The Art and Music List

People are fond of posting lists on facebook of books or music, but I started thinking the other day of art I have seen that touched me or moved me in some way. So here's that list sort of in order of impact.

Van Gogh — Starry Night — MOMA — 1981

The first thing that struck me was how small it was. In a corner a couple of rooms away from the Waterlilies in the pre-redesign of the MOMA, it was surrounded by other works of other artists and seemed almost postage stamp-like. I have gone back specifically to see it more than once.

Botticelli — La Primavera — the Uffizi — 2007

The room was crowded and filled with a babel of language but there it was on the far wall. I cried. I literally cried. The Venus was to its immediate left but I had eyes (and heart) for nothing but Primavera. No amount of having seen reproductions in books prepared me for it.

Renoir — Bal a Bougival — Boston Museum of Fine Arts — 1962

This is the most beautiful of Renoir's paintings. It's in the museum's permanent collection. It is part of a trio of related paintings and is clearly the best of the three. The movement of the couple, the swirl of her dress, the insistent push of the man, and her coy turning way — the painting seethes with romantic tension and you can almost hear the music play.

Monet — Waterlilies — MOMA, L'Orangerie — 1981, 2012

The first time I saw some of these at the MOMA I just sat for probably 20 or 25 minutes as people drifted by. It was soothing to see them, to be in their presence. The ones at L'Orangerie are much bigger and almost implode inside you. We saw those the same day we had returned from the gardens where they had been created and I can no longer separate the images.

Degas — Dancers — Cincinnati Art Museum — 1958

Off of Eden Park, a majestic swath of green at the edge of downtown, I could walk from where I lived, the museum collection wasn't huge, but they had two or three of these Degas. I was instantly drawn to them and came back quite a bit in that one year.

Michelangelo — David — the Academy in Florence — 2007

It seems lonely in its place in the great hallway. Michelangelo's paean to the young male body is erotic and serene at the same time, with a sense of intention you don't quite expect.

Picasso — Guernica — La Reina Sofia, Madrid — 2012

I was exhausted the first time we saw it. I couldn't quite let it in. The traveling exhibit of other Picasso works I had seen back home had included a series of photographs of the mural in progress. After a second visit to the painting a few days later, I could see it and not the photos. There is something cold and almost clinical about the black and white piece, as if you look at it from a far distance. It was the 75th anniversary of the bombing the week we were there.

Rodin — The Gates of Hell — National Museum in DC and again in Paris at the Rodin Museum — 1980, 2006

Many of the well-known individual sculptures (e.g. The Thinker) are in these monumental doors. I think you could examine them for hours. It is a study in la Vie Humain. A close second for me was outside in the garden — The Burghers of Calais.

Velasquez — Las Meninas — the Prado — 2012

Until I saw it in the flesh, so to speak, I could never quite understand why my wife liked this one so much. Now I do. It's an amazing painting, full of nuance and meaning. It was fun to see several of Picasso's cubist variations on it later on in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

unknown — Winged Victory of Samothrace — the Louvre — 2006

For me, the highlight of the Louvre. Yes I know those great ladies Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa are there, but this one just leaps at you with great power and great grace and is superbly located on a staircase that lets you see it from all angles including from below looking up as if it is a figurehead on a ship. Magnificent.

Tiffany — the wisteria blossom window — Metropolitan Museum of Art — 1982

Louis Comfort... what else to say. This is just simply beautiful.

El Greco — Christ Bearing the Cross — a visiting collection at the Cincinnati Art Museum — 1958

It was part of the Lehman Collection traveling through the country and a school class made a special trip. I remember the exhibit for a number of things, among them a wall of Renoirs, and a tiny copy of a Vermeer by Dali, but the El Greco struck me hard. It was hung so that you faced it straight on as you entered the room full of the Greek's paintings, and for a moment it was all you could see. It was the first painting I had ever experienced almost solely as an emotional reaction.

