Nancy Rommelmann

Fantastic, Sobering, Stultifying [updated, with photo!]

My four unpublished books, transferred to memory stick from four-year-old laptop, not to loaded onto new laptop bought today. Only book on there will be one that I am currently working on.

And maybe the novel. The novel, she can come.

At Matt's request, below, the new computer on the left, old one on the right. The new one is a Gateway NV78, running Windows 7, which is very clean and easy thus far. It's got 4 GB of memory and a 500 GB hard drive. And the screen is huge, 17.3 inches; an interesting perspective, as though you're falling in the screen rather than looking at it. The computer itself is over 7 pounds; not really as a concern, as I have a two-pound Asus netbook for when I travel. Which I will do tomorrow, driving across the state to sit with and interview the mother of a man who has just very narrowly escaped the death penalty.

On Being Middlebrow

As someone who is coming late to reading many of the classics, I enjoyed W.A. Pannapacker's essay, "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," in which he quotes Virginia Woolf:

"If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me 'middlebrow,'" wrote Virginia Woolf in an unsent letter to the editor of The New Statesman, "I will take my pen and stab him, dead."

Woolf and her ilk, Pannapacker goes on to say, professed great love for the lowbrow, so long as they did not get anywhere near her sparkling little pocket of the ether. Others rolled their eyes.

As the Harper's Magazine editor Russell Lynes argued in his 1949 essay "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," the ideal world for Woolf is a caste system in which billions of bovine proles produce the raw materials for a coterie of sensitive, highbrow ectomorphs who spring fully formed from the head of Sir Leslie Stephen. At the very least, lowbrows with upward aspirations should have the courtesy to keep themselves out of sight until they complete their passage through the awkward age of the middlebrow.

I think I probably am middlebrow, not in my mannerisms, but in the fact that, yes, I strive--and fail--and strive again for knowledge. There is, after all, no such thing as an intellectual caste system, no matter how comfortable others might be in trying to erect one.

The most comprehensive recent analysis of the cultural turn is Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008). In one chapter, Jacoby remembers the 1950s as a brief moment of intellectual aspiration among many Americans: "I look back on the middlebrow with affection, gratitude, and regret rather than condescension," she writes, "not because the Book-of-the-Month Club brought works of genius into my life, but because the monthly pronouncements of its reviewers encouraged me to seek a wider world."

The Great Books—along with all those Time-Life series—were often "purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the world that had been absent from their own upbringing," Jacoby writes. They represented an old American belief—now endangered—that "anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself."

Janet Malcolm on Journalists

The opening and close of The Journalist and the Murderer (which I realize is twenty years old, but I just read it yesterday):

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse... on reading the article or book in question, he [the subject] has to face the fact that the journalist--who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully,  remarkably attuned to his vision of things--never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own."

“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists… human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interviews—are over. And still they yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

To which I must say, yes; what she says is true. The only defense I can muster is also true: I nearly always walk into a story with no or very little set opinion about the subject, and so can say, when I am talking with him, interviewing him, hoping he will trust me with his story, I am in empathy with him; I am trying to see it his way, because thus far, it's the only view I am getting. I do not lie and say, to the murderer, "Oh, yes; I'd have done the same thing," but I can often in truth say, I see why you did it and why it made sense to you. It is later, I think, once you have finished the interviews, once you start to look around at the parts he has not told you, when you start to breathe life into the piece, that the betrayal, and I think that is the right word, can and often does begin.

From what I've read, when Malcolm published this (first in the New Yorker, then as a book), other journalists went ape-shit, saying they would never act in the way she claims. More honest writers, however, knew just what she meant, amongst them Susan Orlean, who "endorsed Malcolm's thesis as a necessary evil." Yes.

Advice for Would-Be Journalists

I am sorry it has come to this, but it has: I simply cannot answer any more emails from people, nearly always non-journalists whom I don't know, who ask by email how to break into journalism. I have spent hours and days and weeks answering these questions; I have met people for coffee, people who with one exception have not, as far as I can tell, done anything to advance their careers. I've said it a dozen times: I don't want to be anyone's mentor, and I am happy to share my editorial contacts provided you are serious. But replying to the random, tossed-off, "So, I'm thinking about being a journalist, what do I do?" No more. Sorry.

