Morry Schwartz's ongoing fanzine for those sophisticamated US publications, the New Yorker and the Atlantic, arrives in our postbox again. Its name, The Monthly, sometimes feels more like a threat than a statement of chronological intent, and let me say that Schwarz Inc is as good as its word - every 30 days duly inflicting culture upon us. And it's more than we deserve, I guess.
It is one of the enduring mysteries of contemporary Australian literature, this: why Schwarz's magazine should have been started in imitation of unabashedly snobbish, proclaimedly elitist magazines such as the New Yorker, and yet should fail to imitate the good qualities of the same magazine: the humour, the cartoons, the ongoing chronicle of life in a bustling city. What city is The Monthly centred in, even? The publishing house is in Melbourne, but it seems to be a nowhere magazine, attempting to be all things to some people, but being nothing to everyone. Is this another Sydney versus Melbourne rivalry thing?
If people ever wonder why I am still into zines, it's because in zines I would never find a sentence as boring as
Which makes the political challenges in this month's budget far more significant than any in recent history.
Whole swathes of the magazine are colonised by phrases like this. Articles appear on the regular about Important National Infrastructure Projects. Schwarz's commitment to social democracy, in practice, turns out to be like Daddy Pig's commitment to reading every book he can about concrete, albeit with less grunting*. When you turn to the arts pages, meanwhile, you are typically met with a blank wall of abstract art. Sometimes, there is nothing more expressionless than abstract expressionism, more inhuman than the humanities. I remember turning through the pages of one issue and marvelling at how studiously the photographers avoided actual faces, because it's boring photographing faces or something like that, and yes, it might be boring, but there's nothing like a face to make you feel actually included, part of an actual discussion, instead of being excluded at talked at.
And who reads all this stuff, anyway? The prose gives off a similar effect to prose in middle management staff surveys, or intergovernmental department communiques: brisk and efficient, bland, highly functional, but also vaguely threatening - as if, in the long run, it might turn out to actually mean nothing at all. Just this issue, I happen across an article on the decline of public literacy by James Ley, linking the same decline to the decline in democratic liberalism across the globe. Which is all well and good, so far as arguments go, but who is Ley writing to in the article? He agrees that literature is there to connect, to communicate, but his prose is singularly opaque; he gives no concrete examples; he wields the obscure verb 'to arrogate' repeatedly to display his intellectualism; and he seems embarrassed by the topic, ending up talking about all the talk about it that other people give - as if he doesn't really want to commit himself to a position. It is as if he were given the topic rather than chose it for himself, like a student being given an assignment.
So there you have it; the problem is not so much with Schwarz and the Monthly, it is with the whole structure of Australian intellectualism, and literature: it doesn't so much pose the hard questions, as get given them; and the writing is for no-one. It is just a series of bland prompts and the world's most uninspiring writer's group.
So, 20 years on, and I wonder why The Monthly is still so unconvincing. The question is not so much what is The Monthly doing: the question is why is The Monthly, even? Clearly Schwarz likes having it around. Will it bother to hang around after he is gone?
But, you know, the magazine sometimes has a Helen Garner column. There is that.
*'with less grunting'. Presumably. Who am I to say what Schwarz gets up to in the privacy of his own home?
