is being added. Cessation affects e-journals differently than it does print journals; because it is often not clear that updating has ended, a dead e-journal seems more vital than a complete row of bound volumes. This cessation could be a sign of the natural life of a literary journal, which often expires when the individual creators lose interest, or it could indicate that its creative use of the e-journal form was too far ahead of the curve for users to assimilate.
Two Major Players In the print world, the literary journals with the largest circulation are not necessarily the most stylistically innovative. The idea of “circulation” does not precisely translate to the online world, because most online literary journals are free of charge. Still there are some that are read and discussed more widely than others. Two questions worth asking about the more popular titles are the following: “Do they show stylistic innovations comparable with the titles discussed above?,” and “Do the stylistic choices they make agree well with the content they publish?” McSweeney’s Probably the best-known Web-based literary journal is McSweeney’s (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/). Online since 1998, McSweeney’s is a Web-based journal with a related quarterly print counterpart. It has grown into a true publishing phenomenon in the attention that is paid to its Website and to its ancillary print publishing operations. The journal’s founder and editor, David Eggers, is well known for his publishing philosophies and showmanship. He has used a strange mixture of self-effacement and self-promotion to gain recognition for McSweeney’s and its contents. He often goes with other McSweeney’s writers on public reading tours, such as a recent “outing” for the rock band They Might Be Giants. He also gives numerous interviews, but often responds to questions with obscure or recursive answers. Eggers’s memoir of childhood, modestly entitled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a national bestseller.5 He chose to have his second book (and first novel), You Shall Know Our Velocity, published in paper by McSweeney’s and sold only through the Website or through selected independent booksellers.6
Glances at Other Creative Sites It is rare to find such depth of formal innovation among more active e-journals. The following sites, however, present some individually creative design elements: • One poetry e-journal, Apples and Oranges (http://
www.aopoetry.com/index.html) plays a musical sound file when you access the homepage. It also takes related links (about poetry competitions, reviews, a literary search engine, and so forth) and puts them in a separate pop-up window, which it urges users to keep minimized on their desktop while surfing. Within the magazine, the editors have abandoned the issue form and simply give an index of poets with no indication as to how many poems are available for each author or which content is the most recent. • The McLuhan Probes (http://www.dreamwv.com/ probes/) employs creativity of form inspired by its subject matter and explores the visual philosophy of the Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan,
44
Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
The first unusual design element of McSweeney’s is the homepage. In actuality, there is no homepage—at least not in the traditional sense. The main page contains a few assorted links at the top, which are mainly advertisements for their print publications, such as the Eggers novel. The bulk of the page, however, consists of the latest article posted. It does not matter whether the article is fiction or nonfiction or how ephemeral it is; if it is new, it leads. The next obvious element is the simplicity of the page design (see Figure 2).Eggers has made his design philosophy for McSweeney’s clear:
At first glance, the site organization seems equally simple. The “Archives” link brings you to a very long list of all site content in reverse chronologic order. The only numbering systems are publication dates embedded in the article URLs. The only link at the top of each page is the logo, which is a hotlink to the homepage. When you look at the bottom of each page, however, you find another, more idiosyncratic organizational system. A set of links takes you to various content categories. A few of these are traditional choices, such as “Letters to McSweeney’s” and “Order Inquiries and Address Changes.” Recent examples of other, more creative categories include:
Almost all design is bad, and on the Web, that percentage of terribleness rises considerably. Because the medium is inherently cheap-looking, there’s almost no way to dignify it. So at McSweeney’s, we just put the words up. It takes our Web guy, Kevin Shay, about two minutes.7
• Letters from Elizabeth Miller’s Dad, Who Fights
Fires While Flying a Helicopter • Interviews with Drivers of Lunch Trucks • Warnings Affixed to Laboratory Doors at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology • Short Fiction Starring or Mentioning David Gergen
The site lives up to this philosophy in terms of its simplicity. Every article is presented in one centered column of plain black text on a white background. The only graphic is the journal’s line-drawing logo, centered at the top of every page. All articles appear in a plain, small typeface, single spaced, and difficult to read after several screens. Hyperlinks appear in a muted red, so even they do not stand out from the visual monotony. Visited links are displayed in a light gray color, almost indistinguishable from the white background. There are no hyperlinks within articles, a design choice made explicit in the “About” file.8
