Category: newspaper habits

Throughlines and deadlines

[An issue of my newsletter, Leaflet]

Still from "A Quiet Place Part II"

I have lost the throughline. Drastic measures are called for. I therefore hereby undertake to send you a newsletter every Monday morning at 10:30am. This undertaking is inspired in part by a Michael Pollan-esque recommendation in my friend Chris Cox’s new book, The Deadline Effect: “Set a deadline. The earlier the better.” Apparently having no structure in one’s life is bad, and leads to a gelatinous, inchoate diffuseness, and like everyone else, but more so, I have had no structure in mine for the last year and a half. Everything, as I and everyone else discovered, can be postponed: dentist’s appointments, haircuts, third novels, driver’s license renewals, birthday parties, going to the gym, agonizing about whether this will be the year when I finally try a teaching job. At the outset of the pandemic, I told myself, explicitly, that my only objective during the pandemic was to survive, and as long as I met that goal, I wasn’t going to mind not meeting any others.

I didn’t, and I didn’t mind. It was so nice! Every morning I went on a leisurely walk in the park and photographed birds, having bought a telephoto lens just as the coronavirus was encircling, boa constrictor–like, the globe, and then when I came home, while my husband put a pot of oatmeal on the stove, and while it cooked, I did a set of exercises that for about six months perpetuated, if not worsened, my lower back pain, while listening to classical music, which I hadn’t really listened to since childhood, and was slowly becoming reindoctrinated into, and then, for the the next six months, another set of exercises, which, as a pleasant surprise, very gradually abated my lower back pain, still listening to timeless music mostly by performers who were long dead, first a lot of Bach, and then a lot of Beethoven. Briefly I jumped ahead in the alphabet to Rachmaninoff, but found this confusing, if not alarming, and returned to Beethoven. I didn’t want adventure. I wanted steadiness. Sameness. I listened to Emil Gilels’s recordings of Beethoven’s sonatas, and then to Wilhelm Kempff’s recordings of Beethoven’s sonatas, and then to Igor Levit’s recordings of Beethoven’s sonatas. After the oatmeal, and after a considered, unhurried curation of my bird photos, which I then posted online, where the same twenty or so people liked them, and they never went viral, I sat at my desk and either crossed out a few pages of fiction or composed a few, always careful never to let the net number of pages produced by me rise above four or five. It never did.

New York Times At Home section hat

All is changed now, except my productivity. While the pandemic may not quite be over, the psychosocial moratorium allowed by it now is, at least here in America. At the end of May, the New York Times stopped running its At Home section, which had taught adults how to fold their morning newspaper into a hat, or a piñata, and had spoken in the first person plural (“We’re trying so hard to be good,” “We’re searching for the best path”), as blandly and as reassuringly as Mister Rogers. Which means that we aren’t trying to be good any more, and that we have gone back to just taking the first path we see that might get us there. Probably not a moment too soon. By the time Charles Dickens died at age fifty-eight, he had written so many novels that the internet isn’t sure how many, but at least fifteen by my count.

Googling how many novels Charles Dickens wrote

I will be fifty-four this week, and have written only two.

A week or so ago, Peter and I went to see a movie in a movie theater. It was A Quiet Place Part II. It was pretty good? Terrible monsters from outer space are trying to eat a nice American family, which used to be everything I wanted in a movie. The hook is that the monsters zero in on you whenever you make the slightest bit of noise. We ate mediocre veggie burgers with fries while watching, so frightened that we couldn’t really taste what we were eating. I jumped in my seat so violently that I bruised a hand. After it was over, however, we found ourselves wondering: Why did we use to do this? Sit in a dark room silently with strangers and be terrified out of our wits by invented demons? Dystopian fiction can seem a little supererogatory in a world that is just coming out of a plague, if not on the brink of subsiding back into it because half the population has been brainwashed into fearing vaccines, a world where Oregon faces temperatures of 115° F and California the worst drought and possibly the worst fire season ever. The movie’s lesson, Peter pointed out, was that we must all fight ever harder and ever more brutally, that even children must learn to overcome their natural squeamishness and passivity and stab monsters in the head until they die die die, the unspoken lemma of the argument being that we live under capitalism and it’s a dog-eat-dog world and this is what it takes to survive. All of which we learned during the pandemic wasn’t so. During the pandemic, we all realized that it’s fine if we’re just okay at monster-slaying. Just do the best you can, because everything is harder than it used to be. If the monsters eat you, well, okay! On the other hand, during the pandemic, in the absence of external stimulation, I never managed to get off of Twitter, which is very much like living in a world where monsters converge on you ravenously as soon as you make a peep.

