r ieke J ordan The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue This article 1 is invested in delineating one reading position that readers of contemporary pop-culture are invited frequently to adopt: the curator� The practice of reading has come to entail more than the turning of the page, and reading today seems to be rather determined by the interaction with the work of art in the sense of co-making, as an experience of the narrative and material that is predicated on participation� What reading rewards and requires cannot be so neatly categorized anymore; the working through of elusive and open-ended works of fiction resembles more and more that of curating. The term “curation” or the figure of “the curator” stems from the museum context, where a curator’s job includes tasks such as exhibiting, showing, and caring for art works—like the organizing of an art exhibition or the implementation of a(n artistic) vision� As a subject specialist, the reader thus takes care of the interpretation of art that is not her own, and the idea of curation thus elevates the act of reading into an “artful” pastime—and the position of the reader into an aestheticized and aestheticizing one� Transferring the concept of curation into the realm of reading reconfigures the individual’s “singular” positioning toward an object (i�e�, the book, or the every-day consumer item) to one that engenders multifarious practices, such as rehearsal, assembly, and arranging. Without the investment of the reader, the text would remain disorganized, provisional, and maybe even merely conceptual at best� Enfolded within the concept of curation is the question of what a book is and what it does in the twenty-first century. This angle unlocks in what manner books self-reflexively address their material and narrative flexibility. In my monograph Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction, I coin these processes and interactions between reader and object “curatorial labor�” Work in Progress turns to texts such as the retro computer game Kentucky Route Zero by the programming team Cardboard Computer (2013-), or Chris Ware’s Building Stories, a graphic narrative published in a box in 2012, containing fourteen loose leaflets, booklets, comic strips or board games that can be read in any order� Another chapter of my monograph discusses Beck Hansen’s Song Reader (2012), which, similarly, relies on a reader who implements, rehearses, interprets an album that was not written by herself� The fan must play Beck Hansen’s sheet music album to make the songs by the indie rock beau audible, but Beck remains a mere figment. Other examples—not discussed in my book but worth mentioning—are S by Doug Dorst and J� J� Abrams (2013), a novel that asks what might be lost 1 This article extends questions raised in the chapter, “Work in Progress, Curatorial Labor,” published in my monograph Work in Progress: Curatorial Labor in Twenty-First- Century American Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2019)� 104 r ieke J ordan between the lines, quite literally, if print novels vanish into the digital ether— for it chronicles two people falling in love via the marginalia they write in an old library book, or, as I will show, the periodical Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. In this article I want to think less about the history of the book, but rather how text has been under pressure in times of digitization processes and how the reader is to see herself rather as an archivist, conservationist, curator� As the case studies of my monograph suggest, reading has become, more than ever, a haptic process with multiple skills embedded, like playing the guitar or gluing together parts� These objects enumerated above notably demand physical interaction, and the experience of engaging with the book cannot be replicated online—the refusal to be digital lays bare a neat ambivalence of how books seem to become even more material as things in our lives become increasingly digital� Jessica Pressman’s notion of “bookishness” comes to mind, which she defines as a literary strategy figuring the book as “an aesthetic form” and “an emergent literary strategy that speaks to our cultural moment. These novels exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies“ (Pressman np)� Bookishness as literary strategy alludes to the changing roles of media, texts, and reader 2 in the twenty-first century� Caroline Hamilton concurs that books become mysterious lost objects, gateways to worlds of wonder, steadfast friends in one’s darkest hour� In a culture dominated by LCD screens and digital devices McSweeney’s is reassuringly tactile, crafted—not merely published� These are literary works designed not only to be read, but to be collected—and displayed� (22) Hamilton’s choice of words (“tactile”/ “crafted”) outline how books attempt to retrieve something that is “lost” and “mysterious” through their undeniable “bookishness�” But this mystery is not limited to books per se� Other media test out their respective “-ishness,” for they, too, have become increasingly digital� To be more precise, my research examines what a music album does if a song vanishes into MP3 streams 3 , or how a computer game can negotiate the rift between online and offline. These, too, we must understand