Cancel my subscription to The New Yorker

Am I the only one reads magazines now and who thinks it queer that the cover of March 2019 issue of Art in America is a detail from a painting named 'The Creation of Animals' by the 16th century Italian artist Jacopo Tintoretto?

Or that the poetry published in The New Yorker continues to be outstandingly wretched, so wretched that it exceeds its previous wretchedness when every poet I knew in America hoped to be published in The New Yorker.*

Such curious times in my life: 1) a time when, to paraphrase my guru Walter R, I am "offended by almost everything" 2) a time when I go to bed in a good mood and wake up in a less-than-good mood 3) a time when I am heartened by the news that should we be as presumptuous to blow up an asteroid coming our way, the asteroid might be able put itself back together.

This was the best news I'd heard in eons, the asteroid re-assembly that is, the possibility that perhaps there's not the only Hindu notion of creation and destruction at play in the universe, the notion that made such sense to me once I'd heard of it, but that there may be the possibility of creation and destruction and creation, the possibility of re-creation that is.

This asteroid of good news from outer and inner space has cheered me immeasurably; I've been living on it for the last week or so, since so much of the other news is now being decimated by that "short fingered vulgarian" (D Trump as described by the magazine publisher Graydon Carter) and his familial posse. I still wake up every morning wishing I'd wake up in some other country than the one I wake up in, but I wake now with the calmer notion that there is no other country, countries are only man-made fictions that plaster huge ceremonial flags made of plastic on the backdrops of presidential press conferences and campaign rallies to help alien leaders from inner space broadcast fictions to their fellow alien subjects while standing high above them, looking that much larger than life to their subjects for being alone on stage and theatrically well-lit, with the flags of the country they lead on the otherwise empty space behind them.

So the era of magazine subscription is coming to an end. I await the asteroid, the one that has my name on it, with open arms. The news that I once got from the poetry of magazines is now up to me to make: to be able to discern the meaningful from the meaningless, the real poetry from the prose that's made to look like poetry for the magazine reader.  I'll miss the cartoons in The New Yorker though, some of them made me laugh. 

*A poem in the March 18, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, "Bellringer" by a poet named Rita Dove contains the line, "Well, I was born, and that's a good thing," and the other poem in the same issue, "Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men were Singing" by a poet named Ariel Francisco contains the line, "above the ice-cream trucks' warm jingle."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/asteroids-nuclear-weapons.html