the story of a story

When I graduated from college and went off to work as a reporter, my favorite journalism professor—Tommy Miller was his name but we just called him Miller—gave me two books as a going-away gift. One was The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, by Larry King (no, not that Larry King; the better one, in Texas), and a first edition of Crazy Salad, by Nora Ephron. Miller, an old UPI and Houston Chronicle reporter and editor, loved Ephron. He thought she was tough and brilliant and funny, and she was, and I hate knowing she’s no longer in the world.

Crazy Salad contains 25 of her 1970s essays from New York magazine, Esquire and others. Here’s the opening of “Dorothy Parker,” from 1973:

Eleven years ago, shortly after I came to New York, I met a young man named Victor Navasky. Victor was trying relentlessly at that point to start a small humor magazine called Monocle, and there were a lot of meetings. Some of them were business meetings, I suppose; I don’t remember them. The ones I do remember were pure social occasions, and most of them took place at the Algonquin Hotel. Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., we would meet for drinks there and sit around pretending to be the Algonquin Round Table. I had it all worked out: Victor got to be Harold Ross, Bud Trillin and C.D.B. Bryan alternated as Benchley, whoever was fattest and grumpiest got to be Alexander Wollcott. I, of course, got to be Dorothy Parker. It was all very heady, and very silly, and very self-conscious. It was also very boring, which disturbed me. then Dorothy Parker, who was living in Los Angeles, gave a seventieth-birthday interview to the Associated Press, an interview I have always thought of as the beginning of the Revisionist School of Thinking on the Algonquin Round Table, and she said that it, too, had been boring. Which made me feel a whole lot better.

In that same essay she wrote, “I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies—which I once thought of as totally unique—turn out to be cliches.”

Nora, dude, you were no cliche.

—pw

~ Henry Miller, via Dinty Moore

—courtesy my awesome friend Elyssa East

“Who wants a Papa Doble? Papa Doble: two and a half jiggers Bacardi white-label rum, juice of two limes, half a grapefruit, plus six drops of maraschino, pour the whole mess with shaved ice in an electric mixer and you’re ready to rumba. I invented the damn drink and I hold the house record in drinkin’ ‘em: seventeen.”

—Fake Hemingway to fake Gellhorn et al., Hemingway and Gellhorn

Received giddily by mail today: A Treasury of Great Reporting: “Literature Under Pressure” from the Sixteenth Century to Our Own Time, by Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris

There’s work in here by London, Twain, Greeley, Hugo, Liebling, Hersey, Pyle, Hemingway, Winchell — and hey, a woman! West! — and it’s so big and heavy it’ll someday need its own moving box.

Here’s a passage from Dickens, 1840s, covering the beheading of a highwayman in Rome:

He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had occasioned the delay.

He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head rolled instantly.

The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.

When it had traveled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in front—a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax. The body also.

There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.

Nobody cared or was at all affected. There was no manifestation of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. My empty pockets were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the scaffold, as the corpse was being put into its coffin. It was an ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but butchery, beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor. Yes! Such a sight has one meaning and one warning. Let me not forget it. The speculators in the lottery station themselves at favorable points for counting the gouts of blood that spurt out, here or there; and buy that number. It is pretty sure to have a run upon it.

The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed. The executioner: an outlaw ex officio (what a satire on the punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the Bridge of St. Angelo but to do his work: retreated to his lair and the show was over.

the nine stages of Story, as told by my house

A bit of loveliness from Katie Dobie’s Harper’s piece on sexual assault in Indian country, an ASME finalist.

At the sentence level alone, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s unsettlingly gorgeous epic about life in a Mumbai slum, already distinguishes itself as a teaching resource. And these lines are just from the prologue, people!

“He had deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks, a body work-hunched and wiry—the type that claimed less than its fair share of space when threading through people-choked slumlanes.”

“A modest, missable presence was a useful thing in Annawadi, the sumpy plug of slum in which he lived.”

“More cranes for making more buildings, the tallest of which interfered with the landing of more and more planes: It was a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course up there in the over-city, from which wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums.”

“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas.”

“Abdul’s mother was the haggler in the family, raining vibrant abuse upon scavengers who asked too much for their trash.”

