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Saturday 29 August 2020
Wednesday 26 August 2020
Seven Degrees of Separation: Seven People, Seven Typewriters
How are all these people connected?
1.
Pauline Elisabeth Ottilie Luise of Wied (1843-1916), the Queen of Romania as the wife of King Carol I, and was widely known by her literary name of Carmen Sylva.
2.
Elizabeth Lucy, Princess Bibesco (née Asquith; 1897-1945), an English writer and socialite. The daughter of British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, she was the wife of Romanian Prince Antoine Bibesco.
3.
Princess Priscilla Helen Alexandra Bibesco (1920-2004), at aged two. A journalist and daughter of Prince Antoine Bibesco and Princess Elizabeth Bibesco. She was the goddaughter of Marcel Proust and Alexandra, Queen consort as the wife of Britain's King Edward VII.
4.
Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield DBE (1892-1983), known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer.
5.
Arthur Koestler CBE (1905-1983) was a Hungarian British author and journalist.
6.
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley (1896-1980), a British politician who in the 1930s led the British Union of Fascists.
7.
Helena Bonham Carter CBE (1966-), English actress. Her paternal grandmother was politician and feminist Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith.
Connecting the typists:
1. Queen Elisabeth was a lifelong friend of Princess Hélène Bibesco (1855-1902, also known as Elena), a Romanian noblewoman and pianist.
2. Princess Hélène Bibesco was the mother of Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878-1951), a Romanian aristocrat, lawyer, diplomat and writer who married Elizabeth Asquith.
3. Their daughter was Princess Priscilla Bibesco.
4. Elizabeth Bibesco was a close friend of Rebecca West in Bucharest before the Second World War. "I remember she used to sit in this café, and just face the wall," recalled West. "And it wasn't coffee she was drinking."
5. Princess Priscilla Bibesco had a romantic liaison with Arthur Koestler, which became widely known amongst her circle.
6. Princess Priscilla's closest Paris friends included Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana, the former Diana Freeman-Mitford. Repartee was Priscilla's forte, as over lunch when Diana, indulging her loves of Hitler and his entourage, said, "Goebbels had the most beautiful blue eyes", to which Priscilla responded, "Such a pity, then, he had to murder all those children."
7. Helen Bonham Carter's paternal grandmother was politician and feminist Violet Bonham Carter, a half-sister of Princess Priscilla Bibesco's mother Elizabeth Asquith.
Tuesday 25 August 2020
10-Year-Old's Covid Newspaper typed on a Brother Portable Typewriter
Great story on ABC TV’s 7.30 Report in Australia last evening about Suzy
Pollard, a 10-year-old North Melbourne Primary School student who is using a Brother
750 TR portable manual typewriter to produce a newspaper called the Covid Catch-Up News. There are up to two
issues a week and six have so far been published. Suzy said, “I started the Covid Catch-Up because my mum had a
typewriter and I was having a lot of trouble keeping up with everything that
was going on. So I thought other kids may feel the same way.” Suzy’s mother is Dr
Kate Howell, a senior lecturer in food chemistry at the University of
Melbourne. Suzy said, “I just got an email from someone who must have read my
newspaper and they sent in a really good article, so now I'm typing it out to
put in the newspaper.” Suzy suspects she lives on the “quietest street in the
world”. So she worries about people who may be “bored out of their mind” in
lockdown. “Here's a list of things to do when you're stuck at home - listen to
a podcast, build some Lego, write a newspaper, or bake a cake or cookies.” Proceeds from the sales of the newspaper go to care workers.
Monday 24 August 2020
"I always felt a little sorry for people who didn’t work for newspapers”
This video is the best depiction of a typewriter-laden newspaper newsroom that I have seen. It's also a suitable adornment for Sam Roberts's article about newsrooms, which appeared in the US on the weekend. Roberts, just turned 73, has written for The New York Times since 1983, and is now the newspaper's obituaries reporter - which seems appropriate, as his weekend article reads like an obituary for the print newspaper industry. Roberts was previously the Times’s urban affairs correspondent and is the host of The New York Times Close Up, an hour-long weekly news and interview program on CUNY-TV, produced in association with Times and which he inaugurated in 1992. He also has hosted weekly podcasts for the Times called “The Caucus” and “Only in New York.”
