When I Get to the Borders

A happy side effect of the bankruptcy sale of the entire Borders Books inventory has been the emergence of a slew of previously overlooked multidisciplinary magazines that were buried behind the now-sold-out (in several ways) mainstream titles.

I am reminded that I promised a survey of similarly multidisciplinary forthcoming titles from MIT Press, and now that my fabled essay on the murals of Hale Woodruff has been completed, perhaps I can manage to collect my thoughts, if not my wits, and write something coherent about all this.

This is not yet a day for wit-collecting, so all that will have to wait.

I am reminded that print magazines accomplish something that online versions of same can do, but not as well: create juxtapositions that are consciously designed to provoke thought. The online difference is that it is not quite as necessary to navigate through the article you had intended to skip, and thus to be stopped by a bizarre illustration or randomly read phrase that suddenly sheds a new light on some issue of greater interest to you than the topic you had meant to leave unconsidered.

Links lead to a different sort of semi-planned surprise.

Happy Lammas, to those who celebrate such holidays.