newelty

It’s unclear to me exactly how the first “issue” of an online “magazine”–a.k.a., a blog–gets covered by the New York Times.

But based on today’s review of Nowhere, the qualifications seem to be:

• An Andy-Spade-like preoccupation with pencil-scribbled notebooks
• Courier font
• An aversion to using paragraph breaks, or in other ways admitting you’re publishing on the web
• A feeling in every piece that, yes, the writer truly thinks he (or she) is Ernest Hemingway reincarnated

Don’t get me wrong. I love a blog with a point of view, particularly one that’s grumpy. But their mission statement is all kinds of annoying, and should have been left to bake in the oven before being trumpeted by the Times:

You can still get lost on this planet, but it’s getting harder. Travel has been confused with tourism. Travel writing with brochure copy. Adventure with novelty. Tour buses clog the road, guides lurk in the most remote backwaters and Ten Awesome Things To Do articles have been written by people like me about every destination within a day’s drive of an airport. But you can still disappear, if only in your mind.

There’s no reason for this journal. No hidden agenda here. Nowhere is a place between places, an imagined depot for stories from the road. We collect found experiences through writing, art, video and sound then illustrate them with objects brought back from the field.

Novelty is a bad thing. Okay–we’ll have to just disagree on that point.

Travel is for the truly pure at heart, unlike the–sniff!–tourists. Sure. Maybe you’re a local. We’ll just disagree about that, too.

But here’s a hint: If you want to sound like you’re not a tourist, it’s probably not smart to refer to the places you’re visiting–the places people live–as “the field.”

And by the way, they’d like you to support their art through this PayPal link. It’s the topper on the fail cake. “There’s no reason for this journal…” except we’d like to ask you to pay us for it. With PayPal, the online-payment tool favored by eBayers with ceramic-kitten collections to sell.

I don’t blame them, though. I blame the New York Times for elevating them. Times editors, isn’t there anything halfway between puff pieces about cruise ships and rambling, pretentious travel writing? If so, could you please point us towards it?

Also, you just know these Nowhere fellows are totally Neo Lumberjacks, right?