Before joining the Times, Roberts worked for 15 years at the Daily News, first as a reporter, then as city editor from 1977 to 1981 and as political editor from 1981 to 1983. In his years as a journalist, Roberts has won awards from the Society of the Silurians and the Newspaper Guild of New York and has received the Peter Kihss Award from the Fund for the City of New York. His magazine articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the New Republic and New York. An anthology of his podcasts, titled “Only in New York,” was published by St Martin’s Press in November 2009.
Born in 1947 in Brooklyn, Roberts received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1968. While at Cornell he was managing editor of the Cornell Daily Sun and worked as a stringer for the Times and for the Associated Press and Time. Staggeringly, it appears that Roberts's 2014 book A History of New York in 101 Objects doesn't include the typewriter. But we might forgive him for that ...
The Roberts article:
One reason the columnist Mary
McGrory confessed that she “always felt a little sorry for people who didn’t
work for newspapers” was that they had never been exposed to the dynamism of a
big-city newsroom. “Newsrooms are large places, full of messy desks and lippy
people who hang around gossiping and making cheeky remarks about their
betters,” she later wrote. Her first glimpse of one was The Washington
Star’s in 1947. “It was heaven,” she remembered. Mine was of the Daily
News’s. For nearly 65 years, two-thirds of its existence, the tabloid newspaper
was written and edited in the Art Deco skyscraper on East 42nd Street in
Midtown Manhattan, which I first entered as an intern home from college in the
summer of 1966. I would return after graduation and remain for 15 years, as a
reporter, columnist, and city editor during a glorious Götterdämmerung of a
circulation war in the last American city where two tabloids had survived to do
battle.
Today, the Daily News and the New York Post endure largely
to gratify their publishers’ egos. To save on rent, the Daily News moved
from its eponymous headquarters in 1995, first to a warehouse-like space on the
far West Side near the Hudson River, then to Water Street in Lower Manhattan.
Earlier this month, Tribune Publishing, which owns the Daily News,
announced that it was shuttering the downtown newsroom altogether because the
rent there also was too damn high. Which begs the question: Can a newspaper or
news site survive without a newsroom? Journalism, for all the single bylines
atop articles, is largely collegial. “How it throbbed with human life and
thought, quite like a mill room full of looms or a counting house in which
endless records and exchanges are being made,” Theodore Dreiser wrote in his
memoir Newspaper Days. To me, the Daily News’s city room evoked less
a counting house than a frat house. One hotheaded reporter who scrawled
“Impeach Nixon” on a wall was suspended for two weeks - then, when Nixon
resigned, demanded his days back. More than one office romance not only began
at work but was consummated there. An inexperienced switchboard operator
connected an editor’s wife with his mistress.
“There is no writer’s block
in a newsroom,” the columnist Carl Hiaasen once explained. “There’s only
unemployment block.” But telling a story succinctly was more challenging at a tabloid
than at a broadsheet. When one of Mark Twain’s editors demanded a two-page
story in two days, Twain responded by telegram: “Can do 30 pages 2 days. Need
30 days to do 2 pages.”
After I transferred
to The New York Times, in 1983, and plunged into 3000-word takeouts,
an editor complained that he was dealing with 15 years of pent-up frustration
on my part. Copy [at the Daily News] was edited around a horseshoe-shaped desk by an oddball but highly
competent crew that was surprisingly cosmopolitan for a tabloid; at various
times, its ranks were said to have included a German spy and an IRA agent.
(The reportorial staff included the former public-relations man for King
Farouk, who covered Queens.) One copy editor was so exacting that a reporter
named Bruce Drake suggested that the editor would have asked Charles Dickens,
“But, Charles, how could it have been the best of times and the worst
of times?”
Drake was something of a stickler himself. He had interviewed an ex-Marine who
survived an airport terrorist attack, and calmly recalled the incident in
detail. When the first edition of the paper arrived in the newsroom, Drake was
surprised to read that the Marine was shaken and trembling uncontrollably. He
confronted the re-write man, who replied, “You did your job, and I did
mine.” “No other newspaper in New York or, very likely, anywhere else has a
closer relationship with the masses,” The New Yorker’s Jack Alexander
wrote of the Daily News in 1938, and its home reflected that. When a
couple was stranded because the city marriage bureau was closed during a
snowstorm, we recruited a judge to perform the wedding ceremony in the
newsroom. (“It’ll never last,” he predicted after pronouncing them husband and
wife.) On another deadly quiet Sunday, a desperate fugitive called to surrender
to us, but by the time he showed up we had discovered that nobody wanted him.
