Newspaper Nostalgia

I can’t start my day without a newspaper to scan at the breakfast table. I’ve been this way forever. As a child, I read the St. Louis Post Dispatch every day. The high point of my newspaper-reading life was 1983 to 1990, when I got the Washington Post delivered to my door every morning, and every Sunday we got Book World. When I moved to the back of nowhere, our friends here joined in with us to buy a subscription to the Washington Post, but after a few months of reading it two days late, we gave it up. Since then, I’ve been subsisting on a daily diet of The Columbus Dispatch.

Lately, though, the newspaper is often delivered after we’ve gotten up from the breakfast table. And it keeps getting slimmer. The sections I look for each day have been shrunk down and incorporated into other sections, and the front page includes more sports and metro news, and less national and world news. It’s gotten to where I get more of my news from my 20-second glance at the google news headlines and reading articles from The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune when friends send links.

Just recently, I clicked on a link over at a book blog I like to read, Sophisticated Dorkiness, and read this article from the NY Times, about xkcd comics coming out in book form soon. I like what the article says about the collection being an artifact. Newspapers are no longer so immediate as they once were, and they’re not pleasant artifacts, either, after a few days. I have links on my sidebar now to some of the things I like to read that I first discovered in newspapers, like The Borowitz Report--and I don't have to dispose of anything after I've read it. And, of course, newspaper book review sections are being eliminated (Book World) or they've gotten so watered down as to be unpalatable (The Columbus Dispatch now uses the NYTimes bestseller list to list new books on Sundays).

So this year when my kid had a magazine sale for his school, I bought a subscription to the London Review of Books. It’s occasionally interesting; I’ve enjoyed some of the poems there, although the last time I sat down to read any of them was in March, when I discovered David Harsent’s Four Poems. My favorite of the four related poems is this one:

The Garden in Sunlight

Go by white poppies, white tulips, white flags, go by
the white willow arch, go by the apple tree, its full white crop,

go by the pond where white-eyed fish
slide by deeper each day, then out to the lawn, its trackless white

a mirror image of the trackless sky;
but think now: after you’ve set foot you’re on a wish

and a promise, adrift in white’s slow creep
away and over the edge, though something takes you straight

to those little spoil heaps: bone that breaks to ash
under your hand…and you backtrack, hoping for sight

of the house, perhaps, or the garden gate, or the street,
but it’s white-on-white however hard you try,

and a hum in the air, white noise, which could be some rash
report of you: figment, divertimento, little white lie.

Much as I like that one in particular, though, I have the sense that I could have lived without discovering it in the March issue, and that when the issue begins to yellow and curl at the edges, I’ll put it in the recycling basket without a backward look. I used to cut out poems I liked and keep them in various places; sometimes I still find one fluttering out of a volume of poetry when I open it again.

But it’s the volume I go back to. Sometimes I throw away my own inserts, because like the ads that flutter down when I open a magazine, they’re not bound. I’m not bound to them in the same way.

Are you also nostalgic for newspapers? Or have you preceded me into the brave new world in which they’re… well, disposable?