Dr. Metablog

When I was a mere tad, perhaps seven or eight years old but already an enthusiastic reader, I was given a subscription (by whom?) to a children's magazine, perhaps Jack and Jill. It arrived once a month and took perhaps ten minutes to read. It was certainly my older brother (who later owned a large house that had twice as many mirrors as books, who said, "you still readin' that thing for babies?" Always susceptible to public criticism, I soon turned against the publication. Since then, I've subscribed and unsubscribed to dozens of periodicals, many more than I can remember.  Here are a few: in my pathetic teens, Mad Magazine, of which I was a serious enthusiast (and had been so since Mad's Harvey Kurtzman comic book days). Closest I ever came to anarchy. Also, Sport Magazine — a precursor of SI.  Pre-steriods, pre-scandal, the athletes profiled were virtuous, sober, and generous family men who had overcome venomous small town upbringings and acute physical handicaps to rise to the top of the mound or sit astride the Derby winner. Also, when I went though my adolescent fantasy phase, various pulp sci fi mags — Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction and probably others that came and went. I was much enamored of the stuff, which was monumentally escapist and therefore analogous to my sports obsessions. In the '60s, I matured to political magazines: The Reporter, The Nation, and before it went totally and bizarrely wrong, The New Republic. A decade later, when I had set out to study literature through a social lens, I subscribed to Local Population Studies, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, The Psychohistorical Review, and The History of Childhood Quarterly. When I became serious about Shakespeare I was an assiduous reader and collector of the Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Survey and the Shakespeare Newsletter and Shakespeare Research and Opportunities and the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter. Closely related: English Literary Renaissance,  to which I sent a number of my own contributions, and the George Herbert Journal (of which I at one time owned every issue). In the '70s or '80s, Organic Gardening (sample title — "How We Grew Papayas on our Vermont Hillside Using Organic Methods and Faith in God"); later, Fine Gardening (sample title: "How We Converted a Defunct Brick Brewery into an Extremely Expensive Bed-and-Breakfast Complete with a Replica of an 18th-century Capability Brown Landscape").  At then at various times: Scientific American, Science News, Bluebirds Across Vermont, the newsletter of the Southern Vermont Dairy Goat Association, One Two Three Four (a magazine briefly in existence that concerned itself with the early history of rock and roll), the Atlantic, The Skeptical Inquirer. Newspapers:  The New York Times, Valley News, United Opinion (since renamed  the Journal-Opinion), Behind the Times, the B–ld-r Daily Camera. Nowadays: Harvard Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Northern Forests. A long list, but note: no movie star mags, no style, no self-improvement, no golf, no detectives, no alternative healing, no finance, no how-to-pyramid-your-money, no automotive, no weapons. It appears that I'm a person of narrow but eclectic interests, magazine-wise.