There's no shortage of editorial ideas

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1985 by Peter Jacobi

Sometimes I get heavy breathers. When I was young, such calls terrified me. Now they are fun. I breathe heavily right back, then both of us, hyperventilated, hang up.

Once in a while my answering "hello" is followed by a suspicious silence, then a "Who is this?" Such rudeness can not be tolerated. Depending on my current mood, I answer "Julie Andrews" or "Lizzie Borden."

How about a story about the telephone or the door or the doorbell or the duplicator or the refrigerator or the medicine cabinet or the closet or the library or the file cabinet or the news-stand or the vending machine or paper.

I like stories about ice cream, about chewing gum, about nuts, about mustard, about soup, about cherries.

Taking a creative stance

For every aspect of our lives--personal and professional and geographic--there are such subject.

The Village Voice ran an article about spinning. Its author, Robert Coe, begins by contemplating the universal of the notion of motion: "A common view of the universe has everything spinning around something else." He then reduces his vision considerably to a spoon stirring coffee in a cup, or actually a man stirring a spoon in a cup. Eventually he settles on spinning as a "central metaphor" in American theater and dance.

Idea. To spin. To zigzag. To run. To hop. To walk. When and why? Where? What for? In front of or with or without whom? And why does it rain on weekends? And how does one Garbo-watch?

I'm interested in supermarkets for books and records and paints and liquors, and in contract and urban archaeology, and in the tragedy of pet abuse, and the most extravagant hotel suites in town, and in catalogs and in moving companies, and telephone action referral services, and in license numbers and tombstone quotations.

The New York Times' Sydney H. Schanberg thought about the man who scaled a 12-foot iron fence at the Bronx Zoo after telling a guard, "You have to get close to the animals. I'm just trying to show them I love them." He got too close to the polar bears and was fatally mauled. To Schanberg it wasn't enough to be told the man was a derelict and a vagrant and off balance. So he explored. He found out that the victim had been a high school biology teacher in Havana. He found out much more. A story resulted.

At The New Yorker one of "our local correspondents" advises us:

It was sixty-five degrees and overcast when the sun rose over New York City last June 15th, but the skies cleared later in the morning. It was a calm, pleasant day; the maximum wind velocity, seven miles per hour, was reached at 5 P.M., when the temperature was also at its high; eighty-three degrees. Meteorologically and in most other respects, June 15th, a Wednesday, was not much different from most warm-weather weekdays in the three-hundred-and-twenty-fourth year of this city's incorporated life.

There is no such thing, of course, as an average day; in fact, for many accounting purposes there is no longer such a thing as day at all. Increasing numbers of records are being kept not on a twenty-four-hour basis, but rather, in weekly, monthly, or annual totals, compiled mechanically by computers. It may be said, however, that June 15th, a date selected at random in advance, was typical of New York weekdays, and, thanks to the efforts of a hundred and twelve representatives of governmental, civic, and corporate organizations, who retrieved the data (in some instances, a laborious process, requiring the examination of records that were not collected until long afterward), the following 265 statistics, events, attendances, and transactions have been assembled. They are set down here for no purpose other than to reflect the diversity and magnitude of proceedings in the City of New York or, in a few specified instances, on its periphery.