Anyone catch Ms. Knowles on the Kennedy Center awards show last night? She appeared during the final portion of the show, honoring Barbra Streisand. Notwithstanding my recent remarks about Beyonce's limited dancing skills, the girl can sing. Yes, we knew this...but my God can she sing! I actually think she out-Streisanded Streisand on The Way We Were. (Say what you will about the song itself, which some might consider schmaltzy, it's one of those "showcase"-type vehicles that separate the singers from the people who merely sing, if you get my drift.) I bet she could even rehabilitate Way/Were for a contemporary audience if she covered it on a CD, much as Tony Bennett did on several albums of standards a few years back.
I was also reminded of Jordin Sparks' moving and powerful rendition of The National Anthem (complete with the by-now-familiar "Whitney Houston replacement chords") before last year's Super Bowl. Gave me chills.
Speaking of the Super Bowl (and possibly chills as well), the Feb. issue of Playboy, with my long article on NFL officials, should be on the stands any day now. The piece describes "The Play" from last year's Super Bowl through the eyes of ref Mike Carey and the other six officials who were on-field at the time, weaving neat details about the officiating life into the narrative. It gives male readers a plausible reason for bringing the magazine home, and hey, who knows, you might run across some of the girls from Momma's Boys....
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Carl Bartecchi, MD, distinguished professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, got in touch with me after reading my piece on alternative medicine in The Wall Street Journal last week. He included a link to his site, HealthierLongerLife.org. It appears to be a cyber-distillation of a new book he's written that's along the lines of You: The Owner's Manual, except with a more preventive-medicine-type twist; the subtitle is "What Works and What Doesn't." While we're on the subject of what works, I'm not sure that all the internal links of his site do—at least, not on my browser (Firefox). You can, however, navigate around from the "home" position and get to just about everywhere you need to go. SHAMblog regulars know that I seldom if ever link to another site, especially one with commercial aspirations, but Bartecchi provides a wealth of useful (and free) information all in one place.
Incidentally, I was gratified to note that James Randi gave a nice plug to the Journal piece on his site this morning: "The Wall Street Journal gave us all a Christmas present," writes Jeffrey Wagg* on page 1 of the JREF site.
Happy New Year, folks, if we don't meet again before 2009.
* and could there be a more appropriate name for a skeptic?
Some years ago in California, I took the long, guided version of the Universal Studios tour, and I recall being quite impressed by the presentation on sound-effects and allied tricks of the trade. Among other things that day, I finally learned who or what the "Foley artist" was in a film's closing credits—this, after a lifetime of wondering. It was fascinating to watch the little ruses these specialists use to get just the right sound, and I was shocked to discover how low-tech so much of this is (or was at the time, anyway. For example, to mimic the clatter produced by a cantering horse, a guy would drop down on all fours and clop around on different surfaces with wooden shoes on his hands till he got it just right). What I remember most specifically is the presentation on gunshots and the noises employed to evoke same. You see, the report of most actual guns, the sound-effects guy explained, "isn't loud enough or dramatic enough for the director's purposes. It's too much like the description you always hear in news stories, when witnesses aren't even sure at first that what they heard was a gunshot. 'The pop of a firecracker.' " He smiled. "The director wants you to be sure. He wants a robust, room-filling, resonant sound, typically with some degree of echo to it." Which explains why just about every gun fired in a movie or on TV, even those sleek, tiny jobs female villains withdraw from their purses, end up sounding like Dirty Harry's .44 magnum.
Think about that for a minute. We can't use the sound of the actual thing to represent itself in a film, because it's not loud or dramatic enough. The actual sound made by the actual thing is not convincing. We're talking about devices that are capable of ending a human life in an instant, and we need a fake sound to keep us interested.
This also explains, in part, why The Beautiful People, men and women alike, are never quite beautiful enough. Their photos need retouching...as do their physical faces and bodies. The results of the latter endeavor sometimes are so laughable (if not downright hideous) as to make a mockery of the honest beauty the individuals in question once had; see under Priscilla Presley (top) or Wayne Newton (who today somewhat resembles Schwarzenegger in Terminator, except that Ahnold's eyes came out looking better).
No doubt this same phenomenon helps explain why people making decent money and supporting themselves and their families in perfectly adequate fashion need to buy things that blow the budget—cars, clothes, watches, jewelry, whatever—to make themselves look even more successful than they are. It used to be that if and when you attained wealth, you started accoutering yourself with the things that wealth can provide. Credit cards changed all that. Now we want the trappings of wealth even if we don't have the actual "condition" of wealth (which, of course, most of us don't).
I find it both ironic and tragicomic that it's not enough to own a nice-looking purse to carry the money you don't have; it has to be a certain kind of purse. (Chew on this one a while: Some of us will pay twice the price of a "normal" handbag in order to get a fake version of an expensive handbag—at half price. WTF??) Others—this is typical of young men—will look down their noses at a reliable new car that gets good gas mileage and has a bumper-to-bumper warranty in order to drive, instead, a (very) used "status" car with no warranty that guzzles gas, has a history of breaking down, and incurs prohibitive repair costs when it does. As I explained in last Friday's piece for the New York Daily News, America enjoys the distinction of having one of the lowest saving rates in the free world. Let me amend that: We don't really have a saving rate. Not anymore. As of 2005, we began spending every dime we earned and then some, as each of us pursued our own personal vision of Eckhart Tolle's Now.
We're bankrupting ourselves and driving ourselves crazy in the rabid pursuit of the inauthentic. On last night's episode of Momma's Boys* a young woman tearfully explained to one of the Mommas that she'd put herself $136,000 in debt by trying to "be the best me" she could be—a process that apparently included relentless shopping for showy clothes she couldn't afford, a nose job, Botox (the lass is all of 25, I believe), and two breast enhancements. To be clear: I don't simply mean that she had both breasts done, which of course is the usual. I mean that she had both breasts done twice. Once again I was mindful of a question I've posed a number of times on SHAMblog: If, in order to "be the best you that you can be," you have to become someone/something else...are you still you?
Which brings us, at long last, to self-help. If you think about it, SHAMland sells unreality packaged as reality. It is forever telling you to inhabit a world that is not the world that palpably surrounds (and characterizes) you. Consider, for example, one of the cornerstones of modern-style Empowerment: affirmations or self-talk. I am rich, I am powerful, I make my own rules. Those things are not—in the present moment—true. But you're counseled to think and behave as if they are (often, I would argue, to your detriment). Even in Tolle's case, the Now that he famously urges upon his disciples is not the literal Now, but a conjured, idealized one. It's a Now stripped of its negatives, or with its negatives spun so as to deny them or rationalize them into oblivion. Today's Empowerment sells a faux world of limitless possibility (false, or at best misleading) where you take the leap (dangerous) and the Universe promptly rewards you (as if!). We'd do well to remember that immersing ourselves in the Now won't prevent consequences Later: little things like, say, bills and babies.
