Magazines Abound on Bookstore Shelves: Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Don't read yourself to death, but just in case you haven't noticed, there are more than a few magazines on the shelves of book stores these days. There are so many magazines in fact that one zine decided to call itself, Another Magazine, as if to say that's all we need.

You've heard it said of old: "Everything but the kitchen sink." While there seems to be a magazine for every sense and taste and every level of proficiency in whatever subject the reader chooses, there is even a magazine for people who think too much, and it's called-you guessed it-Kitchen Sink.

I'm not here to give you a critique of these magazine, but only to let you know they exist. For me to attempt to peruse each strange magazine on the shelves these days would first of all be a thankless job and it would take me into old age and possibly stimulate the onset of Alzheimer's. Is an underground magazine sitting poised front and center on the rack going to sway your opinion, pro or con, on Iraq, if you haven't already made up your mind on topics like immigration, guns in school, Indie comedy, lesbianism, Aids, starvation, nuclear weapons, etc.? Do these topics somehow have something in common?

Yes, they do. They are missing a companion, a companion conceived of twemty-five years ago and was never brought to fruition. So, I have to tell you that conspicuous in its absence from the book shelves at Borders, Books-A-Million, and Barnes and Nobles, and any other bookstore you would care to mention, is Snake Literary Magazine.

Snake Literary Magazine was conceived of by a certain Debbie Jackson and me, who sat at adjacent desks in the newsroom of the Daily Reflector in Greenville, North Carolina. We were both writers, but I was attending graduate school in the English Department of East Carolina University, and Debbie and I spoke much about literature and the books we had read and the movies we had seen.

But, lo and behold, Debbie got into dreaming about snakes, green ones, black ones, rattlesnakes-you get the picture-and she confided in me as if I were her therapist. So, we started sharing dreams and talking more in depth about literary topics. I told her I had dreamed that I was a cherubim swinging from a round chandelier going in a circle and that my mother was stroking my little penis with a feather as the wheel came around. There was nothing more to the dream, but Debbie and I just fell about the break room laughing at our dreams.

One day she was telling me about another snake dream, and I stopped her in the middle of her story and said, "Do you know that Doctor Ellis, one my professors, says he believes the lock of hair in Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock is pubic hair. She laughed so hard she sneezed.

"I think that's reaching," she said.
"So do I," I said.
"It would go good in a magazine article," she added.
"Which magazine?" I asked. Debbie was a very pretty girl, tallish and slender, with short, coal-black hair and big brown eyes. I was married at the time and considered Debbie a good friend; even though I thought about starting something up, I always chickened out.
"The magazine you and I are going to publish."
"What are you going to call it?"
"I don't know-Snake Literary Magazine," she said, out of the blue.
"Snake Literary Magazine?-Ha! Ha! Ha!" We laughed and laughed. And when she left the Daily Reflector, I felt as though I had lost something terrible-a good friend. She'd come around once in while with her psychologist fiancée and we would laugh about Snake Literary Magazine, which is the only magazine of substance you won't find on your local bookshelves. End of a happy/sad story.

That is, I presume there is no such zine on the shelves as Snake Literary Magazine. I haven't seen Debbie in over two decades so I can't say for sure what she's been up to, but the last time I was in Borders I didn't check the S section of the magazine rack to make sure Snake Literary Magazine wasn't hiding surreptitiously among the hundreds of other titles. For all I know today, she's reading Curves, the lesbian magazine just for women, and publishing a magazine based on her dreams and fear of snakes. Here's to hoping she's happy whatever she is doing.