Writing is using specifics and individuals to describe the universal, that’s all it is. A story can be told over and over again in a thousand ways with a thousand characters and still it will be true. Writers – and among them I’d include poets, novelists, journalists and ‘even’ politicians who can write (Obama’s Audacity of Hope happens to spring to mind! - have just started reading it after finally getting round to finishing the wonderful Animal's People by Indra Sinha) – are busy resuscitating myths, breathing them back to life to be consumed by a new hungry reader.
There’s been a bit of a writing theme to the past fortnight.
e.g. Journalism-related:
Last Wednesday I went to a TimesTalks event called Streets of New York: Writers Covering the City, where New York Times journalists/columnists Clyde Haberman, Dan Barry, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Susan Dominus talked about just what the title suggests – writing about NYC. And yes, as their names give away, the panel consisted of four men (average age 50+ I’d say), and one woman (who was clearly the youngest on the panel). At times it seemed as though the men were a little unsure about how to react to this young female journo in their midst, hence ignored her, or came out with comments such as, “Well, I guess all of us find ourselves inevitably covering sport in our writing about NYC to some extent, except I suppose you Susan, so you can be exempted from this question.” But gender-imbalances and slight aura of fusty institutions aside, the event was a riveting masterclass in the rather precise art of writing columns on city life. At one point Susan Dominus said - not doing much to remedy her minority representation - that she wished she had a pen and paper with her, so she could take notes on the nuggests of writers' wisdom, well more like worldliness, that her counterparts were spouting in their answers. Well lucky me sitting in the audience did have a pen, as well as my little red diary that keeps getting used as a notebook and is therefore getting taken over by spidery scribblings. There's not much clear space left now in the “December” and name & address section at the back; November’s pristine days will also soon be numbered I think.
Jimmy Breslin, who’s been covering the city and its gangs and its under- and uber-worlds and its changes for years sat in the middle of the five, a bit like a king flanked by courtiers. With his bright white hair, high forehead and black-framed glasses, he remained totally impassive as Clyde Haberman, who was chairing, introduced him in laudatory terms. He remained totally impassive too, when delivering his quips and cutting comments that had the audience in stitches, and when painting pictures through descriptions of the people he’s met. Such as the man who was translating Mein Kampf and insisted on having a secretary in his room the whole time he worked, even though there was nothing for her to do. When Jimmy asked why he needed her there, he said it was because he didn’t want to find himself alone in the room with Hitler.
Even though the panellists ask questions for a living, none of them was particularly good at listening to or answering them (that was also the case when John Humphrys interviewed Jeremy Paxman last year; guess it makes sense that they’re not used to and don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of questioning, would be a bit like a dentist finding himself in his chair having his teeth extracted by his patient...or something).
On writing about New York, Jimmy said he hasn’t had a cold in 50 years because of the permanent inspiration that comes from writing about the city. For Pete, the fact that NYC’s a large city where “sex, power and money are concentrated” gives it “a sense of outrageousness.” He described how each day you come to expect / hope for a murder – which reminded me of my sense of deflation the previous Sunday when I learned the reason the stretch of the West Highway near our apartment had been closed by police in the morning was due to falling scaffolding and building materials, nothing more gory.
On nostalgia, they talked about how it's one of NYC’s dominant emotions, how you know you’re really a New Yorker when what used to be somewhere is more real than what is there now, how living in New York is like “being at a wake the whole time”, and how it's hard to avoid writing at least the occasional story on the market that’s been closed to make way for a Starbucks, the community center that's been erased by expensive apartments. Bad journalist me didn’t make it entirely clear in my notes who was saying what hence I’m avoiding attribution. Other, that is, than to say that none of those nostalgia points were made by Jimmy. His take on that was “Worry about today and tomorrow. You don’t get paid from yesterday.” And “Away with ghosts. To hell with them.”
On writing columns, Dan said the crucial difference between them and features is that they have an opinion (of course) - though not an opinion just in and of itself, but an opinion fed by facts and colour. Yes, said Jimmy, you need a person or story at the beginning, then, “rising up with strong legs in the middle” is “the opinion”. Use, said Pete, all senses to make it vivid; smells etc. (not hard in NYC) that bring it to life in ways that television never could. And a good column needs to get two reactions from the reader: “I didn’t know that,” and “I never thought of it that way before." Which begs the point that if you didn’t know it, of course you’d never thought of it that way before – but I guess he’s saying it's either/or, or that both are different versions of the same thing. Jimmy added a third reaction to strive for: “If you can get a smile you win.”
They clearly revel in their work; in the fun of exploring and reporting on the city, and also in the sense of power from telling it in their own words and being read. “It’s a delightful occupation,” said Jimmy in one of his most gentle and direct comments. Yet they did not overstate their importance either. Columnists are like soloists in a band, we get up for a few bars and then sit down again, one of them said. You just have space in a column for “some urgency, some vitality, a couple of grace notes, and then you're off.”
Well I’d like to write too about a very different writing-related scene – Ilya Kaminsky, a poet from Odessa – reading his extraordinarily beautiful poems at the KGB Bar on Friday night. And Tim Minchin the Aussie-born, London-living comedian I saw at New World Stages, followed by lots of sangria-drinking with some of the crew from the musical Celia (as in Celia Cruz). And the article in the Onion (hence spoof) re the novelists’ strike that’s having no impact whatsoever on any other industries or the economy. And the mastery of Animal as the narrator in Animal's People. But time for sleep, will write about those other writing things some other time…
No comments:
Post a Comment