Some of you are old enough to remember that article in The Reader's Digest, I am Joe's liver. It was a good, kind-of-fun layman's description of that important organ; with a personal touch. I suppose my being a magazine buff makes it more likely for me to remember it. I have an informal, (mental), list of "seminal", or "important" articles from various magazines that I've read over the years, and without too much trouble I could increase the list ad infinitum by including those I haven't read but have heard about. I can't say that I've studied journalism so I'm not sure what they teach in college, (I did have one Journalism course in my incomplete college career, and one course that was an Introduction to Television, Motion Pictures, and Radio), but I have heard that Frank Sinatra has a Cold, an Esquire article by Gay Talese, is "taught" in school, by which I guess they mean used as a model; I can understand that; there is much to admire in it, I've read it several times. My contention here is simply that magazines are important. They represent a very old cultural institution, but today are considered the poor relative of television.
The Reader Digest's "Liver" piece, (have a piece of liver won't you?) was so well received that they went on and did other organs, though I won't stop here to research which-all ones; could have been Kidney I suppose, but don't let's get carried away, (duodenum, Pineal, Testicle), yada yada. And the list of great articles from Esquires of the past is almost endless, so I won't go there except to note that someone, back in the 1940s I believe, even wrote a whole article, illustrated, about my father and his painting that referred to his fishing. I remember the first time I read it finding it cringingly fawning, and too gushy. The title was; Ray Prohaska, the poetic seal of Muo. The writer was Robert Ulrich Godsoe, an art critic and gallery owner. In the 1930s he had a gallery attached to a cultural center, The Continental Club, in a famous building at 249 West End Ave. in Manhattan, a historic landmark noted for it's Romanesque Revival architecture. The article was part of a series that included several of my father's friends and contemporaries, and was published in Esquire's July, 1947 issue.
Staying with Esquire for a bit longer, if I can here insert columns as being included under the heading of articles, I have to say that I loved and looked forward to Robert Alan Arthur's column "Hangin Out", which I believe appeared mostly in the sixties. And as long as I'm still doing this off the top of my head, (I'll call a time out when I have to stop to look something up), I believe reading Joan Dideon's famous article Slouching Towards Bethlehem in The Saturday Evening Post was important for quite a few people like myself who "discovered" Dideon in that issue.
I
sent the archived Esquire article about our father to my sister just to
see if she agreed with me and she did. "It's awful", she said, "Was he
being paid by the word?" I dunno. It's one of those twists of fate,
when things that could have helped someone's career didn't; could
have, for want of a complete and radical re-write. It must be the
magazine itself that put together the site, called Esquire Classic. It's very nicely done; attractive, and including so many great
writers; Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron; Fitzgerald, Didion, Capote, Mailer, and a dozen more.
Now, for that time out. ...To go on with this post I'll have to start looking things up, like for instance the Jack Alexander article about Alcoholic's Anonymous. It made a large swath of the population newly aware of A.A. and many alcoholics benefited. When was that? ....There! That was easy, Goggle, right at the top of the page, March 1, 1941. And I'll have to go back to one of my previous posts to pin down the date of an article, actually a series of articles, very important to art history; Clem Greenberg's articles starting with Avant-Garde and Kitsch. It's really hard to believe, but worth reviewing, how important Partisan Review was seventy years ago.
Magazines like Look and Life were everywhere mid-twentieth century and almost as useful, in keeping up with current events, as television is today. There is still something about the photographic image that is very useful and entertaining to humans. And Time-Life is maybe the best example of a magazine company that turned into a corporate giant.
These days it's not at all uncommon to come across a family in who's residence there is not one magazine, unthinkable not too many years ago. Granted I grew up in a household that was dependent on magazines for its bread and butter, but the larger point was that the magazine in all it's variations was ubiquitous. I grew up with Boy's Life, Popular Mechanics, Horse Lovers, Western Horseman, and, because a friend had it, Draft Horse Journal.
Its not dead. I predict the magazine will live on, probably even thrive. You can see it in the need people have for printing things out. ...Words on paper are still high tech.
Here's the last thing I printed out: 'A portrait of Elias Canetti; The Road To The True Book,' By William H. Gass, The New Republic, Nov. 8, 1982.
