Manifold greatness: Reflecting on 400 years of the King James Bible
I have tried, as best I could, to pay tribute to the King James Version of the Bible in this the 400th anniversary year of its publication. That is to say, while I have used it not often enough, I have on those times when I’ve read the Bible, or taken one to church services. I opened it and placed it into the lap of my 13-year-old daughter, Katie, the last time we were in church, for her to read along with the New International Version verses being read aloud.
She smiled and shook her head and said, “What does that mean? It makes no sense.”
I hope one day she’ll feel differently. Because that book in her lap has shaped the language she speaks and reads more than any other single work.
Only as I sat down to write a few words about the King James Bible before the anniversary passes did I realize that the tribute I have paid it was less in private reading than in public imitation.
I write about sports. In a newspaper. In 2011. Yet in the past two years, I can go back and count at least 25 references in those very columns to this version of the Bible published 400 years ago.
Sour grapes. A drop in the bucket. A labor of love. A thorn in the flesh. Sign of the times. Baptism of fire. Fire and brimstone. Letter of the law. Writing on the wall. The powers that be. The straight and narrow.
All of these, and many, many more, either originated in or were popularized by the most-read text in the English-speaking world. Commissioned by King James I of England in 1604, partly out of scholarly and literary concerns but probably to a greater extent out of a political desire to overtake the Puritan (and non-monarchical) influenced Geneva Bible, this was a hybrid of previous versions and translation into the flowering expression of Shakespearian English (and Shakespeare was a contemporary, cranking out “Othello” at about the time the Translators were beginning their work.)
My kids might not pick up on its rhythms, but they are unmistakable in literature, language and even music.
I’m intrigued that some of the most eloquent celebrations of the King James Bible have come from men who don’t believe much of it to be true. Yale literary critic Harold Bloom calls it the “sublime summit of literature,” and the late Christopher Hitchens, a fervent unbeliever in God and critic of religion, wrote of it:
Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening.
A New York Times editorial this past Jan. 9 proclaimed: “All who speak this wonderful language still speak in the shadow of the King James Bible.”
Without it, writers from Emily Dickinson to Toni Morrison cannot be fully understood.
I am still young enough not to have grown up with the King James Version as the primary Bible in use. Yet somehow, when I hear familiar passages, I translate them in my head to the poetic King James rendering without realizing.
I’m certainly not advocating its use over modern translation. Every generation should have the Bible in its own language, translated through its own scholarship. But this version, 400 years out, remains one of the top selling editions, and it does so for a reason — and not only because some of the old church jokes just don’t work without it. (Q: Who was the only woman to smoke in the Bible? A: Rachel. She lit off her camel.)
Finally, it was only in thinking about this short appreciation that I developed one more connection to this most famous of texts. Before he was King James I of England, the King who commissioned this version of the Bible was known as King James VI of Scotland. On April 2, 1571, Capt. Thomas Crawford led a force of 150 men to storm the castle at Dumbarton and expel forces loyal to Catholic Queen Mary. Two years later he advised on the siege of Edinburgh Castle, the fall of which helped James, then only 7 years old, to consolidate power on the throne.
Somewhere in the royal archives in England is a letter from 9-year-old King James to that same Crawford. It reads:
Captain Craufurd; I have heard such report of your good service done to me from the beginning of the wars against my unfriends, as I shall some day remember the same, God willing, to your great contentment. In the meantime be of good comfort, and wait until that time with patience, being assured of my favour. Farewell. 1575. xv September.
Your very good friend,
James R.
Beyond the revelation that “unfriend” was coined long before Facebook, this little letter is meaningful to me for this reason.
To borrow a term from the King James Version, Thomas begat a son named Hugh, who begat Lawrance, who begat William, who also begat a son named William, who begat William Valentine Crawford, who begat Valentine (an aide to George Washington), who begat a son named George Washington Crawford, who also begat a son named George Washington Crawford, who begat James Harrison Crawford, who begat George Finley Crawford, who begat Delbert Crawford, who begat Byron Crawford, who begat me.
