Magazine Report

ESQUIRE: Giselle Bundchen on the cover. Sorry, but with her basketball-player height and harsh features she looks like a striking transsexual. Whatever happened to ESQUIRE's yearly fiction issues? They used to actually put writers on the cover. (Okay, writers like wine-taster Jay "The Fop" McInerney, but still. . . .)
The magazine itself has the look of a women's fashion magazine. The short story in it, toward the back, is the kind of thing teens used to read in PENTHOUSE. I could hardly find the story among the ads and photographs.

THE NEW YORKER: Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates. A profile of Philip Roth. That about says it all. A few weeks ago they did a long piece on Don Rickles, who I thought was dead. The flagship of culture has become a mouthpiece for the geriatric set.
To Demi-Puppets: As long as you use shit like this as your model along with NYer house writers like Alice Munro and John Updike modern American literature will remain dead.

(I'll look at better mags next week, I hope, and maybe a coupla zeens.)