Item! Run-on sentences are acceptable when discoursing on abstract art

Have you ever unsubscribed to a magazine… without success? It's quite an adventure. My Newsweek subscription was set to run out a month or so ago and I did originally return the re-subscription mailer like a good always-two-or-three-issues-behind reader. But before I sent in payment, the magazine was sold to some old dude for $1. One US dollar. Sure, the guy assumed the magazine's debt as well, so it amounts to $1 plus (x), but still.

US$1.

It turned me off, and I was honestly seeking an excuse to free up reading time in order to tackle the pile of books I've not tended to for far too long. After days of measuring the pros and cons (I might have taken the decision a little seriously, but I have been reading for fifteen years and feel I'm better for it) I decided to call customer service and cancel my renewal. She didn't even try to talk me out of it, as she's probably more bitter about that dollar than I am.

I was to receive my last issue the week of September 6. OK. That one arrives and I liked the symmetry when it happened to be Jon Meacham's last as editor. I knew he was leaving and that contributed to my not renewing because I enjoyed his tenure—he oversaw the major, controversial redesign (which I loved until they essentially rolled it back) and the change in focus from a source for news (seemed reasonable to me at the time, since it's gotta be tough for any printed weekly to compete with an RSS reader) to a more exploratory essay format. I was excited until I realized (only very recently) that essays (or, poorly written ones) don't really provide context. So if you don't know the story behind what the writer is going on about then you're probably out of luck. I read it all and understood some. (Even while this was going on, Fareed Zakaria remained their most focused and cogent columnist, but that ship has sailed: he just took his talents to Time Beach.)

September 6 comes and goes, and issues continue to get cozy with my mailbox. When I received the September 20 issue I called and told them so and that they better not try billing me. She said no, the September 27 issue would be my last, and I would not be billed (she, too, never turned on the salesmanship-o-matic). September 27 comes and goes and I'm still getting them, still reading them and still waiting for it to stop. (Though I'm happy to have received last week's issue with the Android cover story, since I am the proud new owner of an HTC Incredible—naturally sporting the inept and amazing guitar solo from Blue Cheer's "Out of Focus" as its ringtone—and, regardless, I really enjoy reading Daniel Lyons. But then I got another one this week. What in the worldwide fuck!)

This lack of unsubscribability has forced me to recognize some strange trends. The first is that George Will is completely batshit—I used to enjoy his sober conservativeness during a messy Dubya era but now I'm afraid he would shoot me dead if I told him it was warm outside. Another is that Jersey Shore and Sister Wives qualify as print-worthy, even considering the magazine's A&E team often exhibited questionable, overly ironic taste in just about everything. Still another oddity is the sequence where a columnist purportedly writes about one topic but then uses that as an opportunity to write about something completely different. Jeremy McCarter recently pulled an elusive double buttonhook by writing about a movie (The Social Network) in order to label Facebook as some enabler of "American loneliness" so he could then casually (in three separate instances!) mention Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom. Just review the book already!

However, the most frustrating byproduct of the above-mentioned design/format is that run-on sentences are now satisfactory. Maybe this has been the case for years and I haven't noticed. Maybe it went into effect only after Meacham departed. Most likely, it is encouraged only for nonsensical raps about art—check out this shit. Even the writer's name runs on: David Wallace-Wells. It seems one first name and one last name are insufficient for serial killers and, now, know-it-all Pollock-blowing nitwits.

Think my graphic example at the beginning was an exaggeration? Well it was, but only by thirteen words in a Wallace-Wells world. How about this sweet excerpt, clocking in at seventy-six words:
"Many of these canvases will be unveiled when a remarkable retrospective opens at New York's Museum of Modern Art on October 3—remarkable in large part because it will be drawn entirely from the museum's own holdings, a reminder of how few enthusiasts forged the outsize reputation of abstract expressionism in its heyday, and how large a role a single institution could play (and continues to play) in an art world of small, critical clusters and long speculative collecting."

Followed soon by this sixty-seven-word gem that's somehow worse:
"The sentinel émigré Hans Hofmann—itinerant painter, teacher, and mentor to much of the New York school—was German-born, had lived in Paris, and seemed to his students the living embodiment of a standing European tradition that the American painters would pillage and repurpose in their own canvases—most explicitly the work of Russian abstract painters Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich and the surrealist exiles Max Ernst and André Masson."

What an asshole. (I'm occasionally that asshole as well but I'm not a professional writer.) Let's take a streamlined fifty-nine-word example and have fun with it, striking every other word to turn it into merely an overlong sentence:
"The truly indigenously thing abstract was the rhetoric celebrated—the magazine, chiefly Rosenberg Greenberg, made of into and crucibles, aesthetic to tests a teleology, presented belated embrace European as world event."

It's as lucid as the rest. ("The rhetoric celebrated"—I love that.) I wish I were his editor so I could leave Freshman composition textbooks on his desk and make hand gestures indicating that he needs to tighten things up. I'll say this though: after a minuscule thirty-four sentences over two pages (!) the guy wraps up with a four-word sentence: "It published only once." He buttonhooked me!