I am sad to report that the “great contentment” King James promised was not passed down through the generations, nor the “good comfort” he advised.
But the Bible he commissioned has been a comfort to every generation since, and an inspiration to many, both who believed and who did not, even to some who did not realize it.
Its anniversary is almost over, but this is a good time of year to remember, and to appreciate the living power of ancient words.
2011: A Christmas Memory
I don’t remember how old I was, nor what gifts I received. For a writer, not remembering is a nuisance. And occasionally, a gift.
It was Christmas night. The excitement had passed. The gifts had been given. Brothers and sister were scattered to corners to play. The grown-ups, I imagine, were sitting around, telling each other that they’d overdone it, that they could return what didn’t fit, remembering.
I do know that I warmed up one of my two basketballs by the wood stove until it was stretched to the point of bursting. Maybe I warmed myself, too, as I sometimes did before slipping out the lengthy back hallway and out toward the barn.
Watch the boy, stepping through the clear night with pregame purpose, trailed by clouds of his breathing. See him pull open a side door, climb up an enclosed feed trough and click on a drop-cord light, revealing a basketball rim and net, hung above the wide, shut, double barn doors.
There were several goals at our house. The main one was out in the side yard. My first goal.
My dad had gotten the idea to fix up a backboard and hoop on an old, out-of-use telephone pole on the property and plant it in a patch of ground beside the house.
So he set to work with the post-hole diggers. He went into town and bought the goal, braced it to the pole, and several of us steadied the unbearably heavy contraption against the closed tailgate of his pale yellow pickup.
The plan, as I remember it, was to back the truck up while pushing the pole and steadying it so that it would nestle down into the hole.
But when we tried to hoist the pole, we lost it, and it slid sideways and crashed to the ground, the fiberglass backboard breaking in half. Sometimes, remembering the scene, I can almost imagine Garrison Keillor narrating it, his voice now lilting to almost a whisper, describing the fall, pausing for the audience to laugh.
My dad had no choice, it seemed, but to go buy another one. On the second try, we got it right, and it became my home court for the next eight seasons or so, until I left for college.
The broken goal hung, too, glued together, above the door of a small wooden shed, about six feet off the ground. I played on it when I wanted to pretend to be tall, until the walnuts ripened overhead and started falling in bunches.
The goal in the barn was reserved for rainy days or winter nights. There was no scoreboard, but the clock certainly was ticking. After about 15 minutes on a cold night, the ball no longer would bounce.
I can’t remember the specifics of that Christmas. I can remember taking off my jacket and bouncing the ball in a playing space not much wider than a free-throw lane, bordered on one side by a stall for a calf and another on the other for storage. The bare light bulb threw off fierce shadows, and a beam in the ceiling meant that shooting arc had to be at a minimum.
The boards of the barn floor were loose and uneven, except for one. How is it that I cannot remember the highlights of a holiday, but I remember a lone board in a barn floor, driven solid by a nail, on which I bounced the ball to shoot free throws?
I couldn’t have stayed very long, but certainly long enough to satisfy one of those bursts of boyhood basketball energy, long enough to feel the cold in my bones, because shooting ball in a winter coat was no way to play. Making the last shot, or maybe several last shots, I flung myself back over into the stall, climbed up and clicked off the light, and headed back to the house.
It’s possible I never even was missed. The clicking off of that light, it seems, is the shutting off of my memory.
But it doesn’t take light to illuminate such a moment, even years later.
As a child, I was focused on the game. The bounce of the ball, the sound of the net. As a man, the camera widens, the light softens, the scene pans and there’s a boy, on Christmas night, in a barn, next to a trough for feeding animals. We never called it a manger. But all these years later, it calls to me.
In a lifetime of keeping my eye on the ball, it wouldn’t be the last time I would wander straight through the Nativity without noticing. Thankfully, each year presents us a new chance to stop, be still and quiet, and find it again before the ball stops bouncing.
