Editors vs. writers: 'Twas ever thus

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I watched the first 2 parts of HBO's recent John Adams miniseries tonight. (As the holder of a history degree, I think it's required by our bylaws.) It's a very fine production, and fascinating on a number of levels beyond the sheer pleasure of seeing our country's beginnings brought to life.

For example, I couldn't help noticing the similarities between then and now, watching the Continental Congress squabble amongst themselves about whether to declare independence or try one more meek petition to King George III. I think today's Congressional debates would be much improved if each member was issued a long stick with which to pound on the floor to signal their agreement with the speaker. (That, and the elimination of microphones, television sound bites, and cable news pundits.)

But the scene that gave me a start and made me nostalgic for my moribund journalism career came in Part II. The retelling of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence shows that writers and editors have always been at odds in their common quest for elegant expression.

The scene opens with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams gathered in a room. Jefferson, having been cajoled into writing the Declaration of Independence by John Adams (in other words, given an unwelcome story assignment by his editor), has delivered his copy to his fellow congressman (editors). Like all writers, he paces nervously behind his editors as they read through the draft. Adams is complimentary of the way Jefferson has made a case not only for the the Colonies' independence from England, but for the rights of all men.

Adams: "This is well-said, sir. Very, very well said."

Jefferson, his nerves slightly soothed, finally takes a seat across the room from the others.

After criticizing Jefferson's inclusion of a condemnation of the slave trade (which Franklin knows won't fly with the delegates from the South), Franklin reads aloud another line in the copy.

Franklin: "'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, et cetera ...' 'Sacred and undeniable' smacks of the pulpit."
Jefferson (eyebrows raised in real or faux astonishment): "Does it?"
Franklin: "These truths are self-evident, are they not?"
Jefferson (reluctantly): "Perhaps."
Franklin (with a brisk nod): "'Self-evident', then."

Jefferson watches unhappily as Adams marks up his printout of the Declaration with his edits.

Jefferson: "Every single word was precisely chosen. I assure you of that, Dr. Franklin."
Franklin: "Yes, but yours will not be the only hand in this document. It cannot be."
Adams (trying to smooth things over a bit): "There may be expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up, but I will defend every word of it."
Jefferson (with a wave of his hand, pretending not to care): "Well, it's what I believe."

Jefferson's restrained reaction doesn't hide his annoyance that any editor, even the great Benjamin Franklin, would have the nerve to alter his golden prose. (Franklin, of course, being a newspaper editor and publisher, proves himself immune to a writer's pique.) I've been on both sides of that argument in my career, and I can't say I handled either role with as much grace as these men.

On the other hand, at least Jefferson didn't accuse Franklin of acting like Procrustes, as a writer once did to me when I had the temerity to ask her to cut a paragraph or two from her review of a community theater production. (Greek mythology says Procrustes offered a bed to weary travelers, cutting off their legs if they were too tall to make them fit.) Not having had a classical education, I shrugged off the insult and told Pat I still needed 3 more lines cut.

I had already learned what Benjamin Franklin knew: You have to have a thick skin to be a copy editor.

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It is what it is

I was plowing headlong through my RSS feeds in Google Reader earlier tonight, trying to get rid of the nagging little (341) perched next to Unread Items. I recently revamped my whole folder/tagging system in Reader, dumping all the subject-centric tags in favor of a simplified 3-tier system: Gotta Read This, Good Stuff, and If There's Time. This makes it much easier to keep up with the blogs I'm most interested in, and I  just hit the Mark All Items Read button on the rest whenever posts start to pile up on me.

But I digress. (Geez, if I had a dollar for every time I've said that ...) I was reading a post on Consumerist promoting a list compiled by the Mint blog of "10 Things You Can Do To Lower Your Auto Insurance Premium". It's a pretty good list, but item 7 did give me pause: Buy a vehicle with a theft device or have one installed.

This is probably good advice for some people, but I won't be taking Mint's advice any time soon. Let's review, shall we? I own a 1999 Hyundai Elantra. The windshield is cracked, there's some rust acne flaring up on the door panels, and I keep forgetting to replace a taillight cover that got broken last winter because I hardly ever walk behind my car. I don't need to buy some fancy gadget; the entire car is an anti-theft device.

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Library Thing book review: Fear the Worst

This suspenseful novel starts out in a very promising way with every parent's worst nightmare: A divorced father is dumbfounded and frantic when his teenage daughter doesn't come home from her summer job one evening. When he goes to her workplace to inquire about her, they claim not to know who she is. So if she wasn't going to work every day, where was she going, and where is she now?

The first two-thirds of the book are solid, filled with a frantic dad trying to convince everyone, including the police, that his daughter's an innocent teen mixed up in some scary stuff. I know you won't be shocked — shocked! — to hear that the police not only don't believe him, they think he had something to do with her disappearance. But the ending is so weirdly convoluted I'm still not sure I understand exactly what happened. Between dead bodies showing up on dad's lawn and a climactic scene at a shabby Catskills resort, it's a disappointing denouement to an otherwise tense thriller. Read more!