Classical Music

I am not a musician or an artist, but often experiencing great art or great music I have this overwhelming feeling of gratitude that somehow the piece or that work was created just for me, and just for the moment of my first encounter. It is a kind of love at first sight or first hearing. Something changes and I am different in that moment and after. It isn't about taste, but about what the music evokes.

Richard Strauss' Til Eulenspiegel — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958

I had never been to a live concert and had little access to recordings of classical music. My exposure was very limited. Given bus fare and the price of second balcony seats ($0.20 + $1.50!!!) this was the first piece of live symphonic music I had ever heard. I was blown away. At intermission I begged the head usher to let me join the Conservatory students who ushered the balconies (I was a junior in high school) and I ended up seeing a whole season.

Beethoven's 7th Symphony — the Esplenade Pops Concerts — 1959 or 60

The Pastorale is, I think the most moving of the Beethoven symphonies. I love the 9th and the 3rd, but I always come back to this. Hearing it outdoors by the Charles River seems somehow most appropriate. A recent performance in Benaroya was lovely.

Bizet's L"Arlesienne Suites — I don't know where I first heard them, probably a recording

Now having been to Arles and Provence the music has a place in my mind. I can feel in it the Mediterranean ethos, full of life with all its underlying tensions.

Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958-59

This is such a delicious piece of music, so evocative; even the original piano version, and the Emerson, Lake and Palmer rock version fully in the spirit of the Ravel orchestration. The promenade may be one of the most memorable themes in music.

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue — probably a recording but since, at least one live performance with orchestra

The opening clarinet puts me right in the center of it. But I didn't miss that in the remarkable four hands two pianos version (how it was written before scoring for orchestra) by Katia and Marielle Labeque. Gershwin seems to me underappreciated.

Liszt's Les Preludes — probably as the theme for an early TV sci-fi show in the 50s

It still evokes rockets taking off. It's kind of schlocky and I have never heard it performed live but it is one of those things I like to play with the volume turned up all the way.

Mendelssohn's Incidental Music for a Midsummer Night's Dream — recordings, film

I think my first experience of this was as the music in the schlocky 1935 film with Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and others. The most interesting version I have heard is a Tanglewood performce with chorus by Seiji Ozawa and the BSO.

Ives' The Unanswered Question — Cincinnati Symphony — 1958-59

I didn't quite know what to make of it, and this is one of Ives’ slightly more approachable pieces. I've come to look forward to hearing Ives done live.

Bach Cello Suites — many times but most recently live at Town Hall Seattle by Joshua Roman — 2012

Joshua did all six in a single concert with a dinner break in the middle. (Easier than the Ring cycle.) He's an immensely talented young man who clearly loves what he does.

Handel's Water Music — BSO in the 1960's

One of these, the second one in the second set, is embedded in my brain as the theme music for "Afternoon Symphony" on WHRB. I think they still use it. I wonder if they still program five pieces from five periods alternating chamber and large orchestra pieces, all to time out to exactly 3 hours. Programming to those constraints was an art form all of itself.

Verdi Requiem — not sure where I first heard it, probably records in the 60s, live in Seattle around 2000

There is something electrifying when the Kyrie rises out of the chorus and orchestra. There's a lot of Verdi that is moving and emotional, the slave's chorus from Nabucco, which I have heard from the wings wearing a Babylonian archer's costume, the quartet from Rigoletto, but the Requiem is first to mind for me.

My Relationship with Tobacco (with thanks to Rudyard Kipling for “The Betrothed")

Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,

For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.

We quarreled about Havanas—we fought o’er a good cheroot,

And I know she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a space;

In the soft blue veil of vapor musing on Maggie’s face.

Maggie is pretty to look at—Maggie’s a loving lass,

But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass.

I was in a small Kentucky town hanging out with the other kids from my not quite nice neighborhood. 9th grade? Maybe 14? I don’t think 13, but certainly before 15. Smoking was an initiation rite, required for membership in the crew that sat on the high curb across from school during lunch breaks. Though we called them cancer sticks even then, no one condemned it or even scolded us. My mother, a smoker wasn’t happy about it, but she hated worse the idea of being a hypocrite.