“Abdul didn’t dare voice the great flaw of his father, Karam Husain: too sick to sort much garbage, not sick enough to stay off his wife.”

“To Abdul’s right, disconcertingly, came quiet snores: a laconic cousin newly arrived from a rural village, who probably assumed that women burned in the city every day.”

“Some days the lips were orange, other days purple-red, as if she’d climbed the jamun-fruit tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed it clean.”

“But most of them would gladly blow their noses in your last piece of bread.”

“Zahrunisa Husain was a tear-factory even on good days; it was one of her chief ways of starting conversations.”

Previous Lines to Love: Ben Hecht, from 1001 Afternoons in Chicago.

Henry Miller’s writing commandments, courtesy of Michael Kruse and Wright Thompson and a whole chain of others on Facebook.

My friend @JeffGordinier emails a poem a day by a range of poets. These often save me. I open the inbox and there waits a perfect moment of clarity or beauty or humor. Here’s today’s. It appeals on all levels but especially, maybe, to creative types. Enjoy.

Fortunes

You are just beginning to live.
You are original and creative.

You have a yearning for perfection.
Your winsome smile will be your protection.

You are contemplative and analytical by nature.
You will take a chance in the near future.

You have an active mind and a keen imagination.
Listening is half of a conversation.

You love sports, horses and gambling but not to excess.
From now on your kindness will lead to success.

Your luck has been completely changed today.
Be direct, one can accomplish more that way.

You will get what you want through your charm and personality.
You will enjoy good health, you will be surrounded by luxury.

Someone is speaking well of you.
Now is the time to try something new.

— David Trinidad

The great war reporter Ernie Pyle supposedly rarely took notes. Truman Capote professed to have a memory so flawless he could recall entire conversations whole. (Sorry, TC, not buying it, and neither does Joshua Foer.) Even in intense, fast-moving situations some journalists take zero notes because they believe they can remember everything: the precise sequence of actions, who said what, what people looked like or were wearing. (Again, not buying it.)

Cops can tell you about the fallibility of human memory. Ask 10 witnesses to describe the same event, or even the same person, and most of the time those witnesses will say 10 different things. Even those of us trained in observation and detail get it wrong, especially under pressure. I recently ran a surprise observation/scene exercise in a class full of world-class journalists and not a single person remembered everything correctly. Nor did I. In this exercise some students have been known to get even a participant’s race wrong.

“… More than half of what we experience is inaccessible to memory within a single hour,” Ed Cooke writes in a recent edition of The Guardian. (Thanks for the link, @AlisonLoat.) Which is scary/instructive.

I use this checklist with students but it’s solid for all of us who are in the business of telling true stories. We’re all students of the craft, no matter how long we’ve been in the game.

>Don’t assume your memory is perfect, even if you’re highly decorated and have been in the field a bajillion years (and maybe especially if you’ve been in the field a bajillion years).

>Cross-check sources’ recollections, if possible—via other sources, video/audio footage, personal observation. (Remember the scene in Shattered Glass where Chuck Lane makes Stephen Glass take him to the site of the alleged hacker convention and learns first hand that the space was closed on the day the convention supposedly happened. You can thank @penenberg for that one; he’s the one who busted Glass.)

>Document: Write it down, film it, record it—whatever you have to do to freeze it accurately in time.

>Look for paper trails—and be skeptical of them. Witnesses to the same event may recall the details differently but consensus leads—if nine of 10 witnesses said the suspect was 5-8 and one said 6-3, you’re going with the 5-8. And if you have the pleasure of a solid paper trail, read everything. What if you stopped w/the witness who reported 6-3?

>Practice better observation/focus/recall techniques. There’s books about this stuff.

>Review the facts as soon as you’ve experienced them. The 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found what “has become one of the few certainties of neuroscience: namely, that all memories grow continuously weaker, but that the rate of ‘decay’ lessens each time you review the information,” according to the above-linked Guardian piece.

>Make no excuses. “Oh but that’s more or less what happened”—not good enough. “Fact checking will fix it”—a dangerous and sloppy journalistic work ethic.

