Enter: Caterwaul Quarterly
A new kind of Internet periodical. Issue one of Caterwaul Quarterly has arrived. In the words of the publication’s #1, “Caterwaul Quarterly is a web-based journal about politics, life, art, society and the physical universe.” It is clearly a labor of love, a rich and heterogeneous e-publication that satisfies this reader.
For all of us; the intellectually curious, the news junkies, the lovers of the printed word, the imminent decline of print media has been a difficult thing. I always feel a little nauseous when I think about it. It feels so good to hold a periodical in your hand, to carry the Times folded underneath you arm, even just knowing that their are a couple of battered magazines wrapped around each other in your purse. It is difficult to stomach the jobs cuts at the LA Times, or the elimination of the foreign news bureaus at the Boston Globe (old news i know, but still).
Yet at the same time, I admit that I receive a great deal of my news from online sources, and read the web editions of many of my favorite cultural publications rather than shelling out for a hard copy.
The cover article of the July/August Atlantic explored the question of how the Internet is altering the way we read, the way we think. Atlantic writer Nicholas Carr:
“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”
But what if a digital periodical remakes the net in its own image? I do not doubt that on some level google is making me stupid, but I am equally certain that engaging with online media has smartened me up a bit. Maybe it’s a push. I don’t imagine that CQ, or any other quality e-publications, will erase some of my bad Internet habits; the scrolling, the jumping, the hyper-linking - but I did read the summer issue almost cover to cover. On this here computer.
3 years ago • Notes