Cigarettes were about 40 cents a pack. I smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. I quit once for about 6 weeks to try out for the basketball team [note: my athletic ability is noteworthy for the wrong reasons, but basketball was the only extra-curricular activity, the town school was that small]. I went right back to smoking when I failed to make the cut.

There’s peace in a Laranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay,

But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away—

Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown—

But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o’ the talk o’ the town.

Maggie, my wife at fifty—gray and dour and old—

With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold!

Smoking was somewhat frowned on at the next school I went to. I was living with my father. He smoked. Oddly his “roommate” did not. At school the smokers congregated on some steps on a wooded pathway down below the school building. It was a varied crew because of changing schedules. One was a girl who had a car. She asked me to go to a French movie with her.

That year was ragged. My father was out of work, had always been a troubled man, and I am sure the parenting of a 16 year old was beyond him. Nor was it in the wheelhouse of his “roommate.” Fortunately they had friends, most of them school teachers, who provided help and counsel. One sheltered me during a difficult night and when I woke the next day offered me a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

And the light of Days that have Been the Dark of the Days that Are,

And Love’s torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar—

The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket—

With never a new one to light tho’ it’s charred and black to the socket.

In Boston for my senior year my father took me to Erlich’s for my birthday at the beginning of the school year. A pipe would be better for me he said. I went. Seemed like a neat idea. He bought me a pipe called a “Canadian” or “Lumber Jack.” It was a design with a cylindrical bowl and a long briar stem with only a short black rubber bit. The length of briar supposedly cooled the smoke. It was a bit of a bitch to clean and prone to break as I found out. He also gave me a couple of pipes from his father.

My grandfather, a doctor, had smoked a pipe all his life. He had even taught his nurses how to fill them so that when he had smoked a bowl he would set that pipe down in the ashtray and pick up and light the one that was waiting. I’m told that the only time he smoked cigarettes was when he was in formal wear that didn’t have the necessary pockets for the various supplies and implements pipe smoking requires. Then he tucked a bag of Bull Durham in his cummerbund and had the art of rolling a cigarette in one hand while managing a cocktail in the other. Maybe it is apocryphal but it is a neat story and image.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider awhile—

Here is a mild Manila—there is a wifely smile.

Which is the better portion—bondage bought with a ring,

Or a harem of dusky beauties fifty tied in a string?

Counsellors cunning and silent—comforters true and tried,

And never one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride.

Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes,

Peace in the hush of Twilight, balm ere my eyelids close.

I smoked a pipe for a number of years after that, smoking cigarettes as a convenience. From time to time I’d smoke a cigar but I was never an aficionado. Alas, pipes were an early target of smoking restrictions because they could pretty seriously smog up a small space. They were a definite no-no on airplanes and quickly so in restaurants. Sort of a shame because there was nothing quite so satisfying as a contemplative bowl after dinner. So I tended toward smoking cigarettes more and more, though I would still smoke the pipe when I could. I had maybe a half dozen that had broken in well and were very enjoyable.

When I transferred to our local prestigious U and entered a fairly exclusive concentration (major) the first meeting of the group was at the headmaster’s residence in one of the houses. Sherry was served and the “gentlemen” were offered cigars. How thoroughly sexist!

Smoking was ubiquitous during the next few years before the campaigns to raise awareness began in earnest. I think cigarettes were a couple of bucks a pack. My wife smoked. We used to buy them by the carton at a discount store I passed on the way to grad school. In my MBA class of 20 guys it became a custom to light up cigars during our Friday afternoon policy class and turn the air blue. It was still okay to smoke in offices, restaurants, classrooms, even elevators! We were relegated to the back of airplanes, which has to be something that is recreated in hell as punishment for smokers and non-smokers alike. I must have reeked for weeks. By then some of my non-smoking friends were prodding me about quitting.