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This example just occurred to me, and it's another busy day, so rather than figure out how to integrate it into the post as a whole I'm merely adding it as a postscript. But this abandonment of the true Self in order to embrace some communal, idealized version of "self" is, in the end, pointless and self-defeating. The example that occurred to me is the Movado watch. Once upon a time, maybe a decade or so ago, owning a Movado was considered special; the watch, or "timepiece," was a status symbol. Now, every married woman I know owns (at least) one. So we're back to square one again. It's as if no one owned one. The culture moves on to the next toy/trinket that serves as an artificial index of "worth." * OK, I admit it, I watched again. But at least partly, I was looking for fodder for this post.
"The Eagles just seem like they have more fire—more 'want to'—than the Cowboys. And they seemed that way from the beginning." —FOX commentator (and former Cowboys QB) Troy Aikman, very late in the third quarter of Sunday's Eagles-Cowboys game, which would determine the final NFL wild card spot. Aikman says this with the Eagles already winning, 44-3.
(First of all, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming—which was supposed to be Part 2 of my post on reality TV—for this urgent dispatch from the land of positive thinking. We'll get back to what Megan Albertus tells us about life tomorrow or Wednesday. And so:)
But Troy (near right, with broadcast booth partner Joe Buck).... If you saw or sensed the Eagles' "fire" all along—"from the beginning," as you put it—why didn't you share this insight way back then? It would've been nice to try to get a last-minute bet down, especially knowing that it was a sure thing/easy money.
Someday I want to hear one of those pre-game analysts down on the field, a Suzy Kolber or Andrea Kremer, say something like, "I just got back from the two locker rooms, and people, let me tell you—aside from the fact that what they say about black guys is true—the Eagles are way more up for this game than the Cowboys. Dallas has no chance. They're toast. There's really no point in even playing the game." Never happen. The mention of attitude in a predictive sense is about as likely as the comment about black guys. Sports mavens wait to see something tangible—say, a lopsided score like 44-3—and then they go back and look for the supposed intangibles that explain it. And I'm just cynical enough to think that the reason sportscasters don't say anything at the outset is that they don't notice anything at the outset. Guys like Troy Aikman either go back later and infuse significance into little moments that meant nothing to them at the time, or they simply follow a script that they know is expected to be followed at a certain point in the action. Last night's game could've just as easily gone the other way, in which case Aikman would've given forth with the same basic quote, except he'd reverse the roles of the two teams, touting the mental preparation of the Cowboys. You can bet on it.
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P.S., 9:03 a.m. I guess it wasn't positive mental attitude that won the game for Philadelphia after all. Here is Eagles running back Correll Buckhalter's take on the bizarre confluence of circumstances that gave the league's final playoff spot to his team: "You can't explain what the power of prayer can do for you." I see. So I guess nobody prays for the Cowboys, or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, or the Chicago Bears (or maybe God doesn't listen to such prayers), all of whom had to lose in order for the Eagles to make the playoffs. For that matter, I guess no one was praying for the Eagles (or God had the sound turned off) prior to this weekend, because Philly lost an awful lot of games they should've won along the way. And yet you have to be careful saying things like this around most folks. You really do.
Take a stand for reason and common sense nowadays, and you become a pariah. * Regulars know that Sportsthink is my phrase for the assumption in sports (and increasingly elsewhere) that winning and losing are determined principally by mental attitude, not physical skills, random events, and plain dumb luck.
First off, quite a day for spreading the not-so-good word, at least in the New York market. I've got this piece, "The Poison of Positive Thinking,"* in TheNew York Daily News, as well as this one, "The Touch That Doesn't Heal," in The Wall Street Journal. If I do say so myself, I'm particularly proud of the latter, which critiques alternative medicine. Read 'em and weep.
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Over the past few days, since I blogged about Momma's Boys, I've exchanged a few emails with Newsday TV columnist Verne Gay on the subject of (pseudo) reality shows. We both find it fascinating that today's reality apparently isn't real enough for people—that marketing and ratings imperatives have pushed the very concept of reality TV into something that isn't reality. What began as art attempting to capture life soon became art imitating art capturing life, then art imitating an embellished vision of life as life might look if it had been captured at only its most compelling moments, and then...well, who the hell even knows where we are now.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this topic extends well beyond revenue-generating initiatives in which Ryan Seacrest has a Machavellian hand. I'm reminded of how few feathers were ruffled this past spring after famed photo retoucher Pascal Dangin, who is much in demand for making models look like what we expect our models to look like (in pictures anyway), casually told The New Yorker that he'd worked even on Dove Beauty Products' celebrated "real women" campaign, retouching the advertiser's "real women" to look not quite so...real. "Do you know how much retouching was on that?" he asked writer Lauren Collins at one point in the interview. (Though The New Yorker used a question mark at the end of that sentence, I rather picture an exclamation point.)
For the record, Dove categorically denied that its models had been airbrushed or otherwise modified in any meaningful way, and Dangin himself later backed away from his original remarks. That's not the point here. The point is that the mere allegation should've touched off a firestorm; there should've been women, angry mothers of impressionable teenage daughters who are compulsively dieting at great detriment to their health, marching in the streets, descending on Dove's corporate headquarters to demand an explanation. In fact the story broke and died in a matter of days. (Do you even recall hearing about it? 'Nuff said.) Especially in sophisticate circles, which tend to set the public agenda (or at least determine which themes and variations get the spotlight), the whole affair was greeted with shrugs and yawns. This tells me that many of us have become so jaded that we don't expect reality to be real anymore, even when we're ostensibly rejoicing at the very idea that real women can be (and are) beautiful—and we build an elaborate ad campaign around that theme.... In my mind's eye, I see some frazzled art director or account exec attached to the Dove campaign standing there biting his tongue or his index finger as he reviews the contact sheets for the photo sessions, trying to get through it all without making/demanding changes...but in the end he simply can't handle it. Can you just make them look a little bit better? he finally says in a soft voice... Or a she finally says it, which is sadder still. More next time, including how this connects up to SHAMland.
* Not my title, and a bit overstated, methinks. It was never my thesis that positive thinking is "poison," per se. I just have a major gripe with the way the concept is packaged for popular consumption.
