Help! I Need Space

How not to manage your subscription

The above David Shrigley drawing was in a sharp review in Bookforum by Lucy Sante of a book by Emmanuel Carrère. That magazine was one among many that I had stored under a table in my study. That whole pile of magazines—I subscribe to The New Yorker, Harper’s, BRICK, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta, BOMB, n+1, and Caravan, with only the last one arriving digitally—awaits another day, week, month, year of calm when I can read them.

I don’t save all the issues. Something must catch my eye and I save that particular issue. But the pile has grown, it is forbidding, and instead of starting new work this summer, I decided to first get rid of this detritus accumulating in my study. Please recognize me for who I am: my eyes are staring, my mouth is open, my wings are spread, and there are magazines going back several years piled up at my feet. This wreckage at my feet is the past.

It is not easy to just put magazines in a bag and put them in a recycling bin. Why did I save this issue is a question I want to ponder. In many cases, I cannot remember. In some cases I can recall instantly why. When that happens, I want to re-read that piece—and in some cases there are new questions, and, in rarer cases, a sense of devastation. Time passes. No work gets done. (I started this work on Monday, today is Friday.) On occasion, I have even read pieces I had no business reading. In a Harper’s issue from June 2022, in the delightful “Harper’s Index,” I came across the following:

Average number of streaming services Americans subscribe to: 4.5

Estimate number of times per day Netflix viewers select the option to “skip intro”: 136,000,000.

Number of years in saved time this represents each day: 195

Reader, did I wonder how many days of my life I was wasting reading old magazines? I did. But I was helpless. Even now, as I write, there are at least fifty magazines lying scattered at my feet. They look up at me, names and titles on their front pages, and sometimes, even friends’ faces on them. (See at the bottom of this entry.)

At times, I have just hurried along, reading only the shortest of pieces. (Yes, this is shameful behavior on my part. Weren’t we supposed to support long-form everything?) Here is an example:

My attention is arrested by reviews. (In fact, I have come to the late realization during these last few days that reviews don’t provoke further reading: they exist to give a false sense of satisfaction to the reader. After you have read a review, even when it is a positive one, particularly when it is a positive one, you need not read the book under review.) In recent months, I had read novels by Hisham Matar and Kaveh Akbar. I now read the reviews of their books in one magazine after another, first to find out if I agreed with a reviewer and then to suss out whether one reviewer agreed with another. (So, I guess, reviews exist also to affirm or challenge your own opinion as a reader.)

I should not complain about these precious days of summer being spent scanning old magazines. I say this because I have also made discoveries. I’m teaching a new course on “nature writing” next semester and just this morning I came across an article from the March 26, 2018 issue (so old! I can’t tell why I saved this one!) that I found amazing and moving. I’m certainly going to include it in my syllabus.

Another discovery: I find that I’m looking at the magazines with new eyes. Some of them pre-date my interest in painting. What did I miss when I first flipped through their pages? Even when I look at more recent issues, I examine some of the drawings and ask myself whether I could ever come close to making such art. Another example:

But all this isn’t what I really came to say here. All I wish to tell you is that in order to do your work, whether it is work on a new book or a new course, you need a room of your own that is free of other marks of failure, not least your failure to read and dispose of a magazine. So, that is what I’m doing right now, clearing a space. If you feel you need to find encouragement to do the same, let me be your Marie Kondo.

Before I end, as I had mentioned before, the other bonus in this task is finding friends (Why, hello!):