Tom Swift - Writer's Notebook

I was whining about newspapers the other day and, obviously, I’m not the only one. For a long time I have been of the mind that at some point the people who run newspapers would realize that even in an ever-increasingly online world they still offer a unique and necessary product — a depth of news and information delivered in the best format for the consumption of both — and that they would start emphasizing their strengths and stop running away from them. Eric Alterman paints a dire picture and makes a point that leads me to think I am wrong: “The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper — the primary information-gathering and knowledge-disseminating instrument of American democracy — is going to have to come from somewhere else.”

Some authors — I know one intimately — don’t think especially well on their feet. Salman Rushie is not among them. I really enjoyed the Q&A at the end of this reading (during the final 17 minutes or so), as readers asked excellent questions and Rushdie provided witty and uncommonly insightful responses.

Last night I read a terrific analysis of a fine writer’s work. One especially well articulated point: “Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse.”

Bookish notes from a couple of days in New Orleans …

• We were in town for all of an hour when we crossed paths with the release of Jackie Collins’ latest bundle of paper gold. In fact, the Savage Beast crashed the party. I would say more but I’m afraid that would leave too much of a trail for the authorities. How the other half lives: Ms. Collins arrived in a luxury bus designed as something of a rolling book cover and she signed copies under a VIP-only tent at what might be the largest casino east of Vegas.

• We spent several hours poking our heads inside book shops. There are worse ways to see a city. Most of them had more books than space (better than the opposite problem, I suppose), including a tiny haunt at what used to be Faulkner’s mailing address. Beckham’s was the one I would return to first.

• During breaks from the heavy heat I read Books: A Memoir. If you love books you might like it.

Somehow I understated the matter. Apparently, those of us with two legs aren’t the only ones on drugs. Though it isn’t the most artfully crafted article I’ve read, the piece provides useful observations about animal behavior that explain a few things about the Beast.

The ritual was almost nightly. After my stories were filed I would go to the all-night Jack in the Box and by the time I had finished dirty bombing my gut with Sourdough Jacks and extra fries the late-night editors would have put the newspaper to bed. I’d return to the then empty newsroom, flip on a computer, slip on my headphones (so as to not hear the overnight cleaning crew doing what cleaning crews do) and read all of my favorite columnists from all over the country. Ten years later I still read online. Cheap as I am, I love that I can browse papers and mags for free. And, of course, today there’s so much more content to choose from.

But, man, I’m getting tired of staring at a screen.

I spend no small number of hours pecking at the laptop and I’m as likely to abandon online as I am to start chiseling my writing into granite tablets. If I am reading a blog post or a short news item the machine does it best. But that’s the problem. If I’m reading anything longer than that my short attention span becomes even more abbreviated. I look for reasons to stop reading.

When I come across longer articles I’ll print them out, find them at the library or skip them altogether. But I hate wasting ink, I can’t get to the library every day, and often the most salient writing cannot be confined to a few hundred words.

So as the world continues to go plastic lately I have started asking for paper. I find myself making a weekly 20-minute drive to pick up a good newspaper (home delivery of said paper not an option at the moment). For the first time in years, a few weeks ago I subscribed to a magazine. And I’m holding onto one of those postcards that fall out of every fourth page because I just might take another.

After years reading periodicals online, I see what I’ve been missing — and I’m sure this point will be obvious — exposure to a breadth and depth of information I don’t get any other way. It’s not that I don’t hear about news events online. Quite the contrary. But online I am either not provided, or I do not seek, more than a blurb’s worth. Perhaps more importantly, when I open a newspaper or a magazine I discover and read articles that would have sailed by me in cyberspace.

Going offline has it’s own quandary because there are so few good newspapers anymore. With rare exception, small ones don’t care enough about reporting to retain quality employees and the big ones keep trying to be what they can never be — print versions of blogs. Google “newspaper” and “layoff” and you’ll find some chilling statistics. Thousands of good reporters are losing their jobs daily as newspapers keep shrinking their news holes. The paradox: there’s never been a longer menu of news and yet I feel the least satisfied with my choices.

