Fifth Avenue, NYC; 1:40 p.m.; Wednesday, September 20, 2017
I took the above photo yesterday (September 20, 2017) on Fifth Avenue at 1:40 p.m. The photo was taken on a Wednesday afternoon on the avenue near 45th Street. In other words, in the heart of the Manhattan on a business day.
It can be plainly seen that there is little traffic. Certainly, no traffic jam.
And yet, social engineers — revered by Manhattan based yuppies who hate cars — want to implement a so called “congestion pricing” plan (already in effect in London), under which automobiles entering central sections of Manhattan on weekdays would be charged a fee.
Wouldn’t you know it, the New York Times editorial board is all for the plan. (See “A Solution to New York City’s Gridlock,” editorial, September 19, 2017.)
One thing the Times editorial writers lack is common sense, or any kind of feeling for life as it is actually experienced by the average person. If they would just look around them (see my photo), they would see that the “problem” they are wringing their hands about is NOT a problem. Public transit is remarkably efficient, despite problems which regularly occur. Traffic of the vehicular sort moves well, for the most part, especially when taking into account the concentration of economic, entertainment, and recreational activities and the population density in Manhattan. Pedestrian traffic flows beautifully — another thing the Times bemoans (the state of pedestrian traffic, that is), stating, incredibly, that the case is just the opposite, when everyone who walks knows that this is not true.
I myself like (love) to walk in the City. But, I have nothing against automobiles. There is plenty of room for cars, buses, and pedestrians, thank you!
As one Times reader noted (letter to the editor, May 31, 2016), congestion pricing “is a good way to hasten the transformation of southern Manhattan into an island for only the gilded rich, a process already occurring.”
“Six boys came running over the hill half an hour early that afternoon, running hard, their heads down, their forearms working, their breath whistling.”
— John Steinbeck, The Red Pony
One can just imagine how the boys were running: “heads down, … forearms working, … breath whistling.” Have your ever seen it? That’s just how boys in a hurry to get somewhere, exerting themselves, do run.
“The turkeys, roosting in the tree out of coyotes’ reach, clicked drowsily. The fields glowed with a gray frost-like light and in the dew the tracks of rabbits and of field mice stood out sharply.”
The focus was on memories one has of ancestors and intimate acquaintances from one’s past.
This reader’s comment concerns the importance of memory as on ongoing thing in our lived experience — including memories of still living persons and incidents in one’s daily life, from the distant past to recent experiences — in making us who we are.
I am blessed with a good memory, which is no doubt something in my brain chemistry (to put it crudely), but I think also that memory derives from one’s emotional makeup. In my case, it seems that I recall every significant person in my life, and most of the people I have known only in passing, or as coworkers or fellow students, with far more than a hazy set of recollections. Many particulars have stayed in my mind, including all sorts of little details that bring the person to life when remembering them. Similarly, I seem to remember practically every conversation I have ever had. No doubt, that is an exaggeration. But, I do recall many conversations from long ago in minute detail, word for word, figuratively speaking.
It has occurred to me that this may have to do with my attitude. I don’t take people for granted. I pay minute attention to what they say. I don’t WANT to forget. Ergo, I remember!
A similar thing is the case with the life experiences I have had, beginning at a very early age. They always had a strong impact upon me. I was rarely indifferent.
It seems that I may have, if I may be permitted to compliment myself, a “novelistic eye.” That I think like a writer to whom little details that might be overlooked are important, portentous, full of implications. It is said that Tolstoy could remember practically everything from his childhood (as can be seen in his first novel, Childhood). So, that the ability to remember may not indicate that one is a genius, but — I would be inclined to say — indicates something about how one experiences things, what is important to that person. This might be seen by considering the converse, so to speak, when one does not recall things. I myself, for example, would be hard pressed to tell you how someone I met the other day was dressed, or what make and model of car someone drove. This sort of thing doesn’t interest me.
