I guess I’ve got a case of readers remorse.  As in … Boy, did I do something really stupid last week when, for the first time ever, I picked up a People magazine.  Something on the cover caught my interest, and I thought why not?  My bad.  Talk about much ado about nothing.  Who reads this stuff?  There is nothing there but fluff and air — such silliness.  Okay, yeah, I’m saying this just after having returned from the nail salon.  But still ….  Is it too much for a girl with pretty French Nails ( who, by the way, can type very well with them) to ask for a little substance in her reading?

It surprises a lot of my readers and callers that I’m uber-feminine, yet eschew pop-gossip (I find my own life much more interesting) and detest fashion magazines (80 percent ads and who are they to tell me what to wear?).  I actually prefer something more substantial — meat and potatoes rather than tofu surprise, thank you very much.  In case you’re wondering:  Yes, this very much carries over into my sexual dalliances, capers, and pursuits.  When it comes to men, sexy is smart and smart is sexy … dummies move on, please.

But back to that reading thing.  As a child, from the time I was in first grade, I’d been permitted to read the Sunday funnies.  But at 8 years old, I rebelled.  I took the funnies back to the kitchen (where my mother and father, drinking their morning coffee, were reading the "big people" parts of the paper) and handed them back to my parents, saying, "I don’t want to read this anymore.  It’s stupid."  And so was handed the Society Pages, which shortly led to the Community pages, which shortly led to the front pages, etc.  But never, ever the Sports pages.  Just wanted to make that clear. *grin*

Then around fifth grade I began reading Reader’s Digest.  In sixth or seventh grade, I discovered Time and Newseek.  In highschool, I continued with Newsweek, ditched Time, and lapped up every issue of Writer’s Digest cover to cover.  Newsweek was still my main squeeze in college, but I kinda-sorta was its cuckoldress, fluttering the lashes of my sheep’s eyes at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harpers, Smithsonian and even National Geographic.  Then there were the one night stands with one glossy ofter another — too many to remember.  Hey, plop an Appalachian girl into the center of Academia with the flash of big city lights beckoning from the horizon and what do you expect?

These days, being an all grown-up girl, I’m kinda-sorta torn between two lovers: Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly.  Now my beloved Newsweek and I’d actually settled into a comfy monogamy for the last few years.  But there I was at my physician’s office, late as usual, my time moved back so that three to five of the patients would get to go ahead of me now, since I obviously needed to be taught a lesson on responsibility by the all-powerful minimum wage receptionist.  .

But I digress.  What was I saying?  Oh, yeah, The Atlantic Monthly.

Well, I guess you’ve figured out that the magazine I fished from the table was The Atlantic Monthly.  While I can’t remember what I read as I sat there stalwartly taking my punishment with barely a stentorian sigh or weary grimace, I do remember falling in love.  So much so, that I pilfered that magazine and brought it home.  No, I’m not in the habit of lifting reading material from the sundry waiting rooms I’ve occasionally and briefly occupied.  But I wanted to read the magazine from cover to cover and I wanted to order my own subscription ASAP.  Which I did and I did.

So now I’m finally getting around to what this somewhat mindless meandering has been leading up to.  You might remember that last month, as a PSOetry entry, I’d presented the poem, Cathedral — and said I’d be asking you about it the next time we talked.  And we have talked, haven’t we Puzzler, Professor, PQS and HDB?  And we talked about the poem, so the four of you already know — as I’m about to tell the rest of my Zen readers — that this particular poem came from … yes, you guessed it:  the pages of The Atlantic Monthly.  But guess what?  It was from the online version of The Atlantic Monthly, where right on the Internet you can access it anytime you want — which, obviously, I am highly recommending. 

Why?  Because the writing is divinely intelligent and eclectic — covering politics, fiction, poetry, national and international news, and stuff … lots of stuff!

ie.

• Goodly yummily writing from James Fallows
• Texas Justice Gone Awry
• Famous and Fucked (over, that is)
• 2008 Election — A Perspective
• Fiction, Fiction AND MORE FICTION!
• Google for Dummies
• And, yes, there are PODCASTS
• The Girls:  Hillary and Sarah
• Interview with poet Philip Levine
• Pornography and Us (that would be me and u)

Is that eclectic enough for you?  Are you feeling it?  The deliriously electric thrill of it all? And that is just a teensie-weensie smidgen of what is available.  Read through just a few of the above cutesy-chocolatey links and I bet you fall head-over-heels just like I did on that fine sunny day when I was kinda-sorta under house arrest.  What’s really fun is that you can sign up for a Newsletter,  The Trans-Atlantic (sample newsletter), and know exactly what’s up and where to find it.  Because it’s link love, baby cakes, and with a clickety-click you’ll be right where you want to be.  Or else you can hang out in higher-end waiting rooms and score your very own print version.  I mean, after all, it worked for me.

Oh how I love this magazine and how I love you and how I love the Internet.  (Well, the Internet is more like a love-hate thing, but we’ll leave that can of worms for another day.)

… and yes, boys, I will be asking questions.  So read up!

xo, Angela

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 12:23 am and is filed under And Another Thing, Rhetorically Yours, WebTopia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.