“This is the story of how we begin to remember.”
Paul Simon from Graceland
Part One
What’s black and white and read all over? This is the sort of riddle that doesn’t work so well in print, or, without a trick of spelling. It’s the sort of riddle that is meant to be told because it teases the listener: You hear two things at once, or rather, two possible meanings. It is the first riddle I can remember hearing in grade school. I was entirely puzzled by it. Okay, yes, naturally, it’s a riddle. That’s the point, right? But then I figured it out and, of course, just as naturally, proceeded to torture anyone who would listen by repeating that riddle over and over and over and…well, you get the idea. To be honest, it remains the one riddle I can always remember to tell when forced to come up with one. (I do have a favorite elephant joke, but it tests the limits of the esoteric and is best told when alcohol has been imbibed, or, as my husband insists, not at all.)
Now I laugh differently about this grade-school riddle. As it turns out, newspapers are not read all over anymore, or at least not in the original form recognized by this riddle. I’m afraid no trick of spelling will change that. In fact, I wonder how long before home delivery will be marked off the business spreadsheet as an affordable expense. Personally, I look forward to hearing the sound of our paper hit the street, out there in the dark, and usually before I am out of bed. That sound has long been a particular comfort in those early morning hours that have found me wrestling with something in need of resolution. Like a lighthouse beacon to sailors, the sound of the paper being delivered at dawn is a promise that the day will begin again--no matter what--like all the other days before it, and that my neighbors and I, for better or worse, are all in this together. Already on our street, that familiar morning sound has faded. What I can hear from my bed in that dark before dawn is that only three of us on the street still receive the morning paper, all folded, and though not quite mutilated, most certainly in danger of extinction.
One of the most difficult parts of all of this, and there are many difficult parts to this, is that I still have a hard time believing this happened so quickly. And as speed is everything now, and always being redefined, let me clarify by saying in the time it took for me to graduate from college until now, in other words, in 27 years. What Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein perhaps could not have predicted in the wake of Watergate, was that journalism, and particularly investigative journalism, would morph into something that had to be both appealing and entertaining where the reporter’s truth would have to be imbedded along with her sponsor’s credo and where ultimately journalism’s purpose as another check on the balance of powers would be leveraged against tomorrow’s corporate numbers.
Now I laugh differently about this grade-school riddle. As it turns out, newspapers are not read all over anymore, or at least not in the original form recognized by this riddle. I’m afraid no trick of spelling will change that. In fact, I wonder how long before home delivery will be marked off the business spreadsheet as an affordable expense. Personally, I look forward to hearing the sound of our paper hit the street, out there in the dark, and usually before I am out of bed. That sound has long been a particular comfort in those early morning hours that have found me wrestling with something in need of resolution. Like a lighthouse beacon to sailors, the sound of the paper being delivered at dawn is a promise that the day will begin again--no matter what--like all the other days before it, and that my neighbors and I, for better or worse, are all in this together. Already on our street, that familiar morning sound has faded. What I can hear from my bed in that dark before dawn is that only three of us on the street still receive the morning paper, all folded, and though not quite mutilated, most certainly in danger of extinction.
One of the most difficult parts of all of this, and there are many difficult parts to this, is that I still have a hard time believing this happened so quickly. And as speed is everything now, and always being redefined, let me clarify by saying in the time it took for me to graduate from college until now, in other words, in 27 years. What Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein perhaps could not have predicted in the wake of Watergate, was that journalism, and particularly investigative journalism, would morph into something that had to be both appealing and entertaining where the reporter’s truth would have to be imbedded along with her sponsor’s credo and where ultimately journalism’s purpose as another check on the balance of powers would be leveraged against tomorrow’s corporate numbers.
