Stories: in Progress

Shakespeare’s Prospero says, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on . . .” Prospero doesn’t say that our lives are composed of dreams, as in the bland directive to “live your dreams,” but rather, that our lives are the source material for our dreams and even our nightmares. Prospero suggests neither that our life is a dream—though some, are said to possess dream lives, nor does he say that our lives enact our dreams—or even our nightmares. Our life, continues Prospero, is bounded by sleep: the sleep before birth when we are enwombed and the sleep after death when we are entombed. But until that latter time, when as Hamlet fears, dreams may come when we have shuffled off that mortal coil and we are no longer capable of doing anything from those dreams, in that interim between that before and the after, well, that is our daily lives. Our dreams do not direct our lives, but it is our lives which influence our dreams.

Now, this would be almost a cliché—we no longer hold that our dreams are the work of the gods and that their influence is evident in our dreams— but one implication of Prospero’s statement suggests that our dreams are stories about our lives. Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw material of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In waking life we story the dream-story, and then these diurnal lives become the resources for the next dream. The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened, and until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened. 

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. Rusty says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why she should do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had would be the facts, but the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they are drawn. We demand context for sense, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think at all about it: mostly in their lives people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. But then we dream, the dream work operates on the dream day and creates the story that carries into the next day and that can be narrated, and these narrations become the storied material of daily life. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance allows space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts. One narrator, Ben, in Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces says, “But the search for facts, for places, names influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.” The facts obscure, and if they do not lie, then they don’t tell the truth. While in the throes of turmoil the emotion consumes and seems to be all that exists and the emotion becomes the fact. But when the raw and immediate emotion subsides then the possibility of story arises. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Patchett’s Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. But, of course, it is only a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and the dream knowingly or unknowingly becomes storied. First, the daily life and then the storied dream. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.  

 

 

 

 

Distraction and Digression

Of late I too often opt for distraction, an experience I think opposed to the more productive practice of digression. Distraction directs me away from a present activity or state of awareness for a brief or longer period of time. The distraction might momentarily relieve a tension I am experiencing in an activity in which I am presently engaged by pulling me out of the engagement and into some mostly irrelevant event. I admit that in these times we need to be distracted, but here I am writing about mostly me. One danger of distraction is that it often leads me to the kitchen searching the refrigerator or stuffing my hand in the cookie jar. For good reasons I prefer to keep the latter empty and the former uncluttered, but the flesh is weak . . . and to alleviate my guilt I hand-bake the sweets. Not that it takes too much effort (though the clean-up is a bother—I am a careless cook); recently I have succumbed to purchasing King Arthur Flour boxed mixes: add eggs, milk, butter and vanilla, mix well, and for scones plop eight rounded portions on a prepared baking sheet and bake. For muffins I simply add the mixture into well-oiled muffin tins. I enjoy even this semi-prepared method; though still requiring clean-up, the distraction of baking and eating does give me pleasure and relief.

I have been, of late, drawn in distractibility too often to the smart phone where there are so many rabbit holes to fall into (oh, the places you go!), and to streaming shows from the computer onto a 32” external monitor screen, and to the reading of different novels, one in the mornings (Middlemarch and at present, Daniel Deronda) and another, at present, The Good Soldier, in the afternoons. But those aren’t so much distractions as engagements. I had startedLonesome Dove for the afternoons but found it, well, characterless despite the full cast of characters. I didn’t value the narrative style: declarative without much insight into character: basically a flat account. In McMurtry’s novel the character is defined by the omniscient narrator and not by the complex consciousness of the character; indeed, there is there almost no entrance into the operations of any character’s consciousness. The narrator tells what each character thinks but doesn’t show any character thinking! Didn’t much care. The reading was not much distraction, and I put the book (all 855 pages) away with a thud. But in these times I’ve chosen distraction too often.

