Relentless Yawp

Though I grew up in Chicago reading the Sun-Times and the Daily News from a precociously early age (and thus claim a historical interest), I haven't decided yet whether the fulminating about the rapidly thinning forest of daily newspapers is misguided nostalgia, crass self-interest (yes, there is also enlightened self-interest), or just a subject to fill the rapacious needs of a nonstop news cycle. Personally, I think the verbiage and ballyhoo would be better spent preserving and nurturing magazines--and I am not talking about those shopping catalogs masquerading as something more. You know which ones I mean.

Happily, there are always those quixotic sorts who keep the torch lit, illuminating ideas and stories overshadowed by the relentless yawp of the so-called mainstream media. A Public Space, out of the writers' paradise of Brooklyn, N.Y., fits that bill nicely. The latest edition features David Shields, T.C. Boyle, and Richard Powers along with poetry by Derek Walcott, Idra Novey, Eric Pankey, Ron Padgett, Mary Jo Bang, and of course the proverbial "more."

And for those of you who share my concern about the deforestation of little magazines, A Public Space's web site makes mention of the demise of Triquarterly magazine, callously shuttered by its sponsor, Northwestern University, and in a stroke that exhibits why we need such institutions reprises first editor Charles Newman's foreword to Triquarterly's first issue in 1964:

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Right on with the "Right On."