You, as the reporter, are the first line of defense. Your goal should be for fact checkers—should you be lucky enough to work with them—to find little to nothing to correct. (Never happens but still, a worthy ideal.) If you’re doing your job you won’t be missing the larger substance of the story by paying attention to the details.

Here’s a whole candy store of recent stuff about memory.

Have memory/reporting tips/checklists of your own? Ping me @williams_paige and I’ll add ‘em.

If you use this at your next party, and don’t lie, you know you will, you may thank this dude, Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft in Seattle.

Q. How many writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Ten. One to change it; nine to think they could have done it better.

Q: How many writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: But why do we have to change it?

Q. How many editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Only one; but first they have to rewire the entire building.

Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: I can’t tell whether you mean “change a lightbulb” or “have sex in a lightbulb.” Can we reword it to remove ambiguity?

Q: If you want to change a lightbulb, how many editors do you need?
A: The way this is worded does not conform to our style guide.

Q: How many senior editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: You were supposed to have changed that lightbulb last week!

Q. How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. The last time this question was asked, it involved senior editors. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Copy editors aren’t supposed to change lightbulbs. They should just query them.

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: File a bug on that and we’ll triage it.

Q: How many localization program managers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Sorry, we already handed the lightbulb off, so we can’t change it.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Just one, but it takes at least three passes.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Depends on just how married the author is to the old lightbulb.

Two recipes, as told to me by my Aunt Zet

Chicken and Dressing

“Cook your chicken. Everybody says it’s better to do a hen than a chicken. You get it at the grocery store; you don’t have to go out and wring its neck or anything. Put it in a big pot and cover it with water and cut you up at least one onion and boil it till it’s done. If it’s a hen you’ll know it’s done when you can take the leg and wiggle it and pull it away from the hen. If it’s chicken it’s got to boil an hour and a half, and a hen a couple of hours.

“Cook it in a big pot—you’ve got to have lots of that broth, see. Put in your salt and your pepper and at least one onion; two wouldn’t hurt.

“Then you gotta cook your cornbread. You know how to cook cornbread. You’ll have to have that black skillet almost to the top to be sure you have enough. You’re gonna crumble up that cornbread in your pan, ever’ bit of it, and get two pieces of loaf bread—if you don’t have loaf bread, don’t go out and buy it, but if you have any get a couple of slices and mix it in with the cornbread. Then cut up two large onions and about eight eggs—everybody says the more eggs and onions, the better it’ll taste.

“Mix all of it up and pull all the chicken off the bone and put it in there.

“Put your chicken in there and then get the broth and put it in there. Throw all that in the pan with sage and butter. You get the sage at the grocery store. It’s in the spice column.

“So: cornbread, loaf bread, cut up those two big ol’ onions, you’re gonna pull the chicken off the bone, you’re gonna pour that broth in there, you’re gonna put two sticks of butter and then sprinkle that sage. This is where it gets to be tricky: I don’t know how much. Just dump it all in there and stir it with a big ol’ spoon. I sometimes mix it up right in the pan I’m gonna put it in, or I have one of these big Tupperware bowls. But it really doesn’t matter.

“Put it in the oven at the top, not way down low or you’ll burn the bottom. 350 degrees. Shake your pan, and when it don’t move, it’s done.”

Sweet Potato Casserole

“Get you three cups of cooked potatoes, mashed up. One cup of sugar. A half-cup of butter. Two eggs. One TABLESPOON vanilla. Put all these in a mixing bowl and mix it with a mixer. You’ve already scrunched up your potatoes with a fork. Then you put all that in and beat ‘em. Two or three minutes. Then pour ‘em in a casserole dish.

“The topping is one cup of brown sugar, one cup of pecans, half a cup of flour and one-third cup butter. Now DON’T MELT YOUR BUTTER. Put the butter in a bowl with your flour and brown sugar and cut it. Cut it with a fork. Soften it by letting it lay out where it won’t be so hard to scrunch up. But mash it up and stir it and cut it back and forth with a fork. I even use a knife sometimes and cut it all together that way. It ought to be something you can take and crumble with your hand. If you melt that butter, it changes the texture and then you get into a spoon deal.

“Just mix it all up with a fork and put it on top of the casserole and bake it for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.”

A thing I love (thanks, Jimmy Chen and htmlgiant.com)