There is an actual point, but you're going to have to wade through some reminiscing first
Many times during my youth, I used the print version for a similar purpose, during hours spent in the opthalmologist's waiting room.
During the course of my youth, I spent a lot of time in the waiting rooms of various medical professionals, in the down time before our appointments. The doctor's, dentist's, and orthodontist's waiting rooms were pretty much a cultural wasteland: the dentist was a sweet Baptist man who liked marathon running, so the reading material ran the gamut from the latest Dr. Dobson tome to Runner's World--in other words, from all the way from scary-and-boring to holy-shit-this-is-boring. The doctor and the orthodontist were both pediatric oriented, so the waiting room material consisted solely of slobbered-on copies of Highlights, a children's magazine written by people who've clearly never met a child who actually likes to read, and Parenting Today, a magazine about which the less said the better.
But the opthalmologist's waiting room was cool...or if not cool, at least somewhere near bearable, which was a good thing given the fact that most of the members of my family are not only both near-sighted and far-sighted, but also astigmatic. His clientele was mostly old people with glaucoma and shit, so he had an extensive collection of the New Yorker placed around the room. The fact that most of the issues were, like, way out of date didn't bother me at all...I was an eleven-year-old in suburban Atlanta, it wasn't like I'd have gone to those gallery openings anyway. Mostly I just circled the room, during our semi-annual "The question is not whether we need stronger prescriptions; the question is how much stronger" summit; I'd find an issue, flip to the Fiction section, devour it, and then move on. Great fun, and also sort of educational, given the slightly risqué nature of some of the stories. It was during these expeditions that I gained the conviction that your average modern short story is pretentious and also depressing, but that didn't put me off it. Hell, you should have seen some the shite I was writing at that time--I mean, depressing is said in many ways.
So that was my first exposure to the quintessentially genteel New Yorker. I picked the habit back up when I had my Pointless But Highly-Paid Internship the summer before senior year. At that job, I had literally nothing to do but sit in a tiny office with no windows and painted steel walls, which...damn. I earned that money the taxpayers of the state of Georgia so kindly gave me. I did have an Internet connection, but I was very soon reduced to staring at the screen, grunting Homer-Simpson-like, "Stupid internet! Be...more...funny!"
Until I discovered the online version of the New Yorker. And not just the regular online version, which only gives you this week, but the secret l33t w4rez HaX0R way to read all the back issues.
Which I present here, without fear of legal ramifications, because for fuck's sake it's on the bleeding internet if you know where to look. Which is here: paste this address: www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?020128fi_fiction into the address bar. You'll get to a mildly awesome story which you should read. The key to the rest of the archives lies in the six digits towards the end of the address: they are YYMMDD, so paste in the date of any Monday back to i-don't-know-when and you should get a fine piece of post-modernish fiction for your viewing pleasure. I particularly recommend all the ones by George Saunders; they rock.
N.B.: I'd just like to point out here that in one of the above sentences, I managed to shoehorn four separate dependent clauses into a single appositive. Yeah, bitches.
During the course of my youth, I spent a lot of time in the waiting rooms of various medical professionals, in the down time before our appointments. The doctor's, dentist's, and orthodontist's waiting rooms were pretty much a cultural wasteland: the dentist was a sweet Baptist man who liked marathon running, so the reading material ran the gamut from the latest Dr. Dobson tome to Runner's World--in other words, from all the way from scary-and-boring to holy-shit-this-is-boring. The doctor and the orthodontist were both pediatric oriented, so the waiting room material consisted solely of slobbered-on copies of Highlights, a children's magazine written by people who've clearly never met a child who actually likes to read, and Parenting Today, a magazine about which the less said the better.
But the opthalmologist's waiting room was cool...or if not cool, at least somewhere near bearable, which was a good thing given the fact that most of the members of my family are not only both near-sighted and far-sighted, but also astigmatic. His clientele was mostly old people with glaucoma and shit, so he had an extensive collection of the New Yorker placed around the room. The fact that most of the issues were, like, way out of date didn't bother me at all...I was an eleven-year-old in suburban Atlanta, it wasn't like I'd have gone to those gallery openings anyway. Mostly I just circled the room, during our semi-annual "The question is not whether we need stronger prescriptions; the question is how much stronger" summit; I'd find an issue, flip to the Fiction section, devour it, and then move on. Great fun, and also sort of educational, given the slightly risqué nature of some of the stories. It was during these expeditions that I gained the conviction that your average modern short story is pretentious and also depressing, but that didn't put me off it. Hell, you should have seen some the shite I was writing at that time--I mean, depressing is said in many ways.
So that was my first exposure to the quintessentially genteel New Yorker. I picked the habit back up when I had my Pointless But Highly-Paid Internship the summer before senior year. At that job, I had literally nothing to do but sit in a tiny office with no windows and painted steel walls, which...damn. I earned that money the taxpayers of the state of Georgia so kindly gave me. I did have an Internet connection, but I was very soon reduced to staring at the screen, grunting Homer-Simpson-like, "Stupid internet! Be...more...funny!"
Until I discovered the online version of the New Yorker. And not just the regular online version, which only gives you this week, but the secret l33t w4rez HaX0R way to read all the back issues.
Which I present here, without fear of legal ramifications, because for fuck's sake it's on the bleeding internet if you know where to look. Which is here: paste this address: www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?020128fi_fiction into the address bar. You'll get to a mildly awesome story which you should read. The key to the rest of the archives lies in the six digits towards the end of the address: they are YYMMDD, so paste in the date of any Monday back to i-don't-know-when and you should get a fine piece of post-modernish fiction for your viewing pleasure. I particularly recommend all the ones by George Saunders; they rock.
N.B.: I'd just like to point out here that in one of the above sentences, I managed to shoehorn four separate dependent clauses into a single appositive. Yeah, bitches.
posted by ridley at 3/01/2005 10:58:00 AM
4 Comments:
Do you remember the Goofus and Gallant part? I always thought Goofus would be way more fun to hang out with.
ok, i read those religiously thru age 12. my mother would never have subscribed to something like that, but it was a gift for 10-or-so years from our grandparents. yes, the same grandparents who were more upset that my cousin is engaged to a black man, than by the fact that her fiance is incarcerated and has been since before they met. hmm.
Yeah, I remember a distinct feeling of relief when my one-year-gift-subscription to "Highlights" ended. *We* subscribed to more subtly preachy children's magazines, like "Cricket", on account of their occasionally containing something stimulating. (Come to think of it, I'm really relieved to no longer be a member of the "Highlights" target age range, never mind readership.)
--Catherine
I remember HIGHLIGHTS! I loved to do the picture finds, usually on the opposite page of Goofus and galant. In fact those were the only two things i looked at in those, so i really can't be a judge of the rest of the publication...
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