Nicci French Blog

Why Magazines Die

I used to subscribe to six magazines. As of today it's only five. The next issue of Word magazine will be its last. It was a magazine about popular culture that had the attractive feeling of being put together by people for the fun of it. So what went wrong?

1) I've worked on a dying magazine (New Society); if your advertising and your already small circulation are shrinking, then there's really nothing more to be said. But...

2) There was always a snag with the magazine. It was meant to be a magazine for a new group of people who liked quality music and quality film and TV and quality literature. But their heart was only ever really in the music. The books coverage reminded me of the little book section you'd find at the back of a Virgin megastore: mainly books about rock music, plus a Hunter S. Thompson, a Nick Hornby, Howard Marks's Mr Nice and Catch 22.

3) And although they carried music reviews, the music they really, hand-on-heart, cared about was post-Beatles rock up to mid-period REM and Radiohead. When they covered black music, or country and western, let alone jazz or classical, it was like they were doing their homework. As for new music, well, they listened to Lana Del Rey the way I listen to Lana Del Rey. It's nice enough, but it'll never matter to me the way the music I heard when I was fourteen mattered to me.

4) They were caught in a strange bind. They were a magazine for a small group, of slightly sad men like me, who want to talk mainly about the music they heard when they are teenagers or at university. And even for us, there's a limit to how often you can mention how amazingly young Paul McCartney was when Sgt Pepper came out (he was twenty-four; isn't that amazing?).

5) The horrible, terrifying problem for potential publishers of music magazines is this: how can you produce a profitable music magazine for young people who don't buy music magazines and refuse to pay for music?

But there's an optimistic side to this: who would have thought that in 2012, Borders would have disappeared but the Owl Bookshop, which I grew up with in Kentish Town, would still be there? Word magazine may have died, and the CD is following it but the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books are still thriving. I suspect that when man has disappeared from the planet and some new insect beings have evolved to take out place, they'll still be reading books. And complaining about the state of publishing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Sean Met Nicci

I felt a pang when I heard of Nora Ephron's death this week. I never met her, but When Harry Met Sally was the film that Nicci and I saw on our first date. Well, of course it was. It was said of the Velvet Underground that hardly anyone bought their albums when they first came out, but everyone who did formed a band. And likewise absolutely every couple who went to see When Harry Met Sally ended up getting up married, unless they were married already. What would have happened if we'd gone to Fatal Attraction instead? Or Basic Instinct? 

The film has one of the best food-ordering scenes in movie history:

 

One of the best. But not the best. Not by a long way. The best food-ordering scene in movie history is, of course:

 

 

Is it a coincidence that both these scenes were written by women? I think not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't bellow, I shriek

X is a feisty blonde. Y is a swaggering braggart. No prizes for guessing who is the woman, who the man. A nag is a woman. A man can't be a nag and he can't be a scold. Why are some words so gendered?


Female words: nag, scold, pert, bubbly, vivacious, feisty, shrill, blonde, blushing, screech, shriek, coy, demure, pout, throaty, svelte, voluptuous


Male words: swagger, cocky, burly, bellow, braggart, banter, leering, lecherous, swashbuckling, ogles, skulduggery

There were lots more and I've managed to forget them - probably because I'm only a coy and blushing blonde….

Cryptonomiconomics

I've just finished reading Neal Stephenson's extraordinary novel, Cryptonomicon, and it's done my head in. For a start, it's about half as long again as David Copperfield. I've written novels in a shorter time than it took me to read Stephenson's book. And then, as I read it, I kept asking myself: how does he know all this? It's obvious that he's a serious expert on computer technology and the science and history of codes and code-breaking, especially in the second world war. But he knows everything else as well, about wartime Britain, about the wartime Philippines, about submarines, about the technology of tunnelling, about just lots and lots of things. 

More important, he deploys all this knowledge in a multi-stranded, multi-charactered, pan-global story of the kind that hasn't been done much since the Victorians, and the different narratives and characters converge with the most amazing virtuosity. It's got the wild imagination of Gravity's Rainbow, with the added attraction - for me, at least - that I almost always understood what was going on. 

I feel I should read the rest of his books, but I checked his latest, and it's over 900 pages. And I'm also reading the George R.R. Martin books. And I'm fifty-three. I haven't got that much time left.

 

The Good War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell died a couple of weeks ago. I met him many years ago. He was an interesting man and a remarkable critic. He was one of that disappearing generation of academics who could write about the mythology of war and the literature of war with the experience of front-line combat. I just came across an interview he gave to The Atlantic in 1997. In the course of it, he criticises the rosy view we have of the 'Good War':

    'We all know that the Second World War destroyed Germany, which had to be rebuilt, but most Americans don't know that it also ruined England -- through wartime expenditure, loss of life, and the damage England suffered in the bombings. It turned England from a powerful, imperial world presence into a third-rate Netherlands. It's just a pitiful little country now, desperately trying to keep up its morale with parades, horse guards and a Queen. But it is povery-stricken and pretty hopeless. The war caused that. The point is that you can't fight a war like that, so close to the enemy as the English were, and survive intact. You win, but you suffer a great deal.'

Oh dear, that's not what we want to hear. Let's change the subject and follow the progress of the Olympic torch processing around Britain instead.