  

This will the fifty give me, asking naught in return,

With only a Suttee’s passion—to do their duty and burn.

This will the fifty give me, when they are spent and dead,

Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead.

The furrows of far off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,

When they hear my harem is empty, will send me my brides again.

I will take no head to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,

So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.

I will scent ‘em with best Vanilla, with tea I will temper their hides,

And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.

By this time the pipe was an occasional thing. You can’t smoke a pipe on a smoking break, and as noted carrying all that stuff was a pain—pipe, tobacco pouch, tamper, wooden matches or a fairly serious lighter, pipe cleaners. So I was channeled into cigarettes at certain times of the day, which is when they began to become time markers for me.

My smoking survived three serious relationships with non-smokers. I had stopped smoking in the house or apartment. I didn’t smoke in the car when someone else was in it. That gave way eventually to not smoking in the car, which felt at the time like a major sacrifice. Now with a four year-old car that has never been smoked in, I have come to appreciate it.

For Maggie has written a letter that gives me my choice between

The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o’ Teen.

And I have been a servant of Love for barely a twelve-month clear,

But I have been a Priest of Partagas a matter of seven year;

And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light

Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight.

I made attempts at quitting, some fairly serious. I did Smoke Enders while I was working in the most stressful place I ever worked, failed in the last week and was scolded by the substitute teacher who was covering the last session for “lack of willpower.” Those of you who don’t, especially those who never have, sometimes make it about will. It is and it isn’t, not solely.

Nicotine gum worked a bit but I had a tendency to be chomping away all the time and that didn’t work at work. I am not a pretty gum chewer anyway. Besides it is pretty pricey. Handy for long flights though.

And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove,

But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o’-the-Wisp of Love.

Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire?

Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire?

Two docs really pushed me. My internist made the case that it was the single most important thing I could do for my health, and my urologist really got on me after a scare from a scan that suggest a bladder cancer. It wasn’t but he had seen me lighting up in the COSTCO parking lot a couple of weeks earlier and took the moment of the scare to have a chat about the connection with bladder cancer. More recently an eye doc enlightened me about the connection with macular degeneration.

All stuff a smart guy should know, and of course I did. But cigarettes in particular are intensely addictive. They had become for me a major instrument of self-soothing. Stressed? Struggling with a problem? Go have a smoke. It was even enough when one of the people I ended up with in the smoking area in my last job, who shared my nickname, was diagnosed and died within weeks of lung cancer. With classic denial I had a host of reasons that I would escape.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider anew—

Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;

And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke.

Light me another Cuba—I hold to my first-sworn vows,

If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for spouse!

I don’t know if Kipling gave up tobacco. I’ll bet he gave up at least some of his cigar habit. Me? A few years ago a new drug came on the market—Chantix. It doesn’t contain nicotine but it blocks the nicotine receptors. My internist suggested I try it.

The regime is to take pills twice daily for three months. It’s not cheap, but with cigarettes in this state at $8 or $9 a pack, it is cheaper than smoking by about 60% for a pack a day smoker. It has an odd side effect—very vivid dreams. For me they were kind of fun. My wife didn’t much like hearing about them though.

It has taken about four tries. I would take the Chantix and be off the weeds for five or six months and then think I could have just one. Or in the last major fall from the wagon I got laid off and was really upset because I was pretty sure full time work was no longer in the picture. I did a course again about 14 or 15 months ago having smoked for a month or two after over half a year without. Late this summer I did the just one thing and immediately called my doc to get a new scrip, and did the 3 month course. What that means is that I have had fewer than a couple dozen smokes in the last two and half years, and probably less than half that in the last year

The drug helps a lot, and it does take some willpower to stay the course. When cigarettes have been part of your self-soothing regime and part of the way you mark time for decades, willpower alone won’t break the habit. But it takes willpower to set aside the occasional thought that I’d really like to have a cigarette right now.