as literary— or rather cultural—strategies of the twenty-first century. If and when these objects underline that there is something being “done” to the book today, we must assume that there is also something “done” to the interrelation of text, 2 As Jessica Pressman elucidates, the book “will not become obsolete with new reading platforms, but rather, will change and develop new incarnations and readerships; it will continue to serve certain kinds of literacy needs and literary desires—specifically, those related to its book-bound physicality and potentiality” (np)� And Pressman’s comment on platforms can be expanded to the material as well: “Literature has never really been just about information delivery—about information in the form of experience and enlightenment perhaps, but content that is inseparable from its formal presentation” (np)� 3 See here my article “Once Upon a Time on the Internet: Digital Nostalgia and the Music Album of the Twenty-First Century,” in which I turn to the Wu-Tang Clan’s album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and Taylor Swift’s album 1989 as case studies of what I call “digital nostalgia�” The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 105 reader, and object� Building on my work in my monograph Work in Progress, this article turns to a new object, namely the fifty-third issue of the periodical Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The magazine issue includes cute blow-up balloons onto which (very) short stories by revered authors are printed� I am particularly drawn to this issue (which I will refer to as the “balloon issue”) because it comments on the way text and material interact and explores the rifts between (conspicuous? ) consumption and (inconspicuous? ) reading� What does reading actually engender in this issue—is it an inflated/ inflatable sense of a literary text, or has reading become yet another way to consume and display taste? By singling out the balloon issue, I will discuss visual and material puns on text and material� Once we acknowledge the interplay of materiality and textuality, we come to understand that the tension between the consuming of aesthetic, cute objects and the diffuse term of textuality in the twenty-first century is at the core of McSweeney’s balloon issue—and the current shifts literature faces� This ambivalence, I suggest, acknowledges that curating might linger closer to consumption than to reading and that literature now seeps into the confines of cute, consumable objects. Curating and Collecting McSweeney’s McSweeney’s has through the years continuously defied what a periodical should look like, challenging assumptions about the forms and shapes stories, books, plots can take� Within the last twenty-one years, the publishing house has risen to be an experimental, hip counterforce against the supposed and much-lamented demise of the book in the digital age� The name “McSweeney’s” has become shorthand for independent and innovative publishing strategies that display an interest in literary experimentations and provocations about what a book can actually be (and what it takes to be regarded as a book)� McSweeney’s was founded, in millennial nonchalance, in an email in 1998—Dave Eggers reached out to friends and peers and suggested starting a new literary magazine: The hope is that this will be a place where odd things that one could never shoehorn into a mainstream periodical, and might be too quirky for other journals, might find a home. I do not expect everyone, or anyone, to produce brand-new stuff� I am relying on everyone who gets this letter or who passes it on to a friend (feel free), will have things sitting in a closet that they had long ago abandoned hope of publishing� (Eggers, “First” 1) He concluded that first email with an upbeat, “C’mon everyone! It’ll be fun, and if we’re not careful, we might make publishing history” (3-4)� This founding myth nestles McSweeney’s in the folds of the rise of the commercial internet and creative communities that promise freedom from publishing constraints� Since 1998, the McSweeney’s enterprise has turned into a conglomerate, with community centers in New York or San Francisco offering tutoring for high school students, or the plethora of printing outlets included 106 r ieke J ordan in its roster, such as The Believer, the daily-updated humor website called Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, as well as copious fiction and non-fiction books by American luminaries such as Michael Chabon, Bob Odenkirk, Lydia Davis, Dave Eggers, and David Byrne� McSweeney’s is, according to an NPR piece from 2013, “that flagship literary quarterly [that] has evolved from a plain-looking throwback to the 19th century, to an intriguing array of eye-popping designs and visual puns” (“‘McSweeney’s’: Quirky Quarterly…”)� These visual puns and eye-popping designs, this recalcitrance and eccentricity need the “right” reader to organize and recognize it and so it works, in turn, to create her. To briefly contextualize this cycle of “creating to be created”: I have turned in my research to similarly disorganized and fragmentary objects to explore how they presuppose a readership that “knows where to look�” Such works intentionally overwhelm and maybe even confuse or frustrate their