Roger Angell

Roger Angell died this past week at 101. He was the last of the truly great and pure writers to come out of The New Yorker at the tail end of its days as an incubator and publisher of the best American writers from the best decades of American writing. I won’t go into his background (read his New York Times obituary for that); suffice it to say he was witness to the creation, and he learned its lessons well.

What does it mean to be a great and pure writer in these days of hobbled sentences and truncated paragraphs? Read this essay on living over 90 if the paywall will let you, and you’ll begin to understand. Basically, it’s more poetry in the journalism and more journalism in the poetry, with the terseness of a Bill Heinz war dispatch and the slow-burn humor of a James Thurber think piece.

Losing a great writer is hard when you think of the words that will henceforth go unconnected, but since nothing is quite as tangible a legacy as the written word, Tennyson had it right. Much abides.

The WPA Guides

A big part of understanding where we are is realizing where we’ve been, where we’ve come from, and how we got here. Those are surprisingly hard things, made harder by the fact that everything around us is relentlessly in-the-now, and keeping up with the now takes an incredible amount of effort.

Given that, it’s a little amazing that anyone ever takes a look back, or that those who do look back ever want to turn around to contemplate the present or the future. I try to balance the looks back with the looks ahead, and I have a little help in that regard in the form of the WPA guides.

It’s hard for us to conceive as we struggle through an era where the government gives arts and artisans the worst seats in the house, but during the Great Depression the government hired thousands of artists and writers and turned them loose on projects for the public good, with profound and astonishing results: folk-art-inspired murals in post offices; plays that merged social commentary with innovative scenery, settings, and performance techniques; good, rough-hewn sculptures in public spaces; and a state-by-state series of proto-travel guides that merged history with advice on how a newly mobile generation could get from place to place, and what they could do once they got there.

There’s no nighthawk poetry in the WPA guides, and to be honest, a lot of the historical parts are sleep-inducing. But to read the stories behind small towns and how they got their names, to discover that almost every state with Native Americans had a legend about a brave and the chief’s daughter jumping off a cliff or drowning, to learn about the battles for county seats and railroads, and to realize that not that long ago towns just like yours had church services and newspapers in Polish and Czech and Norwegian and Italian – well, it makes a lot of yesterday’s headlines sound like today’s headlines, and vice versa.

There’s always value in gaining a deeper understanding of how people really talked and acted and lived before we were there to see for ourselves. The WPA guides do that, wonderfully.

Thank goodness someone thought we could write our way out of the Depression, because in the process they created something as enduring as that stone bridge in the park or the sculpture in the square. And here’s hoping that this is one experiment someone feels compelled to repeat.

For Absent Friends, Red Smith

For Absent Friends is about the strangest great book you’ll ever read. You see, it’s a book of obituaries.

I’m more of a fan of obituaries than I probably should be. Something about me makes me wants to watch the passing parade and understand what we’ve lost. I gravitate to the obits in The New York Times, but you can get me to read just about any obituary of a person of some prominence, and even some of regular joes like myself.

The characters posthumously recognized in For Absent Friends aren’t all household names. Some weren’t really household names when they died, 60 or more years ago. There’s a fair amount of racehorse trainers and boxers, a few horses (racers and otherwise), the odd golfer, some baseball and football types, and the occasional unappreciated writer, like John McNulty, Stanley Woodward, or Joe Palmer.

However, the way Red Smith remembered them, they were all people you’d want to have a drink with, talk with, and get to know better. (Yes, even the horses.)

For instance, here’s how Smith led off his remembrance of a boxer and trainer named Charlie Goldman:

“Charlie Goldman weighed about as much as thirty-five cents’ worth of liver. He had a flat nose, a pair of outsize walnuts for ears, a stripe of scar tissue over each eyebrow, and a rather battered look around the mouth. He had earned those badges honorably in something like four hundred fights.

