November 7th, 2007

To The New Yorker–all my love

Nobody needs another tribute to the utter definition of a venerable magazine, The New Yorker. It’s been around since 1925, everybody’s heard of it and probably has an opinion on it, and it’s even got it’s own hater blogs (which I will not link, even though the one I read was pretty funny). And yet I love it, passionately. It’s the only magazine in my life; it’s the only magazine for me.

I really don’t think it’s a strange choice for my sole subscription, though I get occasional comments: why don’t you read a Canadian magazine or a magazine more relevant to your industry or a freakin’ daily so you wouldn’t always be mystified by what’s going on in the world.

These are all valid suggestions, but they are made by people who don’t read the way I read (like a lunatic) and who have room in their lives for more than one periodical.

I don’t.

I don’t like to skim, I don’t like to skip, and I don’t like to miss anything. If it’s worth reading, to me, it’s worth reading the whole bloody thing. If I took a daily newspaper, I would probably have to quit my job and devote myself to it full time. One New Yorker, read in full earnestness, takes about a week of trips to the gym, if I keep up my cardio, if I don’t miss any days. And that’s what I do.

Not because I am insanely obsessive, although I am, but because I love it. I grew up with the New Yorker. First I just read the panel cartoons, then I read the movie reviews, then I started into the prose and I’ve never looked back. If you are going to let any mag filter the world for you, better pick one with high standards. Two of the stories on my top-ten list a few weeks back I originally read in the New Yorker–Haruki Murakami’s “Sleep” when I was just 10 or 11, and had no idea whether Haruki was a man’s or woman’s name, or if what grownups did at night *wasn’t* eat chocolate and read *Anna Karenin.” I pretty much hoped it was.

If you start early enough with any reading material, it will form it’s own ideal reader (this is true of just about anything, I suppose; it’s how you explain families). I love the New Yorker because I know the people who write it and I care about what they say, and actually what they are up to. It’s been more than five years since I got my own subscription to the magazine; that’s the point at which I felt up to committing to every word, pretty much the point from which I date my adulthood (semi-facetious). But now I *know* these people, because I read their thoughts on movies and music and Iraq and whaling. I really care about Louis Menand’s criticism of the next book, because he was so dead-on about the last 12. And I don’t follow baseball except when I’m actually at the dome, but I read all of Roger Angell’s commentary, and I sort of follow.

Tunnel vision, not ideal, broader horizons, don’t have to read every capsule review, blah blah blah. Someday. For now, it could be worse.

Let the last thing that I give you be a smile
RR

I don’t know

August 10th, 2007

Order and Reality

Those are two things we probably need more of or less of, respectively or in concert. I’m not sure. Those who know me know that I’m a far bigger fan of the first than the second: I know where all my books are, even those I haven’t and won’t need in years. I could probably guess how much money is in my wallet within a dollar or so, how much food is in my fridge to the nearest onion, whose number I have in my phone book, etc. I like being on top of my game, such as it is, knowing what’s going on. The more knowledge I have of my little world, the more I feel the world is manageable, and therefore ok.

So it is curious, then, how much I do not like to read nonfiction. I want to read and write novels and short stories about other people’s little worlds; I do not want to read about the big world as a whole. My current theory as to why is because I’m never going to get a grasp on everything in the whole big world. I’ve got complete control over my hard-drive, my spice rack and my wallet–they are available to me to be exhaustively known, and then confidently ignored. Possibly, there is a feeling in the back of my head that if I tried to read about, say, the oil trade, I would not be able to understand more than a near tenth of any article, and then my obsessive tendencies would take over and I would be found a year from now, body crushed under an avalanche of back-dated New York Times.

Perhaps not. But I do know I like manageable things that I can completely consume. And that is why the one form of non-fiction that I let into my life is The New Yorker. Let’s be honest, it’s where I get all my information on the world that I don’t glean from conversation or fiction. I don’t watch television, I don’t read the newspaper and I change the radio station when the talking comes on.

Are you going to stop reading this blog?

Please don’t. I like you.

The New Yorker is a truly fantastic magazine, and it covers political, environmental and cultural issues about as exhaustively as a WASPy American weekly ever could. It’s quite dense for 90 pages a week, but if I read seriously on the cross-trainer an hour a day, I can read every word of every article and review (I skip the capsule reviews of live shows in “Goings on about Town,” because there’s no way I’m going to see them). Then the magazine is fully consumed, I know as much as I’m going to know about the world that week, which is actually not all that much in the scheme of things. But I know everything about The New Yorker that week. I like that.

This strangeness was driven home to me yesterday when I turned to Elizabeth Kolbert’s article. Normally Ms. Kolbert writes about global warming and other environmental issues. She is very thorough and passionate, but sometimes I find her writing a little…technical. I seem to recall her describing molecules. Fascinating, but not my bag. And then this week, our relationship changed (I feel very close to all the regulars at the magazine. This probably also not a good sign about my personality). Her article “Stung” is about an obsession of mine that predates TNY or having my own spice rack or wallet or anything: bees.

