07-063
I stared at my executive
editor's e-mail to me with a mix of revulsion and horror, as though I had come
into work and found the carcass of a slaughtered dog dumped on my desk.
"Would you mind," my boss asked, "critiquing Sunday's paper?"
Writing a critique of the
newspaper is an odious task to me, and I have done everything short of going
into witness protection to avoid it. In my worst imaginings, I see a Telegraph
reporter reading aloud my critique to the rest of the metro staff like a Nazi
storm trooper fanatically denouncing communist literature at a book-burning. I
then imagine the metro staff falling upon me with full-fledged mob rage.
So I had to get out of
writing the critique. Or at least writing one that would get me torn limb from
limb.
But how?
Maybe, thought I, I should
run the critique through the filter of a writer whose style was so mystifying
that nobody would know what the hell I was talking about. Yes, only Faulkner
would do.
The old woman sat waiting in
the early morning cool on the front porch of the house that the father of her
father's father had built, the old house that was redolent of honor and
sacrifice and valor of soldiers and a cause that was long past yet ever present
and she waited for the paper that would recount the things past that would
never be again, yet would be sanctified in print and so taken away from the
vices and weaknesses of men, and she waited until she was rewarded by the
indolent thump of the paper upon the porch (never meeting the eye of the
delivery person, a person whose family lineage disqualified him from
acknowledgement) and she picked up the paper, feeling its coarseness and heft
and looked down upon it to see "Sewage main bursts into geyser downtown."
But this, too, sinks from its
disadvantages. To write like Faulkner, you would have to read a lot of
Faulkner, and that is something I will only do at bayonet point.
So maybe Hemingway would do.
I like Hemingway.
The Macon Telegraph is
180-year-old paper and is said to have a circulation of 58,000. It's slogan is
"Invite Us Home" and its lobby is dominated by a 6-foot, papier mache
golden eagle. Nobody has ever explained why anybody would invite a 6-foot,
papier mache golden eagle home. The inside of the building is a place where
journalism breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
The breaking part happens when reading stories like downpage schools story on
1B, a story so poorly written it recalled the hopelessness of a luckless
fisherman.
And so I tried to write as
Hemingway would, but after the 10th or 11th drink I passed out at my desk and
then had a lot of explaining to do to my boss. But at least I was free of the
critique.