Part Two
It is no surprise to me that I chose to study journalism. I have always loved words about as much as I have always enjoyed a lively conversation. Because I learn things. And that, I think, is the greatest thing there is about words. They make you learn things; they make you consider things from another perspective; they make you, just maybe, decide to use them to change your small part of the world. This is part of the speech I give to my students every semester as I set about the task of teaching college reading. But this is not where my love of words began for me. You see, despite the fact that I studied journalism in college and wrote for my college newspaper—and other assorted printed media after that—and that I immersed myself equally in the study of English and French, once upon a time I had a grandfather who spent hours sitting quietly reading from his newspaper. Just as Scout observed of her father Atticus in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird, I believe my grandfather “subjected every crisis of his life to tranquil evaluation behind” his paper, which in my grandfather's case happened to be the Aurora Beacon. More than anything else, it was this view of my grandfather, or rather, this partial view of him behind his paper, that has contributed to my pursuit of a life with words. I will also attribute this particular attitude of my grandfather’s to my perpetual fondness, when people-watching, for men who read a newspaper. There is nothing more appealing to me than the promise of a good conversation with a man. And there is no better medium for it than a discussion of the daily news. Here's a bulletin, men: Opt for a subscription not a prescription.
An Irishman and a Catholic, my grandfather was a consummate word’s man. His cultural heritage links him to writers like Yeats and Joyce and Beckett. But he was not your stream of consciousness, theater of the absurd type, rather my grandfather was drawn more to the resolution of a crossword puzzle than to the plot for a novel or a play. For my grandfather, next to the Bible, the dictionary was a sacred text. So it was on one of his trips from Illinois to California to visit his transplanted grandchildren that my grandfather presented to us as a gift for our college-bound years, a great big hardbound copy of Funk and Wagnall’s Standard College Dictionary. Naturally, it landed in our grateful hands with a very loud thud. This was back in the day, long before cell phones and ipods would have rendered this heartfelt gift completely arcane for a modern preteen. But despite my adolescent’s greed for something more exciting, I could still see this gift for what it was: My grandfather’s way of endorsing our higher education--boys' and girls'.
As my mother has told it, this was a gesture of atonement on the part of my grandfather. In 1942 when my mother finished high school, the fifth child and third girl in a family of six children, my grandfather saw no need to send his daughters to college. What was the point of such an expense, my grandfather reasoned, for girls who would soon marry and raise children of their own? This was not an uncommon consideration at that moment in time even if he was a man who read the daily paper. I like to reason that it is precisely because my grandfather continued to read the paper, and read it avidly throughout his 96 years, that he came to put this particular gift into our hands. It is the reason why I bought, as a young single woman and as my first adult piece of furniture, an antique reproduction of a Queen Anne’s chair. Such was the pedestal upon which my grandfather sat, and from which I admired him. It also became the subconscious image against which I would come to measure the intelligence of the future men I would meet: My grandfather reading in that chair. You see, I learned from my grandfather a great thing about this solitary act: The importance of being thoughtful. Atonement, perhaps; but, I prefer to call my grandfather's gesture all those years ago, a moment of clarity.
Part One--Reprise
This summer, along with the diminishing sound of the morning paper being delivered in my neighborhood, I watched the gradual reduction in the size of my daily and Sunday newspaper. I persevered and continued to read it as more writers and editors resigned or were laid off or bought out by the most recent round of cuts made by investment-minded owners. But what is this new investment? As a subscriber, I am investing more money into the paper. In the 10 years I have been receiving the paper at my current address, I have seen my cost go from $7.20 a month to $21 for the same period of time. When you consider the cost of a high-speed internet connection and cable television, the price of receiving a daily paper at your door remains a real bargain. Not to mention that I truly feel as though I am receiving something of value with the newspaper. Make no mistake. I am happy to pay because I understand too well the cost of not having one at all. Consider the following story that appeared in the August issue of In These Times. This story comes out of Bill Moyers’ article in that issue, which was adapted from the keynote address Moyers presented at the National Conference for Media Reform held in Minneapolis in June.
