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"A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train."
— Calvin Trillin reflects on his experience working as a floater at TIME magazine in the early 1960s: http://nyr.kr/WIA50k -
Time Names Mitt Romney Man of the Year 1912→
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In an extraordinary gesture of recognition for a losing Presidential nominee, Time magazine today named former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney Man of the Year 1912. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/UDVcf7
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Notes on Busyness
One Friday evening at BAM this past summer, roughly twelve minutes into Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s four-and-a-half-hour-long avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, “Einstein on the Beach,” a man sitting a row ahead of me stole a glance at his watch. It seemed an eloquent gesture. Not as a verdict on the show—which has been rightly hailed and heralded across the world—but as a vignette of our contemporary busyness. Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance…
Giles Harvey’s notes on being busy: http://nyr.kr/UcBGta
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Richard Brody’s take on Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”:
…Marclay’s temperament is close to that of the most casual moviegoer, and that’s the pleasure that he evokes (all the more reason for his rather indiscriminate blend of great and dull scenes from movies), but he does so with wit. And—though it needn’t be so—wit, here, takes the place of the extreme thought, of personal revelation, of emotional risk. “The Clock” is a feat of showmanship, a tour de force, a spectacle of spectacles; as a work of art, it’s mediocre, even trivial.
Follow the link to continue reading: http://nyr.kr/OJzYM5