So last night I'm allowing myself some guilty pleasure, watching Seacrest's latest opus, Momma's Boys. (If you haven't seen it, or the ads for it, think: The Bachelor with three annoying, wheedling and sometimes-racist mothers hovering nearby, micromanaging the romance.) And all show long—this is a two-hour show, mind you—I'm thinking about how, were I one of the Oedipal young men, I would not be gravitating to all the Barbie-haired, boob-jobbed blondes, or the flashy, stylin' black chicks.
Rather, I'd been drawn to the shy, retiring, bookish-looking one, identified to the viewing public as Megan Albertus—and ostensibly the only girl who came to the show with the modest breasts the good lord gave her.
Megan was presented to us as the last of a dying breed in today's era of the hook-up, a virginal femi-nerd and "pet caretaker" by trade. She cleans and "straightens up" obsessively, seems totally maladroit around the boys—even around the girls—and says that no one has ever really loved her, picked her for anything, etc. It's clear that Megan, despite being just the pertest, sweetest thing, is on the bubble from the gitgo because she has zero sex appeal, especially measured against the teeming sea of decolletage in which she's been dropped. And indeed, towards the end of the night's episode we learn that she has been summoned to the pool—that being the central conceit in this show, the defining moment where girls get one last chance to make an impression on the boys, thus saving themselves from the shattering ignominy of being rejected by someone you just met, oh, 20 minutes ago.
However, before this happens here, before Megan must face her personal moment of truth—she undergoes a transformation. The other girls get together and, in a burst of gender charity, decide they're going to show the boys what they're missing by turning this caterpillar into a butterfly: They're going to give Megan a top-to-bottom makeover that converts her into a total, eat-your-heart-out babe. So she goes to the pool looking like a knockout, the boys are duly knocked out, and they give her another chance...but...what's this??...she doesn't take it! That's right. In the show's climactic action, as jaws drop on the set and across America, Megan, in a long and tearful soliloquy, gives up her spot and voluntarily goes home, so that the last girl who'd been summoned to the pool (and who therefore would've been booted) gets to stay instead. "She deserves it more," Megan says through her sobs, with typical selflessness. I do realize that reading this now, the whole thing probably sounds pretty silly, but at the time it was quite touching and had everyone in tears. If you didn't love Our Megan before, you loved her now.
Except...
I'd already started getting a bit antsy during the transformation scene. It struck me as cliched, porn-plottish (a la "the frumpy librarian who lets down her hair and, next thing you know...") After the show I got to wondering if Megan was actually who she appeared to be—and indeed if, by extension, the show was what it appeared to be. Lo and behold, a few seconds on Google led me to IMDB, where it appears that Megan Albertus is an actress. Not just that, mind you, but one of her few listed movie roles was in a 2007 film called A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, where she played "bikini girl." She also has a MySpace page where she appears anything but wallflowery. One of the posts is titled "Megan's Drunken Christmas and Epically Bad New Year." There is no mention of pet caretaking (though she apparently did serve as an "animal caretaker" for a 2006 Cuba Gooding Jr. vehicle, End Game). She lives in West Hollywood and has 545 MySpace friends. That's her above, shown on IMDB; it's also how she basically looked last night, post-metamorphosis.
I realize that you don't watch reality television expecting genuine what's-gonna-happen-next? drama at the level of the O.J. Simpson trial. Still, isn't there some shared understanding that a reality show should be, at some level, real? That you can at least trust the premise and the fact that what evolves, evolves naturally? (Though it's not quite the same, isn't this related to what got everybody in so much trouble back in the Quiz Show era?) How caught up can we get in the intrigue if we begin to suspect that the whole thing is scripted, and that each character plays a carefully crafted part during our journey to an ending that's already been written? Midway through last night's show, for example, all of the participants, girls and boys, were forced to undergo a challenging physical-fitness gauntlet, and one of the boys simply broke down. So poor was his physical condition that he had to be taken by ambulance to a local hospital. And now I'm wondering, was that real?
I'm very disappointed, Ryan. Very.
P.S. She (meaning Megan) also strongly implies on her MySpace page that she smokes dope. That's not an indictment of smoking dope, per se. I'm just sayin'.
* an allusion to another popular reality show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?
As I write this it's Friday and it's snowing and it's 4 o'clock and I can't reach anyone I need to reach in New York (which probably went home en masse two hours ago), so I'm killing time watching this dapper Brit dipstick on Oprah, Marcus Buckingham, who—she tells us—is a top-selling author, coach and all-around expert on human potential. He helps people get the most out of their lives both at work and at home. Here's what I've gotten so far:
1.You are the best judge of your strengths. Don't focus so much on feedback from others. Focus on what makes you feel good about you.
2.If your child comes home from school with 2 As, a B, a C, and an F, most parents will concentrate on the F, because that's where we think help is needed. Wrong. We should focus most of our energy on validating the As. Put the emphasis where the strength is.
3. You have to do what you really want to do, because otherwise, though you may be outwardly successful, you will feel like an inner failure.
4. If you're doing things because you think "no one else will do them"...you should stop.
First of all, No. 1, of course, is warmed-over "follow your dreams." We've already covered that line of thinking on SHAMblog, and I would only add here that American Idol kicks off a new season soon; in the early episodes, we'll all get a textbook lesson in how many people exist who are following dreams that they clearly shouldn't have. 'Nuff said? Widening the lens, I ask you to consider what would happen if any meaningful percentage of us actually followed Buckingham's "advice." Right off the bat, you'd probably have half of all American kids flunking out of school. Remember, the guy's not talking about college, by which point a student is nearly self-governing and would be expected to have a better sense of personal direction; one could make the case that by that juncture, a student's time is indeed best spent on vocation-minded strengths. But Buckingham is talking about grade school, where kids must master core competencies. (And Marcus, I invite you to try selling Step 2 in an Asian household, where the emphasis on education reigns supreme, and where anything less than an A is actually considered an F. Let me know how that goes.)
In the overall, you'd have anarchy. Marriages would fall apart. Yes, maybe some of the faltering marriages would be ones that never should have occurred. I still think that the application of these precepts (and there were others) would take as its casualties a lot of good marriages, too. Buckingham's counsel seems to rule out (or at least seriously devalues) little notions like obligation and sacrifice and conscience and moral duty. And yet women in Oprah's audience are crying. Crying! They are crying at the brilliance of this Brit-inflected window into their tormented souls.
I also want to make a stronger point about No. 4 above, and people who do things because "no one else will do them." If you've read SHAM, you know my feelings on codependency, which I've also made clear on the blog: God bless the "codependents" and deliver us from a world without them. But it's more than that. Often, it takes someone who's willing to do things no one else will do in order to right a wrong, fix a chronic problem, make life run more smoothly. It takes personal sacrifice and a willingness to go the extra mile that other folks won't go—and such an undertaking usually entails discomfort. It might stress us out, upset us, even overwhelm us. And what do we call the people who take on such burdens anyway?
