A future for newspapers

The decline of newspapers began not with the arrival of the Internet but with the departure of the moguls, wealthy and powerful men like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, even if not as famous, who built and guided their papers and helped them thrive. Eventually, as they died off, their proud newspapers fell into the hands of corporate newspaper chains committed more to profit than journalism.

So writes Dan Kennedy in a new book The Return of the Moguls. If moguls were the key to newspapers' past, he says, perhaps they are also the key to their future.

Kennedy's assessment of the fall of newspapers conforms with my own. I spent most of my career with The News Journal in Mansfield, Ohio, one of five mid-sized papers once owned by Harry Horvitz, a Cleveland millionaire who usually spent one day a week at each of his papers (four in Ohio and one in New York). In the 1980s Horvitz sold The News Journal to the Ingersoll chain, which then sold it to Thomson, after which it was sold to Gannett. Each chain paid a higher price for it and other papers in the group and, to maximize profits, found it necessary to cut both staff and content, leaving our newspaper just an echo of what it once was. Then came the Internet to give newspaper readers and advertisers an alternative.

Similar scenarios played out in communities large and small across the country. Yet newspapers are far from finished, Kennedy writes. Most of them remain profitable, their paper product much more so than their web pages, and most remain a vital source of news for their communities. They may still have a future, and that future, argues Kennedy, may like their past depend upon newspaper moguls, individual owners with big bank accounts and a commitment to quality journalism.

He mentions several but focuses primarily on three: Aaron Kushner, who tried but quickly failed at the Orange County Register; John Henry, who has been doing exciting things at the Boston Globe; and especially Jeff Bezos, with his Amazon fortune behind him, bringing hope (and lots of new technology) to the Washington Post.

If newspapers are to survive, Kennedy thinks it may depend upon the deep pockets of moguls like these who will support their papers' experimentation to find ways to bring back both subscribers and advertisers. Other newspapers across the country will be watching closely, ready to quickly copy any strategy that works.

Wrong about Roth

"Excuse me," he said, "is your name Peter Tarnopol by any chance, sir?" I colored a little. "It is." "The novelist?" I nodded my head, and then he turned a very rich red himself. Uncertain clearly as to what to say next, he suddenly blurted, "I mean -- what ever happened to you?" I shrugged. "I don't know," I told him, "I'm waiting to find out myself."

Philip Roth, My Life as a Man

Philip Roth

Philip Roth, who died last week at 85, had a reputation for writing autobiographical novels. Usually his protagonist was Nathan Zuckerman, but in My Life as a Man (1974) his main character was a man named Peter Tarnopol, a novelist struggling to recover from the emasculating effects of his marriage to and divorce from Maureen. Roth's own first marriage, to Margaret Williams, ended in 1963. (Roth wrote similarly about his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, in I Married a Communist.) There was, for him, an unusual five-year gap between Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), suggesting that after his first marriage ended he really was "waiting to find out" what had happened to him and where he was going as a writer.

Roth wasn't the only one with doubts about Roth. Following the publication of Roth's first book Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of short stories, in 1959, literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote that "his book leaves me worried about his future. For he has put so much of himself into being clear, decisive, straight, his stories are consciously so brave, that I worry whether he hasn't worked himself too neatly into a corner."

But Roth continued to "put so much of himself" into his work and produced book after book, being awarded several prestigious literary awards in the process. These awards included a Pulitzer, two National Book awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner awards, the Franz Kafka Prize and others.

I confess I never warmed to Philip Roth, liking My Life as a Man the best of the few I've read. His prose, in small doses, wowed me, but after a while it seemed more like showing off than meaningful literature. But, like Alfred Kazin and Roth himself at one stage of his career, I may have been wrong.

Books as character tests

The book is a test of character ... When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself.

