On Magazines, Space/Time (but not space-time), and Peeling Labels

I must say, I enjoyed Andie Tucher's section on Newspapers and Periodicals--I would have been cool with it being a little longer, even. (Crazy, I know.)

Tucher's "Magazines and Reviews" made it into my "top two favorite sections" rankings, at least in part due to the fantastic opening line: "Magazines, unlike newspapers, had to work hard to find love" (397). I enjoy having my sympathy evoked for a material form, and I found it intriguing--but simultaneously unsurprising--that early American magazines were seen as "pale imitations" of their British counterparts.

Unsurprising because starting with things more British and using that as a springboard to work gradually into something that is truly American rather seems to have been, for lack of a better turn of phrase, the way America and the concept of what it's like to be American came into being, on all counts.

Intriguing because, given the risky nature of running a periodical in early America in the first place, it would seem like a great form and forum in which to experiment with creating something that is, from the very start, essentially American. (If you're going to fail, fail big, right?)

But then, as Tucher tells us, periodicals did not have the same appeal to writers in America as they did to writers elsewhere. And I wonder what that says about Americans and their conceptualization of time. Did the voice of the American public sphere not find itself best heard in periodicals, as the British voice so very much did, because we did not have the same anxieties concerning temporality? British periodicals created and fed off such anxieties, but in America, spacial, not temporal, anxieties, seemed to be a bigger factor.

Certainly, disseminating a singular novel across the country was more feasible. I can only imagine the anxieties that would have arisen had periodicals here had (or maybe they did?) a Magazine Day, where all the monthlies put out their next issue. How would that issue get to everyone on the same day? An issue would have to be done and printed that much sooner to be transported to all parts of the country in time for distribution day. Just thinking about how difficult that would have been makes me anxious, and I'm here in the good ol' 21 century.

Yet I can understand the rise of periodicals for very niche readerships of which Tucher speaks--people were attempting to bring their voices into an enormous public space, so that their voices could perchance become part of the--but not the--public sphere. These publications were of the middle-class variety, but that certainly does not negate the potential for readership from people of other classes. And it is periodicals of this sort, as Tucher says, that finally helped to "revolutionize the profession of authorship" in America (399). Great American writers were getting paid to write for these niche periodicals, and it is from their readership here that their work outside the periodical realm rose in popularity and esteem.

In this sense, the transformation of periodical culture into something more American resulted in a phenomenon that could certainly be labelled "British," too. Which makes me wonder if we lose the point and the power of history when we try to label things as British or American, domestic or sensational, middle-class or lower-class, etc. One of my favorite lines from Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf comes from Honey, when she's sitting drunk on the bathroom floor, peeling the labels off of bottles of alcohol. "I peel labels," she says, and in the context of the play, as in the context I'm discussing here, it makes you think of how often our labels don't hold, how they really cannot seem to get at--and in fact take away from--"The Real Thing," to borrow the title of Henry James's fabulous short story. From this perspective, labeling something and then neatly filing it away into its "proper" place really doesn't seem so proper.