The links are centered on the screen, and some run to more than one line, making it difficult to tell where one link ends and the next begins. Categories with recentlyadded content (or “newish,” as the site calls it) are marked with a bullet. A large number of links—both in the top and bottom of the homepage and in the archives—are self-referential. Talking about McSweeney’s seems to be something McSweeney’s likes to do. In the Archives, for instance, no distinction is made between their own press releases (usually discussing print publications) and the site’s articles. This preoccupation with itself is also something its fans enjoy. There are entire Websites devoted to Eggersiana, including a Web log by a seemingly obsessed teenage fan.9 There is surprisingly little interactivity within the McSweeney’s site itself. Discussion groups and comment boards would seem naturals for these types of articles. McSweeney’s does have a long Letters column, but it consists mostly of short, new submissions and not comments on previous articles. The e-mail addresses of authors are hotlinked only if the author requests it; otherwise, the text is presented in a simple, unidirectional manner from author to reader. A strange sidelight is that there are two URLs that are often confused with that of the McSweeney’s magazine. The site www.mcsweeneys.com is supposedly owned by a Massachusetts family named McSweeney. Eggers reports that the Massachusetts McSweeneys agreed to underwrite www.mcsweeneys.net when it was in danger of folding; however, many believe that this is just one of Eggers’s hoaxes and that he actually runs both sites.10 Meanwhile, in 2000, a parody site was put up at www.mcsweeneys.org, which was so close to the original that some people assumed that Eggers himself was behind it, although he denies it.11 The .com site has since been taken down, and the .org site has changed into an online t-shirt store. Given the idiosyncratic content of the journal’s content, perhaps McSweeney’s simple format is the best option. The plainness of the black text on a white background, uniform on every page, adds stability. The chronologic archive
Figure 2. McSweeney’s
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Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
encourages readers to think of all articles as equal. More complex screen graphics or design might overwhelm some of the (consciously) slight material.
tiques and Reviews,” “Ficciones,” and “The Foreign Desk.” Links to these categories at the bottom of every page take you to index pages for the category’s articles. An old-fashioned, single search box allows for a keyword search of all content. The Corpse’s editorial voice is eclectic but explicit. Every issue has an editorial linked at the top of the lefthand column—in newspapers, this spot is usually reserved for the lead headline. The editorials often discuss the current issue’s philosophy. This journal being part of both the literary and the unrestricted-access world, they always beg for money. The editorial process is laid unusually frank through a section called the Cyber Bag, which mainly consists of lists of contributors, whether or not their works were accepted. In some cases, the editors add their opinions about the works, the authors, or both. The opinions can be helpful (“That was a damn good way to start a story; but the ending couldn’t compare.”) or facetious (“Dude, if this story is true, you best see a doctor.”)13 Codrescu credits this interplay between editors and authors as a major factor that encourages young authors to submit to the Corpse.14 Interactivity is present, but limited. Each author’s name is linked to a pop-up window containing contact information of the author’s choosing. Some choose to put only street addresses, but most give an e-mail address, a Website, or both; otherwise, as with McSweeney’s, a standard Letters column is the only form of response to articles, and the letters usually deal only tangentially with previous content. Most articles do not contain internal links. The Corpse’s serial stories are the one exception, because each new chapter links to the previous one (but not to any earlier ones). Multimedia is similarly limited, but not absent, in the Corpse. Every issue features a gallery of art and articles, organized by artist. The music reviews also include music samples, when available. Issue 10 includes the complete text of a new play, with accompanying songs in downloadable sound files.15 The majority of the site, however, is pure unadulterated text. The site currently is using a fairly large, bold typeface for its articles. Earlier typefaces were less bold, but still quite legible. Despite its evocation of Surrealism through its title, the articles in Exquisite Corpse are really more realistic and grounded than are those in McSweeney’s, and a large percentage of the articles are nonfiction essays. Many articles run 2000 to 3000 words or more. The subject matter is often international in scope and more political than other literary magazines. The Corpse also is more explicit than other literary magazines in terms of sexuality; erotica is included in words and pictures—usually several pieces per issue. Altogether, the effect is of a journal based in a real, albeit somewhat funky, world.