We tend to call them heroes.
(By the way, in a more global sense, haven't the great breakthroughs almost always been achieved by people doing things "no one else would do"?) I grant you, we all know that some people—women in particular—take on too much and it's killing them. The answer is not a simplistic five- or seven-step program that urges them to (a) abandon everything they've been up to now so they can (b) "embrace" dramatically different behaviors that entail grave risks in a society structured as ours is. Especially a society facing the turmoil ours now faces.
[Hypothetical conversation between woman, Laura, and boss, Debbie:
Laura: "You know what, Deb? I'm just not going to be able to get this done for you by tomorrow morning's meeting. I have too much on my plate at home tonight. And besides, it doesn't make me happy. It doesn't make me feel strong. It makes me feel small and victimized and...."
Debbie: "You're fired. I'll get Jack to do it."
But let's end with a quote from Oprah herself: "The Universe speaks to all of us all the time."
Riiiiiight.
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Anyone else see Ann Curry's interview of pastor Rick Warren Friday night on Dateline? If so, perhaps you'll join me in wondering: What is wrong with this woman?
(NOTE: The above clip from YouTube is just a small segment of an extended interview.)
Evidently Curry has strong feelings on the topic (gay marriage), or she was trying to be a tough interviewer* in, say, the Chris Matthews tradition. Whatever her story, she was, well, ridiculous. She'd say things like, "Your critics want to know how a man who says he stands for reconciliation could possibly oppose gay marriage," and Warren would begin his explanation with something like, "I've always thought marriage was between a man and a woman, because..."—and before he could get out the next word, Curry would blurt, in a very combative, in-your-face manner, "Why?" Which was totally gratuitous, because Warren was already in the process of telling us why. (Hint to Curry and other interviewers: Usually when people begin a phrase with "because," it means they're about to tell us why they feel a certain way.) She did this again and again, interrupting him and even browbeating him for no reason I could discern except perhaps to play to the camera. Speaking of which, the whole thing seemed staged and unnatural, an effect amplified by the strange editing, which spent as much time showing us Curry grimacing and looking skeptical as it did showing us Warren giving his answers. Clearly Curry's message was, We're all supposed to be in favor of gay marriage. It's just the right way to be! And I say that as someone who is avidly in favor of gay marriage. But the newspeople shouldn't be!
Stick with The Today Show, Ann. Do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor. * And to get this out of the way before anyone brings it up, no, it's not because Curry is a woman, and "men think tough-minded women are bitches." There's a difference between (a) a hard-nosed, savvy interviewer and (b) a moron. I don't normally like to organize people professionally by gender, but for the purpose of making the point here, CNN's Candy Crowley is a tough interviewer, and very good at it. She lets people talk, but won't let them talk their way off the hook; she knows when to interrupt and when to follow up. Campbell Brown, also of CNN, is also, generally, quite good. The View's Joy Behar, believe it or not, is in my opinion a smart, tough interviewer. (Watch her sometimes when she subs for Larry King.) Barbara Walters can be tough, if she wants to, and when she's not telling presidents to be good to us, or asking movie legends what kind of tree they'd like to be.
You could blog on Huffington Post about hurricane relief, and somebody will comment, 'What could I possibly learn about hurricane relief from you, you abusive sonofabitch...' " —Alec Baldwin to guest host Joy Behar on Larry King, December 17, 2008, talking about how with some people, everything he says these days is seen through the prism of the infamous voicemail he left for his daughter.
THIS IS AN AMAZING COUNTRY. What we've accomplished in 500-something years! We tend to take it for granted, but if you think about how far we've come—the things we've invented (in every sense: scientific, political, social, artistic), and the overall quality of life (despite the day-to-day carping of which we're all guilty)—it truly is remarkable. As anyone who's watched the NatGeo channel knows, there are regions of Africa, South America and Australia where life today is lived much as it was lived in 1492, and for hundreds or thousands of years before that. (Of course, there are regions of Brooklyn where that applies equally.)
And yet for all of our sophistication and knowledge, our success and savvy...we don't know how to argue.
Let me amend that. We're masterful at arguing. Virtuosos. We just don't know how to discuss anything—how to debate. The examples I could cite fromSHAMblog alone are legion, but I thought it might be more useful (and less likely to kick off another round of he said/she said) if I cited a recent example involving the GM bailout and labor unions.
I was watching TV the other day when a GOP congressman took unions to task for some of what's going on in Detroit. I thought the points he made were eminently reasonable, and not just because I've made similar points on SHAMblog. (Again, the fact that someone makes points similar to those made on SHAMblog doesn't mean that either of us is right. I just felt that there was evidence for the position he took. Just as there was evidence against it.) Understand, he wasn't blaming unions specifically and wholly for the American auto industry's present circumstances. He was merely pointing out that, while unions tend to portray themselves as victims, they do indeed bear some culpability. In particular, he cited CBAs and work rules that prevent cost-cutting and tie management's hands to inefficient practices. In sum, he said, Detroit has become a comedy of errors, a colossal glass house in which no one can afford to throw stones. There's plenty enough blame to go around.
The congressman's remarks didn't go unnoticed. Within hours a UAW spokesman called a press conference and grabbed a mic. There were many legitimate points he could've made in response. He could've talked about forecasting errors, gross miscalculations in planning and design, none of which could be blamed on unionism. He could've talked about excessive executive compensation and outrageous management boondoggles. He could've talked about the general climate of sloppy corporate oversight that afflicted not just the auto industry but much of American manufacturing until quite recently.* He could've even taken the high road, contending that in the end, what happened in Detroit was really no one's fault. He could've said, "Look, America just got caught with its pants down." After all, it wasn't so long ago that Detroit couldn't pump out the SUVs fast enough. The most profitable assembly lines were running 24/7, and corporate strategists were taking the less profitable lines down every nine hours or so to retool for another hot new type of SUV in hopes of sustaining buyer interest: They gave us mega-SUVs, mini-SUVs, crossover SUVs, "green" SUVs**, etc.
Who knew that gas was going to shoot up to $9000-a-gallon and American consumers would have trouble keeping their houses, let alone their cars?
The union spokesman said none of that. He had a half-dozen intelligent, potentially winning rebuttals at his disposal, which he could've used singly or in combination. Instead he demonized the congressman. Made the guy out to be a Fascist union-busting goon-hiring Beltway elitist who didn't have the ball-joints to piss off the GM lobbyists who funded his secret junkets to Majorca.