“Charlie died the other day. He was eighty years old and spry, but he had a heart attack. It is easy to picture him shaping up at those glistening gates with a bouncy stride, wearing his rusty bowler cockily over one eye, and yet curiously diffident in manner.”

If you listen closely you can hear the sound of New York in the ‘50s, the brash toughness, the shot-of-whiskey voice, and the soft heart underneath, all beat out to the quick 4/4 time of an Underwood manual.

That clean, simple poetry is all over this book, and while you can try to copy it – and I have – you’ll never be able to get close, because the people and the places that shaped the voice are long gone.

Many years after I wrote for him I was talking shop with one of my New York Times editors, and I brought up this book.

“Sure, I know that book,” he said. “It’s been on my desk for years.”

“Me too,” I answered. And there’s your testimonial.

Nov. 13, 2018: The New Yorker

I began my career writing, editing, and designing magazines, and it’s neither hyperbole nor starry-eyed nostalgia to state that the magazine business was and is the very best business. You can have all your multimedia; to do one medium right, to bring great writing and great photography and design and style to bear on one singular topic, and then to repeat the process over and over, honing as you go along, is one of the most satisfying of all creative endeavors.

Comic-book artists and writers tell me the same thing – and what’s a comic book other than a magazine where the art takes immediate precedence over the words? (Immediate precedence, but not complete precedence; Stan Lee’s words were at least as much a part of the Marvel voice as the images of Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. And excelsior, Stan.)

It stands to reason that because I love magazines I love reading magazines. I was inspired by Car And Driver 30 years ago; I appropriated its happily snide editor’s voice for my letters-to-the-editor section, I stole its design whole, and I still love it. Creating a magazine about cars where nothing moves or roars or smells of gasoline and grease is not like dancing about architecture; there’s merit in freezing such sensual things and appreciating them in spite of their lack of movement. Car And Driver did that, and if Top Gear flipped off the Freeze button and let everything move again, it only was able to do so successfully because Car And Driver and its ilk had establishing a freewheeling, irreverent voice in automotive journalism that Jeremy Clarkson et al. could appropriate.

All of which is the long way ‘round to say that while I’m given many books by many authors, I rarely read them. Instead, I mostly read back issues of The New Yorker from the 1930s.

These are the greatest issues of the best magazine ever; why would I not read them? Granted, their take on art is restrained: woodcuts here and there, cartoons, and wonderfully fanciful covers. But the words – the words may be the best words consistently placed between coated cover stock.

Here’s what’s interesting: Those abominably long think pieces that characterized the magazine in later years – you know, the original TL;DR stuff – actually reads better online than in a magazine. Something about the way they flow make them more tolerable. Maybe you get through three-quarters now before ditching, instead of the half or one-third when the piece originally ran in the magazine. That’s progress – and it can be awfully rewarding.

Most of my New Yorker reading predates John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the granddaddy of all TL;DR New Yorker pieces. In the ‘30s the magazine was a confection, and it’s worth reading and re-reading if only for the nuance, the construction, the subject matter (My Life And Hard Times in its original form! Sister Rosetta Tharpe at Cafe Society!), and all those lovely, lovely words.

Oct. 11, 2018: Chuck Klosterman, on Van Halen

There’s a reason why we haven’t been populating these departments lately. We’ve been so busy we haven’t had time to read or listen or eat. Just work.

That’s a lie, of course; though we have been exceedingly busy we have found time to read a little, and buoy our spirits with good music, and even grab a bite to eat.

The music tends to this, the food is whatever’s in the fridge, and we keep coming back to this wholly entertaining review of the Van Halen catalog by Chuck Klosterman.

Klosterman writing on ‘80s music is a waste of talent that’s not really a waste because he is so preposterously good at it. It’s like when the 1992 Dream Team played Angola and the Angolans were honored to have been blown out by 68. For all the genuine love Chuck Klosterman has for Van Halen (and this performance of the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein”), it’s an open question whether Van Halen is worthy. But it’s an irrelevant question, since Klosterman writing about Van Halen music is more consistently entertaining than listening to the music itself.

