Last year, I asked for, and received, a subscription to The New Yorker. At first, I made a point of reading at least one article out of each issue, but over time, they started piling up. Soon enough, I was feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of issues. Then I started to resent the pile for making me feel overwhelmed. So, about a week ago, I went through and ripped out any article that looked interesting and threw the rest of the magazines out. That felt great, but now the pile of articles is making me feel guilty too.

I have started to blame The New Yorker for this problem. I want to like the magazine. I want to read the articles. But I am a short-attention-span girl in a short-attention-span world, and my goodness, The New Yorker can be boring sometimes.

Here are my problems with The New Yorker:

* It takes too long for me to figure out whether or not I want to read an article. The New Yorker publishes long articles and I am busy. Therefore, I need to know upfront a.) what this article is about and b.) if it is going to be interesting to me. However, The New Yorker headlines are vague and their intros can take three paragraphs before they get to the point of what the article is about (when you subscribe to The New Yorker, you don’t get that handy outside sheet that tells you what’s inside the issue). So I have to read quite far into the article before I can figure out whether I want to actually devote the time to reading it. Most of the time, then, I simply don’t read it at all.

* I am not The New Yorker’s target audience. So, I’ll start an article about, say, a technology trend and then realize that I have known about this trend for six months already. Clearly, the function of this article is to inform 70-year-olds about the ins-and-outs of this strange thing called the Internet. Conclusion: The New Yorker expects its audience to be old, and so they often write articles for old people. That is oddly alienating.

* The New Yorker’s fiction leaves me cold. Don’t get me wrong: When The New Yorker publishes good fiction, it’s really, really good. But other times, the fiction is leaden and plods along for pages and pages, and afterwards, I just feel tired. It also bothers me that they publish work by their staffers. I mean, I can understand publishing a short story by John Updike even if it’s not his best work, because, hey, it’s John Updike. But a short story by the magazine’s Editorial Assistant? In any case, The New Yorker fiction seems so important ! and official ! that it sucks the joy out of reading for me.

Obviously, this is a venerable, important magazine that often publishes brilliant work. I can sincerely say that some of my all-time favorite reads have come from The New Yorker. That said, I loved this article by David Orr in the New York Times taking issue with this article in The New Yorker by staffer Dana Goodyear (who also publishes poetry in the magazine) about the $200 million grant a rich lady gave the Poetry Foundation. An excerpt from Orr’s article:

Indeed, The New Yorker now treats poetry almost exactly as Goodyear suggests the Poetry Foundation does — as a brand-enhancing commodity. Rather than actual discussions of poetry as an art, The New Yorker offers “profiles” of poets, which are distinguishable from profiles of, say, United States senators only in that the poets’ stories potentially include more references to bongs. That’s not to knock the authors of those profiles — often they’re a pleasure to read. They just have nothing to do with poetry.

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

You see? This is the kind of thing that bugs me. But if I read “For My Grandson,” I would probably feel guilty for not liking it, just as I felt guilty for reading only half of Goodyear’s rambly article about the Poetry Foundation. But no more! Dear The New Yorker… I like you, but you shall have this strange power over me no longer.