My Back Pages
Even the most freighted-with-significance magazine needs a caboose
Are magazines "the ultimate post-modern fruit"? The hi-lowbrow critic Julie Burchill thinks so, and in a breezy Sunday Times of London column last fall she counted the similarities: "they grow on trees, they're exquisite and they leave you totally unsatisfied."
Burchill was writing about the (horrible, horrible) experience of being stranded, sans periodicals, for two weeks on a tropical island. It was a media-age endurance test that forced her to confess -- after noting that magazines put you into "bimbo limbo, a cold storage of the soul" -- one "rather shaming" fact: "an armful of fresh, glossy, fragrant magazines makes you feel seriously healthy; it's the way fruit is meant to make you feel, but doesn't."
Those of us who patronize the corner newsmonger somewhat more often than our local greenmarket won't need to be convinced of Burchill's thesis. (Although I'd take a kiwi over an issue of George any day.) But as I was easing my way through a steam-blasted afternoon with a frappucino and an outsized heap of print recently, I realized that there is one kind of magazine that actually doesleave you feeling more unsatisfied -- in the old-fashioned, pre-Burchillian sense -- than others: a magazine without a back page.
Not literally without a back page, that is, but a magazine where the editors have been impolite enough to push you out the back door without a final feature on the left-hand page that faces the inside rear cover. (It's the literary equivalent of a host who ejects you from a five-course meal without the benefit of a digestif.) Like a book or movie, a magazine begs for a kind of closure. And it can be rewarding to pay attention to what editors are doing with this largely unzoned piece of prime real estate. In fact, in many cases a back page can be used to take tea leaf readings of what Deepak Chopra might call a magazine's Inner Self, its unvarnished soul.
Some back pages are, unfortunately, more telling than others. Witness Vanity Fair's "Proust Questionnaire," for example, where editor Graydon Carter grovels on an almost operatic scale while making amends for the fine high time he had flaying celebrities during his tenure at Spy. (Among the groaningly Not-Ready-For-Barbara-Walters questions flung at Quincy Jones this month: "Which talent would you most like to have?" Answer: "To be a great father.") Over at George, too, the inherent starfuckiness of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s after-school project reaches toxic levels at each issue's end. In George's regular "If I Were President" page, the polemics seldom rise above the level of Gloria Estefan's recent call for a "National Massage Day."
Ed Kosner, Esquire's embattled editor, could likely use one of Estefan's syncopated rubdowns right about now. Never mind that Esquire's ad pages are plummeting (it's become a burial ground for hair replacement come-ons), or that the editorial staff seems demoralized by those retro-nasty "New Vargas Girl" pin-ups, among other Dole-era atrocities. Esquire is also burdened by the presence of Kosner's wife, Julie Baumgold, who teases out a back page column called "Mr. Peepers, Esq." that's even scarier than its title. (In one recent column, a screening of "I Shot Andy Warhol" inspired Baumgold to deliver a mini-memoir about her own quasi-groovy '60s experience.) "Mr. Peepers, Esq." also manages to violate one of the few iron-clad rules of a good back page: it should be self-contained, and not jump you back into the center of the magazine. In Baumgold's case, look before you leap.
Kosner's impulse to keep his back page in the family isn't a rarity. Usually, though, it's a magazine's publisher who tries to sneak into the starting line-up. The results can be uneven. At U.S. News and World Report, publisher Mort Zuckerman seems to dictate his weekly back page "editorial" while astride a runaway stairmaster. Here's a breathless, hurdy-gurdy first sentence from one of his columns during the O.J. trial: "America is in a heightened state of unease today over a crisis in race relations that we did not fully appreciate that we had." Somebody throw that man a towel.
At the National Review, founder William F. Buckley, Jr. is savvy enough to dump his thrice-weekly syndicated columns on the spread just before the magazine's back page. (They occupy the penultimate pages, as Buckley might put it.) That's happy news primarily because it gives Florence King, whose column "The Misanthrope's Corner" is the best reason to scoop up the conservative weekly, room to maneuver. King isn't exactly suave (her recent take on gay marriage wasn't much more than an intellectual head-butt), but at her best she's got a keen eye and a steady aim. Last year she nailed Scott O'Grady -- the pilot who survived on twigs and bugs after being shot down over Bosnia -- for being "our most embarrassing 'hero' yet." An American officer "does not describe himself as 'a scared little bunny rabbit,'" King wrote. "Patton would have punched him."
Too bad King's pieces are forced to rotate with a column called "The Gimlet Eye," territory that's recently been staked out by drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs. Briggs' Southern-fried phrasings come at you in ear-splitting mono, like the squawky voices that leap out of the window microphones at the films he reviews. (He's what you'd get if you injected P.J. O'Rourke's bile into Jeff Foxworthy's faux-redneck patter.) He's got the paleocon dumbbell shtick down pat: In one column last year, he was atwitter after discovering that a Central Park production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" was full of Shakespeare's non-PC fat jokes, particularly since at the late Joe Papp's summer series "they don't do anything unless it has at least one Filipino lesbian handicapped-rights activist in it." The only upside to Briggs' tenure would be trying to watch him bluff his way through an episode of "Firing Line."