Plus, the pay’s probably pretty decent for something Klosterman has done a million times in his head.

Klosterman’s contributions to “Grantland” made Bill Simmons’ Bostoncentric world view a little easier to bear. (Though I am one of the few, the proud who think that Simmons is entertaining even at his worst, as long as he sticks to writing.) Klosterman’s books are a character Tim Burton crafted for Nightmare Before Christmas out of existential philosophy and the shiny top layer of pop culture.

Klosterman is probably the only writer who could make Van Halen simultaneously a cultural touchstone, an inspiration to countless Guitar World subscribers, and a bunch of goofballs given carte-blanche access to bottomless stores of beer and Variacs. (Or, as he puts it better, “Van Halen is, in many ways, the high-profile exception to otherwise inflexible rules: classically trained virtuosos who make music for getting hammered in parking lots.”)

No matter how you feel about the necessity of Van Halen, one thing you can agree on: Klosterman rocks.

July 31, 2018: Ernie Pyle, "Home Country"

I never get tired of telling my Ernie Pyle story.

Before Ernie Pyle became the most famous war correspondent in history he was a travel writer. His job was traveling around the country writing a story a day – and by a story I mean a story, an honest-to-gosh thousand-worder – for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain.

The stories were "On The Road With Charles Kuralt" before there was TV, motorhomes, or even Kuralt himself. They were slices of life from a country that was still wildly diverse and regional but rapidly becoming less so.

Pyle wrote about the last person who knew Billy the Kid and the lepers of Kalaupapa and a couple of genteel people who lived in a cave in Death Valley – whatever turned up and could be fit in before deadline. The results were collected in a book called Home Country, and it's amazing.

Along the way Pyle told readers an awful lot about himself, to the point where strangers would write him, prescribing home cures for his cold or tipping him off about an interesting story down the next road.

Pyle, like Don Marquis before him and Red Smith after, was capable of something near poetry. I can almost recite by heart the opening paragraphs of Home Country: "I don't know whether you know that long, sad wind that blows so steadily and so relentlessly across the thousands of miles of Midwest flatland in the summertime. If you don't, it will be hard for you to understand the feeling I have about it. Even if you do know it, you may not understand.

"To me, the summer wind in the Midwest is one of most melancholy things in all life. It comes from so far and blows so gently yet so relentlessly, rustling the leaves and the branches of the maple trees in a sort of symphony of sadness, and it doesn't pass on and leave them still. It just keeps coming, like the infinite flow of Old Man River. You could – and you do – wear out your lifetime on the dusty plains with that wind of futility blowing in your face. And when you are worn out and gone, the wind – still saying nothing, still so gentle and sad and timeless – is still blowing across the prairie, and will blow in the faces of the little men who will follow you forever."

No matter how good a war correspondent Ernie Pyle was – and he was very good indeed – he never wrote anything to top those two paragraphs.

I checked out Home Country from the library on a whim. I was young then, still living at home, and after reading those paragraphs I had to rush into the kitchen and read them to my mother, so she could hear them and feel that poetry pouring from the soul of one newspaperman into another.

For many years I bought up all the copies of Home Country I could find and gave them to my writing friends, saying, "Here; here's how it's done." I don't know if any of them read it or took it to heart, but in the end it doesn't matter. They'll just keep coming too, like the infinite flow of Old Man River, and some of them will find their way back to this, and that'll be enough.

July 19, 2018: Don Marquis (With George Harriman), "The Lives And Times Of Archy And Mehitabel"

We don't have an office pet – the Cat Who Continually Tries To Kill Us is not worthy – but we do have an office cartoon. It's this:

Don't feel bad if it doesn't ring any particular bell. It's an illustration by Krazy Kat creator George Harriman for a collected edition of the free-verse poems/columns featuring the philosophical duo of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the cat.