That's how we "debate" nowadays. We saw this phenomenon achingly on display during the past election season, which left such an acrid taste in my mouth that I hesitate to dredge up the memory for anyone else by mentioning specifics. We simply don't engage on the ideas. We just try to destroy the people who speak them. What's that you say? Barack Obama lacks the qualifications we like to see in our presidents? You racist pig! Thank God you're not running for president; you don't deserve to have an opinion or an asshole! Excuse me, did I hear you correctly? The stats that show women earning less than men for the same work are flawed and misleading? Why, you're a no-good woman-hating misogynist...and you're probably impotent too!
Or—to the excellent point Alec Baldwin makes in the quote at the top—do or say something people don't like in one arena of life, and suddenly they have no use for what you say or do in every other arena of life. You lose all credibility. Baldwin may not win Father of the Year honors. What the hell does that have to do with anything he says about disaster relief or the war in Iraq?
And so it goes. * Prior to the mid-90s, manufacturing in the U.S. was anything but "lean." ** Another excellent candidate for the late George Carlin's famous riff on oxymorons.
This morning I thought of another small but excellent example of how "academically oriented" writing classes fail aspiring young writers. As it happens, I'm running late on a piece that's due frightfully soon, and as is sometimes the case when I'm behind, I was tempted—for a moment—to skip a step or two in my normally ponderous editing/proofreading process. Understand that I rewrite and reread everything I send out roughly 142 times. It may not seem like it based on some of what ends up on this blog, but I can spend hours on a transition, days on a paragraph. And then go back and do the whole thing over the following week. The typical opinion piece I write, at around 750-1000 words, takes me three or four weeks to put together. That is why, although I've published hundreds of pieces in newspapers, I couldn't actually work for a newspaper. I could never write anything on deadline; my "breaking news" stories wouldn't be ready to run until a month after the fact. It would be like reading a newspaper back in Colonial times.
Anyway, I had just made a series of revisions on the story, and the step I was tempted to skip was this: Instead of printing out the piece in hard copy and making another series of edits (if necessary) using an actual pen, I was tempted to just go back to the top of the piece, do the final read-through on-screen and then, if that checked out OK, email it to my editor. That's when I remembered one of my key admonitions to students: Never send out anything that you've edited solely on-screen. You'll miss stuff. Always. Which is why you must, must, print it out and read it again in hard copy. Then make any necessary changes, put it aside for a day or two, and read it again in hard copy. The final version you read before submission should always be in hard copy. And it's a good thing I followed that advice this time around, because I found two minor typos as well as a section that just hit my ear all wrong.
Throughout my career, I have enjoyed an exceedingly high acceptance rate*, all the more so for someone who's forever banging out essays (unbidden) for uber-competitive newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times or the "Lives" column of the New York Times Magazine. I am certain that one of the reasons for my acceptance rate is that my stuff comes in "clean." It is free of grammatical errors, misspelled names and other typos 99.6% of the time. It's written in a nice, eye-pleasing font that "looks literary" (and/or matches the font the target publication uses). In other words, it already looks, in manuscript form, as crisp, professional and mistake-free as it's going to look on the printed page. Sometimes more so, as magazines and especially newspapers may introduce typos or other errors during the layout phase.
This is the kind of tactical, nitty-gritty procedural tip that is never, repeat never, part of college-level instruction unless the instruction is being done by someone like me. And yet the tips in this category ("tricks of the trade," from my previous post) will pay far greater dividends to would-be writers than yet another protracted excursion into Melville's use of metaphor in Moby Dick. I'm not saying that's the way it ought to be. Editors should care about things like symbolism and metaphor, and an author's facility with same. And they do care—once they know you and trust you. The problem is, if a beginning/unfamiliar writer sends in a manuscript (or even just a cover letter) with a typo in line one and a misspelled name in line five, that may kill the deal right then and there. The editor never gets to the striking metaphor or the part with the wonderful symbolism. The editor stops reading when he reaches the typo.
Apropos of which—comic relief—I once began a query letter to a very important editor with the introductory phrase that appears in the title of this post. Needles to say, the only reason I got the assignment was that she already knew me.
* I.e. just about everything I write sells, eventually.
To pick up where we left off.... I've been down this road with enough institutions over the past year to know that I'm not imagining this phenomenon or making a generalized problem out of my personal unemployability. Take a look, for example, at this leading site that advertises hot-off-the-press faculty openings. Or here's another. Notice that almost all postings specify "PhD required" and/or "ABD considered." (ABD = "all but dissertation." It means you've finished all coursework for your doctorate but haven't yet gotten signed off on your thesis paper.) Some schools advertising for visiting professorships or junior-level faculty will say "Master's considered, PhD preferred." But generally speaking, a PhD is the admission ticket.
Schools justify these policies on several grounds. They'll remind you that you need a Master's in order to teach in most grade-school settings—and certainly to teach high school—so why would college standards be more lax? They'll cite state funding mandates, which, they claim, tie the availability of municipal funds to the hiring of professors who meet certain criteria for scholarly achievement. Administrators will also talk about competitive status: that in today's cutthroat collegiate market, "percentage of PhDs on faculty" is a major barometer by which prospective students compose their A-list of colleges to attend.*Finally, they'll tell you that especially in the advanced classes people like myself often prefer to teach, a prof may well end up with grad students on their way to a Master's or even a PhD. "Does it make sense," they'll ask rhetorically, "to have Master's-level students being taught by a professor with nothing more than a B.A.?"
Sorry; to me that's a lot of b.s., where writing is concerned. First of all, I mentored a half-dozen Master's students at different times while I was at IU, and I still hear from most of them. To a man or woman, they tell me that the nuggets of practical guidance they got from me—not just in a vocational sense, but also in terms of how they approach the craft of writing itself—were at least as valuable as any instruction they received during the entirety of their time in college. They'll often email me to tell me about something that happened that reminded them of a piece of advice I once gave them, or a moment from one of our classes, etc.
More than that, as noted at great length in the article reprinted from The Writer, writing is a professional discipline. It is a trade. And knowledge of the tricks of that trade may have more to do with avoiding regular bankruptcy filings than a solid grasp of rhetorical theory. Let me give you one very minor but pointed example about interviewing, a core-level skill that everywriter should master (which, of course, explains why I've never known a college that offered an interviewing class as part of its overall curriculum in writing/English). When approaching a tough interview, you use the ammo you've got. If you're a woman interviewing Bill Clinton, you put on a short skirt and maybe practice in front of a mirror to know just how much thigh to show when crossing your legs. When you're a guy interviewing the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who has a reputation for being standoffish and brusque—but who you know takes pride in his Italian heritage—you find subtle ways of introducing your own Italian upbringing into the mix.** Those are aspects of "writing" that you will never, ever see in a formal lesson plan drawn up by an academically trained professor. In fact, they'd be considered anathema in the typical college classroom and might well get a professor censured—even though they can have far more to do with whether you enjoy a rewarding career than years of studying James' use of symbolism in Turn of the Screw.
