Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual ALL THE NEWS UNFIT TO READ Aloft, on a plane headed for San Francisco, reading the early pages of the excellent biography of the Sanskrit scholar Max Müller by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, I came...
...I'd as lief read a Times editorial on, say, the environment as memorize the last fifty pages of recent changes in the tax code...
...No one I know has pegged out...
...Op-ed and editorials I glimpse quickly...
...Arthur Miller will no doubt have received another award carrying with it a heavy cash prize...
...Silence is generally the response...
...There was this thing called the news, and one wanted to stay abreast of it, not miss out on anything as significant as, say, the resignation of the minister of defense in Italy...
...On holiday, I never read a newspaper...
...Pride may go before the fall for them, but I come after, grinning through my Schadenfreude...
...Don't worry, Mom, I'm reading good...
...In the sports section I learn that the White Sox have rented the services of Kenny Lofton, the excellent center fielder of the Cleveland Indians...
...I say read when I really mean skimmed...
...I guess I'm home...
...I have long ago given up on Utopia, but this seemed a sound state of affairs...
...As a preface to going away, I call the New York Times business office in Chicago, and cancel my home delivery subscription for the days I shall be gone...
...When I return to Chicago, that day's New York Times awaits...
...During my week in California, I didn't once consult a newspaper, and missed it not at all...
...In his young days at Dessau Müller knew only one, which gave nothing but reports of actual events on one, or half, or even quarter of a sheet...
...I read the front of the paper—the adult section—in something just under the world record for the mile...
...Put that poison in the hands of children...
...After consulting the obituary pages, I read the children's sections of the New York Times— sports and the arts, in that order...
...I know the importance of newspapers to modern government, but my sentiments have come to resemble those of the character in Tom Stoppard's play Night & Day who says, "I'm with you on the free press...
...I go through the rest of the paper, glancing at headlines, attracted mainly by the monstrous, the goofy, the egregious...
...No sooner do I put down my suitcase and take off my coat than I find myself turning to its obit pages...
...While on this self-imposed newspaper boycott, did I miss anything...
...Since I neither read any Chicago newspaper nor watch local television news—"Triplets Found in Dumpster, more on Eye Witness News at Ten"—I am splendidly ignorant of what goes on in my own city...
...I now read only the New York Times...
...Casual ALL THE NEWS UNFIT TO READ Aloft, on a plane headed for San Francisco, reading the early pages of the excellent biography of the Sanskrit scholar Max Müller by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, I came across the following item about life in the ducal city of Dessau in Germany, where Müller was born in 1823: "One thing which helped the peace of the town was the absence of newspapers...
...and occasionally I clicked over to CNN, whose crawls of news squibs tend to interest me more than what the broadcasters are reading...
...I turned on the hotel-room television—it was the last week of the Olympics—to watch people sliding around on skis, skates, and sleds...
...Turning to the arts section, I wonder what new prize Arthur Miller will have won...
...Still, I did this skimming compulsively...
...Invariably, the polite person to whom I give these instructions asks if I would like my papers for the time I will be away to be sent to a local school...
...perhaps some of the professional athletes in my city have decided to rent themselves out to teams in other cities...
...I currently read one newspaper a day, but there was a time, living in New York, when I read three and sometimes four a day...
...Public affairs, I assume, will have been conducted at their usual varying intensities of stupidity...
...Possibly moderately famous people I know or have heard about have died...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...Someone once said that each day one picks up one's newspaper in eager anticipation and puts it down in disappointment...
...For the week that I didn't read newspapers I read instead about the immensely impressive Max Müller and also Virgin Soil, a novel by Tur-genev that I feel I could have written myself, so familiar is its plot of the Russian intellectual going out among the people only to find they are insufficiently impressed by his idealism...
...Smart person, that Someone, for that has been my lifelong experience...
...It's just the newspapers I can't stand...
...A serial killer could be living upstairs, the aforementioned dumpster could be in my alley, and I wouldn't know it...
...Surely you jest...
...I find very little that would make the Dessau news criterion of "actual events...
...One of the reasons for going on vacation is to get away from the daily routine, part of which for me is newspaper reading...
...In recent years I've been reading more business news, chiefly that having to do with media mergers and large-scale scandals and the demise of once overpriced executives...
...Invariably, I answer: "What...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 28