Getting back to my reader’s pithy insight (“Memories of the past make us who we are today.”), I think this is very true. All those people from my past whom I have written about on this blog, particular experiences I have recounted, incidents from various periods of my life which might seem trivial but which for me are pregnant with meaning, form, in aggregate, a sort of compost of which the present day me has been shaped. To paraphrase a cliché, we are what we remember.
One last thought. It is salutary to record such memories, and present them in as much detail and with as much novelistic skill as one can manage, because, when we are no longer living, they may be precious to our descendants. Why else would mementos, letters, diaries, and so forth of deceased persons, including great figures from literature and history, be so valued, as indeed they are?
I was miserable and lonely during my freshman orientation at Brandeis University. Recently, I read a newspaper article indicating that many college students, much more than would be expected, experience acute loneliness when they begin college.
I had been assigned to a dormitory with mostly upperclassmen. The dormitory was broken up into suites, considered innovative for its time, with six or seven rooms sharing a common area. My suitemates knew my new roommate to be B______. They kept saying, “Where’s B_____? He hasn’t shown up yet?”
The mysterious B______ hadn’t appeared.
Exhausted from a week of orientation activities, and depressed, I crawled into bed at 9 p.m. on Sunday night, at the end of orientation week, and went to sleep.
Within a half hour or so, I was awakened by someone entering my room. It was B______, my new roommate, moving in with all his stuff. (He had a lot.) I got up immediately, flustered and embarrassed. He apologized profusely, and kept apologizing, for waking me up.
I kept apologizing myself, in turn, telling him he hadn’t bothered me at all, that I rarely went to bed that early, but had happened to this time, and that it was nice to meet him.
I was sure he thought that I was a real square and loser for going to bed so early; hence my embarrassment.
My roommate was African American. No one had said anything to me about my new roommate’s race, but it was a matter of indifference to me and I barely noticed it. I was pro black and pro civil rights. I had had limited experience with African Americans, but what limited experience I had had had been very positive. Most of it was with African Americans, lay advisors and fellow youth group members, in my church youth group.
A few weeks before the start of the academic year, my freshman year, I received a questionnaire from the college housing office in the mail. The questionnaire concerned one’s choice of a roommate. Did I have a preference as to religion (my roommate’s)? Dining preferences (kosher or non-kosher)? Recreational interests? And so on.
It took me two minutes to fill out the form, as it were. I left all the lines blank and wrote on it, “I have no preference as to roommate.”
My reasoning, which is very consistent with the beliefs and practices I have always adhered to, was that one cannot, and should not, chose friends and associates based upon external criteria such as religion, national origin, political views, etc. How can one tell if one is going to like a person or click with them based on such ridiculous criteria, is what I thought. One should be open, in principle, to anyone, until such time as they prove to be not compatible with you, as far as you are concerned.
He was highly intelligent, brilliant. I half realized this, but did not fully appreciate it at the time.
He could be witty. He had a sense of the ironic.
He was soft spoken and very polite, which seemed to reflect (as I am certain was the case) that he was well raised. At the same time, paradoxically, he could be a bit cocky, thinking, not without justification, that he was cool. He was kind of dapper and suave, but by no means a gladhander or a phony. We never talked about the opposite sex, but he had a way with the ladies.
He had grown up in Roxbury, Boston’s black ghetto. I have learned this and other things about his early years by Googling him, but at the time we attended college, we did not discuss our families or upbringing. In fact, we didn’t really have deep or serious discussions. He treated me with respect and, I realize, eventually, came to admire some things about me (including my intelligence and studiousness), but he wasn’t interested in getting to know me. I never asked him much about himself, which was unusual for me in relating to other people. This seemed to not be the case because we did not have this type of discussion. He sort of put up with me as a roommate, but it was clear he wasn’t thrilled with being stuck with a freshman for a roommate. It wasn’t in the cards for us to become close friends.
My mother said to me, when I told her about my new roommate, “You must invite B______ to dinner.” This never happened, meaning I never got around to inviting him. Somehow, I felt intuitively that B______ wouldn’t be thrilled to be invited by me (which was not an indication of disdain or dislike per se).