So, I am here writing now and distract myself thinking about distractions and digressions. Politics is all about me these days and I am not at peace. (I have just deleted 107 email messages cluttering my junk mail folder: every Democrat in the country asking me for financial assistance, some of them asking multiple times. I am certain that f I gave to each I would be broke!) I need distraction and turn to the streams. I am repulsed and alarmed by the vituperative rhetoric of the Republican party and yet am appallingly drawn to their verbal garbage perhaps in some perverted interest. There is always the Big Lie and the name-calling. Latest news comes from North Carolina and Mark Robinson who proudly claims he is a black Nazi and has advocated a return to slavery! He boasted that he would own a few himself. And there is yet the absurd and dangerous accusation that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Whew! These politicians cheapen the electoral process in their discourse and pollute the environment with their lies and insults. I have given up any careful reading of the newspapers—no distraction there and no room for digression—except occasionally in the arts and leisure sections (too laden with reports about award ceremonies and red-carpet outfits in which I have little to no interest. I don’t care), and on the obituary .pages. If I’m not there I know I’m not dead, so I can eat a good breakfast and go back to bed. When I awaken, I pick up the nearby novel or turn to the shows streaming or to the relevant novel, depending on the exact time of day. Napping is a steady activity—or non-activity, so to speak. But often, I think, those naps are also a distraction! There are other anxieties from which I would flee. Distraction consumes not an inconsiderable part much of my day and does not yield much satisfaction despite the depleted contents of the cookie jar. At first, I considered that the present distractions were in the service of avoiding the work of writing, but ironically, writing is what I am engaged in now writing about distraction. I am considering that the distractions were simply an attempt to avoid deep thinking!  My Freud teaches me that the distractions serve as screen for something else and serve purpose for something other than mere avoidance, though, of course, it does serve that purpose very well. Perhaps. Maybe there is a larger project that I am avoiding: there sits 90 pages of something on the computer, a project begun three years ago and to which I return occasionally and briefly! And then there is the politics and always the omnipresent anxieties.

Digression seems to me to serve as an integral part and saving grace in the exercise of the day. I would invite more digression which nourishes me. Digression seems to open paths from the one on which I presently travel. Digression is how you sometimes have to go a long way out of your way in order to come back a short distance directly. (And who could have imagined that in this writing I would paraphrase Jerry in Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” a play that I had studied for my high school senior thesis on the Theater of the Absurd. Then, I saw a production of the play then at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village when tickets were five dollars and on occasion rats ran across the stage.) Tristram Shandy writes “That tho’ my digressions are all fair,—as you observe,—and that I fly off from what I am about, as far and often too as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs, so that my main business does not stand still in my absence.” I think that these digressions are versions of the stories Newspaper narrates to her listeners in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Her listeners don’t want just the facts: rather, they urge her to put in some pop and scoop and story it up! Without the digressions the linearity of it all becomes deadening. It is all contextless facts. If we stick blindingly to the path before us, well then, there is a great deal in the brushes off the path we would not know about. Digressions are productive. Listen to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree or his “The Ballad of Ruben Clamzo” for the benefits and joy of digression. I don’t always know what might be discovered in the off-path journeys of digression, nor who I might be when I return from those digressive wanderings I take. Digression provides context to a text and deepens meaning. Digression is the pop and scoop Newspaper adds to her narratives. 

 

Of cats and dogs

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the nature of a story’s narrator. Or course, quite everything becomes a story told, though some might pretend what they narrate is just fact and the truth. But even a complex fact lacks context which a story provides. But someone must narrate that story even if just to themselves and and that narration derives from a particular time, place, psychology and motive. Now, Freud refers to the daily lives in which we engage as the dream day, and that from these activities—the dream day—the dream work draws material into a narrative structure to construct the dream. Freud says that the “The dream work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.” That is, the dream work creates stories from the raw materials of the day and though many might say that we are more than our stories, ironically, we would not know that until we tell the story. In our waking life we story the dream-story. We narrate our lives; the character of the narrator determines the story that becomes definitive but finally, it is just a story after all.  The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” We tell the story so that we know what happened and what we think about what happened, but until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened or even what we think!

