As a kid I grew up with my mother and grandmother’s copies of Rona Barrett’s Hollywood and The National Enquirer scattered around the house.

My grandmother especially was unapologetic about the gossip rags, and her ardor made it all the easier for me to revel in them too.

Some of my sweetest memories involve everyone in my family lying around on Sunday afternoons discussing Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand having sex together on the set of The Way We Were. Or at least how we imagined they were having sex together. Tabloid time like this was considered quality time in my family.

To this day I still argue with friends about the veracity of The National Enquirer, and why I still read it — explaining how the potential threat of high-cost litigation keeps the paper trustworthy. This pretty much guarantees that whatever sort of outrageous revelation they are publishing is fact-based (well, maybe).

And The Enquirer consistently releases lusciously lurid humdingers — year after year upping the ante to compete with the seemingly endless circle jerk of celebrity gossip blogs.

Within three days I must have read thirty different online spins on Star Jones‘ gastric bypass. One of them involving an alien probe theory that actively held me catptive until I realized I’d landed on a spoofing website.

Stop it!

And yet, and yet — I still can’t get enough of the fact that, according to In Touch, a post-rehab Britney Spears refers to herself as “Baby” and explains to close friends — as if she’s authoring her life from another planet: “Baby is getting better … Baby was sad, but now she’s happy.” Yes, just when I’d thought I’d escaped Britania for good, a delicacy like this comes a long to make me rethink everything I thought I knew about Spears’ denouement.

Why should I care? What is it specifically that I’m looking for when I ogle the latest photographs of a skeletal Amy Winehouse teetering and stomping down a London street clutching some bananas? There’s a primitive instinct behind my ocular fixation — as if studying Winehouse’s down-at-heel persona might unravel a cipher, drawing forth the Sphinx’s crazy secret. Inquiring minds want to know, after all.

In one of the smartest pieces I’ve read in years on how pop and classical culture intertwine, author Stephen Marche explains why “celebrity stories, which can at first seem so of the moment and so superficial, are really the oldest and most profound stories … The editors of Star and US Weekly are not so much unoriginal as they are subconsciously drawn to ancient types and figures.”

That’s me! Loving both Bulfinch’s Mythology and Rona’s Hollywood; drawn to ancient types and figures — Paris and Helen, Bobby and Babs. Suddenly I feel absolved. And just in time.

The other night, while reading in the bathtub, I was certain that I’d discovered the very nadir of modern day journalism. There in the esteemed Esquire was a ghoulish ‘reality fiction’ feature on Heath Ledger’s “final days.” Bizarrely, it was ‘written’ by Heath Ledger. The notion of mixing verified facts with a freelance writer’s suppositions and collection of impressions seemed utterly vulgar. A place even I couldn’t venture as a gossip whore.

But Marche sees it differently:

“Heath Ledger has always been more fictional character than human being. Fiction is a natural next step in the development of the celebrity profile. We’re all way past arguing about what’s true and what’s not. I certainly don’t care; I just love the stories.”

This seems accurate. As the old Yiddish proverb goes: “God made man because he loves stories.” It’s just that some stories are more glamorous, tinged with fate and the whirling echoes of myth. According to Marche, Heath Ledger’s life mirrored the moral message of hubris (a lack of knowledge combined with a lack of humility) and nemesis — a fatal downfall. A myth made into a modern day opera.

And Marche mentions opera quite a bit in his essay:

“The tragedy of Britney Spears — and it is literally a tragedy — is of a woman driven mad by the social demands of her beauty and her family’s need for her to perform for money. Am I the only person in the world who finds this suspiciously close to Donizetti’s? In that opera, when the audience first sees Lucia, she is at a secret meeting place, furtively looking out for prying eyes — just as we always see Britney. Lucia’s opening aria, “Quando, rapido in estasi,” is a gorgeous evocation of forbidden love — the 19-century version of Spears’ hit Toxic.”

According to Marche the “brilliance of Amy Winehouse is she has recognized she is a character in an opera and that, like other operatic voices, she is called forth to sing her own destruction. With her tattoos … and her Aida eyeshadow, she is closest to Tosca, the opera singer who is the main character in an opera bearing her name. The basic tension is the same in Puccini and Back to Black: the professional artist in and against the passionate sufferer.”

And support groups and therapy? More stage settings:

“Control is the key word in both opera and the “bad girls” celebrity narrative. The contemporary nunnery is rehab, the house of penitent women, where lost girls reclaim their virtue and self-control. Winehouse won’t go there. Or she will. That’s the plot of Act I. Let’s hope it’s not a one-act opera.”

But it’s not all tragic gloom and doom. What about a sub-zero talent like Paris Hilton? He describes her as opera buffa, a term from the first half of the 18th century used to describe Italian comic operas. “Here, again,” with Hilton he explains, “the ancient types emerge: the easy sensuality, the intermittent light music, even a seduced prison warden.”

I wonder what Marche would say about Madonna’s latest manifestation, typified by the cover photograph for her tepid new album Hard Candy? With her legs spread profligately wide (surprise!) we find the fifty year-old cougar looking like a transgendered inflatable sex doll, those kind with the horribly disturbing always-open mouth-holes.

An accompanying publicity shot for the new record has Madge holding a lollipop, dressed in a polka-dotted crinoline. I suppose Marche’s close-reading would move into the cinematic, evoking the storyline of 1962’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

In other words a tragicomedic spectacle on the current cultural landscape that hearkens back to another universal condition — our fear of aging and the way we cling to the last vestiges of youth. Everything new is old again.

Now that I’ve found redemption in Marche’s theory I wonder if this will let me move away from my tabloid-loving obsession? Maybe it’s time to dig out my Kathleen Battle CDs and revisit my (as yet unread) copy of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human to drive out my fear that, as Marche puts it, “Everyone who follows Britney’s story is complicit in her destruction.” Uhm, yes, that would be me.

But as he says: Ours is a very old cruelty.

Why do people go and see tragedy? Why, as Marche puts it, do people need to see the spectacle of a human being destroyed? His explanation is the most poetic part of his essay, and a good way to close my ramble:

“The great Shakespeare scholar A.C. Bradley, a hundred years ago, gave a reliable description: “Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain.” That’s what we’re reading when we’re reading Star or US Weekly: beauty and glory devastated and wasted.”