B______ used to say to me, “how do you feel about rooming with a spook?” Spook was a new word for me. I think he saw me as a typical white middle class suburban kid. In a way, he was stereotyping me.
I have learned things about B______ that I never knew. He wrote an autobiographical sketch of himself that was posted on line.
He grew up in Roxbury, as noted above, in the 1950’s; it wasn’t a nice neighborhood then. He was one of six children. His father was a mail carrier.
His intelligence was noticed early and he was admitted to Roxbury Latin School, Boston’s best high school. I found out only recently that a major influence on him, a teacher who provided great encouragement and steered B______ to college, probably Brandeis, was Sid Rosenthal, chairman of the English Department at Roxbury Latin.
What a fact! I didn’t know.
Sid Rosenthal, an outstanding teacher who was Jewish, lived in Newton, Massachusetts. My father, in those days, would spend a couple of days every week on the road, making “house calls” to respectable suburban communities as a piano teacher. He taught Sid’s children piano for many years, and my father and Sid became friendly.
And, Mr. Rosenthal, through in service summer courses for teachers, became acquainted with Robert Tighe, my and my two brothers’ English teacher at Canton High School in Canton, Massachusetts. Mr. Tighe was also a department chairman and outstanding teacher. The cliché “it’s a small world” seems to fit here.
As I have said, my roommate B______ and I never knew of or discussed these connections. I think it would have ameliorated our relationship.
He got an 800 on his mathematics achievement test (administered by the College Board). He never bragged about this or told me.
He went on to have a distinguished academic career as a professor of computer science.
When I knew him, he did not seem to have much aptitude for languages (in contrast, as I viewed it, to myself). He hid his lamp under a bushel, as they say. In later years, I have learned, he has frequently traveled to China and learned Chinese, no mean feat.
With his high achievement test score, he would have seemed to be a very desirable applicant. He said in a blog post that he chose Brandeis because of the reputation of its mathematics department and also because it was regarded as being liberal. He made it clear that he was speaking, not only of the type of liberal mindedness that bespeaks openness and tolerance in the abstract, in general, but also, specifically, about a liberal stance on race.
B______, as I remember him, as seems to be true of many of the people we meet on life’s journey, was quite a character.
He had a squeaky, high pitched voice. He kept late hours. He was often absent from our room and would hang out with other students in a lounge on the ground floor. He would disappear, saying to me when exiting our dorm room: “Gotta grind.” To grind was a commonly used expression for studying that I first learned from him.
He hung out with math majors. They would study together and share class notes and assignments, as well as textbooks, late into the night. His math major friends were all white guys, which was not surprising. There were hardly any black students at Brandeis then. I also had the impression, feeling, that B______ was thrilled at just being in college. It had happened to him, the first member of his family to attend college, and it was to him a sort of miracle that he was there, and a thrill to be engaged in intellectual activity. He never said this. I just intuited it.
One way in which I clearly seemed to be superior, intellectually, to B______ was in the areas of culture, in depth and breadth of knowledge of the humanities. During the year I roomed with him, he took Music 1, music appreciation. He seemed to have had no prior acquaintance with classical music (which was true of most Brandeis students), unlike me. While preparing for a final exam, he kept playing Mozart’s symphony no. 35 (Hafner) over and over again on a portable record player. I would play it repeatedly when he wasn’t — it was a new piece to me that I liked. He was bemused. He didn’t mind it, but I think he was thinking, why is he so interested in the piece? He doesn’t have to take the final.
B______ was taking first year German. Because it was a language math majors were told it would be advantageous to take. I wanted to write a letter of reply to Joe, mentioned in my post at
a guy from Germany whom I had met during high school at a religious youth group conference, and asked B______ if he could translate my letter for me.
B______ was at first amused and incredulous when I asked him — it was a simple letter. I think he was also flattered, surprised to be asked. He duly translated the letter into German for me.
