The Mechanic & the Muse

Song story: Bonnie Raitt and narrative brevity

Want to amaze your friends? Impress your significant other? Be the hit of any writing brownbag? Pose this question:  What's the shortest story ever told?

Give your audience a few moments and then wow them with:

For sale.
Baby shoes.
Never worn.

Six words.

This story's provenance— the product of a bar bet waged by Ernest Hemingway—seems apocryphal, but I'm happy to be corrected by a reliable source.

But there's no question who wrote another masterpiece of brevity I've been obsessively playing on my iPod to and from work: Bonnie Raitt's "Nick of Time."

I marvel at the way the song treats universal themes--yearning, ravages of time, loss and redemption-- through a range of evocative characters, their predicament shaped by the classic beginning, middle and end triad, and, despite its brevity, a significant amount of repetition, all combined to produce a clear and compelling narrative:

A friend of mine she cries at night, and she calls me on the phone. Sees babies everywhere she goes and she wants one of her own. She's waited long enough, she says, and still he can't decide. Pretty soon she'll have to choose and it tears her up inside. She is scared. Scared to run out of time.

Verse ii
--------
I see my folks, they're getting on and I watch their bodies change.
I know they see the same in me, and it makes us both feel strange.
No matter how you tell yourself, it's what we all go through;
Those eyes are pretty hard to take when they're staring back at you:
Scared to run out of time.

Chorus
------
When did the choices get so hard?
With so much more at stake
Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste.
Waste.
Hummmm...scared to run out of time.

Verse iii
---------
Just when I thought I'd had enough and all my tears were shed
No promise left unbroken, there were no painful words unsaid.
You came along and showed me how to leave it all behind.
You opened up my heart again and then much to my surprise,
I found love, love, in the nick of time.
I found love, darling, love in the nick of time
I found love, baby, love in the nick of time

--"Nick of Time." Words and music by Bonnie Raitt

A story, whole, in just 255 words. It's 3 minutes, 52 seconds of music are best appreciated by ear or earbud. (The tinny 29-second Amazon.com sample doesn't do justice to Raitt's whiskey voice or her soulful backup).

How does she do it in so short a space? That's why I enjoy listening to the song and pondering the power of its lyrics. 

The best search engines of all

The Internet is a library that is open 24 hours a day, needs no library card and features no “Shhh” signs. But the wise writer knows it’s not the only research source.

As a young reporter, I was fortunate to have a reference librarian in my family: my older brother, Jeff.

For the first several years of my career, when I worked at small newspapers that didn’t employ librarians, a call to Jeff was one of my first reporting steps. He introduced me to the Encyclopedia of Associations, brainstormed ideas, and searched card catalogues for books that added depth to my reporting.

In the years to come, other research professionals became invaluable collaborators on stories. (Unable to afford a house on a librarian's salary, Jeff eventually got a job on Wall Street. "I'm doing the same thing," I recall him telling me when he started the job. "They just pay a lot more for the information.") 

These days, I rely on David Shedden, Director of the Eugene Patterson Library at Poynter, and his always helpful staff: Kathy Holmes, Maria Jaimes and Jean Wood.

A librarian can save you time, help you avoid research cul de sacs and, before you can say Dewey Decimal, locate the fact that will help make your stories accurate. In our Googling era, an informed, curious, and patient mind remains the best search engine.

An exciting new feature on emdashes, the blog that takes us between the lines of The New Yorker, has resurfaced the memory of those desperate phone calls to Jeff at the Greenwich Public Library when I was scrambling to get up-to-speed on a topic I knew nothing absolutely about and had to write about it in a few hours. I admit journalism's not rocket surgery; it's harder.

Emily Gordon, emdashes' creator, has just delivered on her promise of a monthly column written by the magazine's senior library staff. In a promising debut, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey tackle A.J. Liebling's start at the magazine; the status of typewriters in the New Yorker's digs; and an illuminating revelation about the fact-checking of cartoons.

