Arthur Gelb, "City Room"
Since this is a memoir from the former managing editor of The New York Times, now would probably be a good time to mention I got another article published in the Honolulu Weekly last week, which can be found here.
You may have noticed that it took an incredibly long time to finish this book, which was given to me by my aunt as a Christmas present in 2003. I put off reading it for a long time, simply because it was so fucking huge. Plus, I don't know Arthur Gelb. I read the Times, and enjoy it, but I'm not the kind of person to try to remember bylines in newspapers, unless they do something extraordinary, like expose CIA for their involvement in drug running in Los Angeles. Or maybe if they get busted for making shit up. Or getting killed. This Gelb guy hasn't done any of that.
But it was a nice gift, and I know that my extended family has always had a hard time figuring out what to get me. We don't see each other that often, so they would try to piece together a gift from what they had witnessed or knew that was going on in my life. When I was 16, I happened to have a particularly nasty hickey on my neck around thanksgiving and out of embarrassment, wore a turtleneck pullover that must have been borrowed from a friend, since I don't remember owning any myself. That instigated a three-year regiment of turtleneck pullovers presents from my relatives come Christmas time, probably because they thought I actually wore those stupid fucking things.
Later in my life, as they knew I worked in a restaurant as a chef, they gave my some cooking utensils involving tongs and ladles. I thanked them for their efforts, but told them that the sad truth of the matter was that after cooking all day at work, I seldom had the energy for cooking anything more complicated than Top Ramen.
And so we have this book, given to me as a gift. My aunt knew I liked to read, and she knew I was interested in journalism. Hence, this book. It's actually nice to think that she went to that much effort, and like I said, I'm hard to shop for.
By the way, my birthday is in one month (two days after tax day, three days before Hitler. Bad things come in threes). I'll make it easy for you. Winston Regular. By the carton. Thanks very much. Oh, and Jim Beam.
So anyway, I was trying to finish this book before I got on the plane for Hawaii, since I was pretty sure I wouldn't want to keep it or ship it, due to its massive size. But the planning and practices for the final show with my former bands took too much of my time, and I think I had only managed to finish two to three hundred pages. Then I left it in my car instead of taking it on the plane with me. Luva mailed it to me eventually and when I got it, I was dismayed to discover that I hadn't marked my place. Worse, since it had been so long since I had last left off, I couldn't remember where I was supposed to start again. Instead, I started back around page 100, 'cause that was the last part I could concretely remember reading.
There's a reason for that. The first 400 pages or so deal with his early work at the Times, first as a copy boy, then eventually moving up in the ranks to become theater critic. Reporters are supposed to live by the art of brevity, taking the dictum of Strunk and White's "Omit Needless Words" as sacrosanct (though with the length of my entries as of the last six months, I should probably shut the fuck up). Now that he doesn't work for the Times any longer, he almost seems to relish in the chance to go on and on about events, most of them oddly enough involving food.
It's not particularly interesting. In fact, at times it became quite tiresome.
Finally, however, Gelb moves into the news department, and the book becomes interesting as he describes decisions, conflicts, and questions of ethics versus news value. Here is where the enthusiasm for the business shines through, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed it, working on the school paper.
It also reminded me how much I missed it.
Even with these stupid bar reviews, walking into a place cold with no idea about what the place is about and then pulling information together, molding observations, quotations, and facts into a piece that is interesting, or entertaining, and hopefully both, can be incredibly thrilling and rewarding. And it's fun. When I worked at the bookstore, I remember talking with a patron about Tom Robbins, and I said that what I really loved about his books is I could picture him writing a paragraph, stopping, reading what he just wrote, and then laughing out loud. I've done that with my journalism pieces.
After the piece came out in the Weekly last week, somebody came into my bar and wanted to shake my hand. I didn't recognize the guy and thought he was just angling to get a stiffer drink by being friendly, but then he said he had read my article and really liked it.
"Yeah," he said, as I mixed his drink, "I was reading and I came across one sentence where you used a really good word. Incongruous. I actually got lost for a second, and then thought about it, and it was the perfect way to describe it."
That was nice. I remembered writing it and thinking the same thing. Of course, it's still entirely possible that he was angling for that stiffer drink.