As noted above, our suite in the dorm had a common area. Joe, the janitor (not to be confused with Joe, the guy from Germany), would take breaks there and talk with us students. On one occasion, we were talking about something of a historical nature concerning World War II. It was of a time representing Joe’s generation.
Joe made a factual statement or claim that I knew was wrong. I said something to him politely such as, “I don’t think that’s correct, Joe. I think it was …”
When we got back to our room, B______ admonished me sternly. “Don’t you realize that he’s not educated? You hurt his feelings.” B______ must have had his own working class, non-college educated parents in mind.
I said nothing. B______’s remarks, while well intended, were uncalled for. He didn’t realize that I was capable of considering such things, but that I felt that, by respectfully disagreeing with Joe, I was actually showing respect for him as an interlocutor, not demeaning him. I think that B______ viewed me as the pointy headed type without a clue as to human relations.
He never appreciated, for the most part, my own personal depth. Never took my measure. We did not room together after the first year. I would see him from time to time in the library where he had a part time on the circulation desk. He would ask me, “What’s up, Roger? You gonna make the dean’s list this semester?”
Once, during the end of my freshman year, I made a witty, ironical remark to B______ sizing up a particular situation, something I am capable of. B______ said, without hesitation, something I have never forgotten: “Roger, you really do know what’s going on, but you act like you don’t.”
It’s one of the truest things about me someone else has ever said.
I’m following the foot philosophy and am going to Manhattan to take the ferry again. I’m not sure why.
I saw “Ex Libris,” the Frederick Wiseman film about the New York Public Library, last night … it’s over three hours long.
I was tired, which may have been a factor, but I wasn’t that thrilled with the film; and, I was very disappointed with Wiseman’s “lecture” Thursday evening.
Nevertheless, I am glad I saw the film.
Today, I am going at 11 a.m. to see another film at the Film Forum: “The Red Pony,” a late 1940’s film, with a score by Aaron Copland, based on the Steinbeck novella. We read it in junior HS.
I had one good teacher in junior high: Miss Hanlon, our eighth grade English teacher. She seemed to think well of me and of my appreciation of reading.
Once we were reading “The Red Pony” and I made what seems in retrospect to have been a perceptive comment about the boy, Jody’s, father. I said that he was a certain kind of stern father who had trouble showing affection for his son. I was thinking of my relationship with my own father. Miss Hanlon appreciated these comments.
I saw the documentary film Ex Libris, directed by Frederick Wiseman, today. The film, which is about the New York Public Library, has just been released.
In one particular scene, a discussion group at the library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue is engaged in a lively exchange of views about a book (naturally): Love in the Time of Cholera (Spanish: El amor en los tiempos del cólera) by Gabriel García Márquez. (I recognized the librarian conducting the discussion. The library is like a second home to me, and this librarian has assisted me with queries and more mundane matters related to using the library for research.)
As is noted in a Wikipedia entry, “The novel examines romantic love in myriad forms. … García Márquez’s main notion is that lovesickness is literally an illness, a disease comparable to cholera.”
This idea was batted around in the discussion group seen in the film. The compulsive pursuit of love in old age by one of the main characters was brought up. Several participants in the discussion said that they were in their seventies.
A young man spoke up and posed a rhetorical question, followed by his own answer.
“What is love?” he asked. “It’s a way to avoid death. For as long as you can.”
I have been listening , for the second time, to a series of lectures by Professor Seth Lerer of the University of California at San Diego: History of the English Language, 2nd Edition, produced by The Teaching Company and included in their Great Courses series of college courses.
The lecture on Indo-European and its relationship to surviving languages, such as many of the languages spoken in the West today, is fascinating. I took notes while listening to the lecture and have attached my notes here as a downloadable Word document (above). If you are interested in languages, as I am, I think you will find the lecture fascinating.
on aesthetic and cultural appreciation of literature and film; my favorite directors (小津安二郎は日本の映画監督・脚本家)
by Roger W. Smith
I will begin this essay with some comments on what I feel the development of aesthetic sense and critical standards, as they apply both to literature and to the cinema, entails.