And best of all, you can, through emdashes, submit questions to the pair. Let's see, how many rejections did it take before the magazine published a short story by Bobbi Ann Mason?

 

Image source: Northport-East Northport (NY) Public Library 

New Yorker fans

Heads-up!

Not just because it's Sunday and the magazine puts selected pieces on its website, with, sadly, a shelf life of just a week. That's important if you're too impatient to wait for the postman. Or, as in my case, you've been swallowed up by the subscription dept. and haven't seen a fresh issue in my mailbox for weeks.

While you're waiting, check out emdashes, a terrific and exceedingly generous blog by Emily Gordon, who's dedicated herself to explore where the emdash—a puncutation mark the length of the letter that serves an interstital purpose—goes, in this case, between the lines and behind the stories of The New Yorker.

emdashes is the place to go if you're wondering what the word "hirple" and other unfamiliar words mean in the Galway Kinnell poem, "Burning the Brush Pile," from the June 19 issue.

Or would appreciate the insiders account of how "Brokeback Mountain" went from an Annie Proulx NYer story to a MMP (major motion picture) and why you can't read it online.

Or, crave links to stories written by mag's regulars (or as one of our daughters at a much younger age referred to as "usuals) : Katherine Boo, Malcolm Gladwell, Rebecca Mead and others whose work reappears elsewhere online. 

Like the best blogs, emdashes is fueled by obsession. "Like me, you read The New Yorker. With interest. Loyally, actively, critically. Ardently," says Gordon, an editor at Print magazine with an impressive freelancer's pedigree.

If, like me, you fit the profile, Gordon's obsession will give more than enough to satisfy your own in the emdashes between issues.

Image sources: emdashes logo by Jennifer Hadley

Point-of-view narrative

The term is Bryan Burrough's, who knows a lot about narrative himself. He was co-author, with John Helyar, of the 1990 narrative nonfiction blockbuster turned HBO movie, "Barbarians at the Gate:The Fall of RJR Nabisco," a  page-turning exploration of the back-stabbing greed behind leveraged buyouts that made the rich richer and the working class unemployed.

Burrough calls "point of view narrative" a new hybrid of the factual storytelling genre; he uses it to describe the approach taken by Ron Suskind in his 2004 book, "The Price of Loyalty," that profiled the quixotic struggles of the Bush Administrations first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neil. Look for his John Hancock on your greenbacks.

Suskind harvested "The Price of Loyalty"  a treasure trove provided by O'Neil: thousands of documents that passed O'Neil's desk, reconstructions of Cabinet and one-on-one meetings with the President and the notoriously tight-lipped Alan Greenspan, buttressed by the note-taking and memory banks of an extraordinarily anal-retentive retired CEO and old Washington hand who served the Nixon and Ford White Houses before signing on with Bush 43.  However well-intentioned, O'Neil's version of events can't avoid a self-righteous "tell-all" taint, especially since it was written after O'Neil was shit-canned after two years on the job for not staying on message and challenging the Bush administration's economic polices.

Doing a mega-publicized tour of Africa with Bono didn't help either.

The book provided a legendary exchange, provided by Suskind's cabinet-level fly on the wall. It came when O'Neil pushed back against a $1.35 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of the population. prompting Dick Cheney to allegedly respond: "We won the mid terms. It's our due."

As narrative, Burrough says, "The Price of Loyalty "was a fascinating exercise, essentially O’Neill’s memoir under Suskind’s byline, and suggested a new hybrid at work: the point-of-view narrative." New?  "Point of view" is one of the most controversial of the literary devices employed by narrative nonfiction writers since the 1960s. Suskind's approach also echoes the time-honored 'as told to" genre, but avoids the era's spate of ghost-written books "written" by politicians; Burrough is correct that he's taken it to a new level.

"Everybody won. Suskind was able to tell a fly-on-the-wall, insidery account of the Bush White House, never mind that he really possessed just one fly on the wall. O’Neill not only got to vent his spleen, he avoided the unpleasantries of the sour-grapes memoir — all those god-awful evenings with Larry King and Anderson Cooper — while his views gained credibility by passing through the typewriter of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist."

