McSweeney's Internet Tendency

Along with looking at McSweeney's Issue #4 next week, we'll also be glimpsing at its website from that era, and some of the immediate predecessors to both.

Some of the earliest manifestations of Eggers' aesthetic -- the playfulness with visual formats, near-performance art gestures, and in addressing readers directly -- can be seen in Smarter Feller!, a comic strip he co-wrote (and then became sole author of) at SF Weekly in the 1990s.  In particular, have a look at the comics dated 11/13/96, 2/19/97, 3/19/97, and 7/23/97.

The issue of Might magazine that I passed around in last week's class also dates from this same period; the posthumous collection Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp captures the general feel of the magazine, though there's really no substitute for an actual issue. (To the right: a cache of them, found by local favorites Green Apple Books.)

The launch of McSweeney's is well covered in The Art of McSweeney's, but it received a huge boost in attention about a year in, with its coverage in a "Next Generation" themed issue in the October 18th 1999 issue of the New Yorker.  Here's an archived page of what a new reader would have then seen upon coming to the McSweeney's Internet Tendency website.

The website, particularly in its humor as edited by John Warner, carved out a distinct short-form niche of its own over the years. But the material on the site that most directly addressed McSweeney's itself was directed at potential writers -- both for and about.  For the former, in "To Submit: Some Guidelines," there's a playful but (over time) increasingly pragmatic page addressing how to submit to a journal that might have otherwise seemed a cipher.

For the latter, in "If You Are Going to Write About McSweeney's," there was -- well, mockery. McSweeney's satire of media coverage, media figures, and particularly public literary personas -- something that could already be seen in Might magazine -- came from both deep familiarity with and skepticism towards these media, especially in the hackery of reductive hot takes and cultural shorthand. Perhaps the most straightfaced of this brand of humor was in Marny Requa's "Recent Headlines Explained," which took the dull puns of lazy headline writing and painstakingly explained them in a way that underlined their sheer vacuity.

Another favorite tactic of this media satire was a gleeful deflating self-importance. It's not too surprising that those newly arriving readers in October 1999 found Todd Pruzan's sendup of anti-ironic jeremiadist Jedidiah Purdy on that front page; or that earlier that year, the site ran a "confession" that Times Book Review editor Michiko Kakutani was herself a fictional construct ("I Am Michiko Kakutani").  Neal Pollack -- who assumed the persona of the raging Maileresque id of "America's Greatest Living Writer" -- perhaps embodied this form most completely in his 1998 demolition of portentious white guilt, "I Am Friends With a Working Class Black Woman."

Through all this, the aesthetic of the website itself was (and has largely remained) almost defiantly plain.  It's probably worth remembering that in endlessly hyped Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s -- let alone now -- this is exactly what websites were not supposed to be turning into.  And yet, that same month -- in October 1999 -- the experimental writer and hypertext pioneer (and later McSweeney's author) Robert Coover gave this address in San Francisco that sounded this similarly contrarian note about the development of web aesthetics:

IN TERMS OF NEW SERIOUS LITERATURE, the Web has not been very hospitable. It tends to be a noisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven, chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders, in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heard or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a moment or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven by ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and the Net is shapeless. The discrete object is gone, there’s only this vast disorderly sprawl, about as appealing as a scatter of old magazines on a table in the dentist’s lounge. Literature is traditionally slow and low-tech and thoughtful, the Net is fast and high-tech and actional.... 

Certainly, the world is full still of subversive and obstreperous writers, and they will not take being made redundant lying down. Text at the outset of this new millennium remains our traditional source of content, of meaning, imagination’s primary trigger, and writers will continue to use it as their tool of choice, if not their only one, even if readers do not.