The New Yorker gets it partly right

I remember the night I figured out my place in the Philadelphia ******er's universe. I was proofreading stories in the sports department, and I came across one that said the local football team's quarterback had "shattered his knee." The trouble was that he had torn a ligament. Ripped, shredded or tore up might have worked, but shattered was plainly the wrong word to describe a tearing injury.

I pointed this out to the night sports editor, who looked at me as if I were from Mars. A reporter standing nearby added helpfully, "It's a matter of semantics." Well, yes, it was a matter of semantics – a matter of meaning, a matter of figuring out what you intend to say, then using the right word to say it. I don't remember if anyone corrected the mistake, but the night sports editor eventually enjoyed a career full of promotions ever higher into management, and the reporter eventually was rewarded with a major beat. As for good, crisp, accurate prose, the people who count at the ******er have always agreed with the eye-rolling reporter: it's a matter of semantics, in the dismissive sense of the word.

Why mention this here? Because I'm grateful to Clive James for raising the question of prose style in his recent New Yorker article, Blood On The Borders: Crime fiction from all over. It's a curious piece, with a conclusion that might anger crime-fiction readers and some slack reporting that frustrated this reader of international crime fiction, but it got at least one important matter right: Good prose is important.

James accuses Massimo Carlotto of bad writing, and he cites this example from The Master of Knots: “We’ve absolutely got to find a way of stopping the Master of Knots and his gang," Max said angrily. James fails to consider that poor translation may be the problem, but he's right; that's a bad sentence. I enjoyed seeing an attack on bad prose in crime fiction that went beyond ritual bashing of Dan Brown.

So much for one paragraph from Clive James' amble through the world of international crime fiction. Maybe I'll discuss the substance of his piece later. In the meantime, read it, and let me know what you think.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Clive James
Crime fiction in translation

A story that hit home

Have you ever read a novel or story whose details rang so true that you thought, "That's me!" or "I was there!"?

I've flipped through the opening pages of Liza Marklund's Paradise. I knew Marklund had worked for newspapers, but my god, did she work for mine?

She has my paper's management philosophy and general atmosphere of the last fifteen years down:

"The editor-in-chief, Torstensson, wanted to introduce a new managerial level ... All the signs of impending disaster were in place: the poor state of the finances; the falling circulation; the grim faces of the members of the board; the newsroom that swayed in a storm, poorly guided and with a run-down radar. ... Torstensson wanted to make a mark, and God knows he hadn't had any editorial achievements."

She captures the humiliation of veteran journalists forced to edit, oh, just to pick a hypothetical example, material almost as demeaning as high school poetry and theater reviews:

"The news editor held out a stack of scores from the lower sporting divisions.

"The question hit Annika like a punch in the gut. What the hell! They were going to have her do the kind of stuff she'd done at the local paper, Katrineholms-Kurien, as a fourteen-year-old ... Fill out your own tables, dickhead!"

And this:

"[I]t was Annika's job to organize and structure the articles. This meant rewriting every one so that they would harmonize with each other and fit the context. Yet her name wouldn't appear anywhere in the paper ... She was a sub-editor, one among the many anonymous, invisible journalists."

OK, Marklund is a little weak on sub-editors (copy editors in the U.S.) In fact, we get less credit than our fictional counterparts in Paradise.

All right, readers, what stories have hit home for you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Liza Marklund

Not that I believe in omens, or anything, but ...

Readers of this blog may have sensed that the initial bloom is beginning to wear off now that I've spent seventeen years, five months, three weeks and six days as a copy editor at the Philadelphia ******er.

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but something about 101 people being laid off, a new editor-in-chief every fifteen minutes, the loss of company contributions to my pension, being uprooted three or four nights a week from the department about which I care most, seeing some of my favorite colleagues forced out the door, and being compelled to work weekends for the first time in a decade can get to a person. Does anyone outside my family, my immediate circle of friends, and my sympathetic blog readers care, though? I thought not until very recently.

