You would open the front door to find a party, with TV cameras and confetti, and a man holding a gigantic check with your name on it (for a lot of money). This was the dream in the ‘70s, your entire life enhanced beyond imagining, not because of a lottery ticket but the value rich and somewhat educational gift that you were smart enough to give your family - MAGAZINES.
Publisher’s Clearing House sent thick envelopes filled with magazine covers printed on colorful gummed stamps; you’d take the ones you want and stick them not to an order form, but to a SWEEPSTAKES ENTRY. Each subscription was only a few dollars, so the savings alone was a win, but there was always the chance that you’d be the lucky recipient of a Grand Prize. Hopefully they came by when you were dressed nice.
This all worked. We had tons of magazines around the house that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford. I read Time and OMNI and Reader’s Digest (they didn’t offer TV Guide). My grandmother had Good Housekeeping and Redbook and Better Homes and Gardens. If magazines could transform any drab coffee table into a splendiferous buffet of color and shine, what else could they do? Besides, y’know, make you a millionaire?
Now, I get a hundred titles free digitally with my iCloud subscription. Yet I used to pass the magazines each week as they lurk by the checkout stands in the grocery store, and the desire to have a physical copy still haunted me.
It was lockdown, I was younger and foolhardy and ready to be a more cultured type of person. I had just started writing more and wanted something to inspire me, and what better than a subscription to the Holy Grail of American Letters, delivered every week?
It was kind of expensive, but one of those “the first year is just, like, super cheap but since we have your credit card information we don’t want to bother you for year two renewal and we’ll just charge you automatically - ohbytheway its 300% more (is that ok?)” kind of arrangements. But I went for it anyway.
I quip. I do. Many are the afternoons when a sharpish jape escapes my lips, bringing a sly smile to the face of a colleague. I might even jest occasionally, when feeling a measure rowdy. I would have loved to spend my afternoons at a big round table with a collection of my era’s finest wits, liquid lunching until cocktail hour. But, I’d gain a lot of weight, and it’s too hot outside - it’s important to remain hydrated, you know. I’m not built for all that.
Anyway.
I’m letting my New Yorker subscription lapse.
They’re stacking up all over the place. I can never “catch up”… it’s like tangible unread e-mail that keeps multiplying, like Tribbles.
I find them everywhere now, in every room of the house, yet feel impossibly guilty picking one up and only reading the cartoons (“I swear I get this magazine for the articles”) .
I tried taking one with me to work everyday and reading it on the subway. I felt distinctly throwback holding Physical Paper…but I had my lunchbag in my other hand so page turning proved perilous and unattractive, as my most effective means was to bite the top right corner and hold it in my mouth while twisting the folded issue clockwise in my fist.
And then we were all wearing masks, so even that was impossible.
I am seven, standing in our little living room in front of the fireplace, looking up at the wall with poems decoupaged onto wooden blocks my mother had hand stained and painted. She had used a lovely shade of powder blue paper for the poems, and the decoupage brush left a texture of thin, deep lines like grooves in a giant record.
That was where I stood when I told her “I want to be an author. I want to write books for people to read.” and she told me that would be a good thing to be, you can make a lot of people happy that way, and you could write about all kinds of things. She never mentioned the New Yorker, or any part of the labyrinthine submission process to get published. She probably just wanted to keep my spirits up, at least until my age hit double digits.
It was aspirational to buy the New Yorker: cool things I couldn’t afford to do with people I couldn’t afford to know. And none of the fiction seemed to extol the banality I adore - everything was so grown-up. But as I weighed the time to go through an issue versus attacking the unsteady stack of books on my bedside table (cummings, Dickinson, O Henry, Connections by James Burke, three issues of Love and Rockets comics and a DVD of Smokey and the Bandit (whoops - how did that get there?) I realized that while I adore the magazine itself, I am probably not a New Yorker reader.
I am a New Yorker now, having lived in Brooklyn for over 20 years. The noise and crowds and hustle and drive - I can navigate chaos just fine. But I’m not sure how well I would do on a sailboat in white shorts with a long drink and sunglasses on. Where are we sailing? Will these speakers Bluetooth to my phone so I can blast some Queens of the Stone Age? Is there any shade on this thing? It’s not my lifestyle. Give me Prospect Park instead; loads of Quinceaneras and picnics and dogs and ice cream carts.
It’s not the impeccable quality of their editorial choices; legends, heroes and national treasures have penned words for them, but I’m spending the time I should be reading the magazine writing now, and I guess that was the point of subscribing in the first place, and I still have the digital subscription.
Though the cartoons are really teensy on my phone.
Jd Michaels lives in Brooklyn. His writing has not appeared in the New Yorker, Redbook, or Good Housekeeping.
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