September 21, 2007
The Walrus on Lapham's Quarterly
The October 2007 issue of the Canadian magazine The Walrus—known semi-affectionately as the “Canadian wannabe Harper’s”— is now online. Its editor, Ken Alexander, who is something of a lightning rod in the Canadian publishing industry (see this summer 2007 Ryerson Review of Journalism article for more about that), writes a brief piece about former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham’s new magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly:
If Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were once “lions in winter” but have become frail before the mighty edifices of the news media, just-in-time delivery, and YouTube (as Don Gillmor recently explained in these pages), Lapham continues to fight, and with his latest project, Lapham’s Quarterly, he takes direct aim at the egotism of our age by challenging the very idea of novelty. His goal? To render mute the ignorant, dangerous, and useless conceit that everything has not already happened; that it has not already been said, written, and experienced; and that there is little to be learned by rooting around in the archaeology of mind and matter. If Mailer and Vidal, in their best selves and their best writings, were profoundly contemporary, Lapham has returned to where he began as an undergraduate student: to history. And yet the tension remains.
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Months ago, Lapham generously sent me the original prospectus for the Quarterly for my comment and appraisal. … Unlike so much these days (resumés that are clearly truncated works of fiction, PR so ubiquitous that truth has been shipped offshore, and other scams high and low), the prospectus promised and Lapham’s Quarterly delivers. It is not the next big thing; it is the real thing, a must-read.
The October Harper’s contains a full-page advertisement announcing the quarterly will arrive on newsstands November 13. I’m somewhat daunted by the four-issue yearly subscription rate of sixty dollars, but will nonetheless pick up the debut, which is on the theme “States of War” and contains among its “correspondents” Thucydides, George S. Patton, Homer, Winston Churchill, and St. Augustine. For a taste of what's to come, the new quarterly's editors have maintained a blog of sorts, featuring a few posts a week, since late May: click here to read it.
As an addendum, the graphic that accompanies Alexander's piece depicts an eye. Its iris has clock hands, and at the cardinal points are the years 2001, 0, 1042, 1776. I can guess what is denoted by 2001, 0, and 1776; I'm less confident about what historically important event occurred in 1042. Wikipedia tells me that in that year Michael V of the Byzantine empire was deposed by popular revolt; that Empress Zoe married for the third time and elevated her husband to the throne as Constantine IX; and that Magnus I of Norway became King of Denmark. None of these events seem epochal, though it could be my ignorance that leads me to this conclusion. Perhaps the date was thrown in to the graphic as a red herring? Perhaps enterprising readers would feel inadequate about their grasp of history and therefore would be more willing to subscribe to LQ . . .