A.A. Milne, introduction to The Wind in the Willows

Last Monday I didn't suppose this would turn into A.A. Milne Week at Wordmanship, but here we are  with my third straight post about Milne, and I am still not half way through Ann Thwaite's book Goodbye Christopher Robin: A.A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Milne was a big fan of The Wind in the Willows long before he wrote his Winnie-the-Pooh books, which to his own surprise, as much as anyone's, supplanted Kenneth Grahame's book as the most popular children's literature of the 20th century. Milne liked Grahame's book so much, in fact, that, as the above quotation indicates, he viewed it as a test of character. If you like it, you are OK. If not, maybe there is something wrong with you.

This reminds me of something Pamela Paul writes in her book My Life with Bob: "What someone reads gives you a sense of who they are. So if you really don't like someone's books, chances are you probably won't like them either." She goes on to tell how she broke up with a boyfriend because, in part, he liked George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman Papers novels and she didn't.

I agree with the first part of Paul's statement, that what people read reveals something about who they are. The second part gives me difficulty, however, except perhaps in extreme cases where one person reads, say, racist literature or books about how to build bombs. These aren't the kinds of people I would want to hang out with. But a person who reads Russian literature should be able to be friends with, or even married to, someone who favors Harlequin romances. My wife likes those Chicken Soup books; I don't. As long as we keep our books segregated, we can get along just fine.

Books are not like movies and music, media best enjoyed as a social activity. Reading, excepting perhaps when you want to listen to a book in the car, is a private activity, a relationship involving just you and the author. Spouses, friends or colleagues shouldn't care what you are reading.

Yet, getting back to Milne's comment, there are some books that make such an impact on us that we cannot imagine they do not affect others in the same way. After all these years of marriage I am still shocked and disappointed when Linda cannot read more than 50 pages of a book I recommend before giving it up. It is hardly grounds for divorce, however.

While in college I was so smitten with Franny and Zooey that I ran out and bought a copy for my girlfriend. She broke up with me soon after, but it had nothing to do with J.D. Salinger. Or did it?

The hard work of poetry

... in modern light verse the author does all the hard work, and in modern serious verse he leaves it all to the reader ...

A.A. Milne, quoted in Goodbye Christopher Robin by Ann Thwaite

Now what do you suppose A.A. Milne meant by that? Is light verse really harder than serious verse? If so, in what way is it harder?


Milne wrote this nearly a century ago at a time when "modern" poets were abandoning rhyme schemes in favor of free verse. Light verse was still expected to rhyme, and that is still true today. But does free verse create more work for the reader? To be sure, many readers prefer poems that rhyme, but that is not necessarily because of the work involved. Rhyme may actually make the poet's work easier because it limits the options of where to go with a poem. Just as it would be easier to choose a cereal brand in a supermarket if there were only three options available instead of an entire aisle of choices, so a poem may be easier to write when one must choose from moon, June, spoon, loon, etc., than from all the words in the English language.

Or might Milne have been referring to the fact that serious poets are allowed ambiguity in their verse, and in fact are all but required to have ambiguity, while writers of light verse must make their meanings clear? For humor to be appreciated, it must be understood. They can't leave the work of interpretation to the reader in the way serious poets do. (There are exceptions to this, such as the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.) But is ambiguity easier than clarity? In many kinds of writing, such as news stories and history, clarity may be more difficult, but in fiction and poetry, maybe not. For art to happen, there should be more than one way to interpret a work. That means some degree of ambiguity, and that can be difficult.

Actors frequently say that doing comedy is more difficult than doing drama, never mind that the Academy Awards seem more often willing to honor mediocre drama than great comedy. If that is true in movies and on stage, perhaps it is also true in poetry as Milne argued. I can't seem to understand why that might be, but that doesn't mean it isn't. Consider that Milne, whose collection of light verse When We Were Very Young was one of the biggest selling books on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1920s, is one of only a few writers of light verse in the last century to become household names. On that list are the likes of Ogden Nash, Richard Armour and Dr. Seuss. Well-known serious poets are more numerous, but that may or may not mean their work was easier.

Although Milne's poems for children and for adults who remember being children were immensely popular, his work was not as adored by critics as he would have liked. Some criticism was savage and hurtful, especially when it came from writers he admired. So Milne was defensive, and this may have been the reason for the comment above.