Library Thing book review: The Cellist of Sarajevo

It took me much too long to review this book, but not because I couldn't decide whether I liked it or not. I knew as soon as I started reading this compelling and unusual narrative of the effects of the 1997 siege of Sarajevo on a quartet of the city's citizens that it was one of the finest books I've read in a long time.

No, the delay was because as soon as I finished it, I started loaning it out to people who I was pretty sure would love it, too. One of them, Amir, lived in Sarajevo when the siege began. He managed to escape through the tunnel mentioned in the book, and later married a good friend of mine and came to the U.S.

But enough about that. The narrative of The Cellist of Sarajevo is unusually constructed. There are four main characters, and the chapters alternate between their viewpoints. One of the characters is the titular cellist, who reacts to a bombing that killed 22 people waiting in a bread line by vowing to play on the bombing site every day for 22 days. Another character is "Arrow," a female sniper who is assigned to protect the cellist from assassination during his daily concerts. Kenan must make a dangerous trek across the city to fetch fresh water for his family, a journey that involves crossing intersections that are targeted by enemy snipers in the hills surrounding Sarajevo. Dragan is making a similar journey, trying to reach his workplace where he knows he can get a free meal — a precious commodity in a city where privation is the norm and no one has enough.

The four characters never meet each other, but they encounter other neighbors, friends, and strangers during the course of their quests. These encounters bring into sharp focus what it means to retain your essential humanity in the most inhumane of conditions, and whether it is possible to live through a war without losing the eseential essence of civilization. It's important to note, I think, that while The Cellist of Sarajevo is based on actual events, the author says in his introduction that he has compressed three years of war into a month of narrative for literary purposes. Knowing that did not lessen the impact of the story for me in any way.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is beautifully, lyrically written. I found myself compelled to read passages to myself, for the joy of hearing the language spoken aloud. Reading aloud also helped to slow my reading, and prolonged the pure pleasure of the experience of living with these four brave, fascinating individuals.

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The way we were, indeed

The Netflix movie de la nuit on Thursday was All the President's Men. It's hard to believe a crusty old newspaper person like myself has never seen it, although in my defense I have read the book about the Watergate scandal on which it was based, by ace reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. (Obligatory parenthetical aside: If I had a nickel for every movie I could say that about, I'd be a rich, rich woman indeed.)

It's a very good movie, and I'm glad I finally saw it. I was worried that the nostalgia would make me all weepy for those long-lost golden days of yore, when newspapers were guardians of the public interest and hewed closely to Finley Peter Dunne's admonition to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" instead of Wall Street's relentless earnings per share drumbeat. I'm not sure why it didn't. Maybe it's because at the time of Watergate (1972-74) I was still in elementary school. By the time I landed my first newspaper job in 1983 (sports stringer for the Daily Review Atlas) there were computers on the newsroom desks, not electric typewriters, and no one was meeting anonymous sources in badly lit underground parking garages (not least because there were no parking garages, underground or otherwise, in Monmouth, Ill., pop. 9,900. Heck, there were only two elevators in the whole town, not counting the grain elevator).

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More than a feeling?

I've got a funny feeling today. It's not the feeling I expected to have on this date. And I'm not sure what it means, or what to do about it. It's just ... there.

I certainly expected to feel something on this date. Happy. Relieved. Excited. Thankful. Lucky. Blessed. It was 1 year ago today, July 31, 2008, when I underwent the third PET/CT scan in six months, and was told that as far as anyone could tell, all signs of Hodgkins' lymphoma were gone. Six cycles, 26 weeks, of chemotherapy had done their job. There had been unexpected complications and detours and side effects along the way, but none of that mattered now. I'd reached the finish line. All was once again well.

And in every checkup I've had since, every 3 months (with a few additional visits just to have blood drawn), it's been the same message: All is well.


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'Lucky Billy' rolls snake eyes

One of my fellow Library Thing members (Kasthu) wrote that she got to page 29 of this novel by John Vernon before giving up in frustration. I'm afraid I wasn't even that successful: Page 19 was the breaking point for me.

And it's a darn shame, because I sure wanted to like this book. I love history, and I love stories about cowboys and the Old West, but this book manages to turn one of the most thrilling legends of American folklore into a dry, confusing, mundane tale.

As a rule, I don't mind POV changes within a book, but it needs to be done well. The shifts should be clearly noted, and there should be enough of a difference in tone between the various "voices" to make it easy for the reader to adjust. The first two chapters alternate a third-person omniscient narrator with a first-person narrator, and it. Just. Doesn't. Work. I get that those Old West fellas were laconic cowboy types, but Sheriff Pat Garrett seems to be on tranquilizers.

It was the sheriff's chapter that did me in, sadly: He was describing to some barmates what Billy the Kid (his former pal turned nemesis) was really like, and it just about put me to sleep. Somehow, I don't think that's the intended effect when you're talking about one of the most notorious outlaws of the Wild Wild West.

I guess I'll just stick with Marty Robbins' classic song version of the "Billy the Kid" story:

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