Dateline Los Angeles, July 12: In a move that stunned the handful of people in the United States who still read serious fiction, the Atlantic Monthly announced that it is shifting its literary editorship from the venerable magazine’s offices in Boston to the city of Los Angeles. Literary Editor Benjamin Schwarz explained the break with the publication’s other departments and its 146 year history by saying “not only are most of the Atlantic’s readers residents of California, but also that most of the most interesting writers with whom I regularly work are living in Los Angeles.”
Dateline Los Angeles, July 12: In a move that stunned the handful of people in the United States who still read serious fiction, the Atlantic Monthly announced that it is shifting its literary editorship from the venerable magazine’s offices in Boston to the city of Los Angeles. Literary Editor Benjamin Schwarz explained the break with the publication’s other departments and its 146 year history by saying “not only are most of the Atlantic’s readers residents of California, but also that most of the most interesting writers with whom I regularly work are living in Los Angeles.”
When I read this over coffee this morning I thought I was looking at the April Fool’s edition of the paper; I chuckled to myself and turned the page, expecting to find a piece about Lindberg’s having crashed in the Atlantic. Speaking of the Atlantic, I have been a subscriber to that magazine since taking over the payments from my father, who went to the big bookstore in the sky (or the ground) thirty years ago. I believe I can state with some certainty that I was the only enlisted sailor on any Navy ship of the seventies who slept with a stack of that particular magazine beneath his mattress.
The shift of Atlantic’s literary editor from the Athens of America to this Philistine province is a reflection of a lot of things, most of which will be bemoaned among the senior literati of the nation, the same folks who didn’t enjoy the change in format and style that occurred at the New Yorker. For those of you who weren’t watching, that particular sea-change involved such drastic alterations as the addition of a table of contents. The Sunday crossword crowd didn’t like that. Somehow they expected that magazine to go on as if it Harold Ross was still hiding Thurber in an upstairs cubbyhole. But of course, things change, and magazines are, after all, only businesses, even if they are institutions, and therefore have to pay the bills, though they would generally like to do better than that.
Thus it is that we have the Atlantic’s literary guy coming out to the coast so as to more easily do lunch with the sort of folks whose writing has increasingly graced the pages of that offering over the past few years, most of which stuff is as incomprehensible to the average Joe (including me) as the produce of the Transcendentalists was when Emerson started cranking it off.
The initial consequence of this move will be to raise a collective groan from the Old Establishment, some of whom will say to anybody in earshot that the world has gone to ruin and that Hollywood is calling the tune these days. Of course Hollywood is calling the tune: it’s been practically the only paying gig for writers who wanted to eat with regularity since Chaplin was tripping over his cane. Hey, that’s why I’m out here, waiting patiently for Ben Schwarz to find me reading my obscure little novel at the counter of a drugstore and lift me from this life of drudgery.
Michael McGrorty
References: http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-et-rutten12jul12.column
The Old Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/nov1857/nov1857.htm
And the new:
http://www.theatlantic.com
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