Exquisite Corpse Exquisite Corpse (http://www.corpse.org/), “A Journal of Letters and Life,” was a print literary journal for many years before becoming an online publication in 1997. It is currently edited by Andrei Codrescu, a Romanianborn novelist, poet, and frequent National Public Radio commentator. The title refers to a Surrealist parlor game of the 1920s, in which people make up a sentence by each person adding a word without knowing what words have already been added.12 Codrescu teaches in New Orleans, Louisiana, and conveys something of that city’s adventurous influence in both the title and style of this journal. Exquisite Corpse, or “the Corpse” as it colloquially refers to itself, is organized on the old-fashioned system of issues, currently being issued semiannually. The look and feel of the layout, however, changes every issue or two. Issue 1 had a futuristic, 1960s-style logo, and content links along the left column. A New Orleans-inspired logo of dancing skeletons lasted from issue 2 through issue 7, when a predominantly black and red color scheme gave way to white backgrounds and yellow subheads starting with issue 8. With issue 11, the whole scheme changed again to imitate a print newspaper, complete with Gothic masthead (see Figure 3). Presumably more change is coming. The Corpse’s homepage is arranged in three columns like an old-fashioned newssheet. Unlike a print journal, however, the Corpse’s homepage has the ability to extend vertically as long as is necessary. The homepage of issue 11 extends for nearly twenty screens on a fifteen-inch monitor. Earlier designs divided these columns with vertical lines, but those have since disappeared. A title bar at the top of every page has logical categories like “Home” and “Archives.” On the current homepage, articles are divided into categories such as “Cri-
The Future None of the current literary magazines examined are as experimental as were the early pioneers such as Urban Desires, although each displays some design creativity in conjunction with its literary aspirations. McSweeney’s contrasts the creative quirkiness of its contents with an
Figure 3. The various faces of Exquisite Corpse
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Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
explicitly plain look, and a simple (although also somewhat quirky) site organization. Exquisite Corpse organizes its data in more traditional ways, but enlivens its presentation with creative and constantly changing graphic design. Both article magazines emphasize the human elements—the editors are still in control, not the Web servers. Even the machine-generated index screen of the Electronic Book Review, which could seem sterile and mechanical, is somewhat humanized by its unusual categories. It is this marriage of human creativity and Web technology that holds out hope for further development of the literary e-journal form.
6. Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2002). 7. Norton, “Reprise of McSweeneys.net.” 8. “About McSweeney’s.” McSweeney’s, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ about/ (22 November 2002). This quote was presumably written by Eggers, although no credit is given. 9. Gary Baum, “My Manifesto,” 2000–, http://www.aphrodigitaliac. com/mm/ (22 November 2002). 10. Ken Layne, “McPovertys.net: Why the Tech Press Believes Good Sites Can’t Afford to Exist,” Online Journalism Review 10 April 2000, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/ethics/1017964932.php (22 November 2002). 11. Douglas Wolk, “Cracking Eggers,” Village Voice June 27/July 3, 2001, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0126/wolk.php (22 November 2002).
Notes 1. Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (New York: W.H. Wise, 1927), 88.
12. “Exquisite Corpse,” http://exquisitecorpse.com/definition.html (22 November 2002). This site is not a part of the Exquisite Corpse journal; it is an unrelated site about the playing of the word game.
2. David Eggers, as quoted in James Norton, “Reprise of McSweeneys. net,” Flak Magazine, 15 February 2000. http://www.flakmag.com/web/ mcsweeneys2.html (11 February 2003).
13. Mark Spitzer, “Cyberbag 11,” Exquisite Corpse spring/summer 2002, http://www.corpse.org/issue_11/cyber_bag/index.html (22 November 2002).
3. Gabby Shannon and Kyle Shannon, “The Beginning.” Urban Desires, http://desires.com/Story/Chapter1/Ch1Complete.mp3 (12 November 2002).
14. Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, “Corpse Readers, Take Heart,” Exquisite Corpse, Cyber #1, 1999. http://www.corpse.org/ issue_1/index.html (11 February 2003).
4. Gabby Shannon and Kyle Shannnon, “UD’s Impact,” Urban Desires, http://desires.com/Story/Chapter2/Ch2Complete.mp3 (12 November 2002).
15. Marc Ellis, “A Man of His Times,” Exquisite Corpse fall/winter 2001/2002, http://www.corpse.org/issue_10/stage_screen/ellis.htm (22 November 2002).
5. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
47
tion and usually little discussion. Only the prediction of sitewide searching has come true for many titles, either through internal search engines or through external search sites such as Google. As in the print world, there is still a strong distinction between scholarly publishing—which tends to be strictly formatted and uniform—and the relative freedom of more “literary” publishing. Of course, much literary work is presented outside of the structures of e-journals, through author homepages and other free-form sites. There are, however, some online literary journals that retain the journal form while playing with the stylistic strictures inherent in structure. Comparing the literary merit of the contents of these e-journals is difficult; there are no fixed standards for judging “literary” quality. It is possible, however, to compare the forms that these journals take, and draw some conclusions about the marriage between those styles and the content they encompass.
If you grind all the individuality out of man, and make him but part of a machine, you are hastening the death of Art, for Art is born of individuality. —Elbert Hubbard1 Almost all design is bad, and on the Web, that percentage of terribleness rises considerably. —David Eggers2
The dialectic between form and substance in writing is nothing new. Presentation always has had the ability to complement or detract from the material being presented. The twentieth century, in particular, saw the rise of the “literary” journal, a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and images that often eschewed standard literary forms. These journals were frequently envisioned and led by dynamic and often dogmatic editors whose vision encompassed style and content equally. When the Web era dawned in the early 1990s, there were many predictions about the styles and forms that new online journals would take. Early predictions were that the new publications would lose some of the structures inherent in print publications. The concept of numbered issues often was predicted to be a casualty. Indexes would become obsolete when sites made all text accessible through search engines. Articles would not be static entities but rather would be continuously and dynamically updated. Surveying the field now, those early predictions seem overly rosy. Most e-journals today are online reproductions of print counterparts. Most still organize their articles into issues, in many cases to replicate the print version. The advent and acceptance of Adobe’s PDF format, which mimics an online photograph of a page, may have encouraged this maintenance of the old forms. Once published, most articles remain static with no modifica-
An Early Stylistic Innovator An early literary journal on the Web was Urban Desires, whose name and URL (http://desires.com/) imply a more salacious type of website than “literary journal.” Based in New York, Urban Desires is a wide-ranging literary magazine with a mixture of fiction, interviews, book reviews, and poetry. The designers of Urban Desires decided to be funky rather than formal. Its homepage (see Figure 1) features birds flying between horizontal lines (resembling a musical staff). The lines are designated “asphalt,” “crimson,” and “ether,” for obscure reasons. The birds use Flash animation to fly along the staff lines. (On computers without Flash installed, they just sit still.) Above them, instead of traditional categories such as “Issues,” there are three choices: Viewfinder, Tunnel, and Slide Rule. Only by trial and error will the user discover the article archive, which is under the Tunnel label. These same obscure categories occur as a header on all other Urban Desires pages.
Persing is Head of Serials, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6278; e-mail: [email protected]. edu.
0098-7913/03$–see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S0098-7913(02)00264-2
43
Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
who was most famous for “the medium is the message.” The “articles” in The McLuhan Probes actually consist of McLuhan-like aphorisms, resembling Zen koans set against related visual images. These articles are given volume and issue numbers, as if each were an issue consisting of one article. The substance of each “article” may seem to be slight, but in McLuhan’s philosophy that is precisely the point. • Electronic Book Review (http://www.electronicbook review.com/) is a site that experiments not so much with its contents but with the indexing of them. This journal has designed a very different table of contents. Using XML and metadata tagging, it creates a dynamic thematic index of all articles. Columns represent somewhat creative categories such as “music sound noise,” “image narrative,” and “internet nation.” Graphics underneath indicate which articles fall (even partially) into each category. This feature gives readers (most of whom are not interested in reading every single review) a quick comparative representation of the site content—an interesting approach for a review journal.
Figure 1. Urban Desires
Many of Urban Design’s articles contain multimedia elements. The “About” file, for instance, which is linked from the homepage, is actually two MP3 sound files.3,4 Many other articles contain motion graphics and sound accompaniments. There is an entire section called “Moving Images,” which (with the proper helper applications) presents short films and images. The archive is arranged with a “timeline” device that graphically shows the viewed issue’s position within the journal’s run. Innovations such as these, reflect the “new” ideas about e-journal design mentioned above. Urban Desires debuted in November 1994, in the heady days when these ideas first were being advanced. Yet the journal, although still fully accessible, did not survive. No new content is being added. Cessation affects e-journals differently than it does print journals; because it is often not clear that updating has ended, a dead e-journal seems more vital than a complete row of bound volumes. This cessation could be a sign of the natural life of a literary journal, which often expires when the individual creators lose interest, or it could indicate that its creative use of the e-journal form was too far ahead of the curve for users to assimilate.