My own view is that light verse, like movie comedy, is under-appreciated. But harder? I have no idea.

Knowing about people

There are three ways in which a writer knows about people: by remembering, by noticing, and by imagining.

A.A. Milne, quoted in Goodbye Christopher Robin by Ann Thwaite

A.A. Milne

The three ways A.A, Milne observes that writers know about people -- remembering, noticing and imagining -- are the same ways any of us knows about people, although for non-writers, what is only imagined about people can lead to trouble, as when one imagines reasons for a slight that may not be true at all.

When Milne wrote those words he was referring to his own poetry, specifically to those poems that comprise his first book of poetry intended for children, When We Were Very Young (1924).

The word we in the title indicates memory is at work in these poems, both for the author and his readers. His first-person poems, such as "The Island," clearly suggest Milne is relying on memories of his own childhood. The closing lines read:

And I'd say to myself as I looked so lazily down at the sea:
"There's nobody else in the world, and the world was made for me."

No man is an island? But Milne could remember, as any of us might, being young enough to imagine himself the center of the world.

These poems were written before the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. His son, Christopher Robin (whom he called Billy) was quite young at the time and and his observance of his little boy clearly inspired several of Milne's poems, such as one called "Hoppity." It begins:

Christopher Robin goes
Hoppity, hoppity,
Hoppity, hoppity, hop,
Whenever I tell him
Politely to stop it, he
Says he can't possibly stop.

The poem "Jonathan Jo" may have been based on a real person, but even so the young poet probably relied mostly on his imagination to pen lines like these:

Jonathan Jo
Has a mouth like an "O"
And a wheelbarrow full of surprises;
If you ask for a bat,
Or something like that,
He has got it, whatever the size is.

Most of the poems must have required all three, some remembrance, some observance and some imagination. Take, for example, the poem "Rice Pudding," which begins:

What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She's crying with all her might and main,
And she won't eat her dinner -- rice pudding again --
What is the matter with Mary Jane?

Milne didn't have a daughter, so he had to imagine a little girl, but are little girls who are tired of rice pudding any different than little boys who are tired of rice pudding? And Milne probably remembered being forced to eat too much rice pudding, or something similar, in his own childhood.

Fanciful fun

For a long time I thought Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time was going to be a time-travel novel without any actual time travel. The 600-plus-page novel has three connected stories, each involving British author H.G. Wells, whose novel The Time Machine has just been published.

First a young man plans suicide after the woman he loves is killed by Jack the Ripper. His brother enlists the writer's help to fool him into thinking he has traveled back in time and killed Jack before he can kill the woman.

Then a conman inspired by the Wells novel develops an elaborate ruse to fool wealthy patrons into believing they have traveled to the year 2000 to watch the climactic battle that saves humanity from being destroyed by automatons. A young woman on one of those excursions to the future falls in love with the hero of that battle, and things get complicated when she meets the same man on the streets of London in 1896. Tom, the actor hired to play that hero, gets Wells to help him maintain the charade.

Finally, in part three, time travel becomes real, sort of, when a man from the future plans to kill Wells, Henry James and Bram Stoker and steal the only copies of the books each of them has just finished. Wells, aided by a letter from his future self, seeks a way out.

The stories weave in and out of each other, and Palma gives us plenty about alternate universes as well as time travel. As confusing as it may sound, he manages to make everything clear, or at least clear enough. The Map Of Time is fanciful fun.

Pirate detective

Let me say upfront that this review of Steve Goble's first novel, The Bloody Black Flag, is biased. I have known him and his wife, Gere, for many years, worked with both of them and been a guest in their home. I am delighted he finally finished his book and found a publisher, and I wanted very much to like it when I started page one.

But just because you are biased does not necessarily mean your opinion is either dishonest or wrong. I genuinely enjoyed the novel, and I'm convinced other readers, at least those open to murder mysteries involving bloodthirsty pirates, will as well.

