July 01, 2004
Reader's Digest
Jo was and is a friend of the family, another expat Australian who came to the UK in the 1960s. I don't know exactly how she and my parents came to be part of the same circle, whether it was before or after the move, here or there, but she's been in my life since the start, more or less. She's been living in Santa Fe for as long as I can remember, having moved there sometime in the 1970s, but there's conscious memory and then there's the rest, and Jo is part of the rest. She crops up from time to time, passing through on the way from one more-or-less glamorous location to another, and it's always a joy.By her own account, she was a bit out of her depth when she first arrived London, but there was a lot going on around then and she coped manfully. She got a job with the Reader's Digest, which seems to have mostly involved dealing with incoming mail from overseas. The mail fell into two general categories.
The first category of letters that Jo had to handle were, for the most part, from US servicemen and diplomatic menials and such, stationed overseas, whose parents, aunts, uncles, whatever, had decided they needed a subscription to the Reader's Digest to keep them entertained on their long tours away from home. These letters went, approximately:
If you ever send me another issue of your stupid fucking magazine, I will personally come over there and cut your heart out with my bayonet.
Yours, etc.
Just the sort of thing you want to read first thing on a Monday morning.
The other category of letters came, on the whole, from young African men being taught English in Christian missionary schools, where the only things they had to read besides the Bible were a few tattered copies of the Reader's Digest, of impressive vintage. These letters were much less aggressive:
I love you! You bring the light to the life of me. Your magazine I love reading and more copies desire. Please have the generosity to send us many magazines as you can wish to say to goodbye. Reading I love! Wonderful your publication are. If you do will I marry and make good husband.
Sincerely etc.
Caricatured thus, the solution is surely self-evident. N subscriptions exist, fully paid up and entirely by the book; O(N) people have them but don't want them; O(N) people want them but don't have. Waste not want not.
Still, as a newly-arrived flunky from the Great South Land, would you have the chutzpah actually to do the deed?
Jo, bless her, did. She simply redirected the unwanted Digests to people who, for whatever reason, might actually appreciate them. An act, it seems to me, of perfect sense, admirable even all these years later.
Needless to say, she didn't last long. Acts of perfect sense, it would seem, were no more welcome at the Reader's Digest in the late 1960s than they are now in most places we might long for them.
Even so, from time to time, they do occur. Isn't that something to be happy about?
Posted by matt at July 1, 2004 11:46 PM