Stories of Christmas past: A Little Girl’s Gift
I wanted to share a few pieces from the past this holiday season, and this one isn’t mine, but from my dad, Byron Crawford. It’s one of his best pieces of writing, I think, though that’s a large field to narrow. Thelma Floyd, a teacher from Bagdad Elementary, shared this story with him. She asked not to be identified at the time, but all these years later, I think it wouldn’t hurt that folks know the source of this wonderful little story. It ran in The Courier-Journal on Christmas Day, 1987.
A little girl’s gift
By BYRON CRAWFORD
The Courier-Journal, Dec. 25, 1987
This story took place one week ago today, in an elementary school in rural Central Kentucky. The teacher agreed to share the story but asked that the school, the teacher and the student not be identified out of respect for the privacy of the family.
The third-grade classroom was abuzz with excitement as the teacher opened her gifts, pausing to admire the beautiful wrapping paper and ribbons, thanking each student by name.
Tearfully, the child nodded that she did.
“Don’t you want to give it to me?”
The child shook her head, then said, sobbing, “Mine’s not pretty.”
“Well now, why don’t you let me be the judge of that,” the teacher consoled her.
With tears streaming down her face, the child handed the teacher her present. It was wrapped in pink wallpaper with little flowers, and no ribbon.
The teacher began to cry as she looked at the wallpaper, and at the tears in the eyes of the little girl who had worked so hard to make her gift a pretty one, but who had been ashamed to leave it under the tree with the others.
The teacher remembered that, a few days earlier, when all the students brought gifts to take to a local nursing home, the child’s gift had been a little bar of motel soap, wrapped in notebook paper and fastened with adhesive tape with the words, “To a friend, love . . .” written on the outside.
She also had realized that the child, who came from a poor family, was very special during the nursing home visit. The youngster had noticed an old woman crying in a room by herself and had left the other children to go in and visit.
“It doesn’t matter what’s in a package,” the teacher told the child. “All I ask of you for Christmas is your love, and you’ve already given me that. So if you don’t give me anything else, that would be enough.”
“That was when she grabbed me around the neck and just hugged me around my neck and cried and cried. We both shed quite a few tears there.”
When the teacher opened the gift, inside the pink wallpaper, she found a Lipton teabag box and, inside it, wrapped in a small blue hand towel, two little glass votive cups — with dust gathered around their candles — that the little girl had found at home and thought the teacher would like.
“Mama wrapped them up in the towel to keep them from breaking,” she said.
The teacher choked back tears as she thanked the child for the wonderful gift, and promised her that she had a perfect place for it at her house.
It was, she reflected, perhaps the most touching moment of her 27 years in the classroom.
A little girl who had no money to buy a gift, and no wrapping paper or ribbon, had reminded her once again that a gift of love is far too valuable for a price tag, and that the most beautiful presents of all are often wrapped in the plainest paper.
The teacher found a perfect place for the child?s candles, right beside the little nativity scene on a table in her home.
Merry Christmas to you all.
On Veterans Day: Reflecting on a wonderful life
I spent a couple of hours last night in the home of Jim and Rosemary Miller. Jim died last month of a heart attack. He was 87. I sat in front of the computer this afternoon and did the impossible, tried to condense an 87-year life into 600 words.
I wanted to do this story anyway, but even more after the events of the past few days. I felt a need to write it and to tell this story, and maybe reading it will provide a needed turn in perspective for some people. You can read the column here.
Jim played football and baseball at St. X, for state championship teams. He went to Tennessee to play football, but spent only one year. He got to be a part of the Tennessee team that won the Sugar Bowl in 1943, then most of the guys on that team reported directly for induction into the Armed Forces.
Jim went to France, was shot in an ambush on patrol. A German surgeon saved him, but he was imprisoned in Stalag 13. I heard from his family some tales of life as a POW. After Gen. George S. Patton liberated those prisoners in the spring of 1945, he was imprisoned again.