I can recall Goble speaking in glowing terms some years ago about Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, etc.). That influence shows in this wild tale, the first in a projected series, about a reluctant pirate named Spider John Rush whose talents include carpentry, fighting with a knife and, as it turns out, solving mysteries.

To elude British authorities in the fall of 1722, Spider John and his much larger friend, Ezra, join the crew of the pirate ship Plymouth Dream. One night Ezra is found dead, and the assumption is that he got drunk, fell and hit his head on the way down. Spider does buy it, not the least because Ezra was not a heavy drinker. He vows to find Ezra's killer and avenge his death.

Soon other mysteries complicate matters. A British frigate keeps pursuing them but, despite superior speed, never manages to catch them. Then a crew member steals a mysterious brass gadget from the ship's captain, who threatens to kill off his crew one by one until he finds it.

As a lifelong newspaperman, Goble knows a thing or two about deadlines. His hero (everything is relative on a pirate ship) faces a deadline of his own: Can he find and kill the murderer before he himself faces the gallows?

The Bloody Black Flag offers plenty of adventure and violence, especially when Plymouth Dream encounters another pirate ship whose crew is no less bloodthirsty than its own.

Before Moby-Dick

Without the Essex, there would have been no Pequod. Without Captain Pollard (or perhaps it was First Mate Chase), there would have been no Captain Ahab. Without the great whale that smashed the Essex, there would have been no Moby-Dick.

Nathaniel Philbrick tells the thrilling story of the tragedy of the whaleship Essex in 1819 and its connection to Herman Melville's great novel (1851) in his book In the Heart of the Sea (2000). Along the way he tells his readers much about the whaling industry at that point in history and about the town of Nantucket, then one of the most prosperous communities in North America. It was from Nantucket that the Essex and most other whaling vessels sailed, usually for years at a time.

The story of the Essex, although all but forgotten before Philbrick resurrected it, was well known in the middle of the 19th century. Melville couldn't have helped hearing about it. Yet there was one place, the author says, where the story was rarely told, and that was Nantucket. Residents there were not embarrassed by the loss of the ship (that happened frequently), or the fact that so few survivors made it back alive or even that those survivors survived only by eating their less fortunate shipmates (that wasn't all that rare either). Rather, to their credit, the people of Nantucket were ashamed of the fact that the first men to be eaten were black.

The black whalers were not singled out for consumption before they died, but they did die before their white shipmates, whether because of a poorer diet aboard the ship (the best food was reserved for officers and the men from Nantucket) or less fat content in their bodies. Nantucket had always prided itself on its opposition to slavery and its treatment of black people. There were several black men aboard the Essex, as on most whaling ships. So eating blacks first did not send the message the people of that town wanted to hear.

George Pollard, the captain of the Essex, was in command of his first ship. Unfortunately, he was never truly in command, usually yielding to the wishes of his other officers when they had a different opinion. This trait proved deadly after the whale deliberately crashed into the ship. Pollard wanted the three boats carrying survivors to head west, with the wind behind them, to Tahiti, which was relatively close. His officers, ironically as it turned out, feared being eaten by cannibals and favored sailing east toward South America. Pollard agreed, and the resulting journey took three months and cost most of them their lives.

Melville used the story of the Essex but, to his credit, reinvented it. Moby-Dick is a fictional masterpiece. The Essex story as told by Philbrick proves a masterpiece of the nonfiction variety.

Down-and-dirty at Merriam-Webster

Ever wonder where dictionaries come from? Probably not. Dictionaries are just something we ignore until we need to know how a word is spelled or exactly what it means. And for most people, that isn't often.

It turns out that making a dictionary is a long, intense, complicated process that few people can do. Those who can think it's the best job in the world, however poor the pay and long the hours. So writes Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper in her marvelous book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.

Stamper calls her book "a nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty, worm's eye's-eve-view of lexicography," and that seems fitting. In her relatively short book, she covers in sparkling prose how they define words, how they decide on pronunciation, how they find examples of usage, how they date words, how they handle offensive and non-standard words and even how they respond to those who question their decisions.

