Will boomers give new life to obituaries?
Death; read all about it.
How does one explain the ineffable lure of the obituaries, the only form of bad publicity, as playwright Brendan Behan once quipped? On the one hand, obituaries relate someone else's misfortune, which is satisfying in itself. And they can be just plain fascinating. An obituary of Jessica Mitford, author of "The American Way of Death," included her rationale for becoming a writer: "I figured that the only thing that requires no education and no skills is writing." Good call, Jessica.
Will people pay just to read obituaries? We are going to find out. Following up on a mini-boom in newspaper obits -- both the New York Sun and the Wall Street Journal have added them -- a husband-and-wife team from Princeton, N.J., plans to start publishing a glossy magazine, Obit. "We truly believe that we are starting a 'movement,' " co founder Barbara Hillier said in a prepared statement.
On its website, Obit calls itself "the hottest thing in periodicals since the golden years of Esquire and Playboy, that will leave an indelible mark on American society." Should the magazine fail after it hits newsstands next year, that line will doubtless appear in its obituary.
I'm not an obits person. I don't turn to them. Every so often, I am pawing through the paper looking for the Bird Sightings and -- bang! -- I come upon a photograph of a younger, better-looking, more accomplished , and probably nicer person than I, who is already dead. It's too darned depressing.
All too clearly, I can see the opening lines of my own obituary, buried between the Sudoku puzzle and the Jumble crossword; ". . .longtime Boston Globe columnist who compared himself to Badger, the lov able but sociopathic character from Kenneth Graeme's 'Wind in the Willows'. . ." You can fill in the rest.
I admire The Economist magazine for keeping the death count down. It publishes one, select, highly readable obituary in each week's issue. Likewise Harvard magazine has an excellent, one-page feature, "Vita" (as in: brevis), which profiles someone who's been dead so long that their absence no longer seem s threatening. But a magazine full of dead people, even glamorous dead people, like Susan Sontag, who is featured on the Obit website? It could be DOA.
Let's talk to someone who did one: Steve Miller, the founder, head writer , and chief bottle washer of Good Bye! magazine. Miller grew up next to a cemetery in Montclair, N.J., and escaped from the 80th floor of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He knows his stuff.
Good Bye!, which is on hiatus while Miller writes obits for the New York Sun, made death notices really, really fun. Each issue had a special "Deaths of the Animals" feature. There, Miller bade farewell to such four-legged friends as Twinkletoes, the oldest rhino in the Los Angeles Zoo, and to an unnamed Yorkshire terrier who was beaten to death by its Ocala, Fla., owner, who suspected it of being gay.
Miller wrote about people, too. He is justifiably proud of his salute to Morris Lapidus, perhaps the least chic American architect of the 20th century. Lapidus designed the Fontainebleau and Eden Rock hotels in Miami Beach, and naturally suffered in comparison to intelligentsia-certified geniuses like Mies van der Rohe. But the founder of "neoplastic" architecture could give as good as he got: Mies, Lapidus said, "represented the Germanic state of mind which dictated to the people what they should like and should not like, the kind of reasoning that gave birth to the Nazi movement in Germany."
Take that, Seagram Building!
Good Bye!, the archives of which are on the Web at goodbyemag.com, was never more than an advertising-free, illustrated newsletter. "Friends always wanted me to make it a commercial enterprise," Miller says, "but I could never envision the market."
But the entrepreneurs behind Obit see the market: the endlessly narcissistic baby boomers. "The generation of Americans approaching their twilight years is like no other generation before in terms of wealth, mobility, and power to shape the consumer market," they state. "Our magazine seeks to speak to this generation, to allay fears through information on the latest innovations in longevity and health, and to spark discussion about our attitudes about dying."
Speaking to me? Over my dead body.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
