The other one

 One day, I would love to see a story in the newspaper about the other Trump, the famous one, the one whose portrait is in the Tate Gallery.

He was a dog, loved by William Hogarth, who painted him repeatedly.

I would like to see a story about the pug because I think it might be significant, and a lot of stories that appear about the other Trump have a significance that is ... well, not obvious to me. I don’t think every bark the famous Trump emitted was significant, nor do I think that everything the other Trump emits is significant.

I wish newspaper editors would do a better job of protecting their readers. Some of the emissions that are like greenhouse gasses. If we could control them, we would change the environment for the better.

Christian Wiman, who edited Poetry magazine for a decade, said he learned to choose poems, not poets. Famous poets submit bad poems for publication. An editor who publishes them isn’t doing readers a favor. It’s a celebration of celebrity over significance.

One day, I’m going to see a headline about the famous Trump and I’m going to enjoy it. I love a good dog story.

Copypaper

 One of the first things I learned about newspapers was that there was such a thing as copypaper. It was the cheapest paper imaginable: newsprint cut to letter size. You threaded the stuff into a manual typewriter and blazed away.

If you saw that you were writing something that couldn’t possibly be edited, you ripped it out and tossed it. You started again. It was only copypaper.

I was 14 and had been hired to take scores from high school football games over the phone. I was to write three-paragraph stories — three grafs — by formula. I might write 25 a night. The paper tried to include items on all the games in the region. I was to understand that the value of the work was in its accuracy and completeness— the more games I could take before deadline the better. People wanted to know that the lowly Tigers in a small town 100 miles to the south had beaten a top-rated team. That’s why people were reading. They were not interested in my immortal prose.

So I learned to get something down on paper quickly. My copy went to the copydesk. The work of the editors made it more valuable, and the work of the compositors and printers made it more valuable still. Proof came back to the newsroom on a higher grade of paper.

Somewhere in there is a lesson about first drafts. The first job is to get it down and then let the editing process, whatever it is, work. You can’t edit a plank page.

I’ve heard of people who work on fine paper in leatherbound notebooks, and if that works for them that’s a fine way to work. I still use cheap stuff — the closest thing to copypaper I can find.

Words that change hearts

 A line in the obituary of Lewis Lapham, a remarkable magazine editor, stayed with me for days. I finally looked it up and copied it into my notebook. This is Lapham:

The hope of social or political change stems from language that induces a change of heart. That’s the power of words, and that’s a different power than the power of the internet.

 

I thought that Lapham, best known as editor of Harper’s, was talking about the way mass media work. The version I learned was a metaphor: a pebble tossed into a pond makes concentric rings. As a young reporter, working at a newspaper in a small town, I wrote an article that influenced people who didn’t read the paper — the mayor, for example.

The words didn’t get his attention as much as the facts, which showed astonishing adjustments on the tax rolls for some of his friends and insiders. People who supported him but were appalled by the facts told him about the articles in the paper — those concentric rings at work.

But the Lapham quotation stayed in mind because it fits a different dynamic. During the Depression and again in World War II, people were paralyzed by fear. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not a great administrator, but he was a good communicator. He didn’t have to pretend to like people. He really did, and he talked to them confidently, intimately, honestly.

He told them that they could overcome the greatest challenges that the country had faced if they would make some sacrifices and work together.

It was not the facts, but his tone, one that communicated reasonable hope instead of fear. Those were the concentric rings that rippled across the pond.

If you ask me what happened to the presidential campaign since Kamala Harris jumped in, I’d say it’s thoseconcentric rings. 

• Source: John Otis, “Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper’s magazine, dies at 89”; The Washington Post, July 24, 2024. It’s here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/24/lewis-lapham-harpers-dead/

Writing lesson: Where to start

 Henry David Thoreau said: 

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

 

You don’t start to write by sitting down in front of blank sheet of paper or an empty computer screen. You start by thinking about something.

If you sit down at the computer without having done any thinking, you might be in trouble. Thinking can include reading, reporting, observation and research. If I haven’t done any of that, I stay away from the blank page, the empty screen.

Amor Towles says he begins a “design book” about four years before he begins a novel. He used a notebook to collect information on the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s for A Gentleman in Moscow. Towles consulted old guidebooks and encyclopedias. He was able to picture the details — how his characters would move around in the setting — before he started typing.

In my mind, Towles was writing during the four years of keeping that design book. I’d say he was writing long before he started on the first draft. To me, that’s not a separate process. It’s an essential part of writing.

• Sources: The Quotable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 195.

John Williams, “Book Tour: At Home with Amor Towles”; The Washington Post, May 18, 2024. It’s here: https://wapo.st/3LAbcRk

Consulting 'the insides'

 Patricia Hampl has something called “insides,” places inside certain books that she often goes. She goes to see Becky Sharp throw Dr. Johnson’s dictionary out the window, rather than re-read the whole of Vanity Fair.

Most of her examples came from poetry: Blake’s grain of sand and Pound’s petals on a wet, black bough were among her favorites.

Poetry might have an advantage in this game. Lines of poetry are meant to be memorable.

My own insides? I was surprised how many short passages came from essays, letters, journals and collections of aphorisms. Montaigne, Thoreau and Woolf were among the essayists and journal writers. Among the letter writers: Roy Bedichek.

• Source: Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day; New York: Viking, 2018, p. 160.

Marilynne Robinson: “Humanism”

 Marilynne Robinson’s voice is one I expect to argue against. And so I’m surprised by points of agreement.

Here are a couple from her essay “Humanism.”

I like the Greek word psyche, despite problems. Here’s Robinson:

 

I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.

 

I also think that one of the appalling features of our common life is its corporate culture. If I were young again, I’d wonder what I, friends, taxpayers and idealistic teachers were doing to prepare the next generation for a life that could be described as “full.” Here’s Robinson:

 

In any case, the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do see to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. 

• Source: Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things; New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp. 9 and 4.

A problem with classic books

 I like looking at lists of classic books, which people are free to take or leave, although the lists tend to turn into syllabi on college campuses and become serious instead of fun.

The lists make me wonder. Why are some enduring books, let’s say Joyce’s Ulysses, loved by some readers and hated by others?

Here is the poet Christian Wiman:

 

The greatness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet.

 

If that torrent of consciousness is something we all experience, why do some of us hate the book?

I had a friend who was a teacher of transcendental meditation. He tried to shut down that stream of impressions. He sought to quiet his mind, to let it be empty. To him, thoughts were intrusive, the cause of anxiety. He saw meditation as a kind of therapy.

My friend hated Ulysses, a book I like. 

I like the stream of impressions. I like to fish items out from the stream. I share some of them in this collection of notes.

I think the answer to the question about lists of classic books is that humanity is an elusive form. Individual humans are just too diverse to fit into it. 

• Source: Christian Wiman, “Hive of Nerves”; The American Scholar, June 1, 2010. It’s here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/