pulphead

A print-only magazine devoted to analog perspective. The world, as told by Montanans. Named after flowers, an ancient word for wind, a particularly groovy song, and a childhood memory. Full details available at the link in @pulphead.bzn bio. Cover image: A stoic toddler clings to his mother—a professional logger collecting firewood to sell—as a multi-thousand-acre wildfire blazes all around them. 2022, Salmon River, Idaho, USA. @kyleniego

#writers #nightowl #bozemanmt

Don’t waste another day letting your story go untold.

Lately, people have been leaving behind aphorisms, sketches, homages, and finished pieces of art on the walls. This (the lounge) is inherently a folk project, so why not allow this? A small, amateur pencil doodle of a fish blowing bubbles has worth simply because someone took the time to make it. An AI world will never understand this. It can’t be programmed.

Things are happening. Stay tuned.

BEFORE/AFTER. When life you hands you a pig, put lipstick on it. I’m told that the space—a former laser photonics lab—sat vacant for months, and that the only other business interested was a tanning salon. Me thinks a late night creative lounge was a better community amenity.

Fifty or so one-of-one mugs collected from ‘round Montana. Over one hundred books available for reading. A cheeky little pairing.

For the uninitiated: Warren Hinckle, the eye-patched bastard editor who helped revolutionize alternative press and investigative magazine reporting in the United States. Hinckle’s legend grew after he transformed San Francisco’s “Ramparts” from a small-fry Catholic journal with 2,500 readers into a national-prestige magazine boasting 250,000 in circulation. His strategy was straightforward; a fly-in-the-ointment approach that earned him many powerful enemies, alongside a coveted George Polk Award in 1966, after exposing the CIA’s secret funding of college-campus recruitment and espionage efforts. “[Hinckle] delighted in tweaking anyone in charge of anything and muckraking for what he fiercely saw as the common good...[drawing] the wrath of mayors, police and anyone who got in his way, and he reveled in it,” wrote “SFGate” following his 2016 death. Under his direction, “Ramparts” became a forum and incubator for major figures in American literature and journalism, including Angela Davis, Seymour Hersh, Susan Sontag, Jann Wenner, and Ralph J. Gleason (the latter two would go on to found “Rolling Stone,” in-part ripping off “Ramparts” art direction and “bomb in every issue” ethos). Hinckle’s subsequent project, “Scanlan’s Monthly,” named after an Irish pig farmer, published the first-ever work coined “Gonzo journalism”—a young Hunter S. Thompson’s 1970 “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”—further cementing the editor’s role in shaping a new wave in American newstelling. Doubtful Hinckle would survive the standards of a modern newsroom. He drank hard and concerned himself little with making friends. Still, he possessed a rare sense of duty to uphold the essential function of the “fourth estate,” long before attractive features or a genial, bookish disposition were typical in the news business.

A print-only magazine devoted to analog perspective. The world, as told by Montanans. Named after flowers, an ancient word for wind, a particularly groovy song, and a childhood memory. Full details available at the link in bio.

A print-only magazine devoted to analog perspective. The world, as told by Montanans. Named after flowers, an ancient word for wind, a particularly groovy song, and a childhood memory. Full details available at the link in bio.

The totemic Sylvia Plath on the perpetual grapple with newness: NEW YEAR ON DARTMOOR This is newness : every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only you Don’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There’s no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.

What’s in a name? I’d typed out a bit of a screed on the subject—notes on the pitiful misfortune of decent folks named Chad and Karen in the meme era; on how, until barely a decade ago, the name Donald carried little to no emotional voltage for the millions of Americans who now begin to pinball at its invocation; on how a baloney name—Google—came to describe a suite of technologies that irrevocably rewired the way humanity thinks; on how my own name offended my late grandfather, who reamed out my parents once he learned they’d saddled his grandson with something that sounded, to him, “too Catholic.” Better to cut to the chase: Pulphead is named after a book, a collection of essays written by John Jeremiah Sullivan, which is itself named after Norman Mailer’s letter of resignation from Esquire. “Goodbye now, rum friends, and best wishes … You got a good mag (like the pulp-heads say).” At the time of its 2012 release, The New York Times called Pulphead, “the most impressive collection of nonfiction since David Foster Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.’” More to the spirit of the point, Zach Baron, now a senior editor at GQ, said, “To be a writer is to obsess about other writers. Mostly it is to obsess about other, better writers … John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Kentucky-born, 37-year-old contributor to GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s and other publications, is that writer at the moment. The better one. The one making it hard on everyone else.” Without a doubt, Pulphead is something of a manual for me (if the naming of a lounge for reading, writing, and the exchange of ideas didn’t make my regard obvious enough). Every few months, I revisit the collection, hoping to absorb just a touch of the electricity that rendered it a global sensation some 14 years ago. There is a copy in the shop. Give it a go. The post: An assortment of covers from various international publishings. Link in bio (aside: is there a more demoralizing, stupider-sounding three words to be forced to type out than “link in bio”?): “Upon This Rock,” which documents Sullivan’s attendance to the nation’s largest Christian Rock festival.