Despite several renovations, the newsroom still conjured up a stage set from
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 play, The Front Page. The
props were pastepots and the sharp metal rods on which editors “spiked”
unusable copy (later outlawed by OSHA). The permanent haze of cigarette and
cigar smoke (which no one complained about) mixed with the pungent odor of
melting lead and printer’s ink, and the sound of clacking typewriter [Roberts does know what one is!] keys or
shouts of “boy” to summon college-educated messengers who delivered copy from
reporters to editors never ceased. (Later they were no longer all boys; at
the Daily News they included Caroline Kennedy. People were surprised
to hear that I tipped her when she got me coffee, but I explained that I would
not impose a means test in granting gratuities to the clerical staff.)
At the
appointed time every evening, the seismic rumble from the sub-basement
reassured all of us that the day’s work was being turned into something
tangible that would be disgorged on conveyor belts to the fleet of distinctive
delivery trucks idling in the dark like horses stoked for a cavalry charge.
Most of the day, the newsroom was meant to be empty, since, in theory, reporters
were out covering the news. In reality, they might be fortifying themselves at
a grungy saloon called Louie’s East across the street or at Costello’s, which
was distinguished by its original Thurber drawings, or at the Gold Coin. If
after-hours drinking was an occupational hazard that prematurely ended some
careers, it advanced others. Costello’s was a night school, an extension course
for the stuff they don’t teach in journalism schools like the one I had
considered attending. The Daily News recruiters persuaded me that I
would learn more on the job than in J-school, and they were right.
The Daily News's Jimmy Breslin in Costello's.
This bygone gregariousness proved to be a godsend in the perilous transition to
computerized typesetting. One evening, when an entire day’s stories vanished in
a flash, I knew exactly where to find and retrieve most of the staff, and
within minutes, they had refiled their copy. Even during the day, bars were
preferable to the building’s cafeteria, which evinced a soul-crushing feng
shui. The invitation-only Publisher’s Dining Room, on the other hand, featured
dinner plates with famous front pages. (I would make sure to arrive early to
avoid the place setting with the photograph of Ruth Snyder, who was convicted
of murdering her husband, strapped into the electric chair at Sing Sing under
the headline: DEAD!)
Captain Joseph Medill Patterson [above] was said to have conceived the Daily
News in conversation with his cousin Colonel Robert R. McCormick, standing
next to a manure pile in France during World War I. Unlike his cousin, Patterson
was a socialist. The paper’s empathy for its (then mostly white) blue-collar
readers was palpable. The Daily News was skeptical but not cynical
and took its responsibility to the city - but not itself - seriously. Where else
could we begin a crusade to repeal the so-called Hot Dog Tax - a levy on
restaurant meals under $1 - with a searing quote from Felix Frankfurter? Or, when
Gerald Ford initially refused to offer New York federal loan guarantees, run
the headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, five words which may have tipped the 1976
election? (The headline that was originally suggested was FORD TO CITY: FUCK
YOU.)
Jimmy Breslin at his Hermes Ambassador.
The following summer, terrorist bombs linked to Puerto Rican nationalists
exploded at Manhattan office buildings and department stores. Studio 54 opened.
And a psychopathic serial killer armed with a .44-caliber revolver and dubbed
Son of Sam held New York hostage. We shamelessly exploited an exchange of
letters between the serial killer and our columnist Jimmy Breslin, who gained
his confidence, no doubt by congratulating him on his deft use of the
semicolon. When a mountain climber from Queens named George Willig scaled the
World Trade Center, we smuggled him into the building, hid him from the
competition until midnight, and published his personal account on the front
page.