Each night as I left work plotting revenge, then rejecting the idea as insufficiently forward-looking, I'd step out into the cold Philadelphia night and head home or to Philadelphia's press club. This week or late last week, though, I noticed that the world had gone a little darker, and tonight I figured out why: The streetlights in front of the ******er Building had been extinguished. As far as I could see, on both sides of the street and in either direction, every bank of two street lamps had at least one functioning light, and most had two -- no small achievement in a big American city. But not the one directly in front of the ******er Building's entrance. Coincidence? The work of a sympathetic streets department employee? One of the ten plagues being visited on my paper's new owners?

And then there are those yahoos in Boston who posted flashing signs with weird little robot characters all over that city as part of an advertising campaign, to which the city reacted with an all-day security alert that cost something like a million dollars.

It turns out that activism is not dead, because someone has set up a legal defense fund for one of the ad men-cum-pranksters behind the campaign, who face charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine carries a story about the guy with the defense fund, who happens to share my first name. Bill's blog post includes an illustration that plays on the flashing signs that caused the hub-bub. I have included a copy in the top right corner of this post.

Perhaps, having read the first part of my comment, you will understand why I find the sentiment attractive. In fact, I'm thinking of having it blown up to poster size and picketing in front of the ******er Building. Stop by and lend your support. Only do so during daylight. The streetlights are out, and if you show up too late, you may not see me.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Andrea Camilleri's humor

I stopped by Philadelphia's press club after a bad night of work at my newspaper this week (though "bad night of work at my newspaper" is a pleonasm – unless one works there during the day). An acquaintance of mine from Italy's Lazio region sat at the bar chatting with two friends who the bartender told me were from Rome.

I understand enough Italian to pick out a word here and there and even to follow the thread of a conversation if I concentrate hard enough, which I could not do because a vacuous blowhard with an extremely loud voice sat across the bar from the Romans commiserating with his female friend about cruise ships and Jamaica.

Not only did he hear what she was saying, but he knew where she was coming from. If he had decided to not even go there, I would have slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, ordered him to shut up, and paid for their drinks and their taxi home.

What does this have to do with Andrea Camilleri and his protagonist, the unparalleled Inspector Salvo Montalbano? Montalbano also hates clichés and psychobabbling banality. Here's Montalbano on the phone with his lover, Livia, in The Smell of the Night (titled The Scent of the Night for delicate-nosed U.K. readers):

"`Come on Livia, don't get upset, try to be patient.'

"`You would try the patience of a saint!'

"Oh, God, not another cliche! Sow your wild oats, count your chickens before they hatch, or eat like a horse, when you're not putting the cart first!

"He realized he couldn't put up with this conversation much longer. Aside from the clichés and stock phrases, he couldn't stand the sallies of cheap psychoanalysis that Livia all too often liked to indulge in -- the kind of stuff you get in American movies ... "

This by itself would be good enough to make Montalbano an enjoyable version of the gruff but loveable old uncle. But what follows elevates him to something like a great comic creation. As he and Livia argue, parry, thrust, and make plans, Montalbano muses upon their strange contentiousness of their phone conversations:

"The best of it was that this animosity remained independent of the unshakable intensity of their relationship. But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average, at least once every four sentences? Maybe, thought the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old ... we feel ever more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us."

That's lovely, I think, an aching and tender insight, and its resonance grows when one reflects that Camilleri was about eighty years old when the novel was published in 2005. But the scene gets better:

"As he was reasoning along these lines (and he liked this line of reasoning, as it was reassuring and banal, like the sayings one finds on the little slip of paper inside Baci Perugina chocolates) ..."

Bellissimo! What a perfect topper! Montalbano is irritable, Montalbano is wistful, and Montalbano slips with comfort into banalities just as bad as those he finds so maddening in Livia. What a perfect little parable of human relations! Has anyone written about love with such tenderness and humorous understanding?

(For more rhapsodizing about Andrea Camilleri and Salvo Montalbano, read Uriah Robinson, the King of Camilleri, on his Crime Scraps blog.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007Technorati tags:
Andrea Camilleri
Italian crime fiction