New and Improved Harper's

While perusing the contents of the April Harper's online, I noticed that there's a piece by Tom LeClaire entitled "They Call Me Mr. Difficult." Given LeClaire's penchant for challenging fiction and the reference to Franazen's Gaddis article.

I can because I just plunked down $17.00 for a Harper's subscription. Now I can read this article and all of the new Harper's, plus the complete archives, over the web. I like this. The NYRB has a similar setup, as does TNR. As far as I know, these are the only periodicals that do this.

I wish more would. Given BookForum's recent foray into putting all their material onto the web (from what I understand, this is a temporary thing), I hope they'll move to a similar model. I only started reading BookForum about a year and a half ago, and I've love to get into their archives. And The New Yorker as well.

Yes, I'm as big a fan of print as anyone, but I don't really mind reading magazines on the web. This makes them much easier to quote on my blog, and I can read them wherever I am. And this way I can donate my back copies to the library without having to worry about getting to that one article I've been meaning to read.

Anyway, back to the piece. It's a 1980 interview between Tom LeClaire and William Gaddis. Scary how interesting are the things that can come when two smart people talk.

LECLAIR: How do the novels get to be so long, if they don't start out with mass in mind?

GADDIS: If one is involved with a complicated idea, and spends every day with it, takes notes, and reads selectively with it in mind, ramifications proliferate. If one has what could be called an obsessional wish to exhaust an idea, understand it on six, seven, or eight levels, the book gets longer and longer.

There's also a choice bit about reviewers failing to read the whole of JR.

Comments

[Antoine Wilson]

Harper's has always been one of my favorite magazines. A few years ago, though, I learned how to do the puzzler in the back, and now the entire mag has to wait until I've figured the thing out.

A