When Bushwick, Brooklyn, was ravaged by fire and looters during the citywide
blackout that July, the Daily News convened a mayoral debate under a
stuffed bobcat in the living room of a local family, the Casusos, and, for
decades, we held the city’s feet to the fire to deliver on its promises to
salvage the neighborhood. In the late 1970s, the Casusos couldn’t give their
house away; by the 2010s, after sticking it out as paradigms of civic pride,
they were rejecting offers of $1.5 million and more. Luckily for
us, Superman was being filmed at the Daily News Building. We were
functional, in the loosest sense, because the newsroom was bathed in klieg
lights. Mike O’Neill, the editor in chief, confided at one point to the film’s
director, “I’ve got a lot of actors pretending to be journalists working for
me, too.”
Bogie on the 'stone' in Deadline U.S.A.
Pete Hamill, who died earlier this month, defined sentimentality, as opposed to
nostalgia, as a genuine emotion, “an ache for the things that are gone, that
actually existed and that you experienced.” The newsrooms of The Front
Page and of my favorite newspaper movie, Deadline-U.S.A., which
was filmed in the Daily News’s pressroom, are no more. (The only time I
heard anyone yell, “Stop the presses!,” he was met with a reply from an editor
who peered indifferently over a copy of the Racing Form: “You jerk, they
haven’t started yet.”)
In today’s newsrooms, those that have survived, plenty
of reporters and editors are smarter - not just better educated. Their writing is
less stenographic. Google has armed them with research capabilities that we
never dreamed of. But when I worked for the Daily News we had more
copyboys than the paper now has reporters.
Carved into the limestone façade of the Daily News Building is a quote
attributed to Lincoln: “He Made So Many of Them.” It referred to the
presumption that God must have loved the common man. No other newspaper in
America came close to the Daily News’s peak print circulation of more than
two million daily and three million on Sunday. But like common sense, the
common man - at least the one who bought the newspaper every day - was not common
enough to keep the Daily News solvent. So many core readers fled to
the suburbs or turned to television and the Internet that the daily print run
has plunged to 200,000. By 2017, Mort Zuckerman was lucky to unload the paper
to the company that publishes the Chicago Tribune, its original
owner, for $1 (plus tens of millions in pension liabilities).
About the only relics that survive today from the Daily News Building’s
newsroom are the copyboys’ bench, which incubated generations of journalists,
and the four-faced wooden clock. I can now confess that I gained a 10-minute
editing cushion on the city desk by making the clock five minutes slower facing
my bosses and five minutes faster facing the reporters whose copy I awaited as
a deadline approached. Time and place merged uniquely in tabloid newsrooms in
ways that can’t be duplicated by working at home. “A tabloid is not a newspaper
of record: the past is too far behind to worry about, the future too far
ahead,” Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “Yesterday
matters only insofar as it supplies copy.”
Saturday 22 August 2020
Raising a Storm in a Typewriter: Flannery O'Connor and Racism
Flannery O'Connor's Remington Noiseless portable typewriter at her former home,
Andalusia Farm, Milledgeville, Georgia.
Even from the distance of
7597 miles from Canberra to California, it’s not difficult for Australians to
imagine the sensitivities stirred by the Black Lives Matter protests which
swept across America earlier this year. Regardless of Covid-19 lockdowns, Australia
had its own Black Lives Matter protests, stemming from the deaths of
Aboriginals in custody. Bear in mind that from 1902 until 1962, Australian federal
voting rights were specifically denied to every “aboriginal native” of
Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific (except New Zealand) who
did not already have the right to vote in state elections (and very few did).
Indigenous Australians were not included in the Commonwealth census until 1971.
Forms of apartheid (that is, “apartness” or “separate development”) still obviously
exist throughout Australia. Nonetheless, overt racism is no longer tolerated, notwithstanding
the continuing efforts of the Murdoch media and a vocal minority of extreme
right-wing politicians and commentators.
Mary
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), born in Savannah, Georgia, was a Southern writer
who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on
regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations.
At
its hub, Elie’s essay says, “Southerners, women, Catholics, and MFA-program
instructors now approach her with devotion. We call her Flannery; we see her as
a wise elder, a literary saint, poised for revelation at a typewriter set up on
the ground floor of a farmhouse near Milledgeville because treatments for lupus
left her unable to climb stairs. O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and
Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a
straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to ‘flying
buttresses’.” It goes on, “For half a century, the particulars [of her racist remarks] have been held
close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if
to save O’Connor from herself.”
O'Connor's ‘flying buttresses’ can be seen beside her typewriter.