Readers will find many surprises along the way. Here are some things that I found interesting:

* Merriam-Webster makes it a point to respond to every letter or email about its dictionaries.

* The hardest dictionary entries are those hardly anyone ever looks up in a dictionary. These are simple words like a, an, and and the. Stamper says she devoted a month to the word take, while a colleague spent nine months on run.

* Average production is one word per day per staff member, or about 250 words a year. That's why it takes years to produce a new dictionary.

* They never start a new dictionary at the letter A. One reason is that those who review dictionaries, and I have reviewed two or three in my career, usually start at the beginning and rarely read the whole thing. Since lexicographers, like everybody else, get better with practice, they save A for later.

* The lexicographers at Merriam-Webster rarely speak to each other during working hours. They communicate in writing. This informal code of silence helps with concentration. Most of them may be introverts anyway, so it's usually not a problem. One exception is the man responsible for determining how words are pronounced. He may go around the building asking staffers to say certain words.

* Stamper seems partial to words of the four-letter variety. With thousands of words at her command, one might expect more refined choices.

Synonyms not quite synonymous

"That's a good idea."

Most synonyms are not quite synonymous. That is, they are words that mean almost the same thing.

William Safire explores this thought in On Language in an essay about the word notion. At the time (1980), this word was in vogue as a synonym for the word idea. Safire’s point is that the two words are hardly synonyms at all. Notion, he said, is "a sneer word, meant to be applied to the quirky noodling that goes on in unthinking minds.”

I think Safire is a bit harsh in his treatment of the word, although I agree it suggests something much less substantial than an idea. A notion suggests to me an impulse, like a sudden notion to eat some popcorn or to take a walk. It can also suggest something less substantial than an idea, something that could be toppled by the first gust of reason. But I'll bet even Einstein had notions. And as Laurel and Hardy frequently illustrated, anyone can have an idea.

Safire also reflects on other possible synonyms for idea: He describes a thought as “a brief idea” (or perhaps he should have said "a sudden idea," because some thoughts, when put into words, can last for ages) and a concept as “an idea with big ideas.” The latter word sounds pretentious, something said by architects, film producers or dress designers. A thought may be a notion with more intellectual content.

If you enjoy words, you can play this game with almost any set of synonyms, reflecting upon how certain choices work best for certain situations. Take the words big, large, huge and enormous as examples. They mean the same thing, yet not quite. Large is like big, but with a little more class. Huge and enormous suggest something really, really big, but likewise enormous has a bit more class.

I recall the song Olive Oyl sings in the movie Popeye when she is trying to convince her friends, but mostly herself, that Bluto is a good choice for a husband. Searching for positives, all she can come up with is that he is large. Imagine that song with the words big, huge or enormous, and it just wouldn't be as funny. Not just any synonym will do.

No harm, no foul

It was a week that saw a white girl wearing an Asian-style dress to a high school prom and being accused of the sin of “cultural appropriation” and Sweden confessing that Swedish meatballs actually had their origin in Turkey.

In the first instance, the only real sin was the cyber bullying on the part of the girl’s accuser, although perhaps he did her a favor. She now has the most famous prom dress in America.

The second news item seems slightly more serious, although thankfully not even the Turks are taking it seriously. They enjoy the Swedish meatballs served at Turkish Ikea stores just as they enjoy the meatballs served in their own homes and restaurants. Turkey likes the attention being given to its meatballs, as China likes the attention being given its traditional style of clothing. As they say in sports: No harm, no foul.

Apparently a Swedish king back in the 18th century visited Turkey, loved their meatballs and brought the recipe home with him, where the meatballs became a Swedish favorite and then an international favorite. The Turkish connection unfortunately got lost along the way.

