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| August | Index |
A
year has passed since Genevieve and I launched Nerve from our telephone booth-sized Manhattan
apartment; now, panning our new headquarters in a downtown loft (five of us, each cocooned in the grip
of oversized headphones, frantically typing), it is clear that Nerve is prospering. We're delighted
(and somewhat surprised) that our oxymoronic subtitle, Literate Smut, has proved comprehensible to
so many. Several million different readers have been through Nerve in the last year, and a few
hundred thousand of you return each month. No doubt our choice of subject matter has something to do
with this success -- it's always effective, after all, to appeal to a primordial urge. But as our
loyal readers know, for all its sexiness Nerve plays less to the groin than the gray matter, and for
this there is a smaller market -- or so say the sales seers. Of course little is more satisfying
than proving them wrong, and towards this end we are doubly obsessed with assembling the most
comprehensively stimulating magazine around.
Much is afoot in the Nerve offices. In the last couple months we've launched
NerveLink, a database
of sex-related websites, and
Nerve.de
, a German version of Nerve. This fall we are scheduled to
unveil a community space (NerveCenter), a line of Nerve merchandise (including sheepskin rugs, silk
pajamas, and Twister sets, if you can believe it), as well as the Nerve: Literate Smut book
(due out from Broadway Books in September).
In order to make sure you are aware of the full breadth of Nerve offerings, Joey Cavella, our design
maestro, has created a new highlights page.
After noting that most people's attention spans have
shrunk with the national deficit (prosperity is distracting, after all), we have added a daily
Curio, which will consist either of a brief quotation ("The last time I was inside a woman was when
I visited the Statue of Liberty" -- Woody Allen), definition (mysophilia: arousal from chewing on
sweaty apparel) or factoid (male ostriches have penises so large they use them alternately as
walking sticks).
We are also using our new highlights format to introduce special issues, each centered around a
common theme. The unifying thread in July was the freakish spectacle of sex on talk shows. David
Futrelle's book review
(The Springer Hearings: A Case for Talking Trash)
addressed tabloid
television's unwitting contribution to sexual revolution; James Hannaham, meanwhile, delivered the
risible tale of a drag queen talk show brawl
(Tragedy in Burgundy). In late July we slipped in a
feature on Lolita,
the book,
the film and
the complex.
August brings our post-marital sex issue. Married readers have been writing us for months, insisting
that marriage is not the erotic Alcatraz it's made out to be. We thought this was splendid news, so
we've enlisted the novelist/poet duo
David Teague and
Marisa de los Santos to dispatch his/her
reports from the bowels of betrothal and
Amy Keyishian to describe the novel comfort of
post-conjugal coitus.
Rachel Greene, meanwhile, conducts the first
Nerve Interview with a
young woman who, in the name of art, married four men in one year.
As always, we hope to hear your feedback, whether harrumphs
or hallelujahs, and hope to see you in
the NerveCenter community space this fall, where we can strum chins together over these and other
aspects of modern (and not so modern) sexuality.
-- Rufus Griscom, August 1, 1998
| ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: |
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Rufus left
his reliable salary and position as an editor and director of new media
at Cader Books, a publisher of bestselling humor and entertainment titles,
in order to co-found Nerve in 1997 with Genevieve Field.
Before working at Cader, he was managing editor for
two years at August House, a publisher of contemporary storytelling and folklore.
Earlier still, he was book review editor at The Free Press in Little Rock, Arkansas.
His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Baltimore Sun and The
Wall Street Journal, among other places. He graduated from Brown University
in 1991. |
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