Casual

...Such was the loyalty on the part of readers built up by Hayes in its glory days, if the magazine ran an article on a subject of ostensibly little interest to you—on pinball machines, say, or the Palm Beach suit—you began it anyhow and usually stayed with it until its end...

...interviews with celebrities are often less than a page long...

...Graphics are such as nicely to confuse articles with advertising copy...

...More than a decade ago, I wrote a few pieces for GQ, a magazine whose very title is an inaccuracy: It doesn't come out quarterly and with its very specific advice on sex techniques it's distinctly not for gentlemen...

...In the 1960s, when under the editorship of a man named Harold Hayes, Esquire was a magical magazine, crammed with brilliant and unpredictable pieces...

...They don't mind talking about toys—cars, sports equipment, and the rest—but always with the understanding that they are finally toys merely...

...they just have, or are supposed by the editors to have, very short attention spans...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...Vanity Fair's special Hollywood issues, its issues on powerful corporate figures, its recent issue on the emaciated folk who constitute what remains of royalty in the world, with a wetted index finger, I pass quickly by all of these...

...Discussions of sex, in the body of the magazine and in the letters column, are such as to make a grown man—that would, I believe, be me—blush...

...I'm a sucker for fat, slick-paper magazines that go for a dollar or less per issue, at which price I was able to obtain all four, and Details even threw in a black gym bag...

...Paid subscriber though I am, I begin to think that I am not the ideal reader for these magazines...

...He's ready to talk skin moisturizers with you, ready to discuss hair conditioners...

...Details seems to be for that new man, the metrosexual, the man who may or not be ambisextrous, but has no problem with open vanity about his appearance...

...These are magazines for a post-literate world...

...Hope you like that phrase "post-literate world," which is one I noted in the New York Times, used by a woman who works for a media buying agency...

...I imagine its prospectus reading: This is a magazine for men of all ages who, even though some of them lived through the 1960s, have never let hair grow over their ears...

...David Granger, the editor of Esquire, puts the matter accurately when he says that the movement in current-day men's magazines is in two directions: "toward the more adolescent idea of a man that the lad books [Maxim and various English slicks] went after and toward a more effete idea of man...

...Articles in Details seem to average roughly 600 words...

...They have not worn—they would not dream of wearing—an earring...

...I wish someone would bring out a magazine for men that might carry the title Sophisticated Square...

...Granger sees another audience of male readers who are neither coarse nor effete...

...It joins those other swell posties, post-modernism, post-humanism, post-toasties...

...Esquire stood for men's style, but when one looks at the clothes touted in its pages today, expensive schmattes usually worn by skinny guys with tattoos, bad haircuts, and four days' growth of beard, stylishness isn't what comes to mind...

...Esquire never regained that magic, though it struggles—dare I use the word in this androgynous age—manfully to bring it back...

...True, I have no use for a gym bag, but, hey, a bargain is a bargain...

...They like fine prose and believe they know it when they see it...

...They prefer to think of sex as a pleasurable indoor activity but one that ought never to be discussed in any detail whatsoever...

...If some clever editor could make good on that prospectus, I'd ante up more than a dollar a month for his magazine, and he can keep the gym bag...

...As a scandologist, I allow my eyes to graze over the magazine's hardy perennial, lengthy articles about one or another screw-up by our own royalty, Swiss Family Kennedy, but soon graze turns to glaze, my head falls forward, and the two-pound magazine drops to the floor...

...They believe clothes can be witty and amusing and they value the well-made...

...Esquire, presumably, is after those readers, but not, I should say, aggressively enough...

...The new readers of the men's slick magazine aren't illiterate...

...Its once famous Dubious Achievement Awards have by now themselves become dubious, its columnists strain hopelessly to be with-it, its fiction is greatly uneven, it runs dead-on-delivery celebrity profiles on its covers...

...They need no help on personal hygiene...

...After making my way through the thicket of ads from designer culture, or what I call Ralph Crapoloville, in search of a table of contents, I increasingly find in those contents less and less to read...

...Post-literate is misused here, of course, because "literate" means not literary or cultivated but simply able to read...

...My guess is that its editors want a magazine that they would themselves like to read, but nowadays, because of marketing interference, that isn't so easy to produce...