I started getting The Sun about 6 months ago, most likely to make myself feel like I was around an interesting lot while in the safe confines of my cozy home, away from the rebel flags, W stickers, and church ladies that make up this southern enclave.

And it worked.

I love this magazine. Readers write, writers write, and it is all compellingly honest and straight forward and thought provoking and human. There are no ads. Sy Safransky, a New Yorker and journalist who now lives in Chapel Hill, NC, is the editor. In the back of his magazine, he provides Sy Safransky’s Notebook, which is actually quite like a blog, but started way before blogging. I’ll say it. Sy Safransky is and continues to be visionary. And brave. From his notebook:

When I was a newspaper reporter in the 1960’s, I frequently wrote about race and poverty. I interviewed scholars. I spent time in poor black neighborhoods talking with teachers and social workers and advocates for welfare rights. But I wasn’t black, and I wasn’t poor…So what can someone like me really know about being black and poor in America – about the way racism crushes a man like a monstrous wave, and poverty, like a razor wind, strips him to the bone?

Sy sold The Sun’s first copies for a quarter, peddling them on the streets of Chapel Hill. I am a sucker for that underdog scrappiness and all or nothing entrepreneurial spirit. And I definitely need to incorporate more of that into my own gamebook. With the scrappiness fully covered, all I need now are the cajones I seemed to have lost somewhere between Colorado and Chicago, in the breadth of my twenties.

Jacquelyn McBain is one of those artists whose work grabs you by the throat and won’t let go until you consider it. From The Orion:

ANY ART, HOWEVER OBSCURE, may suddenly become an important influence for a new generation; one never knows when the past might become revolutionary; when some historical, ostensibly dead art may be resurrected as vital resource and trustworthy guide in an uncertain present. The current return to the Old Masters, as seen in Jacquelyn McBain’s excruciatingly-detailed paintings, is indeed postmodern in the sense that it involves the search for emotional warmth and authenticity in a cold, inhospitable world; a large, very public world in which one must make one’s own privacy to survive…

…McBain gives the familiar dialectic of nature and society, man and woman, a subtle new ecological expression. The threat to woman and to nature are one and the same for her; both are victims of man and the society he rules and the technology he invents. There is no protection against man and his destructive technology here.