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TODDLER DEMOGRAPHIC UNIMPRESSED
A brief review of Schwartz Publishing’s The Monthly: “I asked my 2 1/2 year old what the woman on the cover’s expression was and he said ‘She wants her money back.’”
UPDATE. In comments, Andrew Rutherford provides background to the Peter Craven/Morrie Schwartz split:
Craven wanted, against his own politics, for the Quarterly Essay to embrace conservative contributors. Schwartz disallowed such ideas. Schwartz was uncomfortable with the space Quarterly Essay gave to rebuttal. Craven was lukewarm about the Robert Manne essay which triggered the fallout with Schwartz: even before the kerfuffle over crediting Manne’s student as co-author, the issue was a favour to Schwartz in their to and fro. In compiling the Best Australian Essays, Craven was aware of his biases and strove to overcome them, with original essays by Paul Sheehan, Frank Devine and Christopher Pearson among the fruits.
Tim ... is this a bit of serious competition to The Bulletin? A couple of sentences at The Monthly website read, “The Monthly will be intelligent and inquisitive, witty and wise. It won’t dumb down or suck up. The Monthly will be rooted ...” I stopped at the word rooted ... a word with many meanings ... and came back here. Yes, I think it is a hilarious cover too, Richard.
To be fair, we need to see how it performs over six or twelve months. The word is that Morry is prepared to back it as long as it takes, even five years. The question in my mind is whether they are going to allow the likes of me to get into their pages and seriously debate issues from a libertarian/classical liberal point of view. If they are not prepared to do that then Morry is spending his hard-earned money on a prolonged leftwing wank and he might as well let the readers make do with the SMH, The Age and the array of little magazines that various left cliques and communes bring out quarterly and monthly, like The Australian Book Review.
How can you be so sarcastic about the Monthly. It has absolutely riveting stuff like Mugo McCallum writingf about “Nation Review.” I was pissing my panties with excitement when I read that cutting-edge stuff!
Posted by Susan Norton on 2005 05 23 at 10:06 AM • permalinkWhoever ok’ed the “demented woman” cover needs to be fired.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2005 05 23 at 10:49 AM • permalink#1 Richard - coffee-spitting comment. Did no one think of this when they assembled the cover? In hindsight it’s so obvious.
Posted by walterplinge on 2005 05 23 at 07:16 PM • permalinkPoor Morry Schwartz: he has always maintained that he is a publisher who funds himself by a sideline in property development. All one can say is that he has been spectacularly more fortunate in his sideline. As a publisher, he picked a talentless dud like Peter Craven as one of his editors (until they fell out); now he has lined up some of the finest minds of the 1970s for his new venture.
How many more of these pale Nation Review knock-offs are going to pop up, and dissapear ignominiously in a very short period? The market’s already saturated by the MSM without leaving space for another glossy rag extolling the benefits of an utterly discredited form of political folly. Or are they all just write-offs for tax purposes- now that would be a hoot.
Sophie Lee, ex-Bugs Bunny presenter and writing student, is listed as a contributor, although her only contribution so far has been to appear on the cover under the title “The Best of Times…”, wearing an expression somewhere between “You call this a macchiato?” and “Wait a minute… didn’t we used to have three children?”
Self-reference. So sue me. Or better yet, go to my site and scroll down to “Monthly”!
Posted by blandwagon on 2005 05 23 at 08:52 PM • permalinkRichard McEnroe, you reminded me of the loudest silence I’ve every heard. It was about 20 years ago when Packer decided to publish the Australian Women’s Weekly on a monthly basis but keep the name the same. A normally bright young thing inquired aloud in an office otherwise full of men: “But why don’t they call it the Australian Women’s Monthly?”
To be fair to Morry and Peter Craven and his successor (how boring to be fair) it was a good idea to have annual collections of essays and the like, even if you want to argue with some of the selections.
It is also a good idea to have a quality monthly, whatever it is called. It just remains to be seen whether the management has the guts and the integrity to allow a full-blooded clash of ideas so that the usual suspects are forced to engage with ideas that they normally misunderstand, misrepresent or just ignore.Cuckoo, Peter Craven might have seemed less of a talentless dud to you if his editorial choices had been followed by the money man. Craven wanted, against his own politics, for the Quarterly Essay to embrace conservative contributors. Schwartz disallowed such ideas. Schwartz was uncomfortable with the space Quarterly Essay gave to rebuttal. Craven was lukewarm about the Robert Manne essay which triggered the fallout with Schwartz: even before the kerfuffle over crediting Manne’s student as co-author, the issue was a favour to Schwartz in their to and fro. In compiling the Best Australian Essays, Craven was aware of his biases and strove to overcome them, with original essays by Paul Sheehan, Frank Devine and Christopher Pearson among the fruits.
Andrew R might at least declare his own bias here: he’s obviously Andrew Rutherford, a former editrix of Peter Craven’s Scripsi magazine. Haven’t you gangsters enough space in which to scratch each other’s backs already, without denying cuckoo his right to an opinion here in Tim Blair’s forum? In other words: piss off, you little troller, back to The Age where you belong.
Posted by John Smith on 2005 05 24 at 06:57 AM • permalinkIs it poofs or women that you hate, calling me editrix? I don’t care one way or the other, since I’m neither, but I wonder at such invective.
I made no attempt to conceal my identity and presumed anybody interested could find it out.
Both The Age and Morry Schwartz can be counted among my occasional employers. I was proffering information about Schwartz’s relationship with Craven which I thought would be of interest to readers here, in particular that Schwartz frustrated their agreed policy that the Quarterly Essay would be politically neutral. I did this out of public interest.
I’m just looking to contribute. Just because I sometimes write for the only broadsheet in town doesn’t make me an instrument of the orthodoxy I openly reject. Pull down the setting on your troll-o-meter.
Actually, I find Andrew R’s comments about Craven genuinely informative. I had never given much thought to Craven’s politics, and now that you mention it, he is one of the few litterateurs in Australia who doesn’t routinely shoehorn a bit of Howard-bashing into every review he writes. My description of Craven as ‘talentless’ is based more on his constitutional incapacity to write a meaningful or syntactically valid English sentence, and his lack of any kind of genuine critical insight, or originality of thought. To say nothing of the relentless and laughably obvious promotion of his personal favourites, which is an open joke, even in the ‘Gangland’ of Ozlit.
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Hmmm. Is putting a woman with a frenzied expression on the first cover of your magazine and calling it “The Monthly” really the best marketing plan you had?