What is a Magazine?

Looking through an airline's in-flight magazine I found to my surprise it's not a magazine anymore, but a catalog full of purchasable items, titled Sky Mall. I kid you not. In vain I searched it for articles, advice, horoscopes. The items were fascinating and I probably read the catalog more thoroughly than I ever read those in-flight magazines with ecstatic descriptions of trips I would never take.

I think about magazines, talk about magazines. I receive magazines. So what the heck IS a magazine? A wanna-be book with a shorter lifespan? A paper-bound, two-dimensional variety show? A newspaper on steroids?

Etymology: "storehouse, granary." Sense a) "a storehouse of information on any subject." The term used to be applied to books. But more recently, b) "a periodical with miscellaneous papers, esp. critical and descriptive articles, stories, poems, etc., designed for the entertainment of the general reader." (Then a qualification: "Magazines are now often specialized...") (because there is now no general reader. General readers read, like, catalogs. Magazines are slanted toward certain demographics.)

The dictionary points me toward the word "review." What, I ask, is a "review," as in Paris Review? Threepenny Review? I have never looked it up. Anyone can see that "to review" means "to look again," but the noun is defined thus: "a periodical containing critical articles primarily."

What is a magazine? I love magazines, so I have to give this more thought.

Are You a Writer, or an Author? Part III

Webster's etymologies, as far back as they can be traced:

author: "to increase, produce"

writer: "to scratch; to tear"

I think writers do both. The difference seems to be that writing is composing, and authorial actions are quantifiable or measurable. As in:

Have you written the next chapter of your novel?
Have you authored your 1500 words today?

"Author" and books are related because published books can be counted. Most people have no other way to take the measure of a writer.

OK -- this question's settled. Now: Have you written the next chapter of your novel? Have you authored your 1500 words today?

Are You a Writer, or an Author? Part II

Literary theorist Roland Barthes said of the difference between an author and a writer, "The former performs a function; the latter an activity."

What is an author's "function"? To go on lecture tours, like Mark Twain? To be on Today? To appear at signings and banquets? To inspire writers who aren't at the touring/Today Show level yet? Twain , the most famous touring author, wrote (1896):

I got horribly tired of the platform toward the last -- tired of the slavery of it; tired of having to rest-up for it; diet myself for it; take everlasting care of my body and my mind for it; deny myself in a thousand ways in its interest.

Seems that without actively writing, an author is decorative -- they do call it "an appearance" -- or at best a pawn in his own money-making game.

And doesn't a writer have a function as well as an activity? Like, to stir people's minds? To entertain them? To educate? To stand for something?

Those literary theorists...I'm sure Barthes explains his statement well and in depth, but I read more than enough theory in the 1980s, before we all found out that literary theory ("literature means nothing") was the brainchild of a former Nazi collaborationist, Paul de Man, who in the rest of his lifetime neglected to mention that rather telling fact.

"imperfect"

According to Webster's, the word "perfect" may also mean "legally mature," "fully formed," or "to carry to the end." I realized it is possible for a creative work to be all these things and still not meet MY standards. Then I realized that I don't know what my inner standards are, who set them, or why I hold to them.

I still sting from a book rejection that says "manuscript still contains some weak poems," and it may have been then I decided that the artist in me should be more of a drill sergeant.

All I know is that a few days ago I flipped through my "also-ran" binder, re-reading poems I'd abandoned as hopelessly imperfect and/or imperfectible, and found three that by all reasonable standards were likeable and worthwhile even if imperfect. I wondered why I had been so hard on them. Does an ending really have to "snap the poem shut"? Is "self-indulgent" -- whatever that is -- such a crime? Why isn't 99 percent good enough? 95 percent? 80 percent? WTF? Did Yeats bat 1000? Did Emily Dickinson? Did Dylan Thomas? Are all Beatles songs equally good?

I wondered who benefits when "legally mature" artists are excessively hard on themselves and their work.