So what lesson is to be learned from mortality—Kill more sooner, or We can make our newspaper into a hat?

Privacy is history, 1888

In Silicon Valley Paris, the software coder Mark Zuckerberg the gossip reporter George Flack pitches his idea for a new kind of social-networking site society newspaper, where the targets will volunteer information about themselves instead of having it extracted from them by reporters, to a venture capitalist nubile young heiress:

There are ten thousand things to do that haven't been done, and I am going to do them. The society news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves (oh, they can be fixed—you'll see!) from day to day and from hour to hour and served up at every breakfast-table in the United States—that's what the American people want and that's what the American people are going to have. I wouldn't say it to every one, but I don't mind telling you, that I consider I have about as fine a sense as any one of what's going to be required in future over there. I'm going for the secrets, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want is just what isn't told, and I'm going to tell it. Oh, they're bound to have the plums! That's about played out, any way, the idea of sticking up a sign of "private" and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. You can't do it—you can't keep out the light of the Press. Now what I am going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine all over the place. We'll see who's private then! I'll make them crowd in themselves with the information, and as I tell you, Miss Francie, it's a job in which you can give me a lovely push.

Henry James, The Reverberator, 1888.

Reading for a living

Over at the Boston Globe‘s Brainiac blog, Christopher Shea relays the news that NPR has a new slideshow up about jobs that no longer exist, including copy boy, bowling pin setter, and lector, a person paid to read aloud to people rolling cigars by hand.

I knew I’d heard about this job before, though it took me a minute to remember that it was in James Weldon Johnson’s lovely 1912 novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man:

After I had been in the factory a little over a year, I was repaid for all the effort I had put forth to learn Spanish by being selected as “reader.” The “reader” is quite an institution in all cigar factories which employ Spanish-speaking workmen. He sits in the center of the large room in which the cigar makers work and reads to them for a certain number of hours each day all the important news from the papers and whatever else he may consider would be interesting. He often selects an exciting novel, and reads it in daily installments. He must, of course, have a good voice, but he must also have a reputation among the men for intelligence, for being well posted and having in his head a stock of varied information. He is generally the final authority on all arguments which arise; and, in a cigar factory, these arguments are many and frequent, ranging from discussions on the respective and relative merits of rival baseball clubs to the duration of the sun’s light and energy—cigar making is a trade in which talk does not interfere with work. My position as “reader” not only released me from the rather monotonous work of rolling cigars, and gave me something more in accord with my tastes, but also added considerably to my income. I was now earning about twenty-five dollars a week . . .

The narrator is even able to afford to hire a piano.

Update (March 24): Jenny D. just relayed to me the news that on Thursday, March 25, at 7pm, here in New York, the Americas Society is hosting a reading by Araceli Tinajero from her new book El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. (Alas, I won’t be able to make it, because I’m chained to my laptop impersonating El Escritor until further notice.)

Further update (later on March 24): The topic reminds my friend Gabe of Felipe Jesus Consalvos, a cigar roller in the early twentieth century who incorporated cigar boxes into his outsider-art collages.

And still more: Irin Carmon tells me via Twitter that there’s also a 2007 short documentary film about cigar lectors, With a Stroke of the Chaveta.

Flip you for it

If the recession lasts another year, the New York Times will probably survive. If it lasts two more years, analysts aren't sure. That's one way of reading the latest reporting about the paper's future from the New York Times itself. By borrowing $250 million in January from a Mexican billionaire at what it calls "punishing terms," the paper, according to analysts, "has positioned itself well to ride out another year of recession, maybe two." The trouble is that the analysts also say that the Times accepted the punishing terms because they expect they will only be able to get even worse loan offers as the recession progresses. "Maybe two" years isn't a comfortingly distant horizon.

Another official revelation in the article: Somewhat morbidly, the longterm health of the New York Times is now understood by those who guide it to be conditional on the death of other newspapers across America. "There is a feeling among analysts that there is merit to the last-man-standing strategy," the Times reports. In 2010 or 2011, one analyst suggests, "there could be dramatically fewer newspapers," and absent those competitors, the Times should be able to prosper. To me this sounds a little bit like saying that in the event of a plague, there will be proportionally speaking a lot of canned food left over for survivors.