In Papaellinas’s review of literary magazines in ABR last year (May 1997), he makes the salient point that reviewing literature is not purely a matter of aesthetics or politics. Publications exist within a matrix of editorial decisions, funding resources, accountability, publishing and distribution considerations, perceptions of audience demographics and current literary trends. The most that can be said of literary magazines is that they possess, or ought to possess, a certain imprimatur that marks it as a magazine in its own right. It would be impossible and indeed undesirable, for instance, to compare the Australia Council funded, already well-established magazine of HEAT (at $12 an issue) with the seat-of-the-pants guerrilla tactics of Blast (at $2 an issue). Different strokes, different folks.

All of which is cold comfort to the reviewer. If we abandon any attempt at judging these publications on arbitrary notions of aesthetics and excellence, what other critical faculties can we bring to bear on this matter? This is precisely the point where public transport and literary magazines intersect in a happy confluence. Choosing the right publication for the right journey may be of more importance than definitive pronouncements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The following then are a few modest suggestions that can be modified to just about any transport system.

Ideally, HEAT ought to be consumed on short interstate flights. Say Melbourne to Sydney. You would be ill-advised to being reading it on shorter P.T. trips or you may find, as I did from personal experience, that you are so thoroughly engrossed in it that you miss your stop altogether. Included in issue six are writings from Danish authors, an eerily prescient interview (given that it came out before the drug brouhaha at the Perth World Championships) with an anonymous Chinese athlete talking about the rampant use of drugs in the Chinese athletic teams and a wonderfully inventive piece by Kurt Brereton, ‘The Cultural Poetics of Water’. You have to be grateful to Brereton for the line, ‘they don’t make nostalgia like they used to,’ and for providing a Baudrillard quote that sows the seeds of suspicion that the Great French Theorist may have possessed a wry sense of humour. Then there’s Sue Martin’s biting satire on academic politics, ‘Tenure’, (mendaciously?) placed under the fiction category. Her account of a university departmental meeting (doesn’t specify which department but my guess would be a Cultural Studies meeting), attended by the tenured, the long-term untenured, the bitterly untenured, the PhD student stars looking for tenure and the widely-considered-to-be-tenured-for-the-wrong-reasons tenured, is hilarious and biting. Add Dorothy Hewitte’s feisty and poetically bucolic poem ‘Neighbours’, Peter Tyndall’s sketchings placed alongside his surrealist musings and Carsten Jensen’s unusual take on historical artefacts and colonialism and you have yet another fine edition of HEAT.

Nocturnal Submissions has grown and matured over its five issues and is fact becoming a literary magazine that can hold its own with the bigger acts. It’s obvious that a lot of thought has gone into developing its layout and graphics. The latest issue is a special Irish and Australian issue, but surprisingly it is the Australian writers who really hold attention: Brad Bryant’s poignant story of loss in ‘Where’s Gough?’; Mischa Merz’s crystallised depiction of boredom, loneliness and obsession in ‘Killing Time’; Marcel Maslin’s intriguingly titled prose ‘Hungary tick in a fat dog’s ear’ and Irish writer Paul Lenehan’s short bildungsroman, ‘Song for Sharkey’, with its themes on the cruelty and cold dispassion for adolescent boys, are all examples of the direction that Nocturnal Submissions has taken. Throw in a couple of interviews with Bernard Cohen, a few poems by the likes of Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Edwina Preston and you have a magazine tailor-made for either getting from one suburb to the next (say ten to fifteen minutes) or for those slightly longer trips into the city.

Whoever does the design and layout for Siglo really ought to get an award of some kind. Even the ads look luscious! The graphics and visuals in Siglo are woven throughout the text in a way that constantly has the eye moving from text to visuals, instituting a different experience of reading. Although the theme of this issue is ‘Consumption’ the definition is loose and manages to incorporate issues as widely divergent as music and piano (Vincent Plush), death and taxes (Peter Kenneally), online consumption (Dean Kiley), for and nutrition (Marion Halligan), and fashion (Joanne Finkelstein). Although published in Tasmania it is far from being a parochial magazine. Indeed, with contributions by Bai Xiaoyi and Javant Biarujia it seems to be branching out into an international readership and doing a damn fine job too. The inclusion of a contributors’ bibliography, however, would be an asset. This really is a go-anywhere magazine. You can accessorise it to any daily plan you have. Short trip? Read the one page prose pieces and the poems. Longer trip? Get stuck into the longer articles or just sit and stare at the visuals.

Blast, a mixed bag of goodies advertised as a compilation of new writers and new writing, consists mainly of prose pieces between 1,000 to 3,000 words with a few poems filling up the spaces. While the writers do appear to be new there’s not terribly much in the way of new writings, although the first two pieces ‘Rise’ and ‘Rekord’ might be considered experimental in form albeit self-consciously so. There are, however, a number of gems scattered throughout. Troy Harvey Graham’s piece, ‘Is a straight line “art”?’, has a cross caption that reads, ‘I have worn a ten gallon hat, which I discovered only holds four gallons of vomit’. Now that’s something that demands further attention, and he doesn’t disappoint with his vitriolic diatribe on the absurdities of line dancing. Cate Kennedy’s take on the pitfalls of virtual reality is entertaining as is Marianne Brighton’s wry poem ‘The Trouble with Being a Writer.’ At $2.00 a pop Blast is well worth buying for those interminable waits at the tram/train/bus stop when public transport is either (a) running late or (b) on strike.

If literary magazines are being forced to endure interesting times of funding cutbacks, Quadrant seems to be suffering from a surfeit of interestingness. With the recent (reluctant?) resignation of Robert Manne, the subsequent appointment of columnist P.P. McGuiness as editor and sweeping changes to the board of editorial advisers, Quadrant seems to be undergoing enormous upheavals. It may be that this passage of uncertainty has left Quadrant rudderless but, whatever the reason, Quadrant seems a flat and unenthusiastic publication. After the slick professional approaches of Siglo, Nocturnal Submissions and HEAT, Quadrant appears as the fusty, slightly querulous and unkempt aunty of the literary magazine family. The textually dense articles are packed into the pages with little regard for the comfort of the reader. Even the poems are incredibly long and dense. A creeping lethargy is the main reaction to ploughing through Quadrant, not helped by unimaginative and po-faced tides like ‘One Hundred Years a Nation: Australia Looks to 2001’ or ‘Of Hong Kong, Newfoundland and New Delhi’. Not exactly titles to get the creative juices flowing.

There is a case to be made for taking Quadrant with you on a long coach ride. Perhaps Melbourne to Adelaide. By definition coach trips are one of the most fiendishly distressing things ever invented. Reading every single word of Quadrant is a difficult and time-consuming enterprise but if you can successfully focus on the matter in hand you might just block out the tedium of the trip.

Every literary magazine has its place in the network of public and interstate transport. Just remember, though, if you read and drive, you’re a bloody obsessive idiot.