Sometimes you find yourself coming out with the most absurd things which seem to make an enormous amount of sense at the time. You say things without thinking and no one pulls you up on them. Unless they do, in which case it suddenly strikes you — the full absurdity of your statement. Obviously, like the American troops captured in Korea and force to make vague pro-Communist broadcasts, you need to keep some kind of self-consistency — otherwise you wouldn’t know who you were to yourself and that would be awful.
So you try and justify it. You make fake arguments to support a point that your conscious mind would never usually make. God knows what the unconscious is thinking when it makes these statements.
The thing I said was - “Who reads magazines, anyway?” - a statement made in response to a conversation about me having read a magazine.
What I was trying to get across in that comment is that I find most magazines objectionable. They are full of fashion, making you feel inadequate about the state of your own dress.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite advisable to say this to people who happened to make their living writing for magazines. And of course it sounds stupid, but a part of me still actually agrees with the statement. Who would read magazines by choice when not in a dentist’s waiting room? Of all the many forms of literature, surely magazine articles are the most depressing. Or they are frantically ephemeral, having none of the depth or beauty of a novel. Or they are basically shallow, make weights for books that may or may not come out.
Of course, your man Momus is good on mags, painting them out to be visions of the contemporary crystallized in a way that nothing else is able to do. He’s right I think and that is why I want to retract my statement about mags and start one of my own.
Watch this space.
Leave a Reply