I think I have got this now. I enjoy not smelling it on me and I find myself annoyed rather than attracted when I smell a smoker in the street. It’s too hard to keep quitting so I think I can make it stick. I doubt I will ever be a non-smoker, but I can be an ex-smoker. Good enough for me, and my “Maggie” likes it.

Homeless

Homeless seems to be showing up a lot lately. This week there was a headline about the possibility of YouthCare having to close its Orion Center because of a lost grant. Then another a couple of days later, there was a story that the city was going to take up the slack. Today’s paper had a piece by Danny Westneat about “Real Change” starting operations on the eastside. And then there was Dylan’s release of the first “official” video of “Like a Rolling Stone,” essentially about the experience of being homeless.

I’m not homeless. Never have been. But I have been close at times and probably would have been in today’s economic regime. In my early teens my mother moved three children to different towns in Kentucky, running up debts she could never pay because she got no child support and kept losing her hospital jobs because she stole drugs to self-medicate the pain from an undiagnosed tumor that eventually killed her. That is the absolutely shortest version of that that I can tell. You can fill in between the lines. One could play the float in those days and charging something wasn’t putting it on a card, so she was able by crook to keep us with a roof over our heads.

She wasn’t the right-wing notion of a lazy welfare cheat—we never got public assistance and she basically worked herself to death 13 days out of 14 and on call the 14^th—just a woman in desperate straits who didn’t know where to turn.

The three of us kids were alone in the house we were renting in a new town when she didn’t come home. She had blacked out at her job and been rushed to the nearest big city for surgery. It took three days for someone to wonder about what was happening to us, and we didn’t think to cause trouble by raising an alarm. A minister’s family took me in. Relatives came to get my brother and sister.

The closest I came after that was when I left the apartment where I lived with my father the year I graduated from high school. I’d gotten a menial job running calculations at an insurance company—stuff all done by computers now—and packed a bag and found a room for rent for what amounted to about 1/6^th of my paycheck. The minimum wage at the time was around $1.15 or $1.25. I can’t imagine doing it today when the minimum wage has lagged inflation significantly. That room might be half of my pay now, if I could find one at all.

The roofs in my life progressed from apartments with roommates, then ones with lovers, then ones with a spouse—usually quite small—to a rented house, then our first one with a mortgage after a brief sojourn in a commune. That first house was tiny and very old with minimal amenities that we worked on slowly. It was what we could afford on two state government salaries. One more stop in a rental house during a year as a lecturer at the local U, then we bought something fairly decent; which I gave to her when we split. And I started the progression again. But I was never without shelter. Broke, hungry, not sure where the next meal was coming from, but I always had a roof.

A couple of things from the first paragraph.

“Real Change” is a newspaper. It got started in Seattle in the mid 90s. The idea was that people who were homeless good get copies from the distribution center and sell them on street corners, getting to keep $1.40 of the $2 price: “a hand up, not a handout.” It’s grown quite successfully in these harder economic times and it is estimated to have put $1 million directly into the pockets of the poor. Its expansion to the “eastside,” Bellevue, Seattle’s “tony” burb, is significant because we pretty much think that Bellevue folk think homelessness is a Seattle problem.

YouthCare is a nonprofit organization that has undertaken what I think of as a Herculean task: helping homeless youth, aka “street kids.” They provide drop in facilities, emergency housing, counseling, career help, transitional housing for youth who are about to be able to provide for themselves but need a bit of help, and a host of other care and services for kids on the street. I’ll admit to bias here. I’ve done some work for YouthCare under the aegis of 501Commons, the successor to the Executive Service Corps, and was very impressed at the challenge they have accepted. It made me think about how close I came to needing something like that.

So I’m thankful that despite feeling about one paycheck from disaster at different times in my life, that I have never (yet, knock on wood) been homeless. And it would be so much harder today despite the existence of so-called safety nets and private sources of help.

