"Can I Borrow That Magazine When You're Through?"

I've never been without at least one magazine subscription. I've almost never been without a book to read, either, and magazines are what I pick up when I'm between books. It's like a book is a rooftop, and I need a magazine as a high wire to get me across from one to the next one. I have to be reading or I'll die.

Do you have a favorite magazine? I'll bet it's no easier for you to say than it is for me, because there's a magazine for every interest, and interests change. Or maybe they don't. If you're a welder who lives for his work, then maybe you've always had a copy of Professional Welding Today lying around. I know I would.

When I say a magazine for every interest, you have no idea. If you're into pretty women and necrophilia, try a copy of Girls and Corpses, featuring articles such as “How to Drive Your Corpse Wild in the Sack” and “How to Keep Her Hot Long After She's Gone Cold.” (Think I'm making this up? www.girlsandcorpses.com.) Or Modern Drunkard, whose top story this month is, “I Busted Out of Rehab – They Weren't Serving Booze So I Wasn't Serving Time.” The Miserablist is for people who hate everything. (Their motto is, “Because Life is S&@#.”) I could go on, but I'd really rather not. My point is you have no excuse not to subscribe to magazines, because as you can see, whatever you're into, you're probably in luck.

As a kid, I liked Highlights and then, a few years later, Boys' Life. Boys' Life had that back page full of jokes (I checked recently, and it still does), and I read Highlights from cover to cover. It's a bit more politically correct these days: Goofus of “Goofus and Gallant” is no longer a slob, and he's also not as mean. That's no fun. Of course, Mad Magazine was must reading for people my age. Their movie parodies were some of the funniest things I'd ever seen (their sendups of King Kong and The Birds still make me smile thinking about them), and Don Martin's cartoons were inventive and deliriously goofy. Folding Mad's back page to reveal that issue's punch line was fun, but not so much for me – I didn't like folding a magazine any more than I liked dog-earing a book. I understand Mad caters to advertisers these days, which is sad. That means readership is down. We all grew up, I guess.

 

My mom read Reader's Digest, and I enjoyed all the jokes and anecdotes. But the last time I picked one up, it had so many stiff advertising inserts that by the time I tore them all out, I was too tired to read.

Until a year and a half ago, I was reading the New Yorker. I don't live in New York, and I'm not an effete snob. I started reading it in junior high just for Pauline Kael's movie reviews. Kael, James Agee, and Roger Ebert are the most film-savvy and entertaining film critics I can think of. (Ebert was an acquired taste, meaning it took me a long time to acquire it.) You could have no interest in movies and still enjoy Kael's writing. I also read the cartoons, which I think are the wittiest. (Roz Chast cracks me up every time.) But these days, the New Yorker has changed its focus from culture to politics, and it's gotten dull. So I was reading just the cartoons and reviews until I realized those were the only things I was reading. Hence, my departure. I still get form letters imploring me to please, please come back! But they don't need my readership any more than they need my poems. (I stopped collecting their rejection slips when I began to lose count.)

My sister used to read People and Entertainment Weekly, but she let both lapse. I read EW because I like to keep up with book and movie releases, and some of their articles are informative and good fun. But it's really geared more toward their target demographic – that is to say, if it were sold only at Comic-Con conventions, it would still clean up. (As far as I can recall, the only special issue they've run that was dedicated to one personality was a recent tribute to Leonard Nimoy, if that tells you anything.)

I subscribed to Sports Illustrated for a year, but I finally had to admit that I was reading way more about sports than I cared or needed to. I just thought it was the guy thing to do. (See my previous post about sports and me.) To me, the swimsuit edition is like those women in bikinis who pose for no apparent reason at car shows. What does one have to do with the other?  Don't women in general enjoy sports and cars, too?

The only other magazines I read these days are the literary magazines I review for The Review Review. I enjoy good fiction and good poetry, and there's a lot of it around.  I once subscribed to Poetry for a year.  It's the oldest poetry magazine in the country. The poems that excite me the most are those that, when I finish them, inspire me to sit down and write something myself. Poems that have something to say to the average reader, not just to other poets. That's why I like Stephen Dunn, Jonathan Holden, Mary Oliver, Louis Simpson. . . . Very little in Poetry makes me feel that way. (Now you'll probably say you read a poem of Dunn's or Oliver's in Poetry just last month. I would consider those exceptions to the rule.) Billy Collins is a real favorite among people who don't normally read poetry, but to me he's like Willie Nelson. I liked every song of his that I heard on the radio until I bought my first Willie Nelson album. That's when I realized that, for me, a little of Willie goes a long way. His thin, nasal quality began to grate on me, and he hasn't been a favorite since.

Right now I'm in the mood for a subscription to something, anything, that I've never read before. I'm leaning toward film magazines, but Film Comment is pricey and Premiere is only online; if I can't flip pages, I'm not interested. I used to dream of owning a farm and living the rural life, but I didn't like the hours. Maybe I could live vicariously through Modern Farmer or Classic Tractor. If I ever get weird, there's probably a Women and Herefords out there somewhere. I wonder if they'd deliver it in a plain brown wrapper.