As her mother did before her, my mother has been paying for my New Yorker subscription for my entire adult life. Starting in college, I read it when I had a chance, and since then, with what seems like more free time for volitional reading, I've had years when I read most issues cover to cover and served as a resource to the rest of my family on what to read and what to skip. Sometimes the articles are so long.
I recall certain seasons of reading those too long articles not just for the pleasure of the stories and information contained but for the form and weft of the writing. Particularly towards the end of college, when I was writing quite a bit, mostly term papers but expansive literary-tinged emails and some short fiction, I recall a particular energy around reading New Yorker articles, while I tracked and processed the writing on two or three levels at once, reading for content, listening for literary allusions, particularly in the reviews, and struggling to see how they held together, and perhaps how I could write to match.
Since then, at least until this past year of blogging, I have written at a far slower pace, in all categories of writing but particularly in the literate and referential style honed by late night electronic conversations with my erudite and highly educated friends. Concomitantly, my reading of the New Yorker is less exciting as well. Perhaps it simply was in a golden period of writing around the turn of the millenium, but more likely as I focus my energy on fields outside of the careful crafting of allusions and pithy phrases, my awareness of such declines. There are compensations, toddler giggle being the one that comes first to mind, but I miss getting the references.
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: donuts
lunch: bean salad
dinner: the end of the potato leek soup
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