In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. One of her audience, Rusty, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks Rusty, and he answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that can be had is the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless without the context from which they were first embedded and from which they were drawn. We demand context for sense and meaning, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” but though the play displays the facts, that is not what the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand as imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” We can always tell the story.

Engaged in daily life we have a tendency not to think very much about it: mostly people go through their diurnal existences attending to the facts. Consumed in the immediacy of experience we lack context and do not narrate, but even the slightest distance offers space for the story, and the story happens when we connect up the facts that make up our daily life. Wilder’s Emily is correct: attending to the facts the citizens of Grovers Corners don’t know anything. But the play, Wilder’s story, Our Town, well, it knows. So is it in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the soon-to-be television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel had become torn. In modern parlance, Duke had ghosted Emily: he had stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds to Duke’s behavior with anger, but about herself Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She has narrated that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all might have meant. But really it is all a story. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. And Ann Patchett’s Emily, who had also played Emily in Our Town in high school, college, and summer stock, is correct: all we ever have is the story. The facts are meaningless until they inspire the story. We define ourselves by the stories we narrate. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to now known was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all.  We know others from the stories they tell. We narrate and we hear narration: the character of the narrator is central. What story do they tell, how is the story told, and what sense generates the story. Answering these questions tells us about the narrator.

All this is a too-long prologue (and story) concerning one of Trump’s comments in the recent Presidential debate. In his story-telling Trump accused immigrants of invading—our cities and eating our cats and dogs! Invading, as if at war and by this story turning the white citizenry into endangered victims similar to the beleaguered citizens of Ukraine and Gaza. Trump said, "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there." City officials in Springfield responded saying that there was no credibility to the accusation. It is difficult to discount the absurdity of Trump’s story here . . . but the character of the narrator of this tale is the point here. The story that Trump has narrated is a blatant lie that he has intended to pass off as truth. In fact, he has no facts and context to validate his story; he has made up everything. one has to wonder about his motive. Does he really believe his lie, which might suggest he is delusional, or is his story meant to inspire hatred and violence. Trump’s narrative characterizes him as a liar, a racist, a hate-monger. But I mclaim that Trump is the story he narrates: like Nate Timblin, certainly a fragment, but as Trump, he is a dangerous legend, a deadly force and a nightmarish fright. This narrator can at best be described as unreliable, and the stories he tells are ugly, dangerous and destructive. 

 

 

Post-Labor Day

Labor Day has long been considered the end of summer though there is usually two or three weeks before the equinox. School usually began the Tuesday after Labor Day: I had spent a good portion of my life in school. In Fall, apples began to appear on the shelves and I make apple crisps, cobblers and crumbles; winter clothes came out of storage and I was permitted again to wear my beloved corduroys. On the radio reports on fall colors become part of every newscast and people would plan drives into the places to best view the dying leaves. Thoreau suggests that Fall leaves teach us how to die: in blazing colors! Alas, too many of my shirts are blue and gray.

Another experience that I have come now, having lived for thirty-five years in the mid-west, to associate with the advent of Fall is the quite busy appearance of bees and spiders. Each day I discover bees swarming on my apartment deck, and my windowsills are threaded with spider webs every morning. I am not fond of bees: in their own behalf they sting adversaries like me.  On the floor at the bottom runner on my patio door is an overrun mortuary of executed bees who had ventured uninvited into my domain. Neither am I very friendly with spiders: I have had two memorable frightening confrontations with arachnids. In the crispy mornings from the windows where the spiders have woven their willowy traps, I sweep away the webs that are attached to glass and screen. When my daughters were younger, we watched Charlotte’s Web too many times. I recall Charlotte telling Wilbur that in the webs she would catch her meals and wrap them up so to keep them fresh. In the wispy webs on my windowsills there are no packaged repasts, and I wonder if the spiders just continue to spin their webs out there out of a certain rebelliousness. Spinoza says that the free man thinks least of all of his death. Maybe the spiders are spinozists. Alas, I am not so free

. . . or that wise. Nature has its order but to me who has not discerned that order think that every season has its clutter: in the Fall my windows are covered with spider webs, and every day I sweep these webs from my windows though I rarely see the active weaver. in the Spring I wait to wash my windows until the cottonwood trees have stopped their shedding: the feathery floating white tufts of seeds clog my screens and the view out of the windows is obstructed. The cottony tufts float through the air and fall like snow; in late June the sharp green grass is covered as if with winter’s snow. Summer storms blow down trees and flood the streets and rivers. Winter has meant frigid cold and snow drifts through which I cannot walk. Now I avoid winter and escape to a warmer climate.

