TIME SPENT IN LOCK-DOWN, as now with our COVID19-imposed sentences of unending house-arrest, can be time well-spent in reflection … and even more in reading.
Not everybody will fulfill their long-avoided completion of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu or War and Peace, and I have for my part made a point of sinking into much lighter fare.
Example: a writer in multiple genres, Michael Frayn (left). In his incarnation as a playwright, his versatility arches from the highly cerebral but still theatrically skillful Copenhagen to his famous farce, Noises Off – giving us zany humor with the engineered accuracy of a Swiss watch.
As a novelist, Frayn can be generous. Cascades of detailed exposition, fulsome back-chatting dialogue and satisfying plot-twists characterize my favorite piece of Frayn fiction – a 1967 story to which his American publishers gave a new, inexplicable and unappealing title: Against Entropy.
It’s one of the best comic novels about journalism – the equal of, if not better than, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop – and it originally had a much better British title: “Towards the End of the Morning”, alluding to the time of day when most newspaper journalists show up for work. Frayn worked for London’s oldest newspaper The Observer in the nineteen-sixties, just before I did, too, as a contributor to its international syndication service. This book is not just a hilarious but also a wickedly accurate rendition (to my mind) of life in the now cosy-seeming world of a staid journalistic institution.
I KNOW OTHERS SHARE my recurring concern as a reader. There is – and I know how banal the thought is – simply so much to read. Way too much, of course. So much, in fact, that the insidious feeling of being completely overwhelmed surges up (a sense frequently amplified at a time of crisis like our current emergency) and it seems scarcely worth starting in on any written matter, no matter how interesting or attractive it might seem.
I’m also troubled, again like many others I know, by what I suspect is a neurological result of the digital revolution. My attention span is quite simply, however much I resist the notion, shrinking.
Whether it’s with a set of physical pages, or on a screen, I irresistibly scan ahead (as most reading minds seem prone to) and my heart seems to sink involuntarily if there’s anything more than an additional 500 words to still read.
This casts into sharp focus once again the constant dilemma for all writers in all media. How many words are really needed, ever?
During all our self-isolating time for reflection, I appreciate afresh how often this question has been pondered, both seriously and light-heartedly. In for me a rare adoption of a social media trope, let me offer, as a ‘Throw-Back Thursday’ piece, an extract from this column’s archives. (CLICK for the full article)
I’m thrown back to a Thursday in 2005, exactly fifteen years ago this week, when The Media Beat was a print-only creature, in the free daily ‘AM New York’, owned then by Tribune Newspapers. (At left – A web-version of the column is above right)
After a nod to contemporary journalistic gossip (the Pulitzer Prizes had just been handed out at Columbia University, and I was debunking an unsound conspiracy theory about how one winner was said to have gained an award) I gleefully reported on The New York Times’ Executive Editor, the redoubtable Bill Keller at that point, sending out an internal memo to all his staff. He was on a mission to curb what he called ‘bloat’ in the paper’s output.
Keller insisted:
“a skillful writer … can do full justice to most news stories in under 900 words … Writing tight is a discipline. It takes work.”
Being the 2005 smarty-pants I was, I couldn’t help pointing out that this plea for brevity took the Editor a total of 1,009 words to express.
That’s the end of my 626.