Rightly or wrongly, the names of places have often become attached to certain foods. We have, for example, French fries, French bread, French dressing, Belgian waffles, German potato salad, Irish stew, Italian dressing, Italian bread, Danish pastry, Spanish rice, Cuban sandwiches and so on. The other day I noticed Panamanian ceviche on a restaurant menu. Put pineapple in anything and you seem to be able to add the word Hawaiian to its name. Even when the food tastes less than authentic to those familiar with the food actually served in those places, the names seem more a compliment than an insult.

When my wife and I toured France 15 years ago, we stopped one day at a small restaurant across the street from a castle and ordered sandwiches. Then Linda asked the counter man for some French fries. He didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak French, so what she got was a cup of ice cubes. Because soft drinks in Europe are served at room temperature, I was glad to have them.

What Americans call French fries, the French call pommes frites, or just frites. Supposedly Thomas Jefferson had a French chef in the White House who served potatoes fried in this style. They were a hit with Jefferson’s guests, and they soon became known as “French fries” in the United States. According to a Wikipedia article, however, this manner of preparing potatoes may have actually had its origin in Belgium or Spain.

People are free to disagree, of course, but let's hope they also continue to enjoy the freedom to call their food dishes whatever they choose and, whatever their cultural origin, to wear the clothing they choose, whatever its cultural origin.

Novel with a message

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

Martin Luther King

Jodi Picoult is a novelist known for tackling worthy causes. Her books often come with messages attached, and her best-selling 2016 novel Small Great Things attempts to live up to its title by tackling the cause of racial justice. Her message: Most white people in America are racists whether they think they are or not.

Ruth Jefferson, the middle-aged widow of a war hero, is an experienced nurse in the maternity ward of a Connecticut hospital. She is also the only black nurse in her section. When a racist couple, Turk and Brit Bauer, objects to a black nurse caring for their newborn son, the nursing supervisor orders Ruth to stay away.  Then when Ruth is left alone with the newborns and the Bauer baby dies suddenly, she becomes the hospital’s scapegoat and is charged with murder.

The novel has three first-person narrators — Ruth, Turk and Kennedy, the public defender assigned to represent Ruth. Viewing the situation, including a tense trial, from all three perspectives, shows readers that there are at least three ways of looking at it and, surprisingly, leads to some measure of sympathy for each character.

Even so the author concludes there is really only one way of looking at race relations in America, Ruth's way, or more accurately Picoult's way. So the novel, with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, presents its message, then underlines it, highlights it in yellow and slaps it on a billboard. Even Turk buys into it by the story's end.

Small Great Things offers fine reading and will give readers much to think about. If only it didn't try so hard to tell us what to think.

The right way to spell right

Middle English, the form of English in use when it became an official language of record, had a whopping seventy-seven recorded ways to spell “right.”

Kory Stamper, Word by Word

Kory Stamper

This boggles my mind. Seventy-seven ways to spell a one-syllable word? Middle English refers to the English spoken in England from about 1150 to 1500. At that time relatively few people could read and write, meaning that those 77 different spellings come from a relatively small sample of written material. This was also, for the most part, before the printing press, not to mention dictionaries and the standardized spelling that resulted from these developments. So this meant that when those few people who could write in Middle English did write, they were free to spell words however they thought they should be spelled, by sounding them out like a first-grader. Readers then had to say the words and decide from sound and context what they meant.

But how many ways can you spell right by sounding it out? I can do right, rite, rit, write and that’s about it. I don’t think I could come up with 73 more. Fortunately Kory Stamper gives us the whole list. I won’t list them all, but here are some of them: reght, reghte, reht, reit, rethe, reyght, rich, richt, riht, rihtt, rihtte, rit, ritth, rothes, ryde, ryg, rygt, ryt, ryth and wryght. And that's just 20.

Some of those spellings seem weird to us, but then r-i-g-h-t seems a bit weird, as well, with two of the five letters being silent and seemingly unnecessary. Why do you suppose they settled on that spelling rather than something simpler like reit or ryt?

Many English spellings seem strange, but we can all be thankful that somebody, perhaps Samuel Johnson in many cases, settled the matter long ago. At least we no longer must decide between rihtte, ritth and 70-some other possibilities.