I am quite astonished to have happened on your blog given that I have recently started some research on McSweeney’s for a paper I’m writing for an undergraduate study abroad program. I was wondering if there are any sources you’ve found particularly useful and if you might be willing to do me the enormous favor of pointing me in the right direction? I’m hoping to find some nuts and bolts information on the history and development of the Quarterly Concern (beyond the tidbits always mentioned in reviews or brief articles), some statistics on readership or number of subscriptions, maybe?

Your ideas are very interesting, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

http://filmfreakcentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/in-retrograde.html

Video Essays have become one of my favourite things on the internet.

Glad to see a fellow literary design fan here in London – are you aware of Five Dials, something conceptually similar(ish) to McScweeney’s?

I think you would find the interests and work of a writer named Matthew Stadler in Portland OR of interest. He has written about the subjects covered in your blog, and of similar interest to your work. He was the founding editor for Clear Cut Press, and is currently working on a project called suddenly.org. I enjoy your blog by the way. Thanks, Matt

The kind of model I like to think about just now is McSweeney’s as a locus, a site to organise certain tendencies of literary/artistic communities. But then there’s lots of other stuff associated with brand/identity that I’m wrestling with. In a lot of ways it resists being pinned down, but in other ways it has a very fixed and stereotyped existence, that it can be a shorthand for a kind of cultural experience. The literary and design worlds meet in such interesting ways in McSweeney’s, and this is I think where the meat of my research is.