Columnist Scott Dickensheets: A sleepy Eggers discusses his grass-roots literary effort

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, April 30, 1999 | 12:10 p.m.

It's, what, 11:30 a.m. on the East Coast, and still my call awakens Dave Eggers. He's on Long Island somewhere, at a friend of a friend of a friend's place, taking a month off to work on his "anti-memoir" and rest from the labors of putting out the second edition of McSweeney's, his anti-literary magazine. His conversation is conducted through much yawning and shaking-off of cobwebs.

You probably haven't seen McSweeney's (McSweeney's is its shorthand name; the first issue was called Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the second, Timothy McSweeney's Blues/Jazz Odyssey). I suspect I'm the only subscriber in Las Vegas, and I haven't seen it in bookstores here. Too bad; it's a true rara avis of the newsstand.

For those of us familiar with traditional magazines, it's perhaps best defined by a series of nots. Not topical. Not celebrity-obsessed. Not very '90s, graphic-design-wise. "McSweeney's assumes (yawn) a position of complete disassociation with anything going on at this time," Eggers says. In fact, Eggers began McSweeney's intending to publish pieces killed by other magazines; that policy has waned as writers produce pieces with McSweeney's in mind. Nor is it like a traditional literary magazine. Not serious. Not literary, as English professors mean literary, although it is literary in a satiric, self-conscious way. It operates on the deceptively simple premise, "People are interested in (yawn, strrrretch) interesting stuff." Of course, real magazines invest millions of dollars and untold buckets of editorial brain-sweat trying to parse that easy-sounding w isdom into a working formula.

Not McSweeney's. Eggers and his gang of dada cutups simply write and publish what they like. Ironic, deadpan, killer stuff. If Franz Kafka and David Letterman had a love child, then dropped it on its head, then left it in a library for life, the result might be something like McSweeney's.

It's where you'll find Jim Stallard's "No Justice, No Foul," a crackling satire about the Supreme Court's practice of deciding deadlocked cases via intramural basketball (of New York Times vs. United States, in 1971, he writes, "William O. Douglas burned an indelible image into every brain with a monster dunk midway through the second half ... we had to wait 20 minutes while they fixed the rim.").

Or Brian Kennedy's "I Know What You Did Two Moons Ago (The Revenge)," a short story about ancient Indians cursed for building their burial ground on an even more ancient Indian burial ground.

In Eggers' hands, even the copyright notice -- in most cases a small block of legal boilerplate no one reads -- becomes a 2 1/2-page ramble through the ups and downs of finding stamps, mailing magazines and other epherma. All this stuff has in common a question: Where else you gonna read it?

"No place!" Eggers exclaims. In the real magazine world, "No Justice, No Foul" would be trimmed to a one-pager in the New Yorker or a back-page snickerdoodle in GQ. Eggers lets it run wild. "Satire has to be 800 words these days," Eggers sighs. "The territory of Twain and Swift isn't valued at all any more."

Befitting a labor of love, McSweeney's is a kitchen-table effort. The editorial offices? Eggers' Brooklyn apaprtment. The circulation and distribution center? Eggers' Brooklyn apartment. With the last issue, he and friends hefted 100 40-pound boxes of the magazine up three flights of stairs so Eggers could hand-address each copy and lug them back down to be mailed.

"I like it to be a community arts project kind of thing. It's a ridiculous way of doing it," he admits cheerfully. "Part of the project is the fun of self-flaggelation. Punishing yourself for the priveledge of publishing stuff."

Of course, you want to know, is it making money? Let's say this: He isn't getting rich. Contributors aren't paid -- talk about your big savings! -- and while he has only a thousand subscribers, that seems to cover the overhead. "I sell all of them real easily. The first one sold out completely; the second one is on its way to selling out."

Eggers has carved an enviable career from such off-mainstream endeavors. He drew an alternative cartoon in San Francisco. He co-founded the much-missed Gen X-ish humor magazine, Might, a gloriously money-losing venture that died a few years ago (but was enshrined in the recent essay anthology, "Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp"). His one brief stint in the majors -- as an editor at Esquire -- was a 3-D experience: dissatisfying, disillusioning and, well, dis-something. It shaped McSweeney's freewheeling editorial policies considerably.

"I've never had much luck in the mainstream," he acknowledges. "I have no problem with mainstream, I just don't like to sacrifice to get there." With what appears to be customary self-deprecation, he characterizes his attitude as immautre and spoiled. "But I don't want to compromise. I'll publish six copies of something to avoid having it bastardized. I'm just trying to do stuff and have it come out the way I pictured it."

Now he's knuckling down to finish his book. Inasmuch as it deals with his life, it will be categorized as a memoir, a term that makes Eggers cringe. "It has terrible connotations," he says. "It's an itch I've had for a long time, to write about the deaths of my parents and all that. While writing it, I'm trying to justify it to myself again and again. One-third of it is addressing itself, justifying itself. It's a tortured thing, examining why, what the motivations are to tell one's story. At the same time, it's funny. I'm trying to keep it light.

Anything else, Dave? "It's a crowd-pleasing, heart-warming, inspirational book. I'm supposed to say that." It also needs to be a done book; he cashed Simon and Schuster's advance check long ago -- to bankroll McSweeney's.

(To sample the McSweeney's vibe, check out the loosely related website at mcsweeneys.net; for a subscription, send $30 to 394A Ninth St., Brooklyn, NY, 11215.)

Reading list: Rolling Stone, May 13, 1999: One suspects that Rolling Stone keeps a raft of blank pages ready in case something -- anything -- should emerge from the addled brain and typing fingers of Hunter S. Thompson. A slight chunk of something has. I hate to trash my icons, but the best thing about his "Hey Rube! I Love You" is the title. The rest is a thin gruel of his trademark tics -- dark paranoia, ominous warnings, implied violence -- on the subjects of music, fuel and whatever. Nice photo of Thompson, though.

Men's Journal, May 1999: Contrary to its usual editorial policy, Men's Journal has published an article worth reading. You have to page through the "road trip special" (ground-breaking!) and the three-part golf package (forward-looking!) to get to it, but Scott Anderson's "Lost in the War Zone" is worth the effort. Excerpted from his forthcoming book, "The Man Who Tried to Save the World," it concerns the 1995 disappearance of disaster-relief expert Fred Cuny in warn torn Chechnya. Anderson's tale -- snatched by his own hands from Chechnya, at considerable risk to himself -- is a sad and gripping portrait of a land marred by war, treachery and atrocity, "a place where anything can be true and anything a lie, and secrets are buried with the dead."

The biblio file: San Francisco poets Marci Blackman, Sara Seinberg and Eli Coppola will perform at 8 p.m. May 7, at Enigma Garden Cafe. It's free. Call 368-0999.

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