On my flight back to school last Sunday, I found the latest issue of In Touch magazine tucked in the seat pocket in front of me. Judging by the hot pinks and yellows on the cover, this finding was obviously non-airline material and I was intrigued. I was like, so unaffected by the recent speculation on J. Lo and Marc Anthony’s marriage. I hate In Touch, and don’t care about recent celebrity sightings, drunken rages, weight gains, etc. “I’d much rather read a good book,” I reassure myself, and still flipped through every single page of In Touch, excusing myself by mumbling, “This is trash,” as my mother looked on.
The fact is that magazines have become the literature of choice for most Americans. The National Endowment for the Arts published a study last month which found that only 46.7 percent of all American adults had read a work of literature during 2002. In 1982, that percentage was 56.9. Even more concerning is that fewer 18- to 24-year-olds are reading now than they were in 1982 because they are spending their time doing other things, like surfing the net, watching reality TV and reading In Touch. Magazines are a cheaper, quicker and unapologetically frivolous alternative to the novel.
Despite the glossy, new and improved faces of trashy magazines, they are still sold at a significantly cheaper price than your average novel. Cheap also in the in content: Articles on Mary Kate Olsen’s “Crack Addiction,” “Anorexia” and/or “Rare Blood Disease” are incredibly appealing to me and people like me because we crave the satisfaction of instant drama. When reading In Touch, I don’t have to sift through chapter after chapter to find juicy love scenes or King Lear worthy mental breakdowns. I don’t have to work for anything! Like a drug addict, I and other trashy magazine readers like myself get that quick and easy high, followed by a shaking of heads, and a mumbling of things like “this is trash” to people sitting next to us who don’t know or care.
This transience is also why it is far less conscious-consuming to leave, say In Touch, behind on the airplane than it is to leave behind a Pulitzer-prize-winning novel. There is some level of attachment to a novel, whereas most people would be ashamed to keep In Touch on their bookshelves. Post-read, people flee cheap magazines like they do a crime scene.
The lure is unavoidable, but, I believe I have found some middle ground in the literary market. Magazines such as Blackbook and Nylon, among others, are proudly sitting on the shelf of my recently-decorated Village B apartment, not only because their cover designs are chic and timeless (they contain no street-stopping pinks and yellows), but because their content is refreshingly intelligent and progressive. Brace yourself, the text is a little harder to read(there’s more of it). But the magazine itself is something cheap that will last . . . a lot longer than J. Lo and Marc Anthony.