Two Major Players In the print world, the literary journals with the largest circulation are not necessarily the most stylistically innovative. The idea of “circulation” does not precisely translate to the online world, because most online literary journals are free of charge. Still there are some that are read and discussed more widely than others. Two questions worth asking about the more popular titles are the following: “Do they show stylistic innovations comparable with the titles discussed above?,” and “Do the stylistic choices they make agree well with the content they publish?” McSweeney’s Probably the best-known Web-based literary journal is McSweeney’s (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/). Online since 1998, McSweeney’s is a Web-based journal with a related quarterly print counterpart. It has grown into a true publishing phenomenon in the attention that is paid to its Website and to its ancillary print publishing operations. The journal’s founder and editor, David Eggers, is well known for his publishing philosophies and showmanship. He has used a strange mixture of self-effacement and self-promotion to gain recognition for McSweeney’s and its contents. He often goes with other McSweeney’s writers on public reading tours, such as a recent “outing” for the rock band They Might Be Giants. He also gives numerous interviews, but often responds to questions with obscure or recursive answers. Eggers’s memoir of childhood, modestly entitled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a national bestseller.5 He chose to have his second book (and first novel), You Shall Know Our Velocity, published in paper by McSweeney’s and sold only through the Website or through selected independent booksellers.6
Glances at Other Creative Sites It is rare to find such depth of formal innovation among more active e-journals. The following sites, however, present some individually creative design elements: • One poetry e-journal, Apples and Oranges (http://
www.aopoetry.com/index.html) plays a musical sound file when you access the homepage. It also takes related links (about poetry competitions, reviews, a literary search engine, and so forth) and puts them in a separate pop-up window, which it urges users to keep minimized on their desktop while surfing. Within the magazine, the editors have abandoned the issue form and simply give an index of poets with no indication as to how many poems are available for each author or which content is the most recent. • The McLuhan Probes (http://www.dreamwv.com/ probes/) employs creativity of form inspired by its subject matter and explores the visual philosophy of the Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan,
44
Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
The first unusual design element of McSweeney’s is the homepage. In actuality, there is no homepage—at least not in the traditional sense. The main page contains a few assorted links at the top, which are mainly advertisements for their print publications, such as the Eggers novel. The bulk of the page, however, consists of the latest article posted. It does not matter whether the article is fiction or nonfiction or how ephemeral it is; if it is new, it leads. The next obvious element is the simplicity of the page design (see Figure 2).Eggers has made his design philosophy for McSweeney’s clear:
At first glance, the site organization seems equally simple. The “Archives” link brings you to a very long list of all site content in reverse chronologic order. The only numbering systems are publication dates embedded in the article URLs. The only link at the top of each page is the logo, which is a hotlink to the homepage. When you look at the bottom of each page, however, you find another, more idiosyncratic organizational system. A set of links takes you to various content categories. A few of these are traditional choices, such as “Letters to McSweeney’s” and “Order Inquiries and Address Changes.” Recent examples of other, more creative categories include:
Almost all design is bad, and on the Web, that percentage of terribleness rises considerably. Because the medium is inherently cheap-looking, there’s almost no way to dignify it. So at McSweeney’s, we just put the words up. It takes our Web guy, Kevin Shay, about two minutes.7
• Letters from Elizabeth Miller’s Dad, Who Fights
Fires While Flying a Helicopter • Interviews with Drivers of Lunch Trucks • Warnings Affixed to Laboratory Doors at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology • Short Fiction Starring or Mentioning David Gergen
The site lives up to this philosophy in terms of its simplicity. Every article is presented in one centered column of plain black text on a white background. The only graphic is the journal’s line-drawing logo, centered at the top of every page. All articles appear in a plain, small typeface, single spaced, and difficult to read after several screens. Hyperlinks appear in a muted red, so even they do not stand out from the visual monotony. Visited links are displayed in a light gray color, almost indistinguishable from the white background. There are no hyperlinks within articles, a design choice made explicit in the “About” file.8
