While at Sam the Record Man on Yonge, I picked up a couple of magazines. I found a copy of Arsenal: The Official Magazine which is to When Saturday Comes what a 1979 issue of Teen Beat was to that year's Rolling Stone. Ashley Cole and David Cassidy are both dreamy but I want a bit more than glossy pictures and bland positives.

The Walrus on the other hand, is a good read. A new literate current affairs type magazine - edited out of Toronto, printed out of Winnipeg - for starters it is 4 bucks cheaper than the $9.95 I wasted on A.:T.O.M. Despite the need to have an article by Margaret Atwood - one presumes they might have a mumbling loser Gordie Lightfoot song as their anthem - it has had some good luck getting actual topical essay writers Douglas Coupland and Lewis Lapham to provide for the first issue. Pegs actually just provides some book reviews so it is not too needy a move. [She does, though, write some odd sentences like her first few:

The literary map is like the geological one: It's three-dimensional. Mountains are leveled, rifts open, volcanoes suddenly appear where before there were none. Not so long ago, books by émigrés from the Soviet Union or its satellites were almost guaranteed a hearing in the West. Now, ever since 9/11, a catastophe that is a ready a logo, the publishing hot spot has shifted to another incandescent region, the Middle East.

Now I am definitely stupider than Margaret Atwood and have been marked as a bad speller since grade three, but why is the "i" in "It's" capitalized? Why is the word "geological" used - three-dimensional maps are topographical, not geological. The change in the tastes of publishing described is a swift change but geological shifts are very slow. And why "logo" with all the implications of the branding of falsehood Naomi Klien has brought to the word. Whatever 9/11 has become culturally, for whatever cause its remembrance is misused, the qualities of the event itself are not to the misuse what fast food is to the golden arch.]

Anyway, Atwood aside, The Walrus reminds me of the now longishly departed The Idler (which hung on until last year in its pub form) - but also more Harpers rather than, say, The New Yorker - with photo essays, topics chosen from throughout North American - including Canadian - and global current events and popular culture...and nice cartoons and incidental drawing. Next issue has Stephen Lewis writing about a truly great Canadian Romeo Dellaire, who led the shamefully unsupported UN protection force in Rwanda and who went a ways towards madness afterwards knowing what he saw and what could have been done. I already want to read that.