McSweeney's Inter[esting] Tendency

E-zines are really easy to take for granted. No special trips to the library or the good bookstore w/ comfortable seating are required to access them, and the content often changes so much that they're impossible to keep up with. Or they demand a paid subscription for their substantial content, only to cinch said substantial content once subscription fees are surrendered, in favor of gratuitous and really not so great erotica (Nerve, for example).

Another issue occurs when the the e-zine exists as a wing of a substantial print publication (i.e. McSweeney's Internet Tendency)--the content is not consistently strong. However, this spottiness is merely a symptom of the otherwise great and unique quality of e-zines, which is their ability to take risks with new or obscure writers and more experimental material. And sometimes they strike gold.

This Sunday morning I returned to the McSweeney's Internet Tendency, which features a new piece of short fiction every week or so, on the main page, under announcements for 826 events and other promotions. Following is a brief outline of what I found today:

Further Excerpts from the Diary of an Aspiring Death-Metal Frontman, by Jesse Singal (evidently an undergrad at the University of Michigan and a developing journalist) pops with the energy and wit of a young fiction writer in the process of growing out of a mold of pop culture.

The diary entries are dated over the course of two weeks in January of 2006, and one gets the sense that they were actually written on those days. They are broken up not only by gaps in reflection of Singal's character, a death-metal-obsessed young man who is yet to face disillusion from his dreams of stardom and grandeur, but by strides in the writer's process, as he finds a little more truth in each entry, and learns to portray that truth with less and less hints of trendy irony or pop indulgence.

The narrator, whose given name is Daniel though he insists on the moniker of Deathblow, has just returned to his hometown after a multi-month blackout and subsequent hitch-hiking trip, all of which he outlines in a way that preserves (to him) as much dignity w/r/t his providence as a successful death-metal front man as possible. The necessity, for example, of singing "American Pie"--"a piece of tawdry Americana so horrifically trite that an angel of rock is surely felled every time it's crooned"--to a truck driver in exchange for a lift, is not portrayed without full acknowledgment of sacrifice to his soul. Deathblow (n�e Daniel) allows for his diary to "judge him" on this one.

Deathblow tells us that made another grave mistake, after the demise of his band; that he had "searched for truth in a bottle."

A foolish mistake, to be sure, especially given that truth, as you and I know, is only to be found in a few certain brain-liquefying chord progressions, the shrieks of an unruly, bloodthirsty crowd, and interesting, dynamic lighting sets.

What Deathblow doesn't know of course is that he's in fact as far from the truth as possible, but Singal, for the moment, lets him believe that he is.

Upon arriving at the end of the piece I found a link to an earlier piece by the same author, entitled "Excerpts from the Diary of an Aspiring Death-Metal Frontman." The entries were shorter and more surfacy, though equally entertaining, and valuable as backstory. I recommend them.

-Dave