Mag Club

On a recent tuesday night, seven members of Dallas’ New Yorker discussion club met, as they have the past four years, at the café inside Borders bookstore at Lovers and Greenville. Their topic, as usual, was a month’s worth of the New Yorker. This evening, the April 16 edition generated the most conversation, particularly an article on parkour, a technique employing daring moves that vaults one’s body over walls and other impediments. “Have you been to YouTube? They have a lot of it on there,” said Rick Cox, a gentleman with a thatch of white hair, a background in publishing, and a profile hardly befitting a YouTube user. After a brief discussion of stories on commuting, the language of a remote tribe, and the commercialization of Tibet, the group lapsed into politics not covered in the issues before them. Despite the older demographic of the group, their leanings were decidedly left.  They weren’t exactly mourning the death of the Reverend Jerry Falwell that had occurred that day. Finally, attention returned to the magazines. Karen Meyers, the group’s founder, held up a copy of the April 23 edition and asked, “Is this the issue that didn’t have anything in it?” As they skimmed pages, they debated a poem, about which club member Jean Lamberty claimed ignorance. Olga Bagatourova deemed Ralph Ellison “unsavory” upon appraisal of a piece on the Invisible Man author. Meyers said, “I’ve given up on reading the movie reviews,” thumbing through another issue. “They review lousy movies,” Cox said. “I mean, why would the New Yorker even review Spider-Man?” Toward the end of the evening, Meyers asked, “Does anyone even read Talk of the Town anymore?” The group members absently nodded their heads and continued flipping pages.