To put it as simply as possible: in order to have a deep appreciation of anything cultural, you have to become acquainted with the BEST works. Nothing less.
Let’s consider literature for a moment. Consider the case of someone whose acquaintance with books is limited to reading works such as The Thorn Birds, Jacqueline Susann, The Bridges of Madison County, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and similar works.
I have nothing against such writers and works or their readers per se. It’s enough that people love to read and take pleasure from it. I am not a snob.
But, if that’s all you have read, you will never have
a frame of reference;
a yardstick; or
models of excellence
for purposes of comparison when it comes to appreciating literature in full.
You won’t be able to distinguish between what is perhaps entertaining and/or diverting and what is truly great. You will never know the difference.
The same comments apply to cinema.
Let’s say that in the past you saw films like The Graduate, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, or Kramer vs. Kramer and regarded them as classics. Perhaps you still do.
I have news for you (I’m sorry if I sound arrogant): THEY AREN’T. For why I feel this way, see my discussion of directors and films below.
Extending this comment broadly (i.e., to both literature and film), I would say that it’s like comparing War and Peace with Ben-Hur or Anna Karenina with Erich Segal’s Love Story. You have to have read or seen classics to know the difference.
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I only began to understand and appreciate film after moving to New York City in the late 1960’s, just after graduating from college.
I owe my appreciation and acumen about films, such as they are, to a friend I made during my early days in New York: William S. (Bill) Dalzell.
Bill Dalzell was a self-employed printer who did printing for left wing groups such as Women’s Strike for Peace. (An aside: he was apolitical, though he was sympathetic to such groups’ goals.) He was a very cultured person and a lover of film, as well as of New York.
He taught me, single handedly, to appreciate film.
Bill Dalzell had a personal list of his five all time great films:
D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)
German director Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938)
Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944, with a Part Two released posthumously in 1958; in my opinion, Ivan the Terrible is an even better film than Eisenstein’s better known film The Battleship Potemkin)
Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word; 1955)
Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)
(See YouTube links below.)
Thanks to his advice, I saw them all at least once.
Truly classic films such as the above five are in a league of their own. Few people have seen them or even know of them.
What are some of the ingredients of great filmmaking? Not being a film critic, I can’t say really – I am not qualified to. But my friend Bill made an observation to me once that I remember. He said that films work their magic by “sight and sound.”
Consider the great directors. Most use music very effectively, use it sparingly. They don’t overdo it. But music is a key part of the aesthetic experience. And, the great directors don’t use schlocky music. What you get is Prokofiev, Monteverdi, Schubert, and so on, plus awesome original music. How many treacly film scores have we been subjected to by second rate directors?
To Bill Dalzell’s list of the greatest films, I would like to add and comment on a few favorite directors of my own.
Yasujirō Ozu, a Japanese film director and screenwriter
He is not nearly as well known as he should be, though his critical reputation is very high. He is my personal favorite among directors, perhaps outranking the five listed above.
Of course, it was Bill Dalzell who first alerted me to Ozu’s films. He made a comment that turned out to be true. In Ozu’s films, nothing happens.
They are films about ordinary Japanese people — businessmen, housewives, families — living ordinary lives. One watches them going about their daily lives – there is no melodrama — and, instead of being bored, by some magic which the director, Ozu, achieves – which one can only marvel at – the viewer is never bored. Instead, one is totally engrossed.
It seems like a certainty that you are watching real people go about their lives, a documentary of sorts, as if the director had entered a home or workplace in Tokyo and turned on his camera. It’s hard to believe – one totally forgets – that one is watching actors.
There is wonderful music, simple and enchanting, used sparingly.
It is wonderful to hear Japanese spoken.
There is a sense of place. The films are shot in Tokyo. One feels that one is there, in the houses with people sitting on mats, in bars where businessmen are drinking copiously, in the narrow streets with their colorful lights and signs and paper lanterns.
Ozu has a great visual sense, but like everything else in his films. his cinematographic technique is not obtrusive. He is not showing off. You are having a wonderful aesthetic experience without quite realizing it.