Moyers begins his article with a story he heard growing up in Choctaw County, Oklahoma. I love this story for its timelessness and for its ability to cut through class and culture and go to the very heart of what it means to be human, or, put more succinctly, to battle our innermost demons. Author and educator Thomas Foster would call this “that one story that has been going on forever and is all around us.” It is a story told by a tribal elder to his grandson. The elder is fighting a battle within himself. He tells his grandson about the opponents of this battle. “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf (and filled with) anger, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf (and is filled with) joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thinks about his grandfather’s story for a moment and then asks him which wolf won. “The one I feed,” says the grandfather.
Yes, indeed.
Moyers proceeds to compare democracy to this battle of the wolves, underscoring the fact that the one that wins is the one we feed. He warns that in our particular social experiment, the entity providing the feed is the media. The unfortunate truth about the media, Moyers explains, is that they have gone to bed with the wicked wolf and our democracy is reaping the effects.
Well put. And confirmation from a respected source that a sad day has indeed dawned.
After the trial and associated death of Tom Robinson in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Mr. B.B. Underwood, the newspaper editor of The Maycomb Tribune, fires off an editorial about Robinson’s senseless slaughter. This is the newspaper of the fictional town in which the events of this novel take place. According to Scout, the narrator of the story, this piece proves to be the editor’s bitterest and most poetic. “He couldn’t have cared less who canceled advertising and subscriptions.” Scout adds the following parenthetical: “(But Maycomb didn’t play that way: Mr. Underwood could holler until he sweated and write whatever he wanted to, he’d still get his advertising and subscriptions….)”
And yet, truth is not the same as fiction. Fingers crossed, right, Mr. Orwell? Although things may have played this way in newsrooms when Lee, who worked as a journalist herself for a short time, wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning novel in 1960, such a beast rarely exists today. At the close of the speech and subsequent article I reference of Sir Moyers, this fine gentleman and reporter issues what I consider not only a perfect closing statement but a call to arms. “Democracy,” Moyers writes, “only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.”
All those years ago when my grandfather gave us, his grandchildren, who happen to be in any family the most tangible part of one’s legacy, that big heavy dictionary, he wrote inside its front pages “Happy School Days.” Maybe this explains to me why writing and teaching have become intertwined objectives for my professional life. It is certainly the reason I vent, as Underwood did in his editorial, to my students who come to my remedial reading classes straight from high school honors’ classes still struggling to read and write. Every semester I attempt to get my students to see the dictionary and the newspaper as sacred texts. In keeping with the formation of a more perfect union, they do indeed play a part. By (re)arranging a few handfuls of words from that book, or reading a few handfuls of words from the daily news, we can reestablish our rights and stake our claim.
And yet, truth is not the same as fiction. Fingers crossed, right, Mr. Orwell? Although things may have played this way in newsrooms when Lee, who worked as a journalist herself for a short time, wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning novel in 1960, such a beast rarely exists today. At the close of the speech and subsequent article I reference of Sir Moyers, this fine gentleman and reporter issues what I consider not only a perfect closing statement but a call to arms. “Democracy,” Moyers writes, “only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.”
All those years ago when my grandfather gave us, his grandchildren, who happen to be in any family the most tangible part of one’s legacy, that big heavy dictionary, he wrote inside its front pages “Happy School Days.” Maybe this explains to me why writing and teaching have become intertwined objectives for my professional life. It is certainly the reason I vent, as Underwood did in his editorial, to my students who come to my remedial reading classes straight from high school honors’ classes still struggling to read and write. Every semester I attempt to get my students to see the dictionary and the newspaper as sacred texts. In keeping with the formation of a more perfect union, they do indeed play a part. By (re)arranging a few handfuls of words from that book, or reading a few handfuls of words from the daily news, we can reestablish our rights and stake our claim.
"A (human's) work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."
Albert Camus
1 comment:
Well chosen words indeed! Thank you for giving pause and provoking ponder.
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