Let's explain the cartoon before getting too deep into the characters and their motivations. The two professions the cartoon refers to are an alleycat-of-the-evening (Mehitabel) and an actor (her beau), though around here we use Mehitabel's beau's expression to refer to would-be marketers or editors or anyone who happens to be getting under our skins at present.

Archy writes the words in lowercase under the pretext of being a cockroach and therefore unable to hit the shift key, and the moral universe he describes is ambiguous at best. The result is thought-provoking, odd, and thoroughly delightful – especially when you consider that Marquis was a newspaperman and this work ran in the New York Evening Sun. Let's see USA Today try that.

Archy and Mehitabel hold a special place in my heart for many reasons, but none more so than this: When I was working nights on my master's in communication, I took a Morals and Ethics class, and wrote a long paper on the morals of Archy and Mehitabel. My old professor still shakes his head at that every time I see him.

Our professions may be ruined by amateurs, but as Mehitabel says, wotthehell. There's still a dance in the old dame yet.

June 20, 2018: Ed Zern, "Hunting And Fishing From A To Zern"

I am a graduate of the George Santayana School of Marketing, where the motto is (say it with me), "Those who do not recall the past are condemned to repeat it."

I think about that motto all the time when I look at the world of sponsored content.

There are a lot of people doing sponsored content who think they invented the genre. They didn't; I did – or actually I helped, when I joined 13-30 Corporation in 1982. 

13-30 was the brainchild of Philip Moffitt and Chris Whittle, and was one of the first companies to create large-format sponsored content – like an entire magazine, or in today's media environment, this teamup between National Geographic and Coors Light.

I worked on magazines that Nissan or the U.S. Army would pay for; 13-30 would do the creative, the client would sign off, the magazine would go to the printer, and 13-30 would make sure it was distributed in college dormitories and student unions. 

It was pure genius, but truth alert: It wasn't the first sponsored content. There's been sponsored content for about as long as there have been media to house it.

And there have been times, my work excepted, where sponsored content has been brilliant.

Ed Zern was an outdoor writer and an ad man, more or less simultaneously. He was writing books like To Hell With Fishing at the same time he was writing refreshingly self-aware ads for the "Bathtub" Nash, the SUV before there was such a thing.

While Zern was writing ads and books he was also writing travelogue-type pieces for magazines like Sports Illustrated, back when "sports" meant more than football, basketball, and occasionally baseball, and hockey once a year and Olympics and World Cup every four.

Zern could write; Hemingway said so. And this compilation of his best work shows how thin the line could be between great advertising and great writing.

The major difference between then and now: With Zern, both the advertising and the literature was worth reading.

And here's hoping that's something the non-graduates of the George Santayana School of Marketing come back to.

June 5, 2018: Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff"

Tom Wolfe was a hero. (He also never would have made it in today's three-lines-to-a-paragraph, mobile-optimized world of letters, but that's another story.) I absolutely loved the way he wrote, and I tried approximating it knowing I never could. I loved what he did for journalism, the way he brought his subjects to life, and I loved what he did for language.

I heard the phrase "pushing the envelope" the other day and it struck me that no one would be saying that if Tom Wolfe hadn't said it in The Right Stuff. The book is full of epigrams like that, from "Spam in a can" to "screwing the pooch," but that's not the main reason you should read it immediately. You should read it because it's long and sprawling and messy and perfect, and because the language perfectly matches the topic.

The Right Stuff is one of those rare stories where the movie is almost as good as the book. It's also one of the few books I bought in hardcover and paperback, just because. This is your summer book.

May 29, 2018: Joe Palmer, "This Was Racing"

Joe Palmer was considered by many, including Red Smith, to be the best sportswriter of the late '40s and early '50s – and just about all he ever wrote about was horse racing. This book is a compilation of some his best work, and as a pick-up-and-put-down read it can't be beat. Good luck finding it, though.