Reading Stylishly

Newspapers are essential props for civilized living. Please subscribe to your local paper. If you don’t like the local offering, take a national newspaper. Better yet, take both. Reading two newspapers at once? That’s change we can believe in.

For newspaper readers, every section is Style;
Your handling of the newspaper can demonstrate a rich vocabulary of gesture.

By Garrison Keillor, January 2007

It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is
missing from their lives, the fine art of holding a newspaper.

They sit staring at computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out
of their ears, life passing them by as they drift through MySpace,
that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and check out a video of a dog
dancing the Macarena.

It is so lumpen, so sad that nobody has shown them that opening up a
newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the
bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy - a
newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.

Whether you’re sitting or standing, indoors or out, leaning against a
hitching post or planting your brogans on a desk, a newspaper gives
you a whole rich vocabulary of gesture. You open it with a flourish
and a ripple of newsprint, your buoyant self-confidence evident in the
way you turn the pages with a snap of the wrist, taking in the gray
matter swiftly, your eyes dancing over the world’s sorrows and moving
on, crinkling the page, snapping it, rolling it, folding the paper in
halves and quarters, tucking it under the arm or tapping it against
the palm.

Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, all the greats, used the
newspaper to demonstrate cool. Sitting and staring at the profile of
Kerri (”Dreamer of dreams”) Jodhpur, 18, of Muncie, Ind., and her cat
Snowball is not cool.

A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a stiff, a drone. Where is the
nobility here? He hunches forward, his eyes glaze, and beads of saliva
glitter in the corners of his mouth and make their way down his chin
as he becomes engrossed in the video of the fisherman falling out of
the boat. A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a
wrangler, a private eye.

Holding a newspaper frees you up to express yourself, sort of like
what holding a sax did for Coltrane. Just observe a few simple rules.

1. If you want to make a serious impression, don’t buy one paper, buy
three or four. A person walking into Starbucks with four papers folded
under his wing is immediately taken for a mogul. If he’s young, he’s a
software mogul. If he is unshaven and wearing pajamas under his
raincoat, he is an eccentric mogul, perhaps a Mafia kingpin.

2. Take your sweet time opening the paper. You already know what’s in
it, boss man, you only read it so you’ll know how much other people
know, so there’s no big rush.

3. Once you open it, never look up unless someone speaks your name.
Don’t be distracted just because a leggy blonde has crossed the room,
leaving a trail of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5. You’re the actor
so let others be the audience, you be the scene.

4. Scan the front page, check out the headlines, but don’t pore, don’t
be a drudge. Be cool. Jump to the sports page, then the comics, then
the society page, then editorials. That’s the beauty of the inverted
pyramid news story. A glance is usually good enough.

5. Always rip out a story or two and tuck it in your pocket. Not
casually, like it was a recipe for meatballs, but with urgency and
purpose. This creates an indelible aura of mystery.

6. When you’re done with a paper, clap it shut and toss it aside. (You
can’t do that with a laptop.) A gesture of dismissal that says, “Feh!
Enough of this pettiness! Onward! To the barricades!”

7. All of this should take no more than 20 minutes.

I know a man who is almost my age, and so he grew up with ink on his
fingers and then, for reasons he couldn’t explain, he switched over to
reading online publications and checking out the Times and the
Washington Post and Slate, and then found a website with streaming
video in which a mature Austrian woman with braids tells you what to
do.

He sits, his eyes locked to hers, as she says, “You vill eat, mein
little schweinhund” and upbraids him for imaginary transgressions. If
he reaches for the off switch, she screeches at him and a Rottweiler
growls low in its throat and so he is a prisoner of his laptop, his
days shot. This sort of thing happens all the time.

The Internet will eat you alive. With newspapers, you’re in and out,
20 minutes. It’s your life, you choose.