Digital Reading Done Right: A Successful Online Lit Mag

Do you like your lit mags digital? The editors of The Wag’s Revue do, and they make no secret about thinking they’ve bet on the right horse. The current issue of this online quarterly marks the journal’s second anniversary, and the editors’ note at the beginning looks back somewhat sheepishly at their opening manifesto against, first, all print magazines and, second, all other digital magazines. “With endless gigabytes of storage space,” they said back then, “editors of the online corpus sacrifice stringent controls and adopt a shotgun approach, publishing mediocrity en masse, obscuring the rare gem.” (This opening salvo is still available under the “about” link on the site). The Wag’s Revue was launched to show everyone how this online publishing business should be done, by bringing the editorial standards and design sense of a print magazine to an online publication.

Of course, TWR is not the only magazine to go online, and to apply editorial standards in doing so, but it has taken the “online magazine” concept more literally than most. The magazine is published quarterly (notwithstanding the hiatus since the Spring 2011 edition, during which time the magazine has been conducting a fiction contest) and each issue has a cover, table of contents, and discrete pages. Reading an issue is a little like flipping pages on an e-reader, although the website does not offer any downloadable files for reading on portable devices. Neither is there any good way to print out the pages of this journal to keep them. Readers would probably use a download function if it were offered, but that would mean missing out on the meticulously designed website in shades of plum and lime. If the danger of reading online is the constant temptation to go look at something else, The Wag’s Revue combats that impulse with a genuinely immersive website that goes some way toward replicating the advantages of a print publication.

The Spring 2011 issue is full of animals in snappy-looking suits, as illustrated by Ryan Berkeley. The shark on the front cover is joined by an elephant, bat, peacock, and sloth, each one serving as the frontispiece to one of the issue’s sections. One isn’t obligated to read the magazine straight through from front to back, but there’s a perverse pleasure in going cover to cover in an online publication.

Starting at the beginning, then, the reader finds two interviews with writers Sam Lipsyte and Wayne Koestenbaum. These are, thank heavens, not responses to an e-mailed list of questions but true conversations, with give-and-take between interviewer and subject, and with a bit of background color thrown in for good measure (e.g. “Lipsyte ordered a burger, while Nice drank on an empty stomach”). Sam Lipsyte discusses his latest novel, The Ask, and the work that came before it. The interviewer, Dylan Nice, is obviously an acute and perceptive reader of Lipsyte’s work, and he draws the interview into engaging discussions of setting and style.

The only major failing of this interview is the lack of context: Nice proceeds as if we have all read all of Lipsyte’s fiction already, including a blurb he got from Gordon Lish, which is discussed but never quoted. Overall, the interview is a provocative look at Lipsyte’s creative process and the way he creates “inevitable but surprising” plots for his short stories and novels.

In the second interview, Wayne Koestenbaum discourses engagingly on his research into the Marx brothers and his reading of Harpo as “utterly queer” regardless of whether the actor Arthur Marx was gay or not. This conversation provides a window into Koestenbaum’s deeply attentive and theoretical method of doing cultural studies, and into his definitions of queerness and queer art. The interview as a whole puts the rest of us to shame for being so drastically less prolific than Koestenbaum is.

A sloth in a necktie welcomes us into the poetry section of the journal. Wag’s Revue chooses to group all the poetry together, and each of the three poets featured has contributed a body of poetry at least eight pages long. Of these, Rebecca Bates’ “OK, Julian and other poems” is the most cohesive. It begins with the title poem, “OK, Julian,” and goes from there to a poem called “As Julian Assange,” which in turn segues into a series of fragments written “as” various people all sitting in a hotel lobby, including Tao Lin, a caffeine addict, and the poet herself, Rebecca Bates. Whether “OK, Julian” is actually about Julian Assange is not explicitly stated, but there are enough lines about newspapers, rape accusations, Scandinavia, and “eavesdropping on the President” to suggest the correspondence here is real. These poems are written in an accusatory, keenly observant voice:

How do the witch-hunted fare at night in the train station
knowing stateheads are in cahoots or at least feigning?
Or in the coughing morning, Julian, when Prime Minister
strokes teegr and makes accusations of theft?

Annie Christian’s “Peace Sign = Weishaupt’s Rule of Fives / Death Rune” is as elusive as its title. Any short excerpt from this collection of poems sounds lucid enough; the complication is in the line breaks, where the poems slide into new constantly new settings, voices, and situations, with only the faintest connecting thread to guide the way through the labyrinth. Meanwhile, Michael Ives’ “Queue Bits” shifts, ventriloquist-like, from one voice to the next, covering terrain ranging from the ÇatalHüyük archaeological site in Turkey to a modern school board election, all in a startlingly off-the-cuff voice: “My dog threw up in the concept car. / Which reminds me of Laocoön.”

There are four nonfiction contributions, in three strikingly different modes. Diana Seuss’ “Turd” and Paul Lisicky’s “Palace of Empty Rooms” are written with the immediacy of a short story. If they had wanted to, these writers could easily have sold their pieces as fiction, although reading them as factual reports gives them a different impact. M.J.C. Clark’s “The Heavenly Holographic Soul Doctor” is a consummate work of literary reportage, a closely attentive account of a conspiracy theorist who works with people who believe they have been abducted by aliens. Clark guides the reader through this material with an assured hand, and with only the faintest bit of editorializing. He does both the reader and his subject a favor by taking the subject’s questions seriously, at least for the duration of the essay.

One of the pieces in the nonfiction section is in a different format altogether, showcasing what Wag’s Revue is able to do as an online publication. John Bresland’s “The Seinfeld Analog” is a video essay. Bresland is a bit of a pioneer in this form, sometimes in collaboration with his wife, writer Eula Biss. Bresland reads his prose essay while showing footage of Seinfeld, of the Rwanda genocide, and of himself washing his car. This isn’t just an illustrated essay, and it’s a different species from documentary shorts; it’s a form in which the language and the images complement and play off each other, sometimes in such a pointed manner that the video is almost painful to watch. This work is a powerful indictment of American popular media and the priorities betrayed by our television programming, and it’s a testament to the fact that not only can serious work be found online, some of it is most at home there.

The four fiction pieces in this issue dwell in a space between straight realism and the fantastic. Alvin Greenberg’s “The Most Beautiful People in the World” is a shell game, a sneaky ouroboros of a story, in which either nothing or everything happens. Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s “A Place of Worship” is one of the more sharply observed pieces in this issue, a story of travel, expatriation and homecoming that casts an ironic and ever-so-slightly affectionate glance over all three. “Hidden Away,” by Thomas Bonfiglio, has a meticulously realized voice, while Timothy Denevi’s “Before the Bomb and After” courageously tackles an interesting narrative challenge, narrating family life in the shadow of a catastrophe, although the language relies rather too much on sentence fragments to communicate a sense of urgency (and shatters that urgency with a terrifically unlikely flashback).

The Wag’s Revue is not the only online literary magazine, and it’s not the only venue for this kind of work, but it has its own character, a kind of highbrow deviousness, and it’s a demonstration of how online publishing can be done in a stylish, provocative manner. At the low price of absolutely free, this journal is certainly worth checking out.