I LIVED IT (I culled four years worth of New Yorker magazines)

some people get gym memberships on January 1, I do this

My toxic trait is that I keep things around longer than I should.

will I ever throw away this halloween costume that lives in a bag on my floor? TBD!

But it mostly extends to things that I perceive to have artistic value! And so, receiving a new New Yorker magazine every week for the past four years, full of beautiful art and stories that would FOR SURE change my life if only i carved out time to read them, has been bad for my dreams of order.

these two baskets full of magazines have migrated around my office/home for years

This week, I channelled my various anxieties into cleaning my office and finally going through the hundreds of New Yorker magazines that have piled up since 2020. Why go through each one instead of just recycling them all and being done with it, you crazy person?? you ask. Two reasons:

1. the main reason that I subscribe is so I can have a physical copy of my cartoons when they’re published, and I haven’t even managed to keep up with that over the years, so I had to find the issues that I actually appeared in so i could squirrel them away;

2. I wanted to keep the editorial art I loved for future reference. Why am I spending money on this at all if not to benefit from it??

It took two days, but I did it. I found a surprising number of magazines with my own comics in them…

I put them into plastic sleeves and marked the pages with post-its. I am sure that future me will appreciate this.

…which makes me wonder why I didn’t just put them aside when I received them??

reconstruction of likely events

I skimmed the table of contents of each magazine to see if there were stories by writers I liked, and flipped through to the fiction and feature articles to see if there was cool editorial art I wanted to keep. I filed them away into a binder:

Comics, Illustrations, and Poems/Stories

A few selections:

(clockwise from top left) - Karlotta Freier, Antoine Maillard, Barry Blitt, Kevin Lucbert, Millie Von Platen, Joana Avillez

by Megan Fernandes, published two years before we met at the La Napoule residency <3

I also kept a few magazines and marked the stories that I wanted to read.

The plan is just to pick one up when I have an idle moment, read the marked story, and then recycle the magazine (ASPIRATIONAL)

I hope to do this with every magazine I receive from now on - flip through it and see what catches my eye - instead of “saving it” for when I have enough time to read the whole thing (and therefore never reading it ever).

Through this process, I also learned that one of my old daily cartoons was printed in last month’s Cartoons & Puzzles issue!

published December 23, 2020

Below the paywall, I share the funny/mortifying story behind this that involves attending my first ever (virtual) New Yorker party (ha).