With a lot of guys of that “greatest generation,” I’ve often had the feeling that they could do anything, fix anything, accomplish anything.
That depiction certainly fit Jim Miller. He came home, after escaping his captors and completing his service, became an assistant football coach at Flaget High School, where he coached a couple of guys who would go on to pretty fair accomplishment — Paul Hornung and Howard Schnellenberger. It’s only as I’m typing this that I remember I didn’t have room to work in the story that Hornung used to borrow Miller’s convertible, then Miller’s wife Rosie would get upset later when word got back to her that Hornung had been driving girls around town in it.
He took over the family transfer and shipping business. But, having gotten into music, started singing with barbershop quartets and choruses. He became director of the Thoroughbred Chorus and led it to national and international championships. He took a singing quartet on a USO Tour to Vietnam. He founded a photography company. Such a wide range of accomplishment.
I didn’t have space to talk much about his family. Nor the trip he made in the final months of his life on an Honor Flight to see the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., nor of how when he arrived there, they had a military chorus sing to them, and they brought him up, and he stood up from his wheelchair, and directed it.
They’ve got all the pictures there at the Miller house. He didn’t believe in scrapbooks, they told me. The pictures were on the walls, everywhere. He could sit at his desk and turn 360 degrees around and view scene after scene from his life, friends, events, children and grandchildren, awards and honors.
There were signed pictures with messages of thanks from Schnellenberger, Hornung, Bear Bryant and others.
And then there was this — as we sat around the kitchen table, piece of paper after piece of paper was passed around. Clippings from The Courier-Journal, quite often. A picture of him with his dad marking the date he was to try out for the Cincinnati Reds. A notice of him being reported missing in France. Write-ups from this game or that. Not too long ago, he had done h
ours and hours of interviews with some folks at U of L. These are thankfully preserved on DVDs. But we all sat around and passed around the pieces of paper, photographs, telegrams, letters. And I wondered what will they pass around for those of us younger? And even if there were papers to pass around, would they have recorded so much of life as they used to.
And the answer, of course, is that they do not. They’re fond of having meetings these days about figuring out ways for papers to connect with their audience. The goal perhaps should be less about focus groups and more about those frames and boxes and scrapbooks. The Courier-Journal even included a short blurb about it when Jim Miller, local football star, got engaged. When he died, they had to pay to get a notice in. Just an observation.
Regardless, tomorrow there will run a column on Jim Miller’s life, which I wanted to get into the paper on Veterans Day. And online I’ll run a longer version with some things that there wasn’t enough newsprint space to include. One such nugget — the last real “project” of his life involved a flagpole that a friend had given him. It was all set to be installed, with appropriate lighting, when Miller suffered his heart attack. The job was done while he was in the hospital. Miller flew a flag outside his home his whole life, and his daughters were taught the proper treatment of the flag according to the U.S. Flag Code. The evening I arrived, it was flying, properly illuminated. A fitting final project.
Some have asked about the service. It’ll be Nov. 19 at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Louisville, where Miller was a charter member, at 10 a.m.
Every time you write about someone who has passed away, you feel an urge to apologize, that you can never do people, especially those who did great things or were great people, anywhere near enough justice in the paper.
But it is a privilege to get to try.
- The musical Jim Miller, “Mister Barbershopper.”
- The certificate for Miller’s Bronze Star.
- A certificate for one of Miller’s two Purple Hearts.
- Jim Miller and his father, King Miller, in a photo from The Courier-Journal.
- Miller’s jersey and some photos from his lone season at the University of Tennessee. The program would not field a team in 1943 because of the war.
A quick birthday reflection
So Katie turned 13 a couple of weeks ago, and Jack hits double-digits today. Not sure how they, or their little brother, for that matter, got to be so big, and smart, and funny. Nor am I sure how I am able to be nostalgic about every age they seem to pass. But that’s how it works.