Zuckerman aside (a lost Philip Roth novel?), the publisher with the most influence over his magazine's back page may be Martin Peretz at The New Republic. Peretz drops his own byline into TNR's regular "Journal" column once a month or so, filing urbane dispatches from Cambridge, Mass. or a random minor Eastern European capitol. It's when Peretz vacates that space, though, that the back page "Journal" gets interesting (and sometimes a little wiggy), becoming a dumping ground for TNR contributors' gentrified collection of neuroses, enthusiasms and fetishes. In the early '90s, for example, we were treated to Sidney Blumenthal descanting on Bruce Springsteen ("Some American products are still dependable, and Springsteen is one of them"), and Morton Kondracke confessing that he liked to listen to philosophy lecture tapes by "Superstar Teachers" while cruising the Beltway. (Helps pick up chicks?)
Literary editor Leon Wieseltier can be counted on to occasionally issue a few deep, Heathcliff-like rumblings from the pit of his soul. ("I resisted my melancholy," he wrote while inserting his white-maned self into Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, "and set out to see more than I was expecting to see.") Wieseltier can surprise you, though. A "Journal" piece excoriating a thin David Mamet book called "Passover" began to sound like a scary chapter from Tobias Wolff's memoir "This Boy's Life." Wieseltier observed that, "As a boy, I was pretty good with a knife," and recalled how "I hurled my finely-weighted, mother-of-pearl handled pocketknife with cool accuracy." And this was before his Cornel West voodoo doll arrived in the mail.
More often, the "Journal" columns deliver frothier takes on pop culture. (Matthew Cooper recently commended Starbucks for breaking down class barriers by making "the once-exclusive world" of $3 coffee available to us all.) Lately, in fact, TNR's back page has started to seem like a glittering string of 1,000-word personal ads. Associate editor Hannah Rosin wrote about how she was solicited by a modeling agency. And in a now-famous 1994 column, Michael Lewis gloated about how he keeps a full-page Bloomingdale's ad from the New York Times taped over his desk: "It depicts a young woman, to me terrifyingly beautiful, reclining in midair, clad in a black slip and spiked heels ... What is shocking is that the woman in it is now my wife." You go, guy!
At Wired, Nicholas Negroponte isn't the publisher, but his gloomy-ethereal presence looms over the magazine far more mightily than that of its actual publisher, Louis Rossetto. Negroponte seems to beam in his back page columns, Wizard of Oz-like, from behind a black velvet curtain. Reading these coded, depersonalized messages for the initiated, you get the feeling that entire stock portfolios are in danger of tumbling at the slightest twitch of his eyebrows. I'm waiting for Philip Glass to turn Negroponte's collected works into an opera at BAM.
At the two major newsweeklies, casual essays mix with sterner stuff. Newsweek's George Will and Meg Greenfield have updated their author photos but not their shticks; Greenfield in particular can be counted on for a numbing, twice-a-month wedge of iceberg lettuce masquerading as political science. Time's line-up is more varied, and includes the always potable Barbara Ehrenreich. (After a recent foray into alt.sex.bondage, she observed that we seem to have as little use for sophisticated communications technology as chimpanzees have for volumes of Milton: "If you can't eat it and you can't squish fleas with it," she wrote, "you might as well use it to masturbate with.") Also in Time's starting rotation: Garrison Keillor, Jonathan "King of Pain" Kozol and Charles Krauthammer, who tends to burble sagely on topics like "Why We Must Contain China."
Now that Time has snagged Calvin Trillin to write a front-of-book humor column (it's a back page in disguise), The New Yorker's "Shouts & Murmurs" page is largely defined by Christopher Buckley, who can flash some fine wit but whose pieces have come to seem mechanical. Buckley doesn't write essays anymore: like a late-night television scribe, he sketches out "bits." A recent piece on hypothetical "summer blockbusters" included more than a few forced moonshines. ("DWAGONHEART: A tenth-century knight with a speech impediment (Keanu Reeves) must slay a mythical half kangaroo, half garden slug ...") Buckley is readable, but his pieces are starting to sound like disjointed memos faxed in from Mr. Jenkins, that taped-together smoothie from Tanqueray's print ads. But give me Buckley any day if Tina Brown promises to stop encouraging Steve Martin, whose two recent "Shouts & Murmurs" pieces recalled the low points of his disco-era collection "Cruel Shoes."
Back pages can be used as demonstrations of would-be hipness (cf. the pomo cartoons in Details and Might) or a proud lack thereof (the word puzzles in Harper's, The Nation, and Washington Monthly). My favorites, though, are often the back pages that don't try too hard. Consumer Report's "Selling It" page is a tart monthly mix of updates on corporate greed and human gullibility, and the Columbia Journalism Review's "The Lower Case" is an always welcome, Leno-esque compendium of media miscues and bloopers.
Few magazines, actually, do as well as the U.K.'s The Spectator, which features on its back page a small, slightly giddy advice column called "Your Problems Solved." When one perplexed reader wrote in recently asking if there was "a class shibboleth" about pronouncing the "l" in Volkswagen Golf, the author was happy to decree: "Since the appellation is in this case Teutonic, the "l" should be pronounced. To do otherwise would be an affectation equal to referring to a 'driving looking-glass' or 'Sisil Beaton.'"
Of course, at online magazines like this one, it's almost impossible to build a back page into the edifice. Readers click in, and click out, almost at random. So it goes. But when George finally calls and offers me a shot at "If I Were President," equal opportunity back pages for e-zines will be up there on my platform -- right after National Massage Day.