There is no distance between you and the film, because everything is done simply and with great clarity. There is no bombast, no showing off, no cinematographic techniques being used simply to impress. And, there is no overacting, as is, sadly, the case with most American films.
I do not have a single favorite Ozu film. My favorites include:
Late Spring (1949)
Early Summer (1951)
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Late Autumn (1960)
An Autumn Afternoon (1962; Ozu’s final work)
Robert Bresson
My other personal favorite is the French director Robert Bresson. My favorite Bresson film – his films are all of the highest quality — is Au hasard Balthazar (1966).
The Balthazar of the title is a donkey. It is a sort of “Black Beauty” story (the reference here being to the novel by Anna Sewell). The characters are plain people – some of them mean spirited and petty minded, if not downright cruel – in a French village.
The haunting soundtrack features the second movement (Andante) from Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 in A major, D. 959. Bresson uses music sparingly, but extremely effectively.
Ozu is probably as well known for the technical style and innovation of his films as for the narrative content. The style of his films is most striking in his later films, a style he had not fully developed until his post-war talkies. He did not conform to Hollywood conventions. Rather than using the typical over-the-shoulder shots in his dialogue scenes, the camera gazes on the actors directly, which has the effect of placing the viewer in the middle of the scene.
Ozu did not use typical transitions between scenes, either. In between scenes he would show shots of certain static objects as transitions, or use direct cuts, rather than fades or dissolves. Most often the static objects would be buildings, where the next indoor scene would take place. It was during these transitions that he would use music, which might begin at the end of one scene, progress through the static transition, and fade into the new scene. He rarely used non-diegetic music in any scenes other than in the transitions. Ozu moved the camera less and less as his career progressed, and ceased using tracking shots altogether in his color films. …
He invented the “tatami shot,” in which the camera is placed at a low height, supposedly at the eye level of a person kneeling on a tatami mat … even lower than that, only one or two feet off the ground, which necessitated the use of special tripods and raised sets. He used this low height even when there were no sitting scenes, such as when his characters walked down hallways.
Ozu eschewed the traditional rules of filmic storytelling, most notably eyelines.
[Bresson is] known for a spiritual and ascetic style. Bresson contributed notably to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of minimalist film. …
Three formative influences in his early life seem to have a mark on his films: Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war. …
Bresson made only 13 feature-length films. This reflects his meticulous approach to the filmmaking process and his non-commercial preoccupations. ….
Bresson’s actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of “performance” were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw. This, as well as Bresson’s restraint in musical scoring, would have a significant influence on minimalist cinema. …
Bresson is often referred to as a patron saint of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film. His style can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous “actor-model” methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors.
What I most like about Ozu’s films is his appreciation of moments of silence or non-action. So much is allowed to happen in those moments! They are almost always missing from American films, which seem to require constant noise and movement. You didn’t list it, so I’ll add another favorite: “Good Morning,” which is a comedy.
Thanks for bringing Ozu’s film to the attention of your readers!
I think that to love reading, you have to begin by doing it because of intrinsic interest in the topic and because you are anticipating pleasure, not because you regard it as a duty. You should read whatever you like to; it could be books about sports, entertainment figures, lowbrow fiction, whatever you really and truly want to read.
Whenever (and this comment pertains mainly to classics) you are restricted to encountering good books only as school assignments, when that’s the only place where you encounter them, the game is lost. If you think that classic books are those that you are required to analyze and write essay exam questions on, and nothing more, you will probably not enjoy them in later life. My counsel to all readers, especially young ones, is read whatever you want to read, as much as you can. Seek a level where you have a genuine interest and read at that level. An interest in the best books will often follow.
Similar thoughts of mine upon reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011).
On pg. 61, Philbrick mentions “the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.”
YES – waiting, I would be inclined to say, until you are ready, motivated, and receptive.
Waiting until the most opportune time.
This is precisely that happened to me with Moby-Dick. And, practically every other classic and/or “great book” I have ever read.