I wrote this after a birthday years back. It seems to be applicable after all of them. Only the gifts and ages change.
BIRTHDAY
You won’t remember today.
Not the new ball cap,
not the sunglasses,
not the fistful of candy
melting in your hand.
You’ll look at the pictures
and see some baby
with the beginnings of you
blowing out two candles,
talking, something like words.
And you could not know,
but should know,
that when the mess was cleaned
and you were long asleep,
I sat on the couch, ate
a last bit of cake and ice cream,
and searched for ways
to save the day forever.
Clean-up on aisle something: Losing it at the grocery store
They’ve rearranged my grocery store.
I know people are losing it over this downgrade of the nation’s credit rating. But I’m upset about an upgrade.
That’s what the store manager called it. (And no, before you ask, I did not confront him on why all the changes were made. I’m far too passive-aggressive for that. I don’t complain to managers. I just go home and write about it. That’s how Thomas Paine came to write “Common Sense.” Look it up.)
From professional eavesdropping, I gather that the manager is telling people the store was long overdue for an upgrade. And apparently, that means when I turn the corner to grab cookies, I’m going to get water filters. (Sorry, kids. But don’t complain till you’ve tried one bite. And don’t make a mess.)
“The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men;” wrote Thoreau, “and so with the paths which the mind travels.”
Call my mind soft, Henry David, but I can remember, precisely, which aisles held what items at Nell Samples’ store or the B&N Market in the little town where I grew up. Not far from there now they have built what is billed as the state’s second-largest Kroger. Or, in terms that others might understand, its 10th largest Walmart. Either way, it’s very handy for those who, in addition to needing hot dogs and buns and potato salad for the cookout also need to grab some cheap patio furniture.
You see? This is what happens. You start out writing about groceries, and soon you wind up far from frozen foods and your main point, which remains that a month ago, I could’ve plucked a bag of Grippos out of my grocery with my eyes closed. Today, I couldn’t find one with a Garmin signature series shopping cart.
And it’s a problem. These are the things that raise my blood pressure, not the things I see on the news, not political deadlock nor economic calamity nor partisan rancor nor even stock-pocalypse. I majored in History and English. As a result, I have a good long-range perspective on all these things, have encountered them all before, heard all the debates, and, also as a result, have no amount of money in the stock market to cause me to lose sleep over any of it.
But somebody has moved my damn cheese. Not my figurative cheese but my actual, physical cheese. And as I was looking for it today I was hit with an existential truth that I’m now far more like those poor old souls wandering lost through the aisles than those who laugh at those wandering lost through the aisles.
It is not, I have learned at last, so funny when you’re the one who ambles around so long in search of peanut butter that you forget what you were looking for and wind up turning to a six pack and a bag of Twizzlers just to calm down.
But don’t tell me to clam down. I brace myself every time I hear the words, “In order to serve you better . . . ”
Those are the words you see in the letter telling you that your benefits have been cut, or your rates have been raised, or your service has been slashed. Progress has served us so well. But lately, its label has been misapplied to so many things that it no longer is prudent to trust. That may sound too cynical. But bear in mind, I am hungry.
In any event, for those who are worried sick over the recent downgrade, I can only offer one consolation.
Be thankful it wasn’t an upgrade.
A birthday thank you
As someone whose philosophy at this point in life is to handle birthdays a lot like weather and traffic — that is, to celebrate them “on the tens,” and let them slip on by otherwise — the Facebook birthday phenomenon is a bit overwhelming.
If I had a dollar for every person who wished me Happy Birthday today — hey, wait, that’s an idea . . .
No, no. The value of people taking even just a moment for you is far greater than that. The value of them taking longer than a moment to read something you’ve written from time to time greater still. And the value of friends, of course, is the highest of all.
Thanks to all who took a minute to send birthday greetings. And even to those who didn’t. After a certain age, birthdays become less about what you are going to get than what you’ve already gotten.
You are all appreciated.