Imagine for just a moment. You are able to find work for $9.50 an hour, but only part-time, so you end up getting about $220 a week. The old rule of thumb used to be that your housing should cost about ¼ of your budget. Probably pretty tough to find housing for one week’s pay, possible, but not easy: say one room in a place with 3 or 4 others, but more likely you pay more like $350 or $400. You need to use the bus to get around because you aren’t buying a car (think about the cost of insuring it, and fueling it, not to mention parking it) so that’s at least $20-30 a week, let’s say $100 a month.

You need to eat. You can get one meal a day out of your job, but unless you’re on a Top Ramen diet it’s going to cost you at least $5-7 a day and probably more like $10. Let’s make that $250 a month. Alternatively you could stand in lines to make use of food pantries. You probably can get some assistance like food stamps if the yahoos haven’t wiped out the program. We haven’t even talked about keeping your ratty clothes clean or the other routine expenses of daily life, and you are basically one mugging or layoff from the street. And the layoff can happen if the bus breaks down and you are late for your shift.

These are the people living in the hammock of indolence imagined by the ?Christian? right. Always on the edge of crisis, holding things together by dint of will and the blessing of whatever gods there are; and guaranteed to have things fail or break down or disappear, or to be preyed on by someone equally desperate with less of a conscience.

I’m going to be sending something to YouthCare this year, but there are other places—“Wellspring” that very successfully works to keep people from becoming homeless, “Treehouse” that helps foster kids, “Solid Ground” that supports the food distribution network—pick one. Pick one where you are. Give it as nice a gift as you can manage. As Phil Ochs wrote: “There But for Fortune….”

Writing, "Block," and Getting Old, Among Other Things

This is going to be a salad, or maybe more aptly a hash where the flavors blend into one another.

I have not been writing. It's not about some missing muse, it's just I have not been writing—this or anything else for that matter. No excuses. I don't think there is a thing "writer's block." Either you are writing or you are not. I've not been.

Coincidentally my writing group died after a long lingering decline. I don't put the two together. I wasn't writing before it died. And I miss it. It was a thing to look forward to for the last nine or ten years. Some good work was done in it. I haven't given much thought to trying to put together another one. There was something sweet and copacetic about the first few that assembled and saw fit to ask me to join, and despite some changes in characters, it stayed pretty much that way. I think people went out of their way to make it work. I miss it.

After a long hiatus I have picked up draft 22 of "Cowboy...," the first script I "finished." I have had it staring at me for almost four years knowing that the ending wasn't right and not knowing what to do about it. On our annual to Montana I was talking with my wife about it. My wife talks about the thing as if it is a movie she has actually seen. A few dozen miles of I-90 later she had me on the path to a fix where my protagonist finally brings it home the way you know she should. So now I'm actually in the nuts and bolts of the rewrite. A definite improvement.

Then amid a jumble of thoughts about things that are going on right now, this came to me, so I'm writing this and seeing where it will go. My wife is scheduled to have a hip replaced a week from today, and I've probably been a little anxious about it. But it will also be a relief. She hardly has a waking moment without pain.

And I have had another go round with the eye docs. I've had both lens replaced (cataract surgery) which had really great results, but lately I've had some trouble with fine print. The net: I have the slow form of macular degeneration in my right eye. It's in my left, too, but not progressed enough to impact my vision. I went to a specialist and got some really straight answers. Except for the prognosis (slow deterioration over time) it was a great conversation. He gave me a chart I can use to monitor it, explained the difference between what I have and "wet" macular degeneration which is worse but treatable, and said that unless new research comes up with something (and it might) there was nothing he would recommend doing. He said some of his colleagues do intervene but that he thought the risks were not worth the rare and minor gains.

Some days later I was talking with someone a bit younger and said something to the effect of this business with my eyes "being one of the not so good things about getting old." To which he said "So what are the good things about getting old?" It took a moment's thought and I responded "Complaining about it!"

