Category: reading

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Print shmint, or should we care if newspapers die

If a newspaper falls in a forest, should anyone care? People seem to think, with all the online news sources, including blogs, newspapers are obsolete.  Well, I used to be a newspaper columnist and now I’m a blogger and I’m here to offer this paraphrase: I know newspapers. Newspapers are a friend of mine and blogs are no newspapers.

In the short weeks since I started my blog, I’ve been doing a lot of online reading. I’ve found plenty of good blogs. Really impressive ones, well written and well intentioned. Plenty of bad ones, too. But there’s no blog, no collection of blogs–much as I like the Huffington Post–that takes the place of a newspaper. Even a newspaper online is barely up to the job. Boston.com, the Globe’s web incarnation, is so user-unfriendly that it does the paper no favors. I hate to carp, but when they generously added a link to my blog, I had to contact the editor for directions on how to find it!

There’s a scope of articles a newspaper tackles that’s hard to find anywhere else. There are knowledgeable writers who write great blogs about national politics, toxic banks, and health care. But no one’s digging into your town’s solid waste management problem. Local investigative reporting is something newspapers could afford; most blogs can’t.

Newspapers also land on the doorstep with a certain level of credibility. Facts have to be checked to make their way into a newspaper and if they aren’t the result is a printed “correction.” With a blog it’s hard to know if the “facts” are factual. It can be hard to figure out who among the zillions of bloggers has something of value to say and who is simply grinding an ax.

Here in Boston, where the Globe is teetering on the brink of possible nonexistence, Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has used his blog to call for a “blog rally” in support of the Globe. Mine is among the outpouring of comments. People are arguing in favor of print or in favor of online sources. But the fact is it can’t be either or. Each has something unique to offer in giving us the information we need to remain participants in a functioning democracy. The question is how are newspapers going to survive to fulfill their responsibility. They may be dinosaurs that have yet to find sure footing in this new reality. But blogs are the not-ready-for-prime-time players, with an important role to fill, certainly, but without the ability to do it all.  Until or unless they are, newspapers in some form need and deserve our support.

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Reading the “Rabbits”

I had promised myself I wouldn’t start my first post with “welcome to my new blog.” So here are those words, in my second. I picture that sentence being written a hundred, maybe a thousand, times every day, often by people in exactly my situation: I’m an outcast from old media.

For seven years I wrote a literary column for The Boston Globe. But now that my section of the paper has been shut down, here I am, jumping into the deep end of new media. Ready to see if I sink or swim or simply tread water. What I want to do here is what I did in my newspaper column, have a conversation about reading and writing. But the exciting thing here is that it can be an actual conversation. You jump in, too!

Have you read the Updike “Rabbit” books? I hadn’t and, after Updike died in January, I decided it was time I did. So I set myself to reading all four.

I have to confess, I didn’t love the first, “Rabbit, Run.” It is beautifully written, yes, but it seemed so, well, male. All those sports images, that casual male sexuality, that clueless aimlessness. With the second, too, “Rabbit Redux,” I felt I was slogging through a lit course assignment. I took a little break. But now I’m reading “Rabbit Is Rich” and that’s really grabbed me. In fact, I can’t wait to stop writing this and get back to it.

Still more male than I can easily relate to. But there’s that tenderness, those poignant descriptions of flawed human beings stumbling through the mundane dailiness of a flawed world. Updike seems to feel love not only for his characters, but for the millions of people in the real world whose lives are no more exciting or ennobled than those he’s writing about. He observes our daily lives in all their smallness and forgives the countless ways in which we fall short.

I’m sad to think that, after I finish this, what is ahead is “Rabbit at Rest.”

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Natasha and Liam and the rest of us

I don’t remember thinking about Natasha Richardson before this week. Or Liam Neeson either, beyond, of course, the hunkiness and maybe Schindler’s List. But now I am finding myself thinking about and reading about about the tragedy… those little boys…how, maybe, if the first ambulance hadn’t driven away…

As I look at those photographs of two of them looking impossibly beautiful and adoring, it occurs to me that beyond our sympathy is an expectation that these two actors are still telling us a story that we need to know about. A character on screen, stage, or page has something to tell us about ourselves. Whether it’s a real or a fictional character, there is somehow a lesson or a revelation about the way we live in the world. Madame Bovary, Holden Caufield, Elizabeth Bennett, and, yes Oskar Schindler, have important things to tell us about ourselves and those around us. When Hamlet tells his players to “hold, as ‘twere the mirror up to nature,” what is on view is, as he later tells his mother, “the inmost part of you.”

We’ve seen this before and felt it, the inexplicable sadness on hearing of the death of a public figure. Someone we didn’t know, never saw in person, maybe didn’t even think about. And yet, the public keening, somehow strangely genuine. Maybe it comes from a recognition of our common experiences and what we learn from what we read about and see.

And so what I’m thinking is how Liam Neeson is now, in his real and private grief, continuing to be an actor for us in a way, showing us what grief is, giving us the chance to think about how we might be in that circumstance. We have almost certainly, each of us, witnessed grief close up even if we have not felt it ourselves. But this more distant grief may be easier for us to see.

We are unlikely ever to have a loss that makes international headlines and dims the theater lights on Broadway. But we will, each of us, face loss. We will be the ones “shocked and devastated.” We know this. And even as we ache for what we recognize in the pale face in the photographs, we search it for clues to our own humanness.