readers who cannot make sense of the text at first glance. By emphasizing tactile interaction and self-reflexively addressing the retroness of their respective media, these forms and formats pose “challenges of digitization in creative and often unlikely ways” (Starre 7). These materials are, no less (and McSweeney’s is not an exception), embedded within twenty-first-century infrastructures for producing and consuming (digital) media, and mediate (and maybe mitigate) textuality by way of their materiality. Where does text end, where does material begin? Staged as decidedly offline, time-consuming, and “haptic,” such objects work against assumptions we have about pop-culture and the digital sphere, where quick overhauls and ever new and changing content seem to be the status quo. We might say that text and material interact in order to distil a reader who is in the know and is attuned to recognize what is cool� We can already detect a tension, for objects that demand such organization and care are equally niche objects while their material is mass-produced, available on Amazon or in a conventional book store� And none of these objects are cheap—the aforementioned Building Stories, Song Reader, and S cost about $30, and a McSweeney’s subscription is available for $95 per year and includes four issues� (The material needed for the assembly of these objects is not included�) And rare McSweeney’s issues, such as the infamous newspaper issue or the very first couple of issues that still look rather rudimentary, are highly sought-after collector’s items sold for about $250� These objects bespeak the layering of market value and art object, but they also reveal the links between spending power and distinction. The reader of such texts sees the creative, cultural, or niche value of the object—not necessarily the market or monetary value, or, to be more polemic, the value of the text� The curator is no less a subject specialist who accesses these worlds through fragmentary books, songs, or literary magazines—taking up many different tasks and honing different skill sets� And, in turn, she is also able to create new hierarchies among cultural objects� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 107 One question strikes me worth asking: isn’t the kind of cross-pollination weirdly like a blender that dissolves the boundaries between niche and, well, mainstream? 4 The reader easily traverses between niche and mainstream, between digital infrastructure and offline pastime. 5 The conceptual becomes consumerist, the unique work of art becomes mass-produced� And the objects, mass-produced yet individualized, do not necessarily take the readymade (hence an every-day, ordinary manufactured object) to reintegrate it into an artistic context. We know these gestures from Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jeff Koons, or Hannah Höch, but these texts that I have drawn on in my research flirt with the unique experience granted to a reader by mass products. Thus, these objects perform an obverse operation. They decontextualize the rarified art object and make it available to a wider audience for purchase. By this I mean that they take now rarified objects like sheet music, the short story, arty leaflets, love letters and make them every-day consumer objects. Blow It Up: McSweeney’s Issue 53 Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern demands interaction on material and narrative grounds while, simultaneously, creating a readership attuned to its quirkiness� Engaging with each issue becomes a question of how the subscriber approaches the periodical, how she manages the different formats, contents, and styles every three months� One issue could be compiled of junk mail, another one is a cardboard head of a sweaty man, and the fiftythird issue includes party balloons. The McSweeney’s Online Store explains, “Packed in Issue 53’s purpose-built ziplock bag are seven stories printed on eight party balloons, which one must blow up to read� Gracing these particolored balloons are arresting new stories” by esteemed authors such as Carmen Maria Machado, Percival Everett or Lauren Groff (“McSweeney’s Issue 53”)� The eighth party balloon, at least in my copy, has a hole in it and looks like it was mis-printed� I accept this as a McSweeney-ian joke at my expense(s). Issue 53 is not an aesthetic event, it is an aesthetic party: we can detect a flirtatious wink toward Jeff Koons’s balloon dogs and even speech bubbles we know from graphic narratives� The particolored balloons and the stories 4 Caroline Hamilton in One Man Zeitgeist explains that McSweeney’s speaks to “cultural capital that blends literature’s nostalgic value as high culture and its function in commodity culture as an identity marker� McSweeney’s offers readers much more than short stories: it is a collectable object, a virtual community and a social identity” (21)� 5 These tactile experiences cannot neatly be replicated online because they reward material interaction—even though digital practices of finding music, love, or a rare comics strip have been sleekly adapted and adopted by apps and websites such as YouTube, Tinder, or eBay. Even though these might be universal experiences that people online and offline go through, they are here undoubtedly negotiated by way of