I'm not saying that the latter isn't necessary. Of course it is! But the strategic/theoretical/free-form stuff in which all those PhDs specialize should be balanced and enriched by the tactical/practical component that only people like myself can offer. I come back to what I've often said about plumbing: You'd think that a plumber who, for two decades, has kept toilets happily flushing in some of Manhattan's foremost hotels has proved his qualifications to teach others how to plumb. You'd think this, even if his technical qualifications were a bit on the thin side back when he approached his first commode.
Real-world experience is the great equalizer. It's what a college should be almost desperate to offer its students—if the college is really more interested in helping students than in hiding the keys to its insular kingdom. For this much I can tell you: Innumerable aspects of real-world writing, editing, and publishing are not as-advertised in the cloistered halls of academia. You'd think that academics would recognize this, and would be gracious in their interactions with a person who's been out in the trenches, actually doing what they teach. Instead, they often seem resentful and patronizing, as if someone like me represents a perversion of their teachings rather than a true-life success story with valuable insights to offer. One department chair I called for information—a woman who made a point of correcting me after I addressed her as Professor So-and-So instead of Doctor So-and-So—heard me out for about 20 seconds, then cut me off at the knees. "I'm afraid you have no chance here without your doctorate," she said crisply. Before hanging up, she added, "Good luck with your search," in a voice that conveyed all the warmth of Michael Corleone telling Fredo he's no longer welcome at the house in that classic scene from The Godfather Part 2.
Reflecting charitably on that incident and many similar interactions, one might say the woman—excuse me, the doctor—was trying to save me from wasting further time on a pointless exercise. But even if true, that's a shortsighted answer, a non-answer answer. Why should I have "no chance"? I can understand such a policy in disciplines like history, where academicians have no way of gauging your bona fides unless you've demonstrated increasing levels of proficiency in a formal, structured setting. I cannot understand this approach with writing, where the proof's in the pudding. And I don't mind admitting, it's aggravating to be made to feel by people who've never written a single commercially salable transition that they're better qualified than I am to show aspiring writers how to put together a sustained flow of ideas that might be worthy of a magazine like Playboy*** (which will pay upwards of $7500 for those ideas) or the editorial page of a major newspaper (like the Journal, which pays 10 times what the average op-ed page pays).
Publish or perish is the famous admonition to those seeking academic safe harbor. One infers from this ancient bromide that publication is necessary to certify a professor's standing among his peers; that it's tangible evidence of your mastery of the material you teach; that it manifests your ability to move in respected circles beyond academia. (After all, what is the ultimate purpose of furthering your education? To allow you to remain in the world of education and perpetuate the incestuous cycle for another go-round? Or to enable you to move smoothly in, and contribute meaningfully to, the outside world?) You'd assume that if publication outside the college environment is the benchmark of achievement in a given scholarly discipline, then that should be no less true for those of us already on the outside; you'd think that if we can document a lengthy track record of publishing in the best of the best...that should mean something. This should be especially true in writing, where publishing is the very raison d'etre! (Isn't it?)
Alas, it hasn't quite worked that way here. For me it's been more a case of publish and perish. And I just don't get it.
* The Asian students, anyway, or maybe the parents of the prospective students. The kids themselves mostly want to know how far it is to the nearest pub and whether the area's typical 911 response time allows them sufficient time to scatter when angry neighbors call in about the noise and the used condoms strewn across area streets. ** Though I did not wear a short skirt for my two encounters with Bill Clinton, in 1995 and 1996, I did use the goomba gambit with former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso, and I came away with a wonderful interview for Worth magazine. *** Another time I got called on the carpet was when a high-ranking professor walked into my class and caught me teaching a lesson out of Playboy, for which I'd recently done a major investigative work that examined issues surrounding brain death, organ transplantation, when does life actually end?, etc. "We don't want our students aiming at Playboy," she told me pointedly later. And though I didn't say much in my defense, I thought, Yeah, that's true, I understand totally, why would you want these kids making $3-a-word when they can write for academic journals and get paid in copies?
Was watching the Ravens-Steelers game when I saw the above AmEx spot, which trumpets personal empowerment and the like. The ad features (cardmembers) Dave Matthews, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brian Grazer* and Tina Turner. Its apparent theme is that it's important to believe in yourself...and also important to have other people believe in you.
Well, wait a second now. Which is it? Granted, the two are not, technically speaking, irreconcilable. However, it is a somewhat dissonant message (and certainly in the pop-culture sense, it's an outright oil-and-water affair). The demigods of PMA tirelessly emphasize—as Randy Pausch put it in that instant-classic inspirational line—that "brick walls are there...to stop the other people." The idea is that you can do it—you will prevail—as long as you really believe in yourself. The idea is that you're not supposed to let anyone else rob you of your dreams; you're not supposed to let the skepticism or negativity of others stand in your way. If that's the case, then validation shouldn't matter. Should it? In fact, if you require validation from others in order to really believe in yourself—then you don't really believe in yourself. Do you? Because the kind of belief that the PMA crowd preaches is the kind that confronts any foe, climbs any mountain, chances any odds, perseveres in the face of constant defeat and rejection, blah, blah, blah.... See, I thought the point of a PMA—as currently framed by its foremost advocates—was to believe in yourself when no one else does. I thought the point was to have everyone telling you you're wrong, yet you forge ahead anyway.
How hard is it to stick to your guns when you're being validated by others?
I guess advertisers don't expect anyone to actually think about these things. They figure that if they throw a lot of thrilling images and nice-sounding phrases up there, it'll all wash over us like the pleasant hash highs of my misspent Boomer youth. I dunno. It seemed worth mentioning to me. Incidentally, seeing Tina Turner strut her stuff in that ad made me think about Beyonce. Who was it, exactly, who told Beyonce that she could dance? Yeesh. Her bodily movements are so forced and awkward that I'm tempted to make her the inaugural recipient of the David Hasselhoff Memorial Award For Thinking Your Skills As An Entertainer Extend Well Beyond What They Manifestly Do.
We could call it...the Hoffer!
* producer of A Beautiful Mind and 8 Mile, among others, as well as long-time film-making partner of Ron ("Opie") Howard.
