Item: December 11, 2006 issue of The New Yorker

I have started subscribing to The New Yorker again.  I first started getting the magazine in 1993 or so, when I was living in Santa Barbara.  I'm not even sure, at that time, how I knew about it.  I probably just picked up somewhere that it was an important periodical for writers.  So I read it faithfully all the way through 2000 or so, when I was living in DC.  There was a point when it seemed too familiar to be teaching me anything, I guess; it came to seem unnecessary.

But now I've been in California for 3 years, and I somehow seem to need it again.  Living back east, I wasn't so far removed from a lot of these frames of reference, these styles of thinking, but now I don't have much access to them.

This is the first issue I've gotten, and the cover is a print of a woman in a coat standing on a subway platform, and instead of a subway car going by there's a roller coaster car, with people inside waving and screaming.  It's called "Rush Hour." Right away there's a different editorial slant than occurs in LA, different both in content and humor.  I read and admire a lot of west-coast writing, but I do still seem to want some of this piece from the east.

Yesterday I went through Talk of the Town, and the cartoons, an article on the Somali population in Maine, a review of a Walt Disney biography, and some poems.  It's an easy magazine to slide back into, as if I'd never been away.  The New Yorker comes out weekly, and I have no idea how I'll manage to keep up with it.  Like I really need more stuff to read!

The pork chops turned out okay, by the way, if perhaps a little too done.