Why do people think it's any different from making it in any other profession, meaning, do a good job, a better than expected job, and do it again and again and again?

So here's my advice, once and for all: Be courteous, meet your deadlines; make your editors' lives easier. You sell the pitch, not the completed story. Remember, it's their publication, not yours. Don't call on deadline day, and frankly, don't call at all. Email. Don't expect an instant answer, and yes, it's OK to send one reminder email. Read a lot, write a lot; write better. Start a blog to keep yourself well-oiled and for connectivity (and for god's sake, don't be like the ninny who, when I suggested as much, replied, "But what about copyright?!") Get your facts and your spelling right; be generous in your writing. Never, ever, ever betray your subjects. Don't massage the material to suit your idea of the narrative -- that's called fiction. Strive to be great.

I just now tweeted a question to fellow journalists, asking what they do/what advice I should dole out. Here's what I've gotten back. I will refresh as well as paste in what I get in the comments:

• Tell them to send baked goods to City Arts Magazine, ATTN: [name redacted]
• Suggest a lovely and remunerative career in the fast-growing world of hotel management or auto repair
• Same advice I give people who want to know how to be a film critic: "DON'T." (From film critic Luke Y. Thompson)
• Automate your email to tell them that they'll most likely never make it-those smart enough will figure it out!
• In all seriousness, though. I suggest starting a blog & building a following, while exercising professional journalist habits.will figure it out!
• Tell them to run away from doing it as fast as possible?
• Learn how to live as cheaply as possible, read good journalism obsessively, blog, and develop a skill few or no other people have. (Fom Matt Welch, EIC of Reason magazine.)
• How to get established as a jouno? Work your ass off, wait ten years, rinse, repeat. Never give up. Have a passion. Pursue it. (From author David Rensin.)

Summer Books Bonanza and that Kindle Piece

Like books? You are going to love love love love love this section, with authors aplenty telling you what books they love, which ones they're sorry they finished, which ones they've never finished. Plus this year's great beach reads; literary pull quotes, books on the horizon and those authors you really, really should be reading. Plus my take on Kindle, all courtesy of City Arts Magazine (which puts out three editions, Seattle, Tacoma and Eastside, so pick on up, will ya?)

The New Writing Guru

Readers of this blog -- and again, my apologies for being so absent of late -- know that a few weeks ago, I followed Dan Baum's Twitterfeed regarding his unrenewed contract with The New Yorker. I later emailed with Baum, and also, wrote an editorial for LA Observed.

Baum's original tweets contained a few links to pitches he'd sent to various publications, as well as noting whether the pitch had sold or not. I read one or two of them; they were well-written, writing we learned was helped to get that way by Baum's writer/editor wife, who edits not only his articles (and book) before they go to his editors, but the pitches. I am not going to get into the discussions I've seen online, and also had with several colleagues, about Baum's wife working for no byline; that's their business, and those interested in her services can read about them on Baum's/(their) website.

At the time I read the pitches, I felt they might be useful to beginning journalists. I've had at least a dozen beginners ask me how to write a pitch; I am happy to tell them and to share an example. It seemed a generous act on Baum's part to include links to the pitches.

Since the whole brouhaha has died down, I've checked Baum's blog once a week. A few days ago, I came across a post in which he explained there'd been a slight uproar over his saying, in a recent Q & A, that when he's researching a piece for a magazine but before he's actually sold them the piece, he represents that he is already writing the piece for such-and-such magazine. For those who do not understand the process of selling an article: in the main, you write up your idea (i.e., the pitch) and submit it to an editor at a publication. Once they give you the green light -- meaning they are going to buy it --you're now working on the piece for this magazine. But not before. During the research phase of a pitch, it's just yours. You're out there with no big name giving you credibility, but nevertheless must harvest enough information to make your story appeal to that big name.

Baum doesn't see it this way. From the Q & A:

When you are calling people and you don’t have an assignment yet, how do you convince them to talk to you?

I say, “I’m working on a story for The New York Times Magazine.” Or “I’m working on a story for Wired magazine.”

So you don’t let them know you don’t have the assignment in hand?

No, I say I’m working on a story for Wired magazine and I am. My relationship with Wired magazine at that point is none of their business.

