#compact magazine

[2dcloud]

new site

new books

new newsletter (drawing by angela fanche)

+ a 30-70% OFF sale. last 2 days...

stephen can you re-tumbl?

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you have any "must-read" literary magazines/book publishers/blogs, etc.?

I think the best literary coverage in magazines these days is in Compact and Tablet, because whoever's putting up the money and whatever their agenda has evidently and wisely decided to keep the cultural coverage much more free of overt politics than other venues. I'm not only talking about "wokeness" here but also the nonsense we find in the "anti-woke" venues, like, just to give an example, this tacky "Zombie Reagan" complaint in Quillette that English departments are dying because they teach, and I quote, "Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa," yes, I repeat, Kant. Whereas Compact gives Gasda free rein to take it to the Oxfordians (not least Yarvin), and let the tech-adjacent neoreactionary politics fall where they may, just as Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps. Not to mention that both venues publish interesting free agents like Valerie Stivers and Naomi Tanakia. In the same vein, Unherd is good for political and cultural commentary—pretty unpredictable, if convergent upon what we might call the new center. The Mars Review of Books also seems interesting, but it's too soon to tell. There's still good material in the usual places like LRB, NYRB, The Nation and Harper's—Will Self almost (almost!) persuading me to read a book I've privately been calling Adenoid, for example—but it's been more mixed since the commanding heights crudely tried to requisition the whole of humane culture in reaction to Trump. (Full disclosure: I've written for Tablet a time or two myself.)

In our agitated and ever-shifting media environment, one would have to cover Twitter accounts, Substack and other newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels too, across the cultural and political spectrum, so I have both too much and not enough to recommend. I've always thought Katherine Dee had her finger on the pulse of the culture, so her work in various venues is a longstanding recommendation. The renegade and provocateur Justin Murphy is always interesting if often silly or willfully offensive. The aforementioned Matt Gasda's Substack "Writer's Diary" is always compelling. Lately I've been admiring Emmalea Russo's tour of the Divide Comedy with reference to cinema and astrology and modernism and theory and what have you, also on Substack. The collected 1990s-era YouTube lectures on great books and intellectual history by Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff are also recommendations of long standing, and Sugrue and Staloff also now produce new material, if more casual. My favorite podcasts specifically for literature and the arts are Manifesto! and Art of Darkness.

Favorite book publishers? Not exactly. The go-to answer is NYRB Classics; they publish a lot of stuff that interests me, including things I didn't know would interest me until they published it, especially their nonfiction catalogue, whether Simon Leys's collected essays or Simone Weil on the Iliad or Gillian Rose's incomparable Love's Work, and their attention to major world fiction neglected by other publishers (Platonov, Jünger, Salih). But as I believe Ann Manov once Tweeted, some of those midcentury novels might have been deservedly forgotten; hate me if you must, but I never did finish Stoner. They should reprint the whole of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, though who knows what the copyright situation is there. Another publisher recommendation: you'll rarely go wrong reading a classic in the Norton Critical Edition.

[rwf99]

Sarah Cuje @127floz for Compact Magazine

plotter proofs

[henryrodhamkissinger]

What the fuck is goin on at “Compact Magazine”. Apt name, it is just like one of those trash compacted multichromatic blocks of Hellscape Opinion-Havering

[vintageadsmakemehappy]

1954 Metropolitan Nash Automobile

[kecobe]

Vikki Dougan photographed by Nina Leen for a 1952 Life magazine story about wearing different wigs to get more modeling work

Photographer: Nina Leen (American, born Russia; 1914–1995)

Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

[frachive]

my parents market of heart

[circleofshit]

[krjpalmer]

Macworld August 2000

The software/online controversy of the moment received full coverage in this issue, complete with Metallica's Lars Ulrich attacking Napster and whatever might follow (the article was already talking about Gnutella) and Public Enemy's Chuck D being rather more sanguine about the subject. The next article was about "turning your Mac into a recording studio," regardless of whether or not you'd make money selling your music on CD...

