Bridge – Summer/Fall 2003

I urge you to check out, before even finishing this review, the website of Bridge Magazine, though I know the wish is sort of hopeless: there’s almost no way to conceive of the sort of madness and playful fun the magazine contains, promotes, inculcates, various other verbs. It’s sort of like McSweeneys, I suppose, though somehow more fun, grounded in a real world (perhaps this is the only magazine I can think of that’s made strangely more whole, more itself, because of advertisements [almost all of which are by/for Chicago-area businesses]).

I urge you to check out, before even finishing this review, the website of Bridge Magazine, though I know the wish is sort of hopeless: there’s almost no way to conceive of the sort of madness and playful fun the magazine contains, promotes, inculcates, various other verbs. It’s sort of like McSweeneys, I suppose, though somehow more fun, grounded in a real world (perhaps this is the only magazine I can think of that’s made strangely more whole, more itself, because of advertisements [almost all of which are by/for Chicago-area businesses]). And I really don’t know which point I’d try and sell someone on, or which point I was most sold on, myself: was it the role-playing game? The brilliant fiction (this is especially about you John L. Sheppard and Beth Bosworth)? The poetry (everyone)? The various writings on music, culture and critique, and readings that, if you just open to them randomly and read beginning wherever you want, can convince your brain that you’ve wandered into a super-secret Mensa meeting that’s full of really cool people who have heard music that you really want to be listening to? I’m not kidding: buy this magazine, now, and read it until you get a fever, and then read it to make the fever come down. [http://www.bridgemagazine.org] – WC