The Fall leaves fall in the times of their dyings and like the bees in the patio door window-runners or the spider’s lairs in my windowsills they cover the surface. But the trees from which they fall remain and will issue forth green leaves in some months’ time. The bees will die and others will somehow maintain the hive with resources they have produced from their Spring and summer honey stores. Life goes on.

I know the Spring will come again and I do love the colors of Fall, the crispness of the morning air and the donning my corduroy pants. And there is some stark beauty in the bare trees whose branches will be soon blanketed in snow. There is some comfort in the hibernations of winter. But I don’t welcome the stark grayness of late Autumn and Winter. There is death all about: in the air empty of birds that have flown, on the naked tree branches and the white snow covering of the ground. As the snow falls I think of the closing lines of Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.” Thoreau saw life everywhere: Nature was his guide and source of strength. I have my books.

Labor Day has come and gone. I do not labor much these days

Rereading and Reading

I’ve returned in my eighth decade to books and authors I had read in my fourth: Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, a great deal of Philip Roth, Henry James, Willa Cather . . . And I have been wondering what has drawn me to this catalog of my younger days. I do not have any desire to actually study the texts so that I can write about them for academic journals: I have no CV to pad. I take a few notes for my journal but probably will not return often to my entries, and when I do it often becomes an inspiration for this blog! No do I intend to teach these books: I have no students and do not desire to reenter a classroom. Many of the people with whom I keep company do not read the books I have read and am now rereading, and so if these books are part of their libraries they do not have interest in discussing them in book-group-like settings, or to enter conversation over one bourbon, one scotch and one beer. And so I wonder what sought after relief I seek in these books now; to my bookshelves and not the book stores.

Kate Zambreno states “What is the space of literature for if not as a scratching pad for our irritants.” What does my present reading say about what irritates me. I reread the books that I remember enjoying back when I did study texts for different motives: degrees and publications and syllabi. It is not that person that requires relief from those irritants because that person no longer is so bothered, couldn’t care less and feels no discomfort. Rather, whatever irritant I experience vexes me in the present. It is that individual who is by something bothered. Irritated, as it were, and seeks out a scratching pad for the troublesome itch without really knowing the source of that itch. Because if the book can’t offer relief then it is useless. I recognize that it must be a cliché that we reread in the present to discover in the reading how we have changed from our first experience of the book. In this instance the underlying irritant can be identified as a wonder who I might be in the present as would be revealed by the rereading of the book. What does the rereading say about what I have learned over the years of my life that is discovered by this present experience with the page-worn, even annotated book from the past. 

Of Middlemarch and Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady and some of his shorter works) I can say this much: there is a flow to the sentences that inspires in me a quietening even despite a disquieting subject matter. I am drawn into the text and I pull it over me as I do my blanket that covers me weven hile I read. I have recently observed that the prose in these novels runs continuously without narrative breaks within the chapter; in these texts the breaks occur only betweenchapters. In these books, then, there is no pause in the narrative. But in the contemporary fiction (and non-fiction) that I have tasted, breaks occur within the chapter and a considerable volume of white space comes to exist as the scene and emotional content changes in the narrative with some regularity, almost as if place in order to relieve a reader’s attention. It is a symptom, I think, of our shortened attention spans, our impatiences, that has led to the shorter sections within chapters that facilitates placing the bookmarks where in the reading we have become inattentive and too-soon intellectually and emotionally fatigued. In these contemporary texts we can abandon the effort when we might really endeavor on. Thoreau has said that this only is reading that causes one to stand on tip-toes. Too many books fail this criteria and leave us only flat-footed. In the books that I reread, however, and books I choose for even a first reading, I continue to a chapter’s end before I am satisfied to put the book down for a spell. And at chapter’s end I take a deep and relieved but untired breath and enjoy the effort I have made as I used to relish my body’s sense after a long run on the trail. I recognize now that in even the more contemporary books I have read and now reread—works by Iris Murdoch, Jose Saramajo, W.G. Sebald—I follow the unbroken prose until chapter’s end. I am there content and becalmed. 

