The Ba ffler I mpact State men t
About Us The epigraph stamped on The Baffler no. 1, from Arthur Rimbaud’s “Morning of Drunkenness,” introduced it as a punk literary magazine. It was the summer of 1988. Thomas Frank and Keith White were recent graduates of the University of Virginia. They named their magazine as a joke on the academic fad of undecidability—on the jargon of the professors and the pretensions of the commercial avant-garde, with its paralyzing agonies of abstraction and interpretation. The Baffler would move in the opposite direction. It would strive for the lucidity of independent, critical intelligence. It would “blunt the cutting edge” of the creative class gurus, the entertainment moguls, the cyber-entrepreneurs, and the postmodern theorists who were said to be innovating the country out of the struggles of the Cold War, ushering us into the “end of history,” where there was money to be made. Pop culture was entering its high hipster phase, and few souvenirs that entered The Baffler’s crosshairs were spared its ridicule, not even those countercultural sellouts Scooby Doo and Shaggy. (The Baffler no. 3 explained this pair’s meanderings as an example of the commercial exploitation of deviant subcultures.) In 1992, when
Illustration by Matt Roth, from The Baffler no. 6.
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