The links are centered on the screen, and some run to more than one line, making it difficult to tell where one link ends and the next begins. Categories with recentlyadded content (or “newish,” as the site calls it) are marked with a bullet. A large number of links—both in the top and bottom of the homepage and in the archives—are self-referential. Talking about McSweeney’s seems to be something McSweeney’s likes to do. In the Archives, for instance, no distinction is made between their own press releases (usually discussing print publications) and the site’s articles. This preoccupation with itself is also something its fans enjoy. There are entire Websites devoted to Eggersiana, including a Web log by a seemingly obsessed teenage fan.9 There is surprisingly little interactivity within the McSweeney’s site itself. Discussion groups and comment boards would seem naturals for these types of articles. McSweeney’s does have a long Letters column, but it consists mostly of short, new submissions and not comments on previous articles. The e-mail addresses of authors are hotlinked only if the author requests it; otherwise, the text is presented in a simple, unidirectional manner from author to reader. A strange sidelight is that there are two URLs that are often confused with that of the McSweeney’s magazine. The site www.mcsweeneys.com is supposedly owned by a Massachusetts family named McSweeney. Eggers reports that the Massachusetts McSweeneys agreed to underwrite www.mcsweeneys.net when it was in danger of folding; however, many believe that this is just one of Eggers’s hoaxes and that he actually runs both sites.10 Meanwhile, in 2000, a parody site was put up at www.mcsweeneys.org, which was so close to the original that some people assumed that Eggers himself was behind it, although he denies it.11 The .com site has since been taken down, and the .org site has changed into an online t-shirt store. Given the idiosyncratic content of the journal’s content, perhaps McSweeney’s simple format is the best option. The plainness of the black text on a white background, uniform on every page, adds stability. The chronologic archive
Figure 2. McSweeney’s
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Persing / Serials Review 29/1 (2003) 43–47
encourages readers to think of all articles as equal. More complex screen graphics or design might overwhelm some of the (consciously) slight material.
tiques and Reviews,” “Ficciones,” and “The Foreign Desk.” Links to these categories at the bottom of every page take you to index pages for the category’s articles. An old-fashioned, single search box allows for a keyword search of all content. The Corpse’s editorial voice is eclectic but explicit. Every issue has an editorial linked at the top of the lefthand column—in newspapers, this spot is usually reserved for the lead headline. The editorials often discuss the current issue’s philosophy. This journal being part of both the literary and the unrestricted-access world, they always beg for money. The editorial process is laid unusually frank through a section called the Cyber Bag, which mainly consists of lists of contributors, whether or not their works were accepted. In some cases, the editors add their opinions about the works, the authors, or both. The opinions can be helpful (“That was a damn good way to start a story; but the ending couldn’t compare.”) or facetious (“Dude, if this story is true, you best see a doctor.”)13 Codrescu credits this interplay between editors and authors as a major factor that encourages young authors to submit to the Corpse.14 Interactivity is present, but limited. Each author’s name is linked to a pop-up window containing contact information of the author’s choosing. Some choose to put only street addresses, but most give an e-mail address, a Website, or both; otherwise, as with McSweeney’s, a standard Letters column is the only form of response to articles, and the letters usually deal only tangentially with previous content. Most articles do not contain internal links. The Corpse’s serial stories are the one exception, because each new chapter links to the previous one (but not to any earlier ones). Multimedia is similarly limited, but not absent, in the Corpse. Every issue features a gallery of art and articles, organized by artist. The music reviews also include music samples, when available. Issue 10 includes the complete text of a new play, with accompanying songs in downloadable sound files.15 The majority of the site, however, is pure unadulterated text. The site currently is using a fairly large, bold typeface for its articles. Earlier typefaces were less bold, but still quite legible. Despite its evocation of Surrealism through its title, the articles in Exquisite Corpse are really more realistic and grounded than are those in McSweeney’s, and a large percentage of the articles are nonfiction essays. Many articles run 2000 to 3000 words or more. The subject matter is often international in scope and more political than other literary magazines. The Corpse also is more explicit than other literary magazines in terms of sexuality; erotica is included in words and pictures—usually several pieces per issue. Altogether, the effect is of a journal based in a real, albeit somewhat funky, world.