So perhaps the irritant that sends me to the books is the disquiet of the political world, the multiple wars reported in the newspaper, the violence that continues to violate our very lives and destroys out peace, and the incivility that threatens our place. It is my own obsession with the internet and my life in my phone. These books offer me some retreat I must have known I sought as relief from my too-worldly irritants. The books I have taken to reread provide some haven from which I can think and consider the noisy and noisome world outside.

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Once More Into the Witch

I know, I know . . . I’ve posted some of this before: actually  eighteen years ago. Eighteen is a significant number in Jewish culture: the numerical value of the Hebrew word, which means life, is eighteen. Donations and contributions to shul and charities are given in multiples of chai: one times chai is $18.00, two times chai equals $36.00 dollars, three times chai offers $54.00, and so on and on. In 2006 I felt compelled to address a latest bit of idiocy from the Christian Extreme Republican Right. Dylan then articulated my despair. He wrote in “Stuck inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again): “And here I sit so patiently/Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/Going through all these things twice”

I read in The Forward (16 June 2006) that in a footnote on the third page of Ann Coulter’s new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, she writes “Throughout this book, I often refer to Christians and Christianity because I am a Christian and I have a firmly good idea of what they term, but the term is intended to include anyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others.” I have to say this, but not in these exact words: The absolute effrontery of that ignorant pedant to conflate what Jews believe and what Christians believe in a single belief. I only wish Hitler was so inclusive, a word, of course, anathema to Republicans. What ignorance and hubris the statement reveals about this spokesperson for the a) Christian Right; b) the Republican establishment; and the Conservative Clowns. Her words are too stupid to address in substance, but her words are too stupid to ignore. The Washington Post ran a contest in which they challenged readers to take a common word and change one letter to invent a new word, and then to give that word a definition. The all-time favorite was ignoranus: someone who is both stupid and an asshole. I think Ann Coulter is an ignoranus. Writing somewhere she responded to the image if Gus Walz, 17, who in ecstatic pride sobbed “That’s my dad,” while clapping as his father, Governor Tim Walz, gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. In response, Coulter tweeted a video of Gus Walz’s reaction and wrote, “Talk about weird.” I was appalled and yet shocked at her remarkable insensitivity, her ignorance, and her completely unwarranted chutzpah. (That’s a Yiddish word that means ‘gall’).  In my amazement at her idiocy I decided (again) to discover just a bit about her personal credentials that gave her the authority to make this judgment. I realized that no credentials permit such ignorance. But in the process I learned that Ann Coulter has been engaged to be married a number of times but has not yet married. She has no children. Thus, Ann Coulter joins in the community described by the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance (who the ignoranuses support) as cat-women! Perhaps she can post her thoughts regarding the ignoranus comments of Vance.

I apologize for at least the partial repetition of a portion of the 2006 posting, but perhaps what the reprise has suggested to me is that the nastiness and cruelty that spews from the small minds and unkind mouths of the present day disgraceful gang of lowlifes—I hesitate to call them Republicans ( an association I reserve only for Abraham Lincoln)—defines them this  ignoranuses of the first order. Ann Coulter is certainly not the only fool but she seems in the moment one of the more obviously stupid and horrifically disagreeable ones.

All the News That's Fit To Print?

