At long last, I have decided to bare my soul to the public arena and make a confession that I have been denying for years: I love People magazine. I know that it’s an exploitative publication, but ever since my mother received a year-long subscription of the trashy tabloid as a gift when I was a junior in high school, I haven’t been able to get enough. I long for celebrity red-carpet rundowns and I thirst for cheesy feature stories about how the Flying Tomato was finally able to meet Sasha Cohen. In fact, yesterday afternoon before going into the office to write this column, I spent 30 minutes in the University Bookstore trying to find a photo of Tom Cruise and the very pregnant Katie Holmes sporting her Burberry swim cover-up (which, by the way, can be found on page 60 of the most recent People).
Over the past six years, I have hidden my deep love in shame, hoping never to be discovered by my fellow students as they step up to the magazine rack to pick up their latest copy of Time or The New Yorker. In fact, I have a system to hide my love and complete the deception. As the seemingly more refined student steps up to the magazine rack, I will immediately stash my People behind the closest National Geographic, hoping to update my status from airhead pop culture aficionado to traveler extraordinaire – effective approximately 75 percent of the time.
So goes the story of my love and disgrace, a dangerous cycle of denied love and secret humiliation. After being divinely inspired by Don DeLillo and my upper-level English class, however, I have decided to transform into a new Laura Vilines: a Laura Vilines who openly loves People magazine.
This divine intervention occurred just before my People bookstore run, as my seminar class was discussing “Parable of the Sower,” a novel by famed (and recently deceased) science fiction writer, Octavia Butler. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this book is not the finest work of modern literature, and it hardly holds a candle to Butler’s previous gem, “Kindred” (which I highly recommend). Yet “Parable of the Sower” is almost indisputably entertaining and an easy read. This entertainment factor, though, seems to escape a majority of my Wash. U. peers.
My class spent the first hour of our time making statements such as, “I kept asking myself how anyone would ever want to read this” and “It was almost more difficult to read than ‘Underworld'” (DeLillo’s 800-page tome dedicated to the historical rendering of the post-Cold War era). All the while, I had to restrain myself from yelling at the top of my lungs, “It’s entertaining! Some people read for fun!” And while Butler’s novel really is more than cheap entertainment, the point of this hour-long conversation can not be missed. When did we all become so intellectual that we can’t even enjoy ourselves anymore?
I’d hate to see the day when we can only listen to NPR, drink Perrier and read “The Atlantic Monthly.” So everyone crank up your Ashlee Simpson, pop open a Diet Coke, and bring on the latest People magazine. Maybe if we all take a dive into the depths of generic pop culture, we’ll be able to remember that sometimes, even reading can be fun.