I recently asked a friend (and if you have a good answer to this question I’d love to hear it) what he reads that he trusts to provide comprehensive quality journalism. There’s far more to life than news — heck, there’s far more to reading than news — but I’d like to know what’s going on in the world. And if I am forced to feed on mass amounts of the informational equivalent of Sourdough Jacks what will I miss and how will it (how does it) alter the world when most other people miss it, too?

Now I better cease this rant, lest it become too long for even me to read.

An entirely random book recommendation: If you enjoy cultural criticism, consider taking American Studies. I found a copy without knowing what I was looking for while nosing around at my favorite pre-owned bookstore last week. The collection is five years old and the essays are older than that. I didn’t dig — or follow — every line of every one. But I marked a handful as candidates for re-reading and noted more than a couple passages. From a piece on Richard Wright: “The evil of modern society isn’t that it creates racism, but that it creates conditions in which people who don’t suffer from injustice seem incapable of caring very much about people who do.” Does me good to spend time with such an authentic and well-reasoned writer. Even if his intellectual range is more than a little humbling.

“I know the store is open 24 hours a day,” I said while dropping off a prescription, “but how long is the pharmacy open?” Why, 24 hours a day. Of course! The more I think about it the more that makes sense. We’re all on drugs, it’s just that some drugs are legal and some aren’t. Which says little about which ones are safer. That was among the messages delivered in the most recent edition of Writer’s Voice — an often worthwhile program that features books of social significance — which I caught a good bit of last night while trying to doze off. Even more distressing are the unscrupulous reasons why many medications are prescribed. If you want to learn more you can listen to the show. Or, and this I have not done, read the book. Now, excuse me, I have medication to pick up.

I’ve mentioned before that if you’re into religious worship the temporary hometown has you covered. That is, of course, as long as you’re a God fearin’ Christian. Many of the countless houses of devotion are striking because of their arena-like size. Others I take note of for their ability to save me even as I pass by at 35 miles an hour.

Pictured is one of my favorite parking-lot sermons. Among other powerful aspects, it makes me wonder whether there is a Declaration of Independence from Sin that I could sign and, if so, what such a document might say. Smart-ass that I am, I didn’t think too long on it. I just came up with a few lines on my own:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all church-going men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that they should not fritter away to Satan with drunkenness, cursing or masturbation, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (so long as at least one foot remains on the floor).

The Savage Beast can transform the very nature of man. Or at least the very nature of one man. Used to be that any repeated sound that could evoke thoughts of “bird” and “torture,” a sound very much like the one produced by his newest toy, would make me come unhinged. But no longer! Now I am a portrait of serenity — just happy he’s happy chewing something other than a kneecap. I recorded this video in case you have too much hair and need incentive to pull some of it out. Also, because after having a digital camera for 18 months, I just learned how to use the video function.

I took five flights — was supposed to be six, but one was cancelled — in the eight days leading to the holiday weekend and somewhere in one of a handful of cities I picked up an ornery bug. During the second-to-last flight’s descent my sinuses felt as though they were being squeezed with a pliers. Four days later, my left ear still hasn’t popped. This is the excuse I offer as to why I haven’t spent much time with the laptop of late. I’d like to say I’ve been blasting off fireworks and gobbling up barbecue but I’ve been blowing into tissues and sucking down Echinacea. I hope your holiday was degrees better than that.

The upside of travel and illness is reading time. A few items that found their way into the notebook:

• From a story I would either have skipped or laughed at before the Savage Beast entered the picture: “There are whole segments of the population that prefer being in the company of dogs than people, and I’m not sure that’s such a negative thing.”

• From a collection of Louis Menand essays I’m just getting into: “The silliest charge brought against the sixties is the charge of moral relativism. Ordinary life must be built on the solid foundations of moral values, the critics who make this charge argue, and the sixties persuaded people that the foundations weren’t solid, and that any morality would do that got you through the night. The accusation isn’t just wrong about the sixties; it’s an injustice to the dignity of ordinary life, which is an irredeemably pragmatic and ungrounded affair. You couldn’t make it through even the day if you held every transaction up to scrutiny by the lights of some received moral code.”

• The current issue of Newsweek reports that 77 percent of Americans can’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Apparently, the chief justice has a similar regard for the 77 percent.

• In that same issue I learned (I am sure I was already supposed to know this) that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day of the same year. Interesting. Two great minds. Two brilliant writers. Two who changed the world. There must be something to that. Which reminds me: I was born on the same day of the same year as a fellow author.

