The Finest Literary Publication Since the Edinburgh Review is on Life Support
I pray for Modern Drunkard Magazine's recovery but I fear the worst.
Benedict Groeschel wrote to me once with a Chesterton quip. I spoke with James "Mississippi" Meredith and Russell "the Man" Kirk on the phone. I had lunch with James Schall and Ernest van den Haag.
But if I were single and dropping names on luscious babes with intact genitalia at the bar, Frank Kelly Rich's name would be my bomb.
In response to a pro-life post here at TDE, he dropped me a note (handwritten, if I recall) that merely said, "Drinking is the war against death."
Yes, that Frank Kelly Rich: founder, editor, columnist of, at, and for Modern Drunkard Magazine, the funniest and best-written magazine of the early 2000s and holder of the URL drunkard.com, which is the second most sought-after URL behind insurancecompaniessuck.com.
Rich sent that note to me years before he pinned it to the top of MDM's X feed. In levels of pride, the note ranks somewhere below the birth of my first child and above the birth of my seventh.
But I fear the magazine is dead, or nearly so, hanging on Twitter life-support.
Its decline is a testament to a sad fact: fine prose, laced with humor and style, is gone. P.G. Wodehouse couldn't even earn beer money in today's world of scan-down-and-click readers.
It's also a testament to the atrophy of the right hemisphere. Any form of speed reading is the left hemisphere urinating on prose. If you reflect on the words in front of you only when you're standing at a urinal, weep for your emaciated R.H., then blame your ilk for MDM's decline.
Of course, MDM's maimed existence might merely be the way things are in this vale where all things pass away.
Or maybe all the drinking just caught up with Rich (no liquor poseur, he).
It's impossible for me to day.
But I gotta believe that, if MDM'd had a million subscribers as it deserved, it'd be thriving today.
.