Departments
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Week of 29 October 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 12 |
Feature Article
Scrappy irony
Grad's mag mixes scholarly ideas with pop culture
By Eric McHenry
In a recent issue of the online publication Feed, contributing editor Joshua Glenn (SED'92) mourned the moribundity of zines -- little, low-budget, independent-spirited magazines: "As long as there are Xerox machines and glue-sticks," he wrote, "zines will always exist, but the few stalwarts who've struggled to raise production values by selling ads and printing glossy color covers are rapidly disappearing."
An ironic observation, given its source: Glenn is founding editor of Hermenaut, a fiercely independent "Digest of Heady Philosophy" that began as a small, photocopied, saddle-stapled affair and now features ads and glossy color covers. He is, in his own words, one of the "naifs who still think self-publishing has . . . value."
But Glenn can live with irony. In fact, he can't live without it. "Creative interpretation and empathy alike only become possible," he writes in Hermenaut's most recent issue, "once we've employed irony to decenter ourselves, and learned to see (and hear) the world with new eyes (and ears)."
The issue, Hermenaut's 15th, is dedicated to the theme Fake Authenticity. In its introductory essay, Glenn draws a bright line between the sort of search for authenticity that leads to sincere self-scrutiny and the sort that leads to purchasing prefrayed Dockers pants. A healthy sense of irony, he writes, is indispensable to the former and incompatible with the latter.
Appropriately, Hermenaut 15 is itself prefrayed. Art director Anthony Leone found a way to make the cover look convincingly tattered.
"He did such a good job that when we got the copies back from the printer, we opened the boxes and said, 'Oh no! What happened?'" Glenn recalls. "Then we remembered that he'd done the fake dog-earing."
The issue has sold out its run of 5,000, with the help of a flattering write-up in the October issue of Lingua Franca, the "Review of Academic Life." That's another bit of irony, since Hermenaut is determinedly antiacademic. Glenn, who founded the magazine in 1992, is equally interested in philosophy and contemporary culture, and particularly interested in criticism that draws upon both. What he doesn't care for, he says, is the sort of bloodless, jargon-filled writing he associates with academe.
"Of all the submissions we get," says Glenn, "the worst are from academics. The truth is, grad students and professors are so often locked into a certain way of writing, which when I was a grad student I enjoyed and was good at. But ultimately I decided it was a stifling way to communicate. It's basically just writing for other grad students and professors, not for the general educated public.
"I like to distinguish between scholars and academics," he says. "I consider myself an amateur version of the first, and a refugee from the second mode."
Even so, his ties to the University are various and close. He is the son of SED Professor Charles Glenn and has two younger brothers currently enrolled, Peter (CAS'02) and Matthew (CAS'03). A graduate of Williams College, Joshua came to BU in 1991 to pursue a master's degree in sociology. He enjoyed and benefited from his course work, he says, "but I kept asking myself, 'What's the point? Do I study sociology just to become a sociology professor? Isn't that tautological?'"
Completing, instead, a master's at SED, he intended to teach but "accidentally became an editor, at the Utne Reader, while living in Minneapolis." He remained there for two years, producing Hermenaut on the side. Though not wholly satisfying, the job helped Glenn identify a personal proclivity he now believes is genetic. "Editing is in my blood," he says. "I'm descended from Fletcher Harper, the book publisher who started Harper's magazine, and I just can't stop."
Reasoning that "someone needed to make a magazine that I'd enjoy reading," Glenn began Hermenaut while finishing up his studies at BU. After two issues, he took on A. S. Hamrah as a coeditor and contributing writer. Hamrah had seen and admired Hermenaut 1. So by the time novelist Pagan Kennedy, a common friend, introduced the two at a party, a connection of sensibilities had already been made.
"What appealed to me about Hermenaut originally," says Hamrah, "was the fact that it could back up its attitude with real ideas. It was going to grapple with things."
"I wanted a magazine that talked about difficult, scholarly ideas in an accessible and relevant way," says Glenn, "one that connected the most high-flying theory with everyday life, with pop culture and the contemporary scene."
With Hermenaut, he seems to have realized that wish. The magazine's name is a conflation of hermeneutics, an academic buzzword meaning the science of interpretation, and astronaut. A hermenaut, Glenn told Lingua Franca, is "a traveler in search of signification." Articles in past issues have seen such improbable topic pairings as "Kierkegaard and Liberace" and "Jorge Luis Borges writes The X-Files."
Along with Feed, Glenn is a contributing editor for the English magazine Idler. He also writes freelance articles and book reviews, and hopes to secure a contract soon for a "big book about my eight favorite philosophers and what they have in common." (Along with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the roll call includes Oscar Wilde, Bruce Lee, and Abbie Hoffman.) Glenn says he needs these side projects to keep his bills paid. Through ads, subscriptions, and shelf sales, Hermenaut generates enough money to pay writers, illustrators, the art director, and an office manager, but not enough to afford Glenn or Hamrah a salary. For them, it's a labor of love.
"Of course I was writing about Hermenaut," Glenn says of the Feed column in which he lamented the obsolescence of zines. "It's a dinosaur. That it exists at all . . . is purely a triumph of the will."