I have a digital subscription to The New Yorker—but not the print copy, since nostalgia only goes so far—and don’t have many complaints. No one forced me to pay the fee (I forget how much) and the posted articles offer self-righteous and condescending political opinions as an unintentional (I think, unless editor David Remnick’s pulling a fast one, turning his magazine into a parody landing pad) reminder of how blinkered the “Acela Corridor” cadre of journalists has become in the past 15 years. The decay is real and stinky, not unlike opening a refrigerator after three days of a power outage, but that’s okay: reading that Secretary of State-designee Marco Rubio is one of Trump’s Lilliputians cuddling on his lap, or that the best book of the week/month/year is by a lesbian mixed-race woman “fighting the good fight” in Costa Rica, isn’t a debilitating tug of the ear. It wakes you up!
Usually, I draw the line at wimpy self-help articles written for the affluent, but during this dull period of January—it’s not only the trees that are bare—I spelunk indiscriminately (with the exception of The Washington Post, which I swear I won’t touch until Jeff Bezos sells his albatross to someone who’ll value quality over quantity and hire “content providers” worth reading) and that’s why I read Joshua Rothman’s snoozy “Why Can’t You Just Deal With It?”, a mid-length essay that yielded not a shred of a reward, not even the equivalent of an Atomic Fireball or Wax Whistle.
He writes: “Procrastination is one thing: we’ve all put off writing thank-you notes or responding to e-mails and survived with our dignity intact. Not dealing with it is different. It’s what we experience when a lot is being asked of us and we’re not rising to the occasion. The issue isn’t procrastination—you’re trying!—but defeat… Emotions deepen the complexity. If that home office you need to transform into a nursery is where you work on your personal projects—your novel, your songs, your code—then the prospect of emptying it might make you not just wistful but afraid.”
I might be “afraid” of the Big Bad Wolf blowing the house down, but the time-consuming task of, say, culling the thousands of books in our house or walking up and down from the third floor to the basement to organize boxes and boxes of photos from decades ago isn’t paralyzing. It’s a pain in the ass, but you set a time, tighten the tourniquet and just do it. Not so different from hearing “the bad news” first.
Unlike Rothman and his audience, “your novel, your songs, your code” doesn’t apply to me, and maybe that’s why I’m more cavalier than New Yorker readers who dread displacing their “code” for a nursery. Besides, in the 1990s, leading up to when our kids were born and needed a space to hang their beanies, I wasn’t “wistful” or “afraid,” but energized. I’d move furniture around, carting some down to shared storage space, and then go to Tribeca’s popular cafe Bubby’s and get a liverwurst sandwich or coconut frosted cake to quell my pregnant wife’s cravings. I hate the smell of liverwurst (and she liked fat slices of it on rye, with onions and mustard) but never sought approbation, since I was an enlightened, Lamaze-attending—at least for our older son, since that eight-week course was useless when the blessed event occurred—fellow in his 30s.
One more Rothman snippet: “Recently, like a typical forty-five-year-old man, I was in the gym, trying to best my personal record in the deadlift.” Are gym memberships “typical” for men in their mid-40s? Although The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, said in 1925 that his magazine wasn’t “edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” and the weekly’s demographics today still skew wealthy, my guess is a majority of readers don’t frequent gyms.
The accompanying picture from a long time ago is of John Ellsberry and me, drenched after a mid-afternoon thunderstorm in Lower Manhattan, taking a breather at Jeremy’s Ale House before heading off to Puffy’s to meet a bunch of friends. We “dealt” with it, rose to the occasion and didn’t think twice about it.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Jim Wright is Speaker of the House; Rep. Dick Gephardt wanders around the country fruitlessly; U.S. Surgeon General says “addictive qualities” of nicotine are similar to heroin; The Smashing Pumpkins form in Chicago; 750,000 acres of Yellowstone National Park are burned from wildfires; Miami Arena opens; Philip Morris buys Kraft Foods; Jesse Plemons is born and Hal Ashby dies; Risen Star wins the Preakness; Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library and Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon are published; and Motown Records is sold to MCA.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