The Cleveland Public Library had a terrific photograph on display for the event on Friday — a shot of Charles Bender sitting on a chair being overwhelmed by fishing poles, golf clubs, bats, rifles, and so on. The tools of Bender’s ever-active life included more than one kind of ball. He was an avid bowler and not long after bowling’s most prominent offspring, Skee-Ball, was born in 1909 he gave that a whirl as well. Of course, he was good at that, too. According to a piece in the New York Times in 1915 Bender “rolled 3,500 in ten frames, and in one frame made the perfect score of 450.” Thanks to a fellow writer — I’ll leave his name out of it because he’s doing research he may not want the world to know about it just yet — who sent the article citation.

I made my television debut recently. Though that word makes it sound far more likely than it is that I’ll ever be on the tube again. I am sincerely grateful a producer was interested in my work and Charles Bender’s story. But I simply cannot watch the show. I provide the link because I figure if I have both a blog and a video clip devoted to the same subject that, well, the twain should meet. My segment begins a couple of minutes into the show. I watched the first 14 seconds before hitting pause and going back to my regularly scheduled life. But I listened long enough to hear a host declare that Bender was the first Native American baseball player in Major League Baseball. In the interest of historical accuracy, that isn’t close to true. The less critical person in my marriage said the rest was well done. Probably, though, I talked too much with my hands.

My thanks to Mark Moore, senior subject librarian, and the rest of the staff at the amazing Cleveland Public Library for hosting yesterday’s panel discussion. The Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium is a terrific venue and a great crowd turned out. I am fortunate to have been included in such a first-rate event. As I mentioned in my remarks, I was especially pleased that I had the chance to thank SABR in public while standing in front of a microphone. If you spend any amount of time with “Chief Bender’s Burden” and take anything away from the experience it is foremost because of the direct and indirect help I received from SABR members. That SABR invited me to participate in the panel is yet another reason why I am indebted.

Thanks to journalist Vince Grzegorek for his interest in the book and the event. Also, the panel got a plug in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Cool.

One of the three is a distinguished professor emeritus of history at an accredited university who has written several acclaimed books. Another is a prominent baseball writer who is both a prolific author and a columnist at ESPN. The third is, well, me.

From noon to 1 p.m., Friday (June 27), Dr. Charles Alexander, Rob Neyer and yours truly will make up the Baseball Authors’ Roundtable at the Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium at the renowned Cleveland Public Library. This free public event, held in conjunction with the Society for American Baseball Research’s international convention, is co-sponsored by SABR.

As I understand it, each author will speak for several minutes before we field questions from a moderator and/or members of the audience. After the roundtable, we’ll return to our respective corners to sign copies of our books, which will be available for purchase.

What’s a rookie doing on a panel with a seasoned veteran and a superstar? When an invite like this one arrives, you don’t ask questions. You just pack a bag, book a flight, and keep your mouth shut.

When I was introduced to Harriet Tubman in grade school the Underground Railroad almost sounded like a good time. All that sneaking around and hush-hush meetings with “friends” in the middle of night seemed akin to an adult version of kick-the-can — at least to my woefully insensitive ears. That reference point stuck in part because nothing ever replaced it. Tubman’s life is sadly underwritten; she plays a prominent role in dozens of children’s books like the one I read but only a bit part in those without drawings.

It’s hard to believe it took until 2004 for a serious biographer to tackle Tubman’s story. But, after I finished Catherine Clinton’s fine effort this weekend, I have an inkling why: there just isn’t a lot of material to work with. The lives of African-American women were not exactly well documented in the nineteenth century and the nature of Tubman’s work was, by definition, secret. This reality presented Clinton, who has multiple Ivy League degrees, with an unenviable task — and left gaps this ungrateful reader wanted filled in. The author apparently shared this frustration, as at times Clinton reaches for something that isn’t there. At other points, she offers extraneous material.

But, given the handicaps, I forgive the instances when the writing didn’t blow me away. More important is what someone with Clinton’s research chops did provide: a substantive portrait of Harriet Tubman’s fearless, important and noble life. In addition to its many merits, the book provided a much-needed revised reference point for my now slightly more educated mind.