(NOTE: Below—as best as I can reproduce it using the functionality available on Blogger—is an article I did for The Writer in 2006. It provides some answers for those of you who may have read yesterday's post and quite reasonably wondered, What do colleges need a guy like Salerno for, anyway, if they've got all those learned PhDs to teach the kids how to write? Realize, also, that The Writer is a magazine for writers (duh), or would-be writers, so much of the material herein may be of limited interest to others. I present this merely as further evidence for the overall case I'll be making in this series of whiny, self-involved posts.)
Welcome to the Real World by Steve Salerno
10 things college writing classes don’t teach you about the writing life—but should
They came to me in panic, the students did, typically at the midpoint of their final semesters. Many of them weren’t even my students, but I was “writer in residence” at a small Eastern liberal arts college, and I had a reputation for expertise in mainstream publishing thanks to my work for Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, a succession of airline magazines and just about any decent-sized monthly willing to pay my going rate. (That made me a rarity among writers in residence, who tend to be hermitic, countercultural types, forever in danger of having their heat shut off.) What the students wanted to know—were desperate to know—was how they might find work that allowed them to use all those skills they supposedly honed as “writing concentrates.”
Perhaps they assumed all along that they’d graduate and slide neatly into careers having something to do with writing, but now, after surveying the marketplace, they had yet to find any jobs requiring intimate knowledge of Beowulf or even Virginia Woolf. “What jobs can I get?” they implored. Or, alternatively: “How do I go about landing a writing assignment for, say, Esquire?”
I’m fairly sure my more permanent colleagues in the English department saw me as a de facto placement office, though that was a self-deception on their part, and something of a fraud perpetrated on the hapless students. I could not offset in a few weeks what all those years of academic indoctrination had done to their shared understanding of writing and the publishing landscape as a whole.
I did try. I helped students craft cover letters devoid of the precious phrasing that always elicits groans from the editors I work for. I encouraged them to shed the effete perspectives on “good writing” that my fellow English professors tirelessly pounded into them. Among other things, I told them that if they hoped to do well at job interviews, they might start by toning down their distaste for “consumer publishing,” a phrase my colleagues would speak as if it described a strain of Ebola.
And at the end of it—after all their importunate letters of inquiry were mailed and ignored, after all their interviews had taken place without success—I would ask myself the same questions:
Why did we keep doing this to our writing students?
Why were we setting them up to fail?
A simple truth: College writing courses, as they are presently designed and taught, have nothing to do with the real world. The students who emerge from them think writing is all about self-expression and unfettered creativity and “pushing the envelope of the genre.” Now, if you are intent on becoming the next great experimental novelist, and you don’t want people corrupting your artistic vision with their crass commercialism, and you don’t care what anyone has to say about writing ... that’s fine. On the other hand, if you don’t care what anyone has to say, you wouldn’t be reading this magazine. Would you? And you wouldn’t necessarily be expecting to profit from writing.
Therefore, I will assume here what I always assumed as a teacher: that most of you would like to earn at least some small portion of your living via writing and related activities, rather than by asking questions like “Paper or plastic?”
Of course—and forgive the pun—what we have here is a matter of more than mere academic interest. Many writers aside from those formally trained in college operate under seriously flawed beliefs about the writing profession and “what it takes.” In my experience, almost all young writers have at least one crippling misconception.
Following is what college should teach people about writing. Consider it a few thousand words to the wise.
1. This is a business, folks. College may not be vocational school, but writing most assuredly is a vocation. Part of me admired my colleagues’ febrile attempts to kindle within students a deep, abiding love of their own words and thoughts; Lord knows there are few enough young people today who give a damn how they come across in print or in person. Yet ultimately it’s hard to fathom why writing would be portrayed as if it were a huge intellectual exercise that unfolds in a vacuum. It’s one thing to ask students to strive for a personal voice and a modicum of invention. But to teach writing in a manner that divorces it from its real-world uses—and even imply there’s something vulgar about those uses—is another matter entirely. Not too many landlords accept “artistic merit” in lieu of rent.
2. There are no jobs for writers. OK, I’m purposely being provocative. I’m also overstating. What’s more, if you’re committed to full-time freelancing or writing that great American novel, you might want to skip ahead. I invite everyone else to perform the following exercise: Walk into your neighborhood bookstore and grab a half-dozen of the most familiar magazine titles at random. (Note: Exclude the newsweeklies, e.g., Time, Newsweek and U.S. News.) Take a close look at the mastheads. Collectively—among all of the publications you’ve picked—how many names do you see listed under some variant of the heading “Writer”? Not too many. Depending on the luck of the draw, you may not have selected a single magazine that lists a single staff writer. The opportunity in today’s magazine world—the “way in,” as it were—is through the side door known as editing. Either that, or you have to be successful enough as a freelancer, over a period of years, for a magazine to put you under contract. Such arrangements are not offered to graduating seniors. College writing curricula give almost no formal attention to editing. What students learn about the craft, they learn informally as a result of classroom workshops or their labors on behalf of a scholastic publication. Tip: Take a job on a school newspaper or magazine. Edit somebody else’s copy. Get yourself an exalted-sounding title. It looks good on a resume.
3. You’re going to need a clip file. And while you’re at it, find an internship or two. Take some of that time you would normally spend honing your ethereal voice and devote it instead to getting something—anything—in print. It’s never too early to start lining up publication credits. They’re essential for English/creative writing majors, who’ll be competing for a very small pool of available positions against all those pesky journalism grads, with their years of service to the college newspaper. As for internships, writing students may have trouble landing the real plums, which tend to go—again—to journalism students. But if you’re lucky enough to live near a local or regional publishing company, you may dramatically improve your odds of getting considered for one of those internships. The top j-school students want the slots in New York, not Nashville. Tip: For clips, try the op-ed section of your local newspaper. For internships, try magazines. They’re more interested in overall savvy and talent, less interested in—are you tiring of this?—those j-school bona fides you don’t have.
4. You won’t be writing cover stories for The New Yorker. That particular magazine, of course, is a coveted “all star” market. Even most professionals who’ve been at this for years never get their bylines into The New Yorker. I myself have written for many prestige titles, but in 20 years of on-and-off querying I’ve yet to crack The New Yorker. Yet college-level instruction is exclusively geared to magazines of that ilk. During my years in academe, I found myself surrounded by professors who clearly believed that no magazine but The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic was truly worthy of being read. And trust me on this: You will never see professors teaching out of Glamour or People. There’s nothing philosophically wrong with aiming high. The problem is that training young writers to write in one high-brow voice fails to prepare them for more mainstream assignments, or for the tonal flexibility that will be needed to work for a variety of markets.