material—and the reader becomes a subject specialist in the most literal sense: by being able to categorize and recognize the material at hand� Additionally, by witnessing how music, love, and collections come into being and unfold on a material basis, niche knowledge extends from the realm of the art to the realm of every-day life. 108 r ieke J ordan are now “electrostatically charged”: they are tantalizing, they are hair-raisers—and the price for the every-day commodity is, indeed, hair-raising, too� For the short stories, the reader cannot be short of breath (or money)� Let alone shortsighted: the print is miniscule! Too much air and the story stretches thin or even pops—the work of art is forever lost or must be bought again, for yet another $28� But, in the same breath (sorry), such short stories increase the “value” of the balloon—a pack of eight balloons for $28 (including one broken balloon) are branded with the names of the authors who have critical appeal� The stories make the childish air balloon unique and literary, underlining how the idea of “text” or “story” changes. The balloons seem to reduce the literary event into an every-day object� The balloon materializes cliché: the reader breathes shape, form, and life into the work of art to make it legible (see fig. 1). The issue also includes a “vinyl-bound hardcover containing electrostatically charged new work” from writers such as Lesley Nneka Arimah and Namwali Serpell (“McSweeney’s Issue 53” np)� We also recognize a deliberate play on the material of vinyl� The accompanying book is not a hardcover, but its binding and cover are made out of vinyl (and its cover has little balloons on it, tying the party balloons back to the issue) which makes it flexible and, quite literally, bendable� The material of the balloon might tear and will most likely do so since repetitive interaction with the material renders it fragile. The balloons will slowly deflate and lose their tension, but the vinyl booklet will remain in shape� Fig. 1. Balloon including the short story “Relaxation Technique” by Carmen Maria Machado (image: author’s own)� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 109 Claire Boyle, the managing editor at McSweeney’s, explains to Rob Charles, of The Washington Post, that it was a childhood pleasure of hers to draw “on a balloon and then [watch] the image shrink as she let the air leak out” (Boyle in Charles)� McSweeney’s / Claire Boyle won the ASME Award for Fiction 2019 awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors for the short stories included in the book (but not only for its packaging, even though the jury lauds the “commitment to surprise”): “Skinned” (by Lesley Nneka Arimah), “Vinegar on the Lips of Girls” (by Julia Dixon Evans) and “Unsound” (by Maria Reva). The judges write, “young women find the fortitude to liberate themselves from communities that are hostile to them� With crisp dialogue, melodic sentences and nimbly immersive world building, ‘Skinned,’ ‘Vinegar on the Lips of Girls’ and ‘Unsound,’ deftly explore the imprisonment of young women by social convention and the peculiar and specific longing of girls” (“McSweeney’s Wins”). Confinement and longing are juxtaposed with expansion (blowing up a balloon) and partying. But also with the pleasures of childhood: the doodling on a balloon is being replaced with short stories by revered authors� In reverse, their literary efforts are more than doodles: they are remarkable, giving a new domain to the form of the short story� We come to understand that the reconfiguring of the reader as a curator also mirrors a changing understanding of the boundaries between object and text. This weird re-integration of the every-day consumer object into the realm of the literary aims to entice the reader to think twice about the way text and material relate to one another, and how (and why) a balloon is now a literary device� Another question that arises is the following—What, then, becomes of the text? If the object encourages a consumer position, how is the interaction with the piece of literary work preconfigured? What about the work of fiction that is enfolded within the conceptual, mass-produced, individualized object? Put differently, the balloon issue unfolds the interaction with the text and the consumer position of the curator. The genre of the short story, the fiftythird issue seems to suggest, becomes an inflated and inflatable thing that the reader has to recognize in the thick jungle of coolness and hipness� The format and formal presentation of text ties together the balloons and the booklet accompanying the gimmick into the grander mission of the periodical, as Eggers already explained in the email in 1998. McSweeney’s will give second wind (a new breath? ) to any literary piece vanished into the vaults of failure—or to any consumer good that will otherwise disappear from touch (I can send virtual balloons with iMessages, for instance). The material flexibility (expansion and deflation of the balloon) adds to the formal characteristics of the book included in the plastic bag, striking up a conversation between balloon and text. And, similarly, the balloons still work with the parameter of verso and recto, like a page in a book; you need to turn the balloon around to read the short story on