In memoriam: Cursive handwriting
This post is dedicated to Timothy Matlack. More on who he is in a minute.
I thought about him, and his work, when news arrived a couple of weeks ago that Indiana schools no longer will teach cursive handwriting.
The notion doesn’t seem right, though crafting a practical argument for why presents a challenge. Students still must learn to print, after all. Handwriting still must be learned. Is there, in fact, any modern need of cursive? Probably not.
But let the ink not fade on its legacy without a respectful remembrance of what it has meant.
The most famous handwritten document in American history is, no doubt, the Declaration of Independence. The words, “IN CONGRESS” at the top make the page instantly recognizable. But it was far from the first copy of the document. In fact, the first official copies, once a final handwritten version was settled on, were printed broadsheets by John Dunlop of Philadelphia, produced on July 4, 1776. These “Dunlop Broadsides” (photo below) were set in type not unlike a newspaper’s today and distributed to political and military leaders at the direction of John Hancock. Twenty four of those still exist, including one that George Washington kept with him throughout the Revolutionary War and brought home to Mount Vernon (only partially intact) when he returned in 1783.
I bring all of these up only to note that, though they were the first true public copies, they are not the ones that stir Americans. That honor belongs to an official “engrossed” copy written in the hand of Timothy Matlack. Official and important legal documents in those days were written on parchment. As clerk to the Secretary of the Continental Congress, Matlack got the honor of inscribing this most famous document. It is not without mistakes. On one line, he misspelled “Representative,” but wrote the missing letters above. On another, he left out a word, and inserted it above the line.
These don’t matter. Though the original is badly faded (due in part to a couple of engravings for facsimiles), it is this handwritten document that represents the power of that historic time, even though it was not authorized until two weeks after the Declaration was adopted and published, and was not signed until nearly a month (Aug. 2) after that date.
All of which is just a long-winded way of saying that the inscribed document carried more authority. It was more personal. The original U.S. Constitution was similarly inscribed.
NOW I’M CERTAINLY NOT proposing a return to calligraphic handiwork for all official documents.
I am, however, saying that there is a power in the handwritten word that ought not to be lost. I don’t make any claims on being a great writer, but I have copied favorite poems or literary passages just to see what it feels like to form such words. A preacher I knew in Indiana led his congregation on a project of copying parts of the Bible in their own handwriting, to give them the experience of forming the passages, and to personalize its reading when the job was done.
There is, in handwriting, the experience of words as physical things. Letters must be shaped, lines must be filled. It is a physical act. I can tell you more about a man from his handwriting than his typing.
Maybe that’ll be my next career. I must confess that I’ve always been fascinated by it. In school, I liked watching teachers write on the board. I will watch people’s hands today as they write, if I get the chance. I’m the only person I know who collects shopping lists that people leave in their carts at the store.
The end of cursive instruction in Indiana is hardly a tragedy. I can’t recall any cursive instruction I got in school after the basics, and remember only two teachers past grade school — one in high school and one in college (a professor in Classical Greek who made penmanship a factor in the grade) who spent any significant time at all talking about handwriting. And I had an English teacher in high school, Ernestine Jennings, whose handwriting was so beautiful that it made me want to have better handwriting. She was a great influence in encouraging me to write more — but unfortunately the handwriting didn’t wear off.
I will say, in those classes where penmanship was stressed, it made me pay closer attention to detail. I also have to say, I’m not sure it made my handwriting any better today. (You can read for yourself. Here’s a page of this blog post, handwritten by me.)
Blogs, of course, aren’t much suited for cursive. And it appears not much else in the world is anymore, either.
Writing for free, the ‘personal brand,’ and journalism
In recent weeks, a couple of writers I admire offered some high-minded advice to student journalists. I want to respond here:
Rick Reilly, ESPN.com columnist and ESPN personality, told graduates of the University of Colorado journalism school this:
“When you get out there, all I ask is that you: DON’T WRITE FOR FREE! Nobody asks strippers to strip for free, doctors to doctor for free or professors to profess for free. Have some pride! What you know how to do now is a skill that 99.9 percent of the people don’t have. If you do it for free, they won’t respect you in the morning. Or the next day. Or the day after that. You sink everybody’s boat in the harbor, not just yours. So just DON’T!”