[ruinedholograms]

Pretty Hate Machine (1989)

[grandhotelabyss]

Since we're on the topic of Catholic statism, it turns out that the rumors about Compact receiving Soros funding were correct. Honestly, I find myself mostly indifferent to the news: it's a great magazine and I don't plan on dropping it over a couple of Soros bucks - not to mention that pretty much everyone is at least partly foreign-funded nowadays. Besides, I never got the impression that the Compact team were dishonest about their political allegiances either, as they've made it perfectly clear from the start that their sympathies lie with social democracy and Catholic universalism rather than with the more individualistic principles of traditional American neoconservatism. What's your take on the whole thing?

Yes, there's no hidden agenda at Compact, and their cultural coverage is admirably diverse, as are the various expressions they're willing to give their basic political orientation. Does any other single journal publish a range of political and cultural commenters like Marco Rubio, Chris Rufo, Helen Andrews, Leon Wieseltier, Thomas Fazi, Ryan Zickgraf, and my excellent Substack subscribers Ross Barkan and Sam Kahn? I do think they've gotten less interesting and more sectarian since their debut, since Ahmari decided to wage war on the Nietzscheans. Would they publish those Nick Land pieces today? I understand the strictly political case against a certain Nietzscheanism—honestly, I agree with Rufo's latest polemic against "racialism left and right" and am glad they published it, typical as it may be coming from "dark whites" like us—but from an artistic and philosophical perspective you can't just be a Catholic conservative, you have to undergo the vertigo of modernity. And from an American perspective you have to be at least a bit of an individualist—or why did we leave the Old World in the first place if only to rebuild its despotisms here?

The Soros funding tells us more about Soros than about Compact. It is only surprising to the less sophisticated populists who think Soros is on "the left" in any world-historical sense, who don't hear the anti-communist connotation of the phrase "Open Society." Of course he'd work with Catholic social democrats to push his agenda of a managerial state actuated under the cover of a pseudo-independent civil society. He'd be a fool not to. While I'm sure he'd prefer liberals who would be friendlier to the eugenic part of the agenda, the overall Catholic idea of a bureaucratic clerisy overseeing a restive laity does not conflict with his political model beneath the latter's cosmetic layer of NGO-ism secretly representing state interests. And to be fair to Soros, I'm sure he is personally interested in intellectual pluralism, as cited in the Vanity Fair article. If he wants to demonstrate this commitment to pluralism even more overtly, he should give me some money!

[schonheit-ist-in-alles]

MMC, WHO'S GOT THE FLAVA?

- YM, November 1993

[historyofguns]

In a detailed review by Richard Johnson for The Armory Life, the Springfield Armory XD Mod.3 pistol emerges as a noteworthy evolution of the original XD line, designed for the 9mm cartridge. Priced attractively at $325, this striker-fired pistol combines a host of modern enhancements with the reliability of the original design. Key updates include its optics-ready slide compatible with various professional red dot sights, upgraded grip texture for improved handling, a flat trigger similar to the XD-M's META trigger, and compatibility with existing full-size XD9 magazines. Despite its budget-friendly price, the XD Mod.3 showcases a robust feature set, including a hammer-forged barrel, Melonite finish, and ambidextrous controls, making it an excellent value in the 9mm pistol market.

[vintageadsmakemehappy]

1972 Ford Capri advertisement

[unita2org]

LA GUERRA COGNITIVA IN OCCIDENTE

di Thierry Meyssan https://www.voltairenet.org/article221286.html In Occidente la censura è diventata un metodo di altri tempi per governare. La Nato sta conducendo una guerra cognitiva: non combatte idee e ragionamenti, ma agisce per compromettere la facoltà delle persone di tener conto della forma mentis di altre culture. Questa guerra ha dapprima portato alla messa al bando dei media russi,…

[suzimiya]

Achtung #Reichelt!

Achtung #Reichelt!

Julian Reichelt von #NiUS wartet auch schon auf seine Stunde. #NiUSVerbot 😂👍 #Compact #Elsässer