the “back” of the balloon (see fig. 2). We can make larger assumptions about the genre of the short story, then, which might, because of its formalistic constraints, lend itself even more strongly to such playful gestures as well as creative uses of its narrative and material flexibility. This 110 r ieke J ordan could cement the role of the short story in contemporary culture, for it is built on confinement and brevity and hence refers to its own short-ishness: short of breath, short reading pleasure, short attention span� A balloon, suddenly, materializes literature, partying, gimmick, and collector’s item, and a new venue for the short story as the text for a throwaway consumer object� The American fast food chain Chipotle used a similar text-object strategy in 2014. Stories by Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, George Saunders, and Malcolm Gladwell were printed on soda cups, and the short stories are exactly the length of a cup, interacting with and catering to the constraints the object imposes on the text. 6 That is a lot of (cultural) work that a throwaway object has to muster� We see how distinctions between the 6 Apparently, it was Jonathan Safran Foer’s idea, who, as the legend goes, sat in a Chipotle restaurant one day, not wanting to die of boredom� Struck by inspiration, Foer emailed Chipotle’s CEO: “I said, ‘I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn’t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text. … ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service’” (Foer in Makarechi)� Fig. 2. The “back” of the balloon, which includes the short story “Relaxation Technique�” The balloon still makes use of verso and recto, even though a balloon is round and has no left and right, no back and front. And one relaxation technique is undoubtedly calm and steady breathing (image: author’s own)� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 111 conceptual and the consumable become contested and the idea of “caring for,” “organizing” and even “second wind” reach new terrain� This invites a reading of Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic category of cute—one terrain she explores in her seminal Our Aesthetic Categories� Those categories of zany, cute, and interesting “grasp how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Ngai 1)� Cute is a category that evokes affection and aggression, and it indexes an intimate, sensuous relationship with an object that is based on these oftentimes contradicting emotions (see 54)� McSweeney’s rewards such “sensuous” relationship with their periodical by building upon exactly these contradictory affects. In our case: electrostatically charged and confiding; prone to pop and prone to deflate. Ngai continues that cute has becomes an emergent consumer option in the mid-twentieth century, arising out of the “marriage of modernism and mass culture” (58)� She argues persuasively that “these aesthetic categories [are] based on milder or equivocal feelings made explicit” and that it is “the continuousness and everydayness of our aesthetic relation to the often artfully designed, packaged, and advertised merchandise that surrounds us in our homes, in our workplaces, and on the street” (58). The description text in the McSweeney’s online store speaks to this, and the issue is even sold with these contradictions in mind: The balloons are “perfect for decorating a birthday party, reading and then popping as a zen meditation, or repeatedly blowing up and releasing in order to observe their whimsical flight around the room, these balloons will provide endless enrichment” (“McSweeney’s Issue 53”)� Notice that we can “pop” (destroy) or meditate (restore)—something akin to a simultaneously aggressive and zen operational aesthetic� The balloons invite the balancing of blowing too much air into them (so they could pop), or caring for them so much as not to inflate them at all (i.e., keeping them pristine as a collector’s item)� The reader/ subscriber/ consumer acknowledges that the balloons can be deflated and then refilled with air, always with the ambivalence of “aggression” and “failure” built in� Such a literary balloon is a different way of negotiating (print) consumer goods (or, rather, now elevating a trite thing like a balloon into print capitalism) that surround us day to day: McSweeney’s takes the every-day object and reintegrates it into the realm of high literature, marking it with text that would usually be found in anthologies or high-gloss blogs (the same rings true for the Chipotle cups)� But the one shape that always comes back into view—the balloon animal, if you will—is the consumer� Media scholar Jim Collins suggests in an interview with Ben De Bruyn that Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern insists on the “uniqueness of the reading experience of the consumer; apart from the rest of cultural noise in order to survive� And so in effect these books labor to create a space for a certain kind of reading which is clearly separate from the rest of popular literary culture but then, as soon as they become the stuff of literary adaptations, television bookclubs, superstore bookstores, Amazon communities, in effect they’re still a part of it” 112 r ieke J ordan (199) 7 � Notice how Collins does not speak of a reader, but