Hardly any of them – almost none – were read by me as school assignments.
The following film can be viewed on YouTube at the following links.
D. W. Griffith
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916)
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, Yasujirō Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, and Robert Bressson’s Au hasard Balthazar are available from the Criterion Collection.
This Martin Shkreli guy sounds a bit weird and he may be guilty, as he has already been found to be (but I wonder). There is no reason, however, for revoking his bail and imprisoning him now.
In a maximum security prison.
No prior criminal record. He’s a “danger to society”?
These judges are sententious fussbudgets devoid of common sense as regards — or any insight whatsoever into — actual people, with all their foibles.
There are usually explanations for odd, off-putting human behavior that doesn’t actually result in harm to anyone. Judges refuse, 99.9 percent of the time, to hear them. They — as an individual I met at a funeral once said about one of his relatives whose husband had died — lack a “humanity gene.”
Petty indiscretions which offend their sense of propriety are pretty much the same as egregious crimes in their book. If there was such a book, it wouldn’t be good or enlightening reading. Maimonides it wouldn’t be. Think Boy Scout or Girl Scout Handbook.
Mr. Donleavy lived in London and on the Isle of Man for most of the 1950s and ’60s, then moved to Ireland in 1969 after it had abolished the income tax for creative artists, including writer [italics added].
— “J.P. Donleavy, Acclaimed Author of ‘The Ginger Man,’ Dies at 91,” by Anita Gates, The New York Times, September 13, 2017
I worked as a proofreader and copyeditor during the 1970’s and 1980’s and made a living at it exclusively for about five years during which I was self employed. I greatly benefited from a professional course I took with a Doubleday editor and from on the job experience. My work improved over time, pretty fast. It had to. One has to be thoroughly knowledgeable and competent, diligent, and meticulous to do such work.
I saved, many times, very good writers from egregious errors. As a writer over the years, I know how essential to any writer copyeditors and proofreaders are. Check out the acknowledgments section of a scholarly book and more often than not you will find the author stating just that.
So why did The New York Times eliminate its stand-alone copy desks?
“Editing is vital to The Times. It separates us from the competition. It is one of the reasons readers trust our information. And it elevates our language,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet recently stated. (“Dean Baquet Answers Readers’ Questions on Editing in the Newsroom,” The New York Times, July 6, 2017.) He was speaking about the Times’s decision to eliminate its stand-alone copyediting desks and fire dozens of (mostly veteran) copyeditors.
I agree that editing is vital. Also, as a regular Times reader for some 50 years, I have noticed that it has always seemed to be more carefully edited than most daily newspapers, in addition to the fact that the stories are notably polished and well written.
Suddenly, wouldn’t you just know it, despite assurances that quality would not suffer, frequent typos and the like are cropping up in Times articles. This despite Baquet’s assurances that “we will be watching closely to make sure that our stories are still up to the standards our readers expect.” When I read that statement three months ago, his words did not sound reassuring. Who will be watching closely?
As noted above, I once took an invaluable copyediting course. The instructor made a point about why attention to detail on the part of editors and copyeditors is essential: Sloppiness in editing and production tends to decrease the reader’s overall confidence in a piece of writing (I am not thinking of fiction) and its accuracy. One starts to wonder, with careless errors here and there, if maybe there are not more serious errors, such as misspelled names, wrong dates, errors of fact, and other mistakes for which one will find the newspaper apologizing in its “Corrections” section. Or that can make the informed reader of a nonfiction book wonder whether he or she can trust its contents. If there are frequent mistakes of the kind a copyeditor should have caught in the published book (such as the time that I found W. E. B. Du Bois’s name being misspelled throughout a book that was devoted to African American culture and writers), one may suspect that it was rushed into print and that one can’t rely on it as a source.
There is a noticeable trend away from correctness in written and spoken language. Electronic communication is mostly responsible for this, it seems: the internet, texting, and email. The age of print, which began with Guttenberg almost six centuries ago, may be ending. This would be incredibly unfortunate — devastating, in my opinion.
