Far Out Man by Eric Utne

Author:Eric Utne [Utne, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

I loved working with my brother Tom on our new magazine. We could hang out for hours without talking, or have heated arguments about politics, religion, or about how each of us thought the other should be living his life. He was my closest collaborator and friend.

On the night he and I laid out and pasted up the galleys of the prototype for the first Utne Reader, it was snowing. I savored the quiet camaraderie of long hours hunched over our drawing boards in focused concentration. We could have been ninth-century monks in a candlelit scriptorium, copying and illuminating calfskin vellum pages in black oak-gall ink with goose-feather quills. I looked over at Tom and recalled the Sunday mornings of our childhood, each of us on our knees on the floor copying panels of our favorite comics characters and then making up our own.

Vapors of Bestine rubber cement thinner and spray fixative nipped at our nostrils. We had decided we wouldn’t invest in an Easycoat 9 Waxer until we knew we were in business for the long haul.

Tom and I didn’t know that the future was looming with its software to replace our X-Acto knives, rubber cement, and layout boards, our metal T squares, blue lines, and wastepaper baskets overflowing with curling galleys of waxy words. We were still innocent of all that, that separation from the touch and smell and sting of the work.

The prototype was a grab bag of the pieces that I’d clipped, photocopied, and foisted on friends and family for several years. Though the Reader’s Digest was our inspiration, Utne Reader would be different from that amalgam of “condensed” articles. We wouldn’t tamper with the authors’ language, condensing or altering their vocabulary. We would reprint fully intact excerpts from longer articles and books. The excerpts would stand on their own, unadulterated. And we would introduce each article with an editor’s note that explained where we’d found it and why we thought it was significant.

We were laying out columns of words by Paul Hawken and Barbara Ehrenreich, Joanna Macy, Petra Kelly, and a half dozen others. I had written to each of the authors, offering a free subscription in exchange for the right to reprint their work. All had agreed. Our lead article was the interview with Robert Bly from New Age Journal. I wrote an introduction describing just how revolutionary I thought Robert’s thinking about masculinity was. I knew that “men’s work” was an idea whose time had come.

At some point, in the wee hours of the morning, Tom blurted out, “Good enough!” his customary pronouncement that it was time to pack up the issue and send it off to the printer. We looked each other straight in the eye for the first time all night. We knew we’d done a good thing. Snow blanketed everything on the street. Cars parked on both sides were buried in the wake left by the city snowplows.

As I walked the two blocks home, laying down a new trail through the trackless powder, I felt an inner excitement, a quickening.

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