rather of a consumer� The consumer seeks out a unique experience that pertains to her, and her alone. Being a louder, analogue, offline noise in a sea of other virtual options has certainly become part of McSweeney’s marketing and self-fashioning that caters to exactly this unique consumer position enabled by mass objects. End: less, Enriching The description on the McSweeney’s website promises “endless enrichment”: But why should material and narrative interaction with the objects at hand be “rewarding” and “enriching” for the reader? Or is the work of fiction here enriching? The balloon issue incorporates ideas of replicating unfree time within the confines of partying and leisure 8 —work, organizing, assembly, caring for come to mirror partying, childhood experiences, zen-ness, and decoration� These, too, are contradictory notions similarly to Ngai’s ideas of the ambivalent aesthetic parameter of the cute� Here, though, it is the work performed with and toward the object that remains ambiguous� Asked more blatantly: Is this work? Is this leisure? Is it reading? Is this a text? Is this a consumer object? Is it care work? Is it decorating for a party? Allow me to repeat my idea that curation describes tinkering with and implementing an artistic vision; it redefines the role of the reader in terms of the interactive and participatory notions of contemporary culture� And it matters that such (inter)activities are based and filtered through the act of reading and the way that the literary text is transferred onto a consumer good. McSweeney’s understanding of “reading” layers one activity onto the other� We could say that the balloon issue is writing “over” the long-standing nineteenth-century notion of reading as a true leisure time activity—for people really were not working when they read� Now there seems to be a peculiar pleasure in being overwhelmed, with arranging and figuring the material out, and with, well, partying� 9 But this endless enrichment is juxtaposed with material and narrative limitations (another short-ishness), and even aesthetic failure. You can only inflate the balloon up to a certain point, for instance, and to underline these limitations a balloon with a hole is included� This inbuilt failure (or aggression, to return to Ngai’s language) might indicate that success is actually antithetical to artistry� This, then, gives us a more nuanced idea of the curator-cum-consumer: the way that “making” is staged here has started to slide into something we rightly need to call “remaking” since authorial/ creative intention is so often stripped away from the consumer� We can relate this idea toward the material 7 Jim Collins calls this idea an effect of “de-convergence culture” in opposition to what Henry Jenkins famously called convergence culture (199)� 8 I borrow this idea from Theodor W� Adorno who in his piece “Free Time” traces the paradox of free time—free time cannot exist without unfree time (see Adorno 167)� 9 Similarly, pastimes like playing the guitar, collecting curio, or even partying are interlaced with the idea of working through the story and become a skill that relates to reading� I discuss this in depth in my monograph� The Test Balloon: McSweeney’s Fifty-Third Issue 113 strategies of McSweeney’s: the layout and content of the respective issues defy any notion of routine that would assure the reader of stability or even durability (i.e., the hole in the balloon). There is no single, consistent reading experience, because there is no consistent layout or consistent material property for McSweeney’s� Instead, there is a heterogeneous form that requires new and intensified forms of reading labor and consumption. The acts of reading and consuming McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern conflate and remain individualized—because it does not create a narrative of constancy in which one reader can clearly imagine the reading experience of a fellow subscriber or the layout of the following issue� Rather, McSweeney’s depends upon a singular grappling with dynamic and sometimes obdurate form: an affective negotiation that stresses the reader-text and reader-object relationship and relegates it toward that of consumption rather than toward reading� McSweeney’s balloon issue occurs exactly at the cusp of this ambivalence, this tension between the consumable cute story that now appears on party balloons (and brands them with literary names) and the way that literature seeps into the weirdest confines, like a party balloon or a cup in a fast food restaurant. In this way, the endless “enrichment” McSweeney’s promises is folded into a contemporary form of cultural cache that is predicated on consuming the “right” things� The curator “gets it”—and she knows the niches and the hip harmonies of American pop culture� Their aesthetic of hipness, of DIY fun, of maker creativity is marketed to and in the same breath creates a particular kind of consumer: a reader who is willing to move between formerly disparate aesthetic registers and who is able to bridge contradictory affects, such as aggression and affection (partying, leisure, work, reading, collecting), and other porous circuits that happily fall together in the twenty-first century, such as novels, artisanal coffee, and vintage sneakers that are all