Oh, You Tease
10 Jul. 2008
I love reading because of the ideas and insight it gives me, but for much the same reason I have little patience with pedantic, trivial, belabored, or non-insightful writing. I can think of nothing worse than reading something that has nothing new to say, or reading something painfully long and slow that spells everything out for me. Instead, I like to read short snippets that fire my imagination. Things that have something new to say, or that come at something from a surprising angle, or that expose me to a thought or tidbit I've never had before. I like playful writing that takes chances with language or ideas and puts things in a way no one else ever has. Writing that dares to fail.
It almost goes without saying that I rarely have the patience to read a full book - certainly not non-fiction, though I love it and buy it all the time. I do love learning and reading, yet I rarely have the staying power to see the author through to the end. My guilty secret is that I absolutely adore magazines, because they expose me to something new and then leave me with just enough info to tease me, to leave me thinking about the ideas, chewing them, worrying them, playing with them and turning them this way and that and coming up with my own. Just enough to whet my appetite but leave me hungry for more.
Okay, I'll admit it. I like to be teased more than anything in the world. There's something sumptuous about magazines that books don't necessarily have. If not just the fact that they are overflowing with different positions and perspectives - as if it weren't enough to have a hundred ideas in the course of 4 hours, or the serendipity of finding a new voice you'd have never found otherwise - magazines have a tactility that's oddly missing in books. I especially love magazines with matte paper that soaks up the ink. The images become super saturated and acheive a lushness and depth (god the depth, you feel like you could fall into the page) that books rarely have. Each page brings a new image, a new writer, a new idea, a new font and layout. All but the best books are ossified in their presentation, formulas, and ideas, and it's easy to put out a shit book. But putting out a magazine consistently is expensive and risky, which ends up meaning the signal to noise ratio in the magazine world is a lot more favorable. I have a small collection of magazines that I have bought simply because they are so damn beautiful I couldn't pass them up. I purchased them thinking that someday I might create my own magazine, and I keep them for inspiration.
Just a few fantastic magazines I have been drawn to, whether beautiful, insightful, novel, intriguing, brilliant, necessary, or just plain good:
Cabinet, Coupe, American Scholar, Gagarin, Canteen (beautiful but notably sorry reading), Foreign Affairs, Polar Inertia, Farimani, Dumbo Feather, The Economist, Texas Monthly, Brick, Leonardo