Aging women: if you don't laugh, you'll cry (NYT)

Today's New York Times looks at More magazine, aimed at women over 40.

Stephanie Clifford points out that a magazine whose organizing principle, aging, provokes anxiety among its readers, has an inescapable challenge.

“Don’t take it seriously,” Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor in chief of More, said in a recent interview. “We’re making fun of ourselves. We don’t take aging seriously. It happens to everyone. You can’t avoid it.”

More certainly does not. Age infiltrates almost every article, and while it is a touchy subject for readers, advertisers are wary about it as well. More’s average reader is 51, among the oldest in the magazine business, making selling ads a challenge, More executives say. While it tackles ageism in its pages, it is getting a good dose of it from advertisers.

Advertisers show the same blind spots as I mentioned in my last blog:

[Advertisers] penalize the magazine because its readers are female. The More reader makes a lot more than the average reader of Esquire, at about $66,800, and GQ, at about $75,100. But where GQ, Esquire, and the younger women’s magazines are filled with ads for designer clothes, fragrances and expensive accessories, the ads in More suggest that when rich women hit 40, they yearn for cheap processed foods.

Grr!

Mysterious footpath blotches

Downstairs I have a second, small apartment which I rent short term, furnished. A recent tenant was a lovely old gentleman, Simon. Only old, not older, because he is younger than me.

He lives in Germany and some things here in Wellington mystified him.

"I've noticed blotches on the pavement," he told me in incredulous tones. "Some of them look a little bit like --- I don't know, could it be lichen? And some of them look like -- I don't know what. Could it possibly be... chewing gum?"

"Well now," I said. "It's most likely that some of them are lichen, and the others are chewing gum."

He was amazed. And I was amazed that he was amazed.

On the one hand, very likely in German cities the pavements are scraped and cleaned, so they don't have blotches. Blotches banned. Blotches deleted. Blotches despatched. Wellington underfoot may be disgusting to the foreign eye, for all I know.

On the other hand, how lovely that he could get so much fascination from a miniature quandary like this. He wasn't disgusted, he was charmed. So I was charmed. He could certainly summon up the daily smile.

Moreover, on the one foot, many old people walk heads down, staring at the pavement. That posture is one way you can spot an old person at 100 paces, even without your glasses. I suppose they've had a fall or fear a fall. It's tough when you walk like that, because you don't see the world or any of the wonderful things in it.

But on the other foot, if you walk around staring at the pavement, you may discover wonderful things there too. Like chewing gum and lichen. And by gum, down there, shimmering among the city blotches, one day you may spot an image of Elvis Presley or the Virgin Mary.

Then the boot will be on the other foot. And you'll be smiling.

Old, older,oldest

On Wednesday, 28 February, 2001, Japan's oldest twin Gin Kanie died, aged 108. She and her sister Kin (left) were national celebrities.

No doubt about it, she was chronologically old! She was also the oldest.

You can see the difficulty here. From Latin grammar books I learned that adjectives have three forms:
1. positive (e.g. heavy or sweet or old)
2. comparative (heavier, sweeter, older)
3. superlative (heaviest, sweetest,oldest)

Trouble is, the word old now has two meanings: chronologically old and old in spirit. Chronologically old has slunk out of use. We deny it, like fools, in favour of old in spirit.

It's funny, I can have an objective conversation about this semantic oddity with some of my friends but not others. Last Monday, for instance, a friend said, "You're not old. You're just older." It was clearly intended as a compliment, but since when was older younger than old?

It makes my head spin. Old is the new young? There's no such thing as old? Do we grow older, then old, and finally become the oldest — in our street, if nothing else?

Actually, it makes a kind of crazy sense when you consider the terms positively old, comparatively old and superlatively old. We don't progress in that order.

We start by being comparatively old, that is, a bit older than we were a few years ago, or yesterday. Then at some point, we can be classified as positively old. Finally, if we live to 108, that certainly qualifies as superlatively old.

But for most people, this will be the progression:
Positive: older
Comparative: old
Superlative: dead.

Being old is heaps better than being dead, surely. I think I'll join the Old Pride movement, if it exists.

Conference speakers over 55

I'm still digesting 15 fascinating talks I heard at a conference last week, The Future of the Book. Audience was a mix of book publishers, teachers and lecturers, with a smattering of authors and technical people. So, not an ultra-young audience; definitely older than audiences at the usual conferences I attend, which lean towards the internet. Perhaps not a cross-section of book people, because they all had an interest in electronic books (or the possibly terminal illness of P-books).

I asked a few speakers how old they were: 55, 57, 57, they said. I made my own deductions about the others and got this distribution, counting only those whose presentations I saw and heard:

Young speakers (40 or younger): 8
Medium age speakers (40s and 50s): 6
Over 50 speakers: 9

My point? Plenty of people who are pushing 60 are leaders in the everyday world.

This world of exploding ebooks is a lively one, with exciting new developments every week. You have to keep on your toes to dodge the shrapnel and find a good trail through the smoke. For me, that's a deeply attractive feature. Nothing beats learning new stuff when it comes to keeping a live brain. (Apart from the luck of the genes.)

Oh yes, and they gave us this dessert of mini-pavlovas and fruit. Very nice.