It’s fashionable in my profession to dislike Reilly. That usually happens when a guy gets really famous and really rich. I’m a great admirer of his early work (which is not a back-handed way of saying his current work stinks), and he remains the kind of writer who can draw non-sports fans to sports subjects (though I’m not sure he’s in the right forum to do that). To be sure, his job had to be somewhat easier before he became Rick Reilly.
Regardless, I found myself reading his advice, thinking, “Preach, brother.” One of my big concerns with journalism is that every year journalists are asked to produce more words, particularly in the form of blogs and multimedia, without a corresponding increase in pay. Professional writers and reporters should be paid to write and report. Free labor is nice, but usually doesn’t work out so well for the labor. I’m a word guy, not a math guy. But the math isn’t good.
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said the great Samuel Johnson, quoted often by the great Mike Royko.
But it’s a whole lot easier to say that from the other side of fame. From Reilly’s side, the gozillionaire side.
The fact is, writing for free is very much a part of establishing yourself these days — and really always has been, in all forms of writing. Not everyone has to do it. But in a climate where words are cheap and publications are struggling, writing for free for some is the only way. In fact, even for journalists who are employed, a certain amount of it is done — less as a way to help out the team than as an attempt to build one’s own daily web audience lest you have to carry it elsewhere with you someday. To borrow from Thoreau, the mass of media lead lives of quiet desperation.
Emily Dickinson wrote for free (though I’m fairly certain she didn’t have a blog). Bill Simmons wrote for free. Matt Drudge wrote for free. Will Leitch. I’m writing this for free. And if you can find another blog entry that mentions those names in the same sequence, click on it!
I agree with Reilly in principle. But I’d tell those J-school students he was talking to that day, if there’s something they’re passionate about and the only way they can write about it is for free — write it. Post it. Submit it. Do something with it. Waiting for the check, while required in restaurants, is not in writing.
But that brings up a second piece of advice, from no less than Gene Weingarten, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning feature writer and humor columnist from The Washington Post, who unquestionably is one of the finest newspaper writers in the nation. His book on shelves now, “The Fiddler in the Subway,” a collection of his best columns from The Post, should be mandatory journalism school reading.
Weingarten got a question from a college student with the assignment of asking how he built his “personal brand,” and answered with this column, headlined “How ‘branding’ is ruining journalism,” which advised:
The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.
These are financially troubled times for our profession, Leslie — times that test our character — and it is disheartening to learn that journalism schools are responding to this challenge by urging their students to market themselves like Cheez Doodles.
He went on to explain that her focus and the focus of journalists should be on doing great work, not on building a brand, that the brand comes later. Again, my response initially was, “Right on!” It sounds correct. Sure, he’s right. You build with substance, and style comes from that.
Then again, Weingarten writes a column that is named, “Below the Beltway.” That’s a brand. And frankly, the more I thought about writers, the more I realized that more of them than not absolutely were conscious of brand — regardless of what they would admit. I grew up the son of a columnist who wound up in the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. In his early years on television and in the newspaper his trademark was an old camouflage hat that he wore on the air during his stories from the back roads of the region. He even wore it in his first newspaper column photo.
Wherever we went, people asked about that hat. In speeches, toward the end he’d whip that hat out and the crowds would applaud. Now, there was substance to the work he was doing. If there hadn’t been, he’d have been just some guy in a hat. Charles Kuralt,who was doing the same kind of stories at the network level, once called him, “The best storyteller in Kentucky, if you count only the ones who tell the truth.”
And later in his career at the newspaper, he ditched the hat. But by then his “brand” was established.
But I needn’t resort to such a local example.
