My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4,#22, December 14, 1998

THE LOOK OF LIFE

I came across a wonderful web site this past week called Fifty Things Worth Saving, which reminded us in brief articles and photoessays of the quiet importance of things like trains, bicycles, small towns, and music teachers. Keith and Jill Foxe, its creators, invite us to consider our own fifty things, to look anew at all the things we love and take for granted .

Like them I would have chosen bicycles and liberal arts colleges. I would also have chosen such immediately endangered things as courtesy, the first amendment, and downtowns. But at the top of my list would be another threatened species--general interest magazines. Too many of them have already died--Century, Saturday Review, Look, to name a few--while Saturday Evening Post and Life are shambling undead shadows of their former weekly selves.

I miss the old Life Magazine, which every week brought photoessays on every imaginable subject: Darwin and the Galapagos Islands, the art of ancient Greece, desegregration, Cuban jails. Celebrities, too, of course, though their celebrities included people like Hyman Rickover and Dame Edith Sitwell as well as Marilyn Monroe. It amazes me to think how much the editors enjoyed educating people, sharing their knowledge in gorgeous pictures and graceful simple prose. They also celebrated our fads and fancies (I remember an amusing photoessay on the hula hoop), and caught us in the act of pursuing our American dreams (another photo essay took us inside a college for would-be clowns, with fetching pictures of the students sticking out their tongues and contorting their bodies en masse). While Life's editors might have been ahead of many readers on the issue of civil rights, mostly they reflected the atttudes of their time--a 1962 article titled "Look What's Going on at Radcliffe" marveled that "College Girls Add Beauty to Brains."

Saturday Evening Post gave us wonderful cover art--think Norman Rockwell--that captured America as we believed it to be. Along with that it gave us short stories (Earle Stanley Gardner, Evan S. Connell and other popular writers of the day), and articles on everything from the phenomenon of air conditioning to memories of the convention that nominated Wendell Willkie. It specialized in stories about interesting people, both famous and not-so: Althea Gibson, the Fischer Quintuplets, Al Worthington (Reds pitcher and lay preacher), but also a veterinarian who treats injured birds, and a man who overcame his compulsive gambling habit.

Look was perhaps less of a loss, more given to celebrity stories, fashion, travel, and the fall TV schedule. It gave us photoessays on the coming Montreal Expo (1967), Twiggy, and the canine mascot of a naval ship. But it still brought us quite serious discussions of Khrushchev, the Alliance for Progress, the dangers of high school football, and "A Way Out of our Parochial/Public School Conflict."

There was a cheerfulness and optimism about these magazines, a sense that there were no limits to the wonders to be discovered, and that by and large we are a marvelous species. So many of the stories were of people who dared greatly and succeeded, people who did good and did well. If you didn't finish the magazine feeling better about the world, the magazines were having an off week.

Until the 1970's, these magazines flourished, appealing equally to men and women, city dwellers and suburbanites, people of all ages, as you could tell from the ads for cat food, tires, air travel, cars, vinyl flooring, beer, cigarettes, and Scotch. But now only a few remain: Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, the New Yorker, Reader's Digest and its alternative press equivalent the Utne Reader, and the news magazines that also tell us about art and Viagra, Madonna and racism, punk rock and home mortgage rates. The New York Times Magazine is one of the last of a dying breed of Sunday newspapers' general interest magazines--two more were lost this year when the Denver Post abandoned its Empire magazine, and the Miami Herald gave up on Tropic, home of Dave Barry's column.

These magazines declined for many reasons. Television replaced magazines as a source of the images we craved, but it also supplied a larger mass audience for advertisers than they did. When companies decided to target their ads more narrowly, they went to special interest magazines and cable networks--Golf Digest and ESPN, Money and CNBC.

The death of leisure time had a lot to do with it, too. These highly specific magazines and cable networks met the needs of people with too little time and patience to wade through irrelevant stuff to get to what they needed. The web has carried this one step further by allowing us to create a personalized newspaper, which selects only the stories we need to know and no more.

But if we can find the time for them, these general interest magazines can do for us what a liberal arts education or random browsing through a library's stacks can: give us a chance to learn about something we previously had no idea we were interested in.

I learned about urban folklore in the pages of Readers Digest in an article called "The Case of the Choking Doberman," by its foremost popularizer, Jan Harald Brunvand. I had no inherent interest in ventroquilists and mall-walkers and what the federal government buys every day, but I read about them because in the hands of Cullen Murphy, almost any topic is interesting. I have also read about convention planners, frozen desserts and the importance of the Barbie doll because David Owen wrote about them in the New Yorker and the Atlantic).

After all, one of the functions of magazine editors is to find wonderful writers and give them a chance to explore whatever topics interest them. How many of my favorite writers would I have come across were it not for these magazines? Bill Bryson writes largely about travel, a topic that generally bores me. But because the Readers Digest reprinted his article "Tootle Him with Vigor," about the bizarre things that happen to the English language in other countries, I discovered him, and have since read everything he has written, including his wonderfully snotty tales of re-exploring his (and my) native midwest (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America).

Where did I discover Bob Greene, a columnist who like me explores oddities of our changing culture? It might have been in Readers Digest, where his article "Your Permanent Record" appeared in 1989, or perhaps in Esquire where his "The Man Who Wrote Louie, Louie" was printed. I think I first became aware of Molly Ivins in pieces in the Utne Reader or perhaps in Ms. I know I discovered the trenchantly witty, fiercely political Barbara Ehrenreich in Newsweek, and Anna Quindlen's calm musings on men and women and family in the New York Times Magazine. I found Anne Lamott, the writer I want to be when I grow up, in Salon Magazine, a general interest webzine.

The New Yorker and Atlantic and Harper's also try to keep the art of poetry and short stories alive. In their early days they published Mark Twain and Faulkner and Thurber. More recently they have introduced us to Cynthia Ozick, James Dickey, John Updike, Tess Gallagher, E. Annie Proulx. "The Lottery", that chilling little masterpiece by Shirley Jackson, first appeared in the New Yorker.

And let us not forget that these magazines were the primary venue for cartoons, perhaps the art form of our century. It's extraordinary how those cartoonists have shaped our images of people and our attitudes toward social issues. Indeed, the very way the world looks to us has been changed forever by Charles Addams and Gary Larson.

Because these magazines reach a broad audience, they also have the opportunity to set a public agenda, to say "these are the problems that need to be solved, the issues that need to be revisited." It was in Atlantic Monthly that James Q. Wilson published his famous article "Broken Windows," which explained that when communities don't care enough to repair broken windows and punish small offenses, they signal the predators that they can move in. This influential article eventually led to the revolution in policing strategy that has made New York City so much safer. And Readers Digest, which has campaigned for years against smoking and the tobacco companies, helped to create broad public support for the anti-smoking legislation and lawsuits that have cost the industry dearly. Utne Reader not only made us aware of the need for good, leisurely conversation in its articles about salons, it also invited people to establish Utne salons in their own communities!

Each magazine in its own way teaches by example the art of civil discussion and disagreement, and supplies historical background and novel ideas that shake people loose from entrenched positions, widen the dialogue, and make our solutions more intelligent.

These last remaining general interest magazines are like a smorgasbord; all the picky eaters in the family can find something there they like. But they can also, without risk, take a taste of something new and different and discover that after all they DO like green eggs and ham.

We can't bring back the old magazines. But we can, and should, keep the ones we have. Go visit a newsstand, why don't you? Do your bit to keep one of my fifty things alive.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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