5. There is such a thing as a service piece. College writing classes place a premium on originality, free expression, “finding one’s voice.” They emphasize critical thinking and tackling the important issues of the day via long, searching essays. The notion of communicating personally useful info to the reader seldom seems to occur to anyone. The writing professors I knew were uniformly scornful of those short “front-of-the-book” magazine pieces on how to lose those love handles or cook a roast in that new, low-fat way. The service piece may not be your cup of tea. Learn to drink it anyway, because it’s another excellent way in. A friend of mine is a good case study: After being laid off from his editing job for a major self-help publisher, he began writing short service pieces for Better Homes & Gardens. Gradually the pieces got longer, while the pay got higher. BHG now trusts him to stretch out a bit, so he’s writing more of the kinds of articles that make most of us want to become writers in the first place. It behooves me to point out that what you’re reading right now is, in fact, a service piece.
6. Editors will faithfully read your manuscript—until the moment you lose their interest. Let me put that another way: As soon as you lose their interest, they stop reading. My students were always shocked to learn that there is no generally accepted covenant that binds editors to reading what you wrote in its entirety. Not if what you wrote takes way too long to get started. Writing a salable manuscript is a step-by-step seduction. If few college- level wordsmiths get this core truth, it’s because the average teacher is willing to receive and evaluate their work as a collection of parts, rather than a cohesive whole. Thus students never learn to view a manuscript as an orderly, pointed flow of information that impels the reader steadily forward. They expect a random, trenchant insight buried on page 7 to redeem an otherwise rambling, undisciplined piece of work. In the real world of publishing, no editor will stick with that piece until page 7. The trenchant gem remains buried.
7. You write to fit—the market, the publication, the format, whatever. Because I taught upper-level courses, I encountered my litterateurs late in the cycle. They did not understand (because no one had made them understand) the importance of writing within an imposed structure, no matter how commonsensical that structure’s “constraints.” When I forced them to do it for specific assignments, they manifestly resented it, and sometimes mutinied. In most of my classes I assigned a work of researched nonfiction, such as a top consumer magazine might run. One semester a graduating senior turned in her assignment as a nine-page poem, which she appeared to have written off the top of her head. She sneered at me when I told her she had two choices: Either do the research and rewrite the piece in format, or receive an F for the course. She relented, but not before carping about it to her advisor, who was my department chair. He later stopped by my office to “just chat a bit” with me about my larger goals for the course. He suggested that I should’ve given her a bit of praise for the poem itself, which, he said, “had some nice moments.” Writing students naturally assume that writing is author-driven, not market-driven. Their professors (and, regrettably, many visiting celebrity writers) encourage them to believe that if you write what you want to write, eventually, “if it’s good enough,” some important publication will run it. As if! If your voice doesn’t fit the publication, guess who’s going to have to adapt or perish? The idea is to make editors like you and take you under their wing, not hate you and want to burn your manuscripts. Tip: Always ask yourself: Does my writing sound like the publication I plan to send it to? This sounds obvious enough, but you’d be shocked at how seldom young writers even think of this step.
8. The big-money opportunities are in giving readers priceless info ... not your 2 cents. Because so many colleges teach writing through the medium of the personal essay—or heaven help us, the “thesis paper” (see #10)—academically trained writers, like the student aforementioned, often fall into the trap of writing off the tops of their heads. Post-college, the best-paying writing jobs are in reported feature journalism. I frequently encountered resistance when I tried to get students to imbue their work with those inconvenient little items called facts. They’d complain that I was changing their tone or voice, or that the factual material “just didn’t seem to fit” in their stories. Even as seniors, my incoming students had relatively little formal training in the use of research resources and far less training in firsthand digging— making phone calls, doing interviews, checking court records and the like. This is a deficiency the young writer must learn to overcome in order to land actual assignments with viable frequency. Tip: Invest in a good book on the craft of reported magazine journalism. Take a week you were going to spend with Tom Wolfe or Toni Morrison and give it over to the journalism book instead. Sure, some of it is going to seem pedantic, boring, “anti-creative.” Trust me, it’ll pay for itself a thousand times over during the course of your career, if only because it may allow you to have a career. Even novelists need to know how to dig.
9. It’s a big, wide, unheard-of world out there. The American Legion Magazine has what you might call negative cachet in academia (and in New York publishing circles, for that matter). It’s so politically incorrect, with its right-wing leanings, that I actually stopped mentioning my substantial body of work for it during chats with academic peers. But during the decade beginning in 1984, I sold an even 40 pieces of varying lengths to Legion—for an aggregate payday of more than $75,000. Legion is just one of hundreds of second-tier publications that can provide a writer with an excellent, albeit fairly anonymous living. It’s the official publication of the nation’s largest veterans organization. Kiwanis, The Lion’s Club and many other associations, industries and even major companies also have publications that need writing help. You’d never know it from what they teach in college, where such markets are roundly scorned for their “low-brow” content. Shameless confession: I once did an annual report for a company that came to me in last-minute desperation: 10 pages of prose, six days of actual writing. There are worse ways to make $16,500.
10. We don’t call it a ‘thesis statement.’ Your lede has a few problems, but at least you didn’t bury the nut graf this time. I’m gonna need a one-line bionote; you can send it with those cutlines I asked for. By the way, I didn’t know you were going to do this as a round-up, but I think it works. I’ll let you know more after we get this top-edited... If you just emerged from a college writing curriculum, you probably haven’t a clue as to what I just said. Not only don’t they teach you real-world lingo in college, but they leave you steeped in an academic jargon (like “thesis paper” instead of “essay” or “think piece”) that fairly screams “I’m a novice!” There’s nothing more embarrassing than getting lost during conversation with professional editors because you don’t know the terminology. Find the time to learn. Talk to a few actual writers. Attend a writers conference or workshop (not an academic one). There’s money to made out there and rewards to be had. It just helps if you know what you’re talking about. #
There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Anyone catch Ms. Knowles on the Kennedy Center awards show last night? She appeared during the final portion of the show, honoring Barbra Streisand. Notwithstanding my recent remarks about Beyonce's limited dancing skills, the girl can sing. Yes, we knew this...but my God can she sing! I actually think she out-Streisanded Streisand on The Way We Were. (Say what you will about the song itself, which some might consider schmaltzy, it's one of those "showcase"-type vehicles that separate the singers from the people who merely sing, if you get my drift.) I bet she could even rehabilitate Way/Were for a contemporary audience if she covered it on a CD, much as Tony Bennett did on several albums of standards a few years back.
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