Few writers of the past century are more notable than Vladimir Nobokov. Last week a friend sent to me a Paris Review piece that, among other things about the author noted how much he worked to craft his image, going so far as to write entire interviews ahead of time. See the post, and video, here.
I think what I’d have told the student (who didn’t ask me, and why would she?) was that rather than crafting an image, to try to develop a style that distinguishes itself somehow from the voices around it, while managing to maintain in that voice something that is distinctly you.
Then, of course, hope like hell it sells.
I'm a sports columnist for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., but this blog is a spot for my non-sports writing of various kinds. Thanks for stopping by.
A bike and a bridge, echoes of Sherman Minton
When Minton was 13 years old, he was known around his neighborhood in southern Indiana as a troublemaker. He hadn’t had the easiest time of it.
His father, who had worked for the railroad, was disabled from a bout of heatstroke. His mother had breast cancer and died during a surgery to try to remove the tumor — a surgery performed by a visiting surgeon on the family’s dining room table.
The young man became angry and rebellious. He turned his back on religion, according to his biographers. It was against this backdrop that he ducked out of traffic on a New Albany street one day to ride his bike on a sidewalk.
He was stopped by a policeman and arrested, if you can believe that. They hauled him in front of the justice of the peace, who fined him three dollars.
Much later in life, after he had become a United States Supreme Court Justice, following a stint in the U.S. Senate, he would credit that episode with the bike, at least in part, with inspiring him to become a lawyer.
Fitting then, I guess, that when his name is being remembered these days, it is by people sitting in traffic, most of whom would take to the sidewalks with a bike if only they had one handy.
I’m always interested in how names from history poke up at us from the past in unexpected times. No one in the mainstream of life has thought about this man, a legitimate giant of Indiana political history, for years. In the three months leading up to the closure of the bridge that bears his name, a Nexis search showed only seven mentions of the bridge — or his name — in The Courier-Journal. But here he is, trending on Twitter. All right, maybe not. The misnomer #loubridge hashtag hardly does him or the bridge justice. If it’s “Lou’s” bridge, after all, shouldn’t Lou pay to fix it? Though the trendier #Shermageddon might yet take the day.
Regardless, three scattered but quick thoughts on Minton, and his bridge:
1). I’m going to have to start collecting bicycle lore in these parts. On the Kentucky side of the river, a kid has his bike stolen and the resulting anger spurs him to start boxing, and he becomes “The Greatest.” Over in Indiana, a kid rides his bike on a sidewalk, gets in trouble, and winds up a Supreme Court Justice. There must be something to it.
2). Indiana Southeast professor Linda Gugin, author of “Sherman Minton: New Deal Senator, Cold War Justice,” along with James St. Clair, writes that Attorney Nicholas Katzenbach had this to say about Minton in his eulogy in 1965: “He was at pains to separate predispositions from the decision-making process; indeed on occasion he noted his personal distaste for the actions of parties in whose favor he felt constrained to decide.” That alone, the ability to separate our “predispositions,” our preferences, our leanings, from our decision-making processes, is a rare gift, and something worth thinking about while sitting in traffic.
3). Minton was a great friend of President Harry Truman, and donated his papers to Truman’s library. Not among those, reportedly, were correspondence with Truman, which his wife destroyed. Her reason? She thought they were “undignified and occasionally profane,” according to Minton’s son.
So, I daresay the bridge’s namesake will understand if your response to the traffic snarl it has sparked also is undignified and occasionally profane.
After retiring from the Supreme Court in 1956 because of health issues, he told a reporter, “There will be more interest in who will succeed me than in my passing. I am an echo.” Maybe he’d be surprised that 55 years later, his name is echoing still.
POSTSCRIPT: I am tempted to remind the reader that “echo” also is a term used in a particular card game to describe a signal from one player to a partner to continue playing the present suit. The game, as you might guess, is bridge.
Sherman Minton’s official congressional biographical entry is here.