Reviewing Suskind's new book, "The One Per Cent Doctrine,"  in the New York Times this weekend,  Burrough detects another product of the point of view/fly on the wall narrative. The big difference this time: Suskind has more flies at his disposal, among them former CIA director George "It's a slam dunk" Tenet, and his allies in Langley's spook factory."

For all its insider glimpses, "The One Per Cent Doctrine" magnifies the dangers in point of view narrative. Burroughs says:

"The problem is that Tenet, however central, was just one horse in a crowded field. President Bush is here, as are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. There’s no hint, though, that any of them said word one to Suskind. There’s no attribution, a concern magnified in the point-of-view format, but their every appearance clearly arrives through the eyes of Tenet or his men. It’s not so much that the text is ill informed. It’s just one set of hands on a very big elephant."

Over the last week, I've read both Suskind's books. Ultimately, they suggest to me that history is written by the first flies on the wall to alight on a keyboard,  especially one wielded by a writer of Suskind's quality, a Burrough characterization I agree with:

"That it works as well as it does is testimony to the author’s narrative skills. Suskind was a top-notch newspaperman, one of the best natural writers The Wall Street Journal (where I also once worked) ever produced, and he commands an authorial voice many journalists can only dream of. Give him an hour with a cooperative source, and he’ll give you six pages of beautiful scene-setting, scissor-sharp dialogue and a nugget or two of insight; his discussion of Bush’s view of the Iraq war as a global “game changer” is eye-opening. "

But Burrough's description of a point of view narrative's fault lines should sound a klaxon alarm for writers who venture into point of view narrative:

"Time and again his ambition outstrips his source base. Every hot button of the last five years is pressed — Tora Bora, torture, nuclear proliferation, Libya, Iraq, Valerie Plame, W.M.D. and many more — but what we get are narrative bits and pieces, inevitably scenes built around Tenet or an aide, rather than anything approaching a rigorous, detailed exploration of the issue, much less a rigorous, detailed retelling of what actually happened."

A conversational, Everyman voice is one of Suskind's strengths, making it, as Burrough ends his review, "an easy and worthwhile summer read."

That would be music to a writer's ears--and bank account--but it's a discordant note for  readers, like me, who prefer nonfiction narratives that depend on more substantial underpinnings than a fly glued to the wall.

One such book is Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001." It's as eminently readable, also Pulitzer-Prize winning, and equally alarming as "The One Per Cent Doctrine." But its rigorous sourcing documented in voluminous end notes, left me with a firmer, and more confident understanding of how we've gotten into the Middle East mess we're in today.

But that's just my point of view. 

Image Sources: O'Neil's signature-U.S. Treasury Dept.; Bono and O'Neil: SAURABH DAS/AP; Fly-Mark Plonsky

The smell of war

We know all about the fog of war, but what about its smells?

In newsrooms where I've visited I usually offer a bounty for anyone who can locate a story with sensory details that require the nose. I've never had any takers.

But Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, must know their  value. My nose for olfactory news sniffed out a pungent line in his story from Beirut where the war between Israel and "the radical Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah," sparked by the capture of two Israeli soldiers. He quotes a Lebanese victim of an Israeli air strike:

 

"They don't want to strike civilians? Then why are they doing it?" asked Mohammed Fathi, a 37-year-old resident of south Beirut. He stood outside Harkous Chicken, the restaurant where he works as a chef. The smell of peppers mixed with the reek of cordite, and workers swept shattered glass off the street near a bridge destroyed in a pre-dawn airstrike. The facades of nearby buildings were sheared off, and cars with broken windows sat parked along a street strewn with debris."

Not a pleasant combination--peppers and the smokeless gunpowder--but coupled with visuallly vivid details, one that that helped Shadid put readers on the scene.

In general, newswriters rarely take advantage of our olfactory sense, arguably our most evocative, even though it takes up a minuscule amount of space in our brains. For instance, I can't catch of whiff of patchouli without being drawn back to 1974 when I was in Quebec, learning how to speak French in preparation for a Peace Corps assignment in French West Africa.

