Not Just One

I try to avoid bookstores the way I try to avoid potato chips. You can't eat just one -- you know, nor can I go to a bookstore and buy just one. Before I was past the vestibule of Barnes and Noble yesterday I found two sale books, an anthology edited by Toni Morrison about banning books [No, No!] and a novel by Paul Auster. I only meant, really, to see if they have the kind of art calendar for 2010 that I have so much enjoyed for 20009 -- a Page a Day on it's own easel and great art pictures. They had it.

The only Starbucks mid-cape is in this B-N so I had to have coffee. Can't have coffee without reading a magazine so I picked up two, one on journaling and the latest Quilt Arts Journal -- I let my subscription lapse because I don't really make art quilts and I get tired of their endless emphasis on techniques that require great outlays of money for stuff like paints and Angelina yarn and so on. It seems to me they exist for their advertisers. [So what-da-ya expect? I ask myself. That's how they most publications are.] Anyway, this one has an article about using snow in a dying technique that was so intriguing I had to have the magazine.

However the journaling magazines is NOT for me, it's mainly about visual art journaling
and about kinds of paints and various stick-ems and expensive techniques. That I dislike but I also dislike the insipidity of most of it. It's greeting card-y and a little new age-y and design is not innovative -- again: [So what do-ya expect?] Okay, that goes back on the rack. So then I browse the magazines a bit more -- I am a magazine junkie, I'd bring home every art mag on the racks if they weren't so expensive -- and I saw that the cover girl on Shambala Sun [another lapsed subscription because everyone was sounding alike] was none other than Pema Chodron and she cannot say anything that is not worth reading. She has a new book I will have to get on my next trip to B-N which probably won't be for another month at least.

Did I say I'm a magazine junkie? I had a very small errand downtown today -- which was really an excuse to walk a couple miles round trip because it's a beautiful Indian Summery day -- so I went to the library to see if they had the latest couple of New Yorker magazines, and they did. This is not a lapsed subscription because I'd drive myself nuts wishing to keep up with them if I got one every week. But I love their serious articles and with a library time limit I'll read the most interesting ones and let the rest go. Oh -- I also picked up a Smithsonian because the cover story is about hiking Hadrian's Wall which continues to fascinate me as a possible summer activity ... hmmm.

So it goes ... books and magazines are a little less fattening than potato chips but so much less resistable.