The Week
This week I got the latest Covid vaccine and also got my usual reaction: knocked on my butt for 24 hours. I’ve come to expect it and I take it as a sign that my immune system is healthy and aggressive. I’m not complaining.
It did, however, throw sand in the gears of my busy schedule, leaving me almost no time for blogging this week. Fortunately — fortunately for me, I dunno about you — one of those ragged chunks of autobiographical flotsam that are always drifting around in my head washed up on the shore of my consciousness, so I cleaned it up and now offer it to you.
Image of the Week
I took that picture in the park just upstream from us. Although it’s just half a mile as the duck swims, we used to drive several miles to get there. But this summer they removed the (very small and inconsequential) dam, and now we can walk along the riverbed all the way to the park. Well, until the rains come and the river rises.
Quote of the Week
I had an insanely long commute — New York to D.C. — when I worked at ‘National Geographic.’ I hate to waste time, so I spent my time by writing about my life on the premise that I might be able to pitch those as short essays to magazines. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I was writing a book.
— Charles M. Blow.
Recommendation of the Week
Check out Lee Felsenstein’s recent post on his Patreon page. There you can read about his upcoming book (which I helped with) and an event commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. The book will be available in about two weeks and tells of his participation in two revolutions and the ideas about community that he has been refining over the years.
Magazine and Me
I have had a lifelong love affair with magazines. When I was very young there were these things called general interest magazines, a concept and product that no longer exists. Back then my family subscribed to Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post, which meant at least one magazine in the mailbox every week, sometimes two or three. I read all these magazines cover to cover, and during my brief stint as a cub scout I received and devoured my personal monthly edition of Boy’s Life magazine too.
At twelve or thirteen, I tried my hand at creating a magazine of my own: Our World, with a hand-drawn world globe as its logo on the cover. I borrowed elements from all four of those magazines: the celebrity interview from the Post, news stories from Life, photo features from Look, a joke page from Boy’s Life. I made up all the stories and jokes and drew the “photographs” and illustrations and invented a masthead of regular writers, photographers, and artists, developing a distinctive style for each of them. Mack Hack was very matter-of-fact, B.B. Doran drew everyone bullet-headed. My production equipment consisted of eight sheets of typing paper, folded and spine-stapled, and a pencil.
(If you’re doing the math as you read along, did you get 32 pages, including the cover? That would be correct. Well done.)
I did have one real contributor: I recruited my four-year-old brother to do a cartoon feature. He invented two characters, Fuzzy Fox, who didn’t look much like a fox but was definitely fuzzy, and Mighty Missionary, who swung a lethal Bible on a chain. My sister was too young and too skeptical to draft into service, so I ghost-wrote a cooking column under her name.
I produced three issues of Our World magazine before moving on to creating one-off pencil-drawn comic books (my favorite: Hazard Smith and the Daredevils, about a team of post-World War I crop duster pilots and adventurers) and then science fiction magazines. I had a revelation when I tackled science fiction. It was clear immediately that I wasn’t going to write multiple science fiction stories to fill an issue, but that didn’t matter, I realized. What most interested me about a magazine was the Table of Contents.
I felt as though I was attuned to something in magazines that others weren’t. I connected with their structure, how they were put together. Why the joke page in Boy’s Life had to appear where it did. Pullquotes as appetizers. The bookending of an editorial up front and an anchor column on the last page. I felt as though I had X-ray vision and could see through their skin to their skeletons.
This was all delusional, of course. Everyone could see the skeleton of a magazine, because there it was right up front: the Table of Contents. I wasn’t seeing something others couldn’t see. I was just unnaturally obsessed with it.
That obsession has served me well in a long career of magazine work. I got to create real magazines, several of them, to be purchased and read by real people, and I got to play with TOCs, honing my ideas about hierarchy and a sense of completeness, an entrance and an exit, and the structural elements to produce a sense of unity and personality and flow from a collection of disparate elements.
I have this white whale magazine, Specs, that I have dreamed of creating for years and for which I have never got beyond the TOC and probably never will. I’ve repeatedly designed that TOC. I’m pretty sure I don’t want the magazine, I just want to perfect its TOC.
One TOC has tantalized me over the years: that of The New Yorker. The title and date centered at the top of the page, then that vertical shaft of page numbers five picas off center, with authors italicized and right justified on the left and titles and descriptions left justified on the right, for a kind of feather effect. Then the structure clues: All caps to name recurring elements and a bit of color to identify sections — only I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t think The New Yorker’s TOC is strictly hierarchical. And I have unresolved feelings about that.
Of Interest
When I was editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, we had a section in the back of the magazine titled “Of Interest.” Here are some things that I think you might find Of Interest.
Blogroll
This feature is on hiatus. I’m working on a better way to promote the blogs and sources I follow. I recently saw what Dave Winer is doing with his blogroll and I thought maybe I could up my game. New approach coming soonish.
First Verses
I’ve written a bunch of poems. They are by no means all limericks but this one clearly is. In its defense, it’s seasonal.
It’s invaded your coffee selections,
Polluted pies, cakes, and confections,
While its proper place is
To make spooky faces,
This squash with a carrot complexion.
Who, Me?
I’ve been a writer all my life, and computers entered the picture pretty early. With Paul Freiberger I wrote the seminal history of the personal computer, Fire in the Valley, the basis for the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. I’ve written short stories and poetry and books and columns for magazines, and have had a long and productive career editing books and magazines. For decades I was associated with the pioneering personal computer software developers’ magazine, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and I currently edit books for The Pragmatic Bookshelf and blog about artificial intelligence and other topics.
Coming Attractions
Thanks for reading. You can read all the back issues of Swaine’s World at my blog home. In the coming weeks, look for more Swaine’s Flames flashbacks, Dirt Road Diaries, bulletins from the AI revolution, tech history, and books.
Like the ToC that was there for all to see, I didn't quite realize the extent of your fascination/adoration of magazines and their structure when we worked together, but I guess that's what made our collaboration so much fun. Even though Dr. Dobb's could hardly be called a "general interest publication" we always shared a greater understanding of how the medium worked best and that influenced us to strive for more. Maybe we should create a magazine for magazine geeks?