The Terrence Crimmins Newsletter
Once a Month
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New Novel
I am not writing the new novel as fast as I would like, but I am making progress. Below is another excerpt.
Below is a short excerpt from
Ghetto Teacher
“Since we’re going to be studying American History, it is important that we consider a very important question. What is an American?” he asked.
The students paused for a minute, struck by the simplicity of the question.
“Someone who lives in America,” one shouted out.
Stafford, as he did many times in the course of the year, raised his hand up to indicate the procedure, and did not respond to the speaker, who reluctantly raised his hand.
“Yes, Desmonde, thank you for raising your hand.”
“Someone who lives in America,” Desmonde repeated.
“Doesn’t it go a little deeper than that?”
The students stared at him blankly.
“As you can see, this is tonight’s homework. Write a one-page paper on what it means to be an American.”
The students looked glum and, of course, omitted a groan when Stafford pointed out that they had homework on the first day of school.
“Let me ask you a question,” he suggested. “Imagine that you were stranded on a ship that went to a foreign country, and you were the only American on board. When you got to that country you spent weeks without seeing any other Americans. Then, all of a sudden, you found a restaurant where there were a lot of your fellow Americans, and you went there to talk to them. What would you talk about?”
“Stuff!”
“I dun-nooo.”
“What would you talk about?” said a student, attempting to reverse the question.
“Listen,” Stafford declared. “What do you talk about now? Or what will you be talking about out in the hallway, or at lunch, or when you go home?”
The class was silent for a minute.
“Stuff!”
“Stuff,” Stafford grunted. “That is a very general category. Can we narrow that down to topics? What kinds of things are you interested in?”
“Music!”
“There’s one,” their teacher affirmed. “But again, could you narrow that down?”
“Lil Wayne,” a student declared, naming one of his favorite rap stars.
How can I help these kids, Stafford often wondered. He wanted to help them but, in a way, it seemed that they didn’t