He later clarified in a blog post:

For example, if I’m working up a proposal for Wired, and I call a source to ask some questions, I don’t say, “I’m working up a proposal for Wired,” or “I may be doing this story for Wired.” I say, “I’m working on a story for Wired.” And if I have to leave a message, I say, “This is Dan Baum. I’m working on a story for Wired; please call me.”

Is that dishonest? I don’t think so.

The truth is, in such a situation I am working for Wired. Wired doesn’t know it yet, but I am out there gathering information that I will send to Wired’s editors in the form of a proposal.  So not only am I working for Wired, I’m working for free.

It is true that I am engaging in a trade with Wired without its consent. I am doing a bunch of legwork for its editors for no pay, in return for the use of Wired’s name and reputation.

It’s fair, I believe, because I’m working in good faith. I am genuinely trying to develop a story that Wired will want. To use Wired’s name in any other context would be dishonest.

Really? I've been a journalist for fourteen years; I know a lot of writers, and I don't know any who would do this in good faith. We've all had to make cold calls -- recently, I had to make some for an article I hoped to sell and did sell to Wired. If the people you cold-call ask who you're writing for, you say, you're working on a pitch; in the past you've written for so-and-so, and they can see some of your work on your website.

 As a journalist, I do think it's dishonest to say you're writing for a publication from whom you've yet to get a contract. Baum is a road-tested journalist with good credentials, but who's to stop Joe Blow from calling and saying, "I'm writing for the New York Times"? The person called now feels a certain security (or, as the case may be, hostility) to speak, to open up; to rely that his story is going to appear in the New York Times. 

To me, prematurely (one might say, hopefully) using a publication's name is a line that cannot be crossed. But what galls me, and I guess why I am blogging this, is that Baum is doling out this advice as acceptable protocol to junior writers. Think I'm exaggerating about the possible impact? Read the comments, which include "Massively inspirational," "comforting" and "He's so tenacious!" Which makes me think that Baum may be creating for himself an empire along the lines of what Robert McKee did for wannabe screenwriters. I cannot count the number of people I knew in Hollywood who shelled out for McKee's classes, and to whom he became a Svengali. 

I could go on; about how much I hate the word "mentor" (want to learn how to write? Read. Write. Write badly. Write better); how having an editor before your editor seems decadent; how I finally last night read a New Yorker piece of Baum's I printed out weeks ago, and how painful it was to see how little his subject wanted the reporter around. Instead, I reprint here what my editor emailed me, after I sent him Baum's Q & A:

Dear Dan Baum,

If you haven't spoken with someone at Wired Magazine about making the phone call, please don't make it under the auspices of Wired Magazine.

Thanks!

Joseph O'Neill on Flannery O'Connor

One of my favorite novels of the past year was Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. It took me a little while, nearly 100 pages actually, before I fell into it, and then, to my surprise, just kept falling and falling. Most successful novels (successful in the sense that, I like them) do not gather ferocious speed at the three-quarter mark, but this one did, throwing me into the abyss where you could only fall and watch, fall and watch. Not a lot of writers can do this sort of controlled madness -- the first I recall reading was Jane Bowles, who just let the whole thing spool out until you were, sometimes and unfortunately, untethered from the story. Anyway, I wound up loving Netherland, whose end had me holding my breath and then crying from the realness of it all. The last book to do that was Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which I cannot recommend strongly enough, and which, I've just realized, also threw me at the beginning, though in that case, only for the first page or two.

O'Neill writes, in the Atlantic, about Flannery O'Connor, one of the very greatest of twentieth century fiction writers. She writes with a controlled, even cold savagery, writing which O'Neill describes as:

[A]lmost unfairly good:

She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton."

Or (upon the arrival of refugee Poles at a farm):

She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked bodies in the newsreel. God save me, she cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan!

The narrating third person hovers in an almost miraculous fusion of proximity and comic distance. With O’Connor, there never seems to be space between the words and their creator’s sensibility. You almost never catch a whiff of authorial self-consciousness. About how many writers can this be said?

You can read the rest, which includes a review of Brad Gooch's new biography Flannery, here.

A note on why so little blogging: I am writing, and I am also often on Twitter, posting what would have gone here. Why? It's fast. Join me? http://twitter.com/NancyRomm