60 Reasons to Read Esquire’s October Issue

It was an impossible though hardly thankless task that Terry McDonell took on when he became editor of Esquire: Create a magazine for the man of the ‘90s.

Now he’s been replaced. His last issue will be December, but it’s likely he’ll be remembered for October’s 60th Anniversary issue.

Rather than use it as an opportunity to rehash manly wisdom from Esquire’s past, McDonell rounded up “60 truths about the way we live today, in 1993” from as notable a cast as one could hope to find between two covers.

Some of the insights are fun, some funny, some profound. Amazingly, none are stuffy or preachy or simply awful. The compilation makes a fine bed-stand companion, and should prove a lasting browse-fest of laughs and maybe even solace.

Some pieces go well with an easy chair and cognac. Norman Mailer contributes the longest, name-droppingest, most interesting (if anachronistic) essay--on boxing.

The award for strangest, most disturbing and hardest to accept as nonfiction goes to author Donald Katz, for his apparently factual profile of a high-tech voyeur.

There’s no reason not to read the magazine cover to cover, although the astute reader will find cosmic resonance between numerically distant essays.

Zen anchor Tom Brokaw, for instance, urges folks to go not with the flow or against the flow, but across the flow, in a wise essay about swimming; Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, falls into a sewer and makes that a metaphor for hope’s triumph over absurdity; and George Plimpton offers a toast: oogy wawa.

Novelist Ken Kesey, sounding a tad autobiographical, explores America’s obsession with an ever-steepening success curve. He quotes from a boozy conversation with Jerzy Kosinski, in which the now dead author says: “In Europe, a single success makes one successful for life. Duchamp was not expected to paint an ever-improving series of Nudes Descending a Staircase.”

But then writer Jerry Adler actually illustrates America’s success obsession with a time line tracking him and three Yale classmates--one-time television whiz Brandon Tartikoff, cartoonist Garry Trudeau and Pulitzer-winning writer Anthony R. Dolan.

This issue is a major success, even though editors cheat in the middle, slipping a dozen “words to live by” on just two pages. Only two bear repeating: “Attack power with wisdom” (Jacques Yves Cocteau) and “All good work is done in defiance of management” (journalist Bob Woodward).

Some of the best stuff comes from fine thinkers quoting finer thinkers. Novelist Jim Harrison, for instance, quotes Heidegger in an essay about how we all betray our lives. “Poetry proper,” Heidegger said, “is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: Everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.”

But then, taken out of context, the ordinary language Harrison uses to explain why he likes to sleep in the wilderness would make a decent poem or at least a startling fortune cookie: “Perhaps it is equally likely that a bear will bite off my sleeping face, or I’ll die in a plane crash on the way to L.A., but I prefer the former.”

Author Bill McKibben points out the life-diminishing nature of information overload: “What we need is not additional information--we have, the least-informed of us, more information than a king two centuries ago--but more reflection, more silence and solitude, and darkness to put in context what we know.”

McKibben labels this “the Age of Distraction.”

Cartoonist Doug Marlette prefers to call our times the “Age of Inauthenticity.” These days, he says, Yuppie revivalists (he names Bill and Hill among them) sob in encounter groups and on talk shows with evangelical fervor, relishing this “crossroads of the modern soul, where narcissism meets obsessive compulsion.”

For every cautionary tale, though, there is an antidote.

In an essay called “Shut up, already,” journalist Tad Friend advises: “A humble silence is admirable because the world is an astonishing predicament and most verbal assays of it are blather.”

At least one openly gay man (playwright Tony Kushner) has his say: “I read Esquire when I was a boy--well, I didn’t read it, I flipped to the back part and ripped out the underwear ads when the barber wasn’t watching. . . “

Women, though, are woefully underrepresented. The sole female writer to appear is Susan Minot, who rather than use her infiltrator’s position to wax feministic, instead gives the enemy this heartening advice: Beautiful women don’t know they’re beautiful, so men need not fear them.

Despite the magazine’s men’s club atmosphere, women are seldom even the subject of conversation.

But rapper Ice-T offers a sobering view to any reader who may be feeling smug at having just picked up 60 ways to be more manly:

“A ‘90s woman ain’t having it. She watched her mama go through hell with her pops, and she ain’t having it. She doesn’t need you. She says, ‘We’re in love. Let’s kick it until we ain’t in love, and then I’m out of here. . .’

“So now you’re in for a real ride, because only one of y’all is wearing the pants, and it may not be you.”

Required Reading

* Mad monks James Crotty and Michael Lane blasted through Los Angeles last spring, and the current issue of the peculiar little magazine they publish from their oddly painted monkmobile is now on the stands, and devoted entirely to this city.

Monk magazine is a quasi-classic, from its fresh takes on such familiar sights as the Del Rubio sisters and Angelyne to a rambling narrative that gives rare insight into the city’s soul.

The monks’ alternately astute and naive “33 reasons why we love L.A.” should be included in the Chamber of Commerce’s “please don’t go!” kit for business owners:

1.) “L.A. is the world’s great melting pot . . . It’s like an 80 theatre multiplex where a whole new culture and country awaits just a door away.”

2.) “Contrary to Marxist myth (sorry Mike Davis) L.A. is not a police state. L.A. has the lowest police officer per resident ratio of the six largest U.S. cities . . . “

3.) “L.A. is so decentralized, you can carve out your own niche and extraneous people will leave you alone.”

(For info, call 1-800-GET MONK.)