And why else did real estate agents advise sellers to have cookies baking when prospective buyers arrived, but to evoke pleasant childhood memories? (They've since found out that a couple of drops of vanilla on a burning lightbulb will trigger the same memories.)

For more on the subject, see my column, "Writing with Your Nose," featuring the olfactory writing of novelist Richard Price (Clockers, Freedomland), various ways to use smells in your writing and a brief explanation of how smells work.

Here's a tip on how to put your nose to the keyboard: Next time you're reporting a story, add to what it looks, sounds and feels like a detail that conveys what it smells like, too.

Pigging out on questions

Two words in today's New York Times jumped off the screen, prompting me to write this "Chip on Your Shoulder" column.

Researching and writing it helped me reconsider my criticism of the interviewing methods of the White House press corps. At the same time, it gave me hope; perhaps there's growing awareness that the way journalists ask questions often plays into the hands of sources intent on controlling their message.

Best of all, I got to find out how many things the phrase "double-barreled" can modify.

And to think it all started with a simple barbecue, German style.

Photo: REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Dick Cheney walks into a bar

A book I should be reading, according to two people whose tastes I respect-- my oldest brother Jay, a retired banker, and Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist, is Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Per Cent Doctrine."

I had the privilege of a brief friendship with Ron when we were both reporters at the St. Petersburg Times in the mid-80s.  Ron went on to an illustrious career at the Wall Street Journal and then as an author, beginning with "A Hope in the Unseen," based on a 1995 Pulitzer Prize winning series for the Journal. In recent years, Ron's reporting behind the firewall of the Bush spin machine published in magazines and books has been a thorn in the Bush administration's side.

Besides the "must read" advice from my brother and Rich, there's another interesting reaction I stumbled upon. This one came from John Allen Paulos, a mathematician committed to making the science of numbers accessible to those, like me, who saw in journalism a refuge from math. Oh hell, basic arithmetic can be a challenge.

The first weekend of every month, Paulos demystifies math in his aptly named  column, "Who's Counting?," published on ABCNews.com. In his latest, Paulos takes on what Suskind terms as Vice-President Cheney's "One Per Cent Doctrine" from a mathematician's perspective. Paulos writes:

Suskind describes the Cheney doctrine as follows: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. It's not about 'our analysis,' as Cheney said. It's about 'our response.' … Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."

Ron Suskind writes that Vice President Dick Cheney forcefully stated that the war on terror empowered the Bush administration to act without the need for evidence or extensive analysis."

Buttressed by that single digit, Paulos considers the 1 percent rule in other contexts, some which support the notion and others which carry unthinkable conclusions. He continues:

"There is a complex interplay between an act's possible consequences, evidence, and the probabilities involved. And sometimes, of course, the probability justifying action of some sort is even less than 1 percent. Vaccines are routinely given, for example, even for diseases whose risk of being contracted is much less than 1 percent.

That being granted, the simplistic doctrine of "if at least 1 percent, then act" is especially frightening in international conflicts, not least because the number of threats misconstrued (by someone or other) to meet the 1 percent threshold is huge and the consequences of military action are so terrible and irrevocable.

But what if, Paulos wonders:

"A young man is in a bar and another man gives him a hard stare. If the young Cheneyite feels threatened and believes the probability to be at least 1 percent that the other man will shoot him, then he has a right to preemptively shoot him in "self-defense."

"Or an older woman visits her Cheneyite doctor who, finding that the woman has suffered from a sore throat and fatigue for months, orders that she be put on chemotherapy since the likelihood of cancer is in his opinion at least 1 percent. Further tests, he might argue, would take too long."

The bottom line for Paulos: 

"Whether the issue is war, science, or a myriad of other issues, probability and evidence should play a critical role."

Even somebody who bombed on the math portion on their SATs can figure that one out.

(Source for book cover and author photo: ronsuskind.com)