Then our book group was making its annual selections and one of the women recommended a book which she described as being "a little dark, sort of like the Updike Rabbit books, about a man in late middle age who loses his job, gets divorced... it's supposed to be really good." She looked around when no one jumped on the suggestion and then added, "Maybe we should defer to the men in the group on this one." I looked across at one of the other two men and said, "I think not. Been there, done that," to general laughter. It did not make the cut.

This all munges together for me. Not being completely well, though not sick, getting old with things that just don't work the way they used to—what we take for granted in youth—not writing that way I say I want to (not much good saying and then not doing), having associations change and dissolve, being a long distance away from kin and in some cases being deeply estranged from them.... Makes me feel time passing.

Well, I have a hot script waiting my attentions.

Ooops

Well just as proof that memory does not always serve, there were some errors in my description of the process. I have corrected the previous piece.

The linotype would generate inch high slugs of lead--single lines of raised reverse type that would be collected in the stick. These would go to the composing table and assembled. this made it easy to adjust the columns by taking out a line that made it too long and putting in a continued to page n.

Should have remember it as those slugs were used all around the paper as paperweights.

Other than that I had it pretty on target.

And for those who want to know how it is now, newspaper printing uses offset lithography and direct computer to plate composition. The romance of hot lead is gone.

etaoin shrdlu

This is a little on the long side, prompted by a friend's email.

A longer time ago than I sometimes care to contemplate I was a copy boy at the Boston Globe. A friend posting about the slow demise of the newspaper business prompted me to think about it.

I was a co-op student at a large eastern educational factory which enabled me to pay for my education by alternating job and semesters at school, and because I was interested in writing and considered journalism as a possible career choice I took the job at the Globe. It paid only slightly above minimum wage and consisted of the most menial of work. I sat at a desk two seats away from the dayside City Editor, one Al Monihan by name. His brother was editor for the "Lobster Shift," (more on that in a bit).

I logged stories as the writers around the room wrote them, measuring the inches and entering the reporter's name and the time. Monihan or his Assistant Editor, Callahan, would edit them a bit; but then I carried them to the copy desk where the blue pencils would fly. I would be sent to get coffee for the City Editor or his Assistant—the reporters in the pool were expected to get their own, thankfully—and sometimes would be asked to take a "cut" down to the composing floor below. Cuts were photo engravings of pictures taken by the news photographers mounted on inch high blocks and had a typed caption attached. I had to take them to the desk where the pages were assembled (more about this later, as well). I sometimes was sent to the "morgue," where the files of old stories were kept, to find something the editor wanted. Other than that there could be a lot of simply sitting around listening to the reporters gas and chivvy each other.

The newsroom was all Irish and Italian, BC grads if they were grads. The editorial offices on the far side of the newsroom was all WASP and Harvard. There was a bit of a war between them.

Al Monihan wore blue oxford button down shirts, open at the neck with a tie loose but knotted. I never saw him in anything else. His jacket was always on the back of his chair. He always had a cigarette in his mouth. He smoked unfiltered ones that would hang stuck to his lip as he yelled at the reporters. The other copy boy who was sometimes there would bet me how long the ash would get before it would drop. He was the definition of irascible. The stories were typed on old uprights, usually with two fingers (none of them could touch type), on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of what looked like rough newsprint. If they went more than a page, Monihan would tape them together as he got them. I remember one day him screaming at one of the guys as he held up what had to be six feet of taped pages, "What the hell is this, Tarbi, an epic!"

Once in a while I'd be asked to go down to the composing room and get a mat to bring back to Callahan. A mat was a yellow plastic or fiber looking page sized piece that was used to make the plates that went on the presses, so it looked like the page would look with the type readable and showing the pictures from the cuts. Callahan had a fetish about how the front page presented itself. He believed that the Globe was a "local paper" and that it should lead with the local news and not devote the front page to national or international news. He and Monihan would argue about it vociferously, sometimes Monihan would win, sometimes Callahan.

