I just got my October issue of The New Criterion. The magazine usually comes right before the beginning of the listed month, but this go round it didn’t. September passed and each October day as my wife and I ended our walk with a mailbox check I’ve made the same stupid semi-joke wondering if my “trending towards old Criterion” had arrived.

I’m not sure if the one I got today is the one I was wondering about. If you don’t get your copy, or if your copy is damaged, they have a number you can call “within 90 days of issue date for a replacement copy.” I only called two days ago and they told me to allow one to two weeks for delivery so this may be a lickity-quick replacement or a foot dragging original. Either way, I have another copy out there.

As a subscriber, I have access to every issue online dating back more than forty years. The archives alone are worth the price of the monthly. I’ve gone down Auden, Pound, Lowell (both), and many more rabbit holes. Go back two sentences and amend it to read “The archived Willaim Logan criticisms alone are worth the price…” That guy’s pretty funny, very sharp. I pick a subject or an author and read back dated stuff all the time. I could have read this October’s issue online, but I didn’t.

I don’t have anything against reading digitally, I just like reading the physical copies of this periodical in particular. I managed not to give up on the postal service and get going, but I was tempted. This month’s “Reflections” feature was “Cavernous imaginations” (they don’t capitalize through titles – you get used to it) by Archie Phillpotts. It was the subtitle or blurb that interested me: “On the memory-palace technique.”

The memory-palace technique refers to The Method of Loci. Legend has it that between writing poetry and inventing letters of the Ancient Greek alphabet, Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC) went to a terrible dinner party where the building collapsed killing almost everyone in attendance. Simonides was able to help assemble a list of the deceased by picturing the guests as he saw them seated. This unlikely but useful story developed into The Method of Loci. Long story short, the method used to be referred to as the memory-house until recently when it suddenly was and always was, Berenstain Bears like, the memory-palace.

Memory-house was so recently memory holed that in an episode of BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017) with Benedict Cumberbebatch, Watson got exasperated with Sherlock for saying memory-palace. “Everybody else gets a memory-house. Why do you get a memory-palace?” he paraphrased. In no time flat it went from a throw away joke to parlance. I wanted to know if the article mentioned the sudden construction upgrade.

I could have read the new issue online, but I didn’t. I didn’t because The New Criterion uses the cover for its table of contents or vice versa. They still limit ads and pictures to the inside of the front cover, three of the first four pages, the last four pages, and both sides of the back cover in the tradition of The Little Review, Dial, The Egoist, or Poetry. There’s a point where after reading a number of online articles you realize that you’ve read the whole issue. There are no more articles; no build up to the end or joy of progression. You just find yourself done.

Each page turned of the physical copy, as you make your way through reviews of music, plays, operas, novels, biographies and histories, musings on current events, new poetry, or clever observations, is a page turn measuring progress through a magazine so hoity toity it needs patron’s support in addition to earnings from advertising and subscriptions to stay afloat.

Every page grows the booster seat on which I sit, looking down on my not fellow, less lettered man.