As a child, I loved bees and ants. An incipient obsessive, I loved learning about their perfectly ordered societies, rigid life roles and hierarchies. They lived in little cells! They had life roles assigned to them from larval stage and they *never did anything else*. (You know what else I liked as a child? Feudalism.) As I devoured the article, I thought fondly of my illustrated insect guides, my “pet” ants (country children do not have ant farms; I played with ant hills in the yard). Kids are weird, kids are obsessive. Some grow out of it, some don’t. At least I don’t wish I was a bee anymore. Much.

Possibly this is all twitter, and definitely self-involved, better left to for a consciousness-raising seminar (uck, how I would hate that–so unmanageable). But reading matters a lot on this blog and it has long been a sticking point for some (hi, Scott!) that I don’t read nonfiction ever. Isn’t it interesting that there is a solid psychological reason why not?

Or maybe it’s just that I’m actually an insensitive person and don’t care about global warming. Either way, you should really read the bee article. It’s interesting and bees are awesome and Kolbert, when she’s not writing about the end of civilization, is hilarious.

I can’t stand up / for falling down
RR

May 7th, 2007

Influenza

When I was very young, I read indiscriminately–Christopher Pike, Louisa May Alcott, J. D. Salinger, Joanna Spyri, Francine Pascal, whatever you handed me. This is not terribly different from how I read now. However, the stuff one reads when one is very young is far more likely to become deeply embedded one’s literary consciousness, and resurface again and again, perhaps especially if one takes to writing for oneself. Or perhaps it’s just me.

Anyway, my literary foundations are equal measures literature and tripe. Sometimes when I read my own writing, I can hear faint echoes of things I thought were brilliant when I was ten. Some I still do admire–it’s hard to shake that early hero-worship. And it’s really really hard to convince myself that I’m not John Updike, or that it’s not at least worth trying to be.

Anyway, an influence far more viral, though less venerated, than Updike is Sassy magazine. At least, it was in the years between 1990, when I discovered it at Hy & Zel’s (don’t tell me you don’t remember “the supermarket drugstore”) and 1994, when it was purchased by the Peterson Publishing company rapidly transformed into Teen‘s “If boys don’t like you, what’s the point?” twin.

But until then, great days. The fact that I was in grade school, a member of the Fido Dido fanclub, buying magazines at Hy&Zel’s because of Sunday shopping laws, and growing prize-winning squash for the fair did not seem to me to be in conflict with the Sassy ethos of Doc Martens, dyed hair and alternative music. CGBG sounded good to me, and so did Manic Panic, vegan, Olympia, indie, and all those other nice words they used.

It was the words that got me; they do it every time. I never really got the bands they promoted, the clothes, the makeup, (though I did get myself some Manic Panic at one point–chaos ensued). I liked the magazine for the way it seemed to be written as a girls club where all the writers wrote primarily for each other as audience. Readers like me, who didn’t live in New York and didn’t know underground from inground, were welcomed to the readership like partygoers being ushered into the room.

Linguistic jokes, like using “rilly rilly” to be emphatic about something silly, “alterna” as the just-a-bit-better adjective to alternative, “yo” as emphasis…I loved being in on those jokes (note that those are things I still do–worrying?). I also started writing, for the high school paper, as editor of the yearbook, in letters, emails, um, this blog, as if I were part of a large and unruly staff of writers. Ever since I made my first PA announcement from “We here at Yearbook Central” I have liked that tone. So much so that when the magazine first altered and then (swiftly) folded, I didn’t know what to aspire to. Would my “staffer” status eternally be imaginary?

Apparently so. I think Sassy did change women’s magazines–it made them self-conscious, more willing to use the first person pronoun in articles, to refer to writers’ lives, complexions and sexual experiments, to make the content about the character as Sassy did. But the love for the reader gradually leeched out of it, and made those articles just little exercises in self-empowerment–“oh, I’m so embarrassed about it, let me tell you, and tell you, and tell you.” As I say too often, self-consciousness is the new ego. If you constantly talk about how embarrassed/inadequate/confused you are, you are still talking about yourself. Not that I see anything wrong with that–is Rose-coloured an unself-conscious venture? Hardly. But I really did think there was something community-building about Sassy, and I loved that. The idea of writing in concert, not necessarily sharing every opinion but sharing a voice, is quite alluring to me. It probably wasn’t as great as I imagined–I was, after all, a hick kid, and anybody who didn’t have to take the school bus every day had some mystique to me. But I still rilly do think about Christina and Margie and Jane and Mike and Diane–when I put on the Docs I got when I was 23, or the Hole cd from when I was 21, or a lot of eyeliner, anytime.

And I still want to be John Updike.

I’ll tell you about the Manic Panic sometime.

I’m floating in and out of disco
RR