 

For years I have lived by the lines in the final (?) verse to the song, “Get Up and Go.” The verse sounds, “I get up each morning and dust off my wits/Open the paper and read the obits/If I'm not there, I know I'm not dead/So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.” I have sympathy with the sentiment; for years I have read the obituaries in the New York Times, and if I wasn’t there . . . I learned to read the newspaper with the New York Times, often folding it unskillfully on the number 1, 2, or 3 subway trains rolling under the streets of New York City. Now, I have the paper delivered five days a week and I have read it sitting the dining table with my breakfast. E. get the Sunday paper and on Shabbat I rest from the news. Well, mostly, I do, since I still follow events on the digital version of the paper, the on-line news outlets and commentary. I still check the headlines and occasional stories in The New York Times, CNN, and Politico, for example. For the past several years my time with the Times has decreased considerably as the reporting has in my opinion declined in quality. I suppose that with all of the active online outlets for news and comments the print newspapers have modified their presentation of the news by transforming it into personal, human interest stories. Instead of the first paragraph—as I once learned—defining who, what, when, where and even how, now opening paragraphs of a news item even on the first page begin as personal narratives concerning individual(s) whose situation focused the story on the eventual newsworthy. Since the online sources have instantly reported on the who, what, when, where and sometimes how, the newspapers now offer anecdotes to illustrate and/or explain the situation. One could read considerably through the printed column before one even knows what the newsworthy topic might be. I prefer my stories in bound editions acquired in bookstores and libraries; from the newspapers I want reports on what is going on in the world—who, what, when, where and sometimes how. I’ve now stopped reading the newspapers because I don’t want my news presented as short stories. Lately, I sometimes don’t even pay too much attention to the Times opinion columns. I’ve got some opinions of my own. But I had still turned to the obit pages. Until now! Here is the one that has put pause to my regular study of the obits, In the on-line obituary notices headlined prominently today is that of Robert Pickman, who died at the age of 74 years. 

Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74 

Convicted in the murder of six women (though he boasted of killing many more), he died of unspecified injuries after being assaulted in prison.

 

I thought to myself: What the hell? How does a serial killer who proudly claimed that he had murdered forty-nine women deserve the space for a prominently displayed and researched formal obituary in the New York Times? Especially since the Times has been running obituaries of folks whose deaths were at the time unrecorded by the paper because according to the Times they weren’t famous enough despite now reported positive contributions to society that they might have offered. Perhaps these deaths of remarkable people were unreported because the prioritized obituaries to be researched and printed were those of unremarkable criminal types. How is it that a serial killer merits a full obituary in the New York Times. To whom is the obituary addressed? What exactly does this obituary of Robert Pickton say about the newspaper and our times? 

Well, I will attempt one explanation. We have become a society in which criminals and very bad people have achieved the status of cultural icons. Pretty Boy Floyd. Bonnie and Clyde. The legendary Robin Hood. Dylan had once sung that to live outside the law you must be honest. That is only partly true: the wages of sin in this country are high. But I also know that heinous villains have not been honored with a formal obituary in the New York Times. On April 24, 1998 the death of James Early Ray was covered in a story on Page 1 and continued on page A25. Not on the obituary page. The death of Lee Harvey Oswald appeared on page 1. No obituary on the obit page. The death of Jeffrey Dahmer was reported on November 29, 1994, Section A, Page 1. No obituary on the obit page.  The death of Ted Kaczynski was reported on page 1 of the New York Times on June 10 2023. No formal obituary. An article reporting the suicide death of Jeffrey Epstein appeared on Augusts 10, 2019 but I cannot find an obituary in the esteemed paper.  Now we have a former President convicted as a felon whose face appears on the front page of every newspaper as he spews lies and vituperative insults at the justice system that found him guilty of thirty-four crimes against the people of the United States. Donald Trump was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Are newpapers that put Trump’s lies on the front page give him a platform and give his lies credibility. Is serial killer Robert Pickton really worthy of a formal obituary? Why? Is he now really a folk icon? What exactly is the New York Times supporting here?? 

I will be in the future more circumspect reading the obits. But if I’m not there, I know I’m not dead and go on with breakfast.