Mike Brodie arrived in West Hollywood for his first major photography show dressed in a sleeveless Japanther shirt he hadn’t washed in two years.

I tried to beg out of a recent invitation to speak at a fundraising event for the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre. The organizers wanted me to talk about the Bard himself, and that is a subject I am definitely not qualified to address, especially on a program with a Hollywood producer, award-winning writers, English professors, and other Shakespeare experts. I'm just the publisher of a Southern literary magazine.

They call it the Global Village. Nothing goes unobserved, nothing is without distant consequences. A man throws a rock in Pretoria, another man ducks in Helsinki. The world's all wired, or wireless-I have no idea how any of it works, mechanically. This willful ignorance is appalling, even in an English major of Medicare age, but it's grounded in an invincible lack of interest. Call our technophobia innovation fatigue. You may find it's chronic in my generation. Though we can't fathom microchips, we don't pretend we're not stunned by their impact.

If magazine editors contribute in some way to the dissemination of art, it's not only in their decisions about which writing to publish, but in the routes they open up for writing. I hope we are creating a little route in this issue with the debut of a department titled "Writers on Dating."

We came by the idea easy. After all, whose dating advice should we crave more than a writer's?

There he is, the artist as hippie dandy, with his cocked homburg hat, his long black braids, his carved walking stick, tiny white birds on his shoes. Jim Roche picks up the photo, taken around the time in the '70s when he was hanging out at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea and showing at the Whitney. He says, "Look at him. Is he full of himself? Does he have some ego? Is he thinking he's really something?" And laughs at his young, impossible self.

They gave me a Pontiac, fueled up and Firebird red, and I'd like to blame it on that. Okay, it wasn't an actual Firebird-the rental-car wardens had entrusted me only with their cheapest little compact-but given that for the past eighteen years I've driven a Geo with the approximate pickup of a wheelbarrow, it might as well have been a Porsche. If I can't blame it on that, I'd like to blame it on NPR. The only public radio I could get was one of those with classical music on a loop and the rest of the stations were all bad pop, or pop country, which is to say the same thing. So I'd like to blame it on the music. Or on a month of sleeping on floors and reading to crowds who don't buy books, which is what we authors call going on tour.

If, on a rusty autumn afternoon, you were to catch my grandfather cruising the streets of Goodlettsville, Tennessee, chances are he would be behind the wheel of a shiny black El Camino. The vehicle, Chevrolet's 1983 take on the Greek Minotaur, is half-hot rod, half-pickup, and entirely shameless. With its sharp edges and silver runners, combed back into a slick mullet of truck bed, the El Camino, Spanish for "The Way," was engineered to be all things to all rednecks, as fit for drag racing on Friday night as for hauling timber on Saturday morning. The El Camino bucks any appraisal that smacks, in the slightest, of ambivalence. Passersby are either offended—a girlfriend once told me it made her want to hurl—or, like my grandfather, turned strangely, irremediably, on. But like a debutante at a dive bar, the car sends major-league mixed signals.

You live at the end of a winding cinderblock hall lit by fluorescent bulbs, in what feels like the catacombs of the veterinary school. Nearby, sick dogs cry out from kennels. Their anesthetized moans are drowned out by Gregorian Chant music on NPR, which blares from a small radio hanging from the doorknob of your room.

But this is a worthy soundtrack: You are whiskered angels, mewing cherubs, givers of platelets and life.