sold in the same hip boutiques, be it in Berlin or Brooklyn� As a connoisseur and curator, she is to perform “good work” with the preset components made available to give the beautiful objects the right shape (blow air into them? Keep them deflated? ). This allows the following speculation: will these objects ever be read or will they remain in their packaging? This is after all a McSweeney’s publication, an object of a certain cache and collector’s value� This adds a twist to the creative achievement that Andreas Reckwitz, for instance, 10 diagnoses in his work on creativity as a dispositif in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and marks the creative endeavor, such as the short story, as a thing to buy and throw away� And likewise the labor performed by the reader is culturally coded as creative, but is similarly much less institutionalized� The “achievement” here is not only the colorful feats of design and packaging, but of creating a reader/ consumer position that recognizes the work of art� Or, taken one step further: is it McSweeney’s achievement to create a curator in their image, or of their likes, whom they teach to engage in their 10 Andreas Reckwitz notes that a certain creative ethos has become a structuring principle in the individual’s life in the twenty-first century. He makes this argument explicit in The Invention of Creativity. 114 r ieke J ordan material gradually (with every issue, for example)? This gives us a slightly different version of the curator as an implementing, creative agent: to what degree does the curator-reader predetermine her own path through the object? Or is it predetermined by style and packaging? Through curation-cumconsumption, the reader legitimizes the work of art and her proficiencies and fluency in aesthetic subgenres. Cultural capital arises because she “gets” the aesthetic while never being its real maker. It seems as if the texts need a curating, crafty, careful reader to attain such levels of quality and legitimacy� The aesthetics of bookishness in the twenty-first century, as Pressman argues, are “decisively different in tone and ambition” compared to other playful forms of literature (np)� As my discussion has shown, we might have to take this at face value: the ambition of the curator not to be tone-deaf� So curation might be in fact a limited activity rather than a truly creative one, for curation enables a delicate position for the reader toward the object, author, and text. The objects dictate their own terms, they circumscribe the reader in a range of possible options that only seems infinite. We can wonder what kind of legacy McSweeney’s will project into the future: a testament to consumer culture or a playful subversion of textuality? What we might have considered a looser or more creative agency before might indeed not singularly be integrated into such modes of creative endeavors� Maybe the curator actually works for or toward the recognizing of a singular experience becoming manifold� This shift from reading toward consuming and, enfolded within this, the challenges that text and material pose to one another are indicative of a new consumer position that is artful and reliant on individuality� Maybe such objects like McSweeney’s issues or a Chipotle soda cup are test balloons about the new material aesthetics of texts in the twenty-first century. It is interesting to see that they all are kind of intersectional materials/ forms, for they need to translate material from one into the next. The love story, the album, the collection, or the party take on disparate forms that become recognizable only through interaction and consumption—only to be discarded� And maybe the cultural and consumerist need for literature to be unique and quirky are exactly those market forms that take on shapes of balloons—nothing more, little less than hot air in a literary container� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� “Free Time�” 1969� Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords� Trans� Henry W� Pickford� New York: Columbia UP, 1998� Charles, Ron� “Friday Thoughts: Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear: Trump in the White House’ Is Already a Bestseller�” The Washington Post - Books. 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McSweeney’s, 1998-2019� Web� 22 March 2019. <https: / / store.mcsweeneys.net/ products/ mcsweeney-s-issue-53? taxon_id=1>. “‘McSweeney’s’: Quirky Quarterly To Publishing Powerhouse�” Npr.org� NPR, 18 Nov� 2013 Web� 25 March 2019� <https: / / www�npr�org/ 2013/ 11/ 18/ 245420833/ the-best-ofmcsweeneys-from-quirky-quarterly-to-publishing-powerhouse? t=1553506682608>� “McSweeney’s Wins ASME Award for Fiction�” American Society of Magazine Editors. ASME, 6 Feb� 2019� Web� 22 March 2019� <https: / / asme�magazine�org/ asme/ mcsweeneys-wins-asme-award-fiction>. Ngai, Sianne� Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting� Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2012� Pressman, Jessica� “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature�” Michigan Quarterly Review: Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age 48�4 (2009): np� Reckwitz, Andreas� The Invention of Creativity. Cambridge: Polity, 2017� Starre, Alexander. 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