I later heard that Callahan had died of a heart attack covering the first visit of a Pope to the United States. He was a devout Catholic and had asked to cover what he thought of as the story of his life. He was a gentler man than his City Editor, and sitting beside me in his white shirt and tie, neatly together at the neck in contrast to his nominal boss, took the time to tell me how to handle my job and answer questions.

One day between coffee runs and when it was quiet in the newsroom I decided to follow what happened with the copy I logged. I watched discreetly at the copy desk as the piece was edited. Then it was weighted with a piece of lead and dropped down "the slot," an actual open slot in the desk, and dropped to the floor below. I scooted to the stairs and ran down, getting to the composing table as someone was picking up the story. It was cut or torn into parts and each part was annotated with type style and size and given to a linotype operator.

Mergenthaler Linotype machines may have been the most complicated and fascinating pieces of machinery that occupied only about eight square feet of floor ever created. It looked like the console of a great cathedral organ with multiple registers and racks of type. Unlike a typewriter which separated the most frequently used letters to avoid jamming, the linotype organized its letters by frequency. The test line that sometimes used to creep into papers was "etaoin shrdlu." The machine had huge levers and gears, and to one side a hot pot of melted lead with an ingot hanging into it on a chain. The brass type kept in the machine was not reversed, but it was indented—the letters graved into the brass. You could read them. The operator would enter the story, line by line, each line generating a "slug," a line of type. and the slugs would slide into place in "the stick," a column width metal pan or frame that held them. He (they were all "he'" then) would enter spacing between letters to get the lines adjusted.

The sticks of slugs would taken to the composing table.  They would be adjusted to fit the page so that continuations worked. At the composing table the backwards raised type would be assembled in page sized wooden frames along with any of the cuts on the page. The frames would be tightened and the type hammered to make sure it was completely flat. Sometimes this would be inked and a page would be hand printed to see how it looked. But usually it went into the machine that made the yellow mats, once again with the type not reversed and indented into the mat. These would be taken to another machine that formed them into half cylinders and filled them with lead making a half cylinder plate that would be taken down to be put on the huge presses.

The presses occupied two floors at the end of the building away from the newsroom. The various half cylinders were put into place on the printing rollers in the order needed to print the paper correctly. Then the paper could be printed. The time from copy desk to press was about a half an hour as I remember. Not much at all.

The whole floor was an industrial space and smelled of hot lead. I wonder how much of a hazard it was and if OSHA rules would allow it today. Certainly the noise when the presses started to roll would be a hazard. The whole building would shake.

The input was huge rolls of newsprint, multiple pages wide. These were mounted on a trio of rollers so that as one roll ended the other could be pasted with it on the fly and the print run could keep going. At the other end sharp knives cut the pages apart as they streamed off and they were automatically assembled into sections and folded and the finished papers layered between the wires of a conveyer that took them to the loading dock.

I found the process fascinating and am a little sad that technology has replaced it. Those presses could roll for as many as six or seven editions a day. Usually there were three: a morning, an afternoon, and a late. They matched the shifts. Dayside did what became the afternoon edition. The afternoon people did the late or evening edition. The Lobster shift was responsible for the morning paper, usually a minimal replate of the previous evening. The whole paper didn't have to be recreated each time. A lot of the back sections stayed the same along with all the ads, the comics, the syndicated columns, and the like. The front page and some of the front section would change so it wasn't the daunting task you might think to do six or seven editions.

I was there for one six edition day, when the Kennedy baby was dying. It was Boston and the newsroom full of Irish Catholics who idolized the man. It was all hands on deck, and a furious round of plating and replating front pages as the story evolved. Boston had three fairly vigorous papers at the time, though one was already on shaky ground, and there was a lot of competition to get the stories out first. I'm glad I wasn't there a few months later in November of 1963.

That's all gone now. Where I live now we had two papers, one a fairly solid evening paper, one a not so strong morning Hearst paper. The evening paper decided to switch to a morning edition and go head to head. The other paper died within a year or so. Now our morning paper seems to get a little thinner week by week. As I said to my friend—makes me feel like a trog.