Exquisite Corpse Exquisite Corpse (http://www.corpse.org/), “A Journal of Letters and Life,” was a print literary journal for many years before becoming an online publication in 1997. It is currently edited by Andrei Codrescu, a Romanianborn novelist, poet, and frequent National Public Radio commentator. The title refers to a Surrealist parlor game of the 1920s, in which people make up a sentence by each person adding a word without knowing what words have already been added.12 Codrescu teaches in New Orleans, Louisiana, and conveys something of that city’s adventurous influence in both the title and style of this journal. Exquisite Corpse, or “the Corpse” as it colloquially refers to itself, is organized on the old-fashioned system of issues, currently being issued semiannually. The look and feel of the layout, however, changes every issue or two. Issue 1 had a futuristic, 1960s-style logo, and content links along the left column. A New Orleans-inspired logo of dancing skeletons lasted from issue 2 through issue 7, when a predominantly black and red color scheme gave way to white backgrounds and yellow subheads starting with issue 8. With issue 11, the whole scheme changed again to imitate a print newspaper, complete with Gothic masthead (see Figure 3). Presumably more change is coming. The Corpse’s homepage is arranged in three columns like an old-fashioned newssheet. Unlike a print journal, however, the Corpse’s homepage has the ability to extend vertically as long as is necessary. The homepage of issue 11 extends for nearly twenty screens on a fifteen-inch monitor. Earlier designs divided these columns with vertical lines, but those have since disappeared. A title bar at the top of every page has logical categories like “Home” and “Archives.” On the current homepage, articles are divided into categories such as “Cri-
The Future None of the current literary magazines examined are as experimental as were the early pioneers such as Urban Desires, although each displays some design creativity in conjunction with its literary aspirations. McSweeney’s contrasts the creative quirkiness of its contents with an
Figure 3. The various faces of Exquisite Corpse
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explicitly plain look, and a simple (although also somewhat quirky) site organization. Exquisite Corpse organizes its data in more traditional ways, but enlivens its presentation with creative and constantly changing graphic design. Both article magazines emphasize the human elements—the editors are still in control, not the Web servers. Even the machine-generated index screen of the Electronic Book Review, which could seem sterile and mechanical, is somewhat humanized by its unusual categories. It is this marriage of human creativity and Web technology that holds out hope for further development of the literary e-journal form.
6. Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2002). 7. Norton, “Reprise of McSweeneys.net.” 8. “About McSweeney’s.” McSweeney’s, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ about/ (22 November 2002). This quote was presumably written by Eggers, although no credit is given. 9. Gary Baum, “My Manifesto,” 2000–, http://www.aphrodigitaliac. com/mm/ (22 November 2002). 10. Ken Layne, “McPovertys.net: Why the Tech Press Believes Good Sites Can’t Afford to Exist,” Online Journalism Review 10 April 2000, http://www.ojr.org/ojr/ethics/1017964932.php (22 November 2002). 11. Douglas Wolk, “Cracking Eggers,” Village Voice June 27/July 3, 2001, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0126/wolk.php (22 November 2002).
Notes 1. Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (New York: W.H. Wise, 1927), 88.
12. “Exquisite Corpse,” http://exquisitecorpse.com/definition.html (22 November 2002). This site is not a part of the Exquisite Corpse journal; it is an unrelated site about the playing of the word game.
2. David Eggers, as quoted in James Norton, “Reprise of McSweeneys. net,” Flak Magazine, 15 February 2000. http://www.flakmag.com/web/ mcsweeneys2.html (11 February 2003).
13. Mark Spitzer, “Cyberbag 11,” Exquisite Corpse spring/summer 2002, http://www.corpse.org/issue_11/cyber_bag/index.html (22 November 2002).
3. Gabby Shannon and Kyle Shannon, “The Beginning.” Urban Desires, http://desires.com/Story/Chapter1/Ch1Complete.mp3 (12 November 2002).
14. Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, “Corpse Readers, Take Heart,” Exquisite Corpse, Cyber #1, 1999. http://www.corpse.org/ issue_1/index.html (11 February 2003).
4. Gabby Shannon and Kyle Shannnon, “UD’s Impact,” Urban Desires, http://desires.com/Story/Chapter2/Ch2Complete.mp3 (12 November 2002).
15. Marc Ellis, “A Man of His Times,” Exquisite Corpse fall/winter 2001/2002, http://www.corpse.org/issue_10/stage_screen/ellis.htm (22 November 2002).
5. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
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