Elie’s
article has sparked some highly critical reactions, the latest published this
past week by Charlotte Allen under the headline “Flannery O’Connor and the
Ideological War in Literature”. Allen, a PhD in medieval studies from the
Catholic University of America, said the Elie essay “bluntly [accused O’Connor]
of racism” and that he “flatly announces” O’Connor as “a ‘bigot’”. Allen said
the Elie article “has since gone viral”. Allen concluded, “ … there is nothing
so literal in its after-effects as cancel culture, mowing down everything in
its path in the name of anti-racism or whatever the ideology du jour might be. What cancel
culture has just mown down isn’t simply Flannery O’Connor or her works, but our
ability to view them through any other lens except that of doctrine.”
And
just last week Elie re-entered the fray himself. As the Tacoma News Tribune said in mid-July, “The
dialogue around O’Connor and her racism is neither new nor will it end with [the
documentary] Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia.
If anything, it may be further expanded upon, which is important.”
I’m
not too sure about that. My own reaction to reading Elie’s essay is that it
would be a shame if reading her today was prejudiced by thoughts informed by
revelations from her private correspondence. What I think we should look for in
the works of this period is as much a sense of the author’s time and place as
anything else, if for no other reason than to appreciate that things have
changed in our society. We read Dickens and are appalled by the conditions in
which people, especially children, lived in England in the first half of the
19th Century. We assume, of course, that Dickens was sympathetic, but – his
writing aside – incapable of changing the general way things were. Dickens was philanthropic,
but, like O’Connor, by no means an angel. After all, he left his wife for an
actress barely older than one of his own daughters. Today that would still be
considered scandalous, but Dickens’s reputation had suffered no one jot, nor has
our enjoyment in reading him. Take Ernest Hemingway, whose Nick Adams stories
are in part suggestive about the lives of Native Americans. Do we think any the
less (or more) of the poetry of Longfellow - in reality a boring, stay-at-home
old fart - when we read of the adventures of Hiawatha?
On
reflection, the Elie story reinforces the awareness that racism is not
inherent, but a product of our upbringing and circumstances. My own were very
different from O’Connor’s, so am I, for one, qualified to judge her? We each
should come to terms with not only our upbringing and circumstances, but with what
we do inherit in the way of attitudes and opinions, and adjust ourselves
accordingly, all the while remaining true to ourselves. I grew up in New
Zealand, never aware of any overt racism (though I’m sure it probably did
exist). All through primary school, almost everything we learned about our
country and ourselves connected in some way or other to the indigenous Māori
people, most notably through Māori legends, the reality of the Treaty of
Waitangi, our place names, the history of the colonised nation (being
constantly aware it was colonised and
not founded by Europeans) and in particular the area we lived in, and in the
sport we were so passionate about. I feel this makes a significant difference in the way one now views the broader world.
Strange
as it may seem, all this has reminded me of James Joyce’s impenetrable novel Finnegans Wake (1939). I guess that in a
book that’s next to indecipherable the author can get away with almost
anything. Joyce writes in riddles and, like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork
Orange, more or less invents his own language. The inspiration for part of this
mish-mash was Joyce watching the New Zealand "All Blacks" rugby football team perform a haka (Māori war
dance) before playing at Stade Olympique de Colombes in Paris in 1925. Joyce wrote
to his sister, Margaret Alice “Poppie” Joyce (then otherwise known as Sister
Mary Gertrude) of the All Saints
Convent of Mercy in my home town of Greymouth, New Zealand. Joyce asked Poppie
for the Māori words of the haka so he could use them in Finnegans Wake. For “Kia whaka ngawari au ia hau”, Joyce, working
from the correct words, wrote, “Ko Niutirenis haururu laleish”, “the sound of
maormaoring”. Am I now to think of Joyce as a racist, along with everything
else? Or should I take his mention as a sort of back-handed compliment to the
Māori and to rugby?
Maybe
a future Paul Elie will set me right. The present Elie, however, says of
O’Connor that, unlike Joyce perhaps, “she was admirably leery of cultural
appropriation.” As well, so Elie tell us, O’Connor had a sneaking admiration for
Muhammad Ali, although that too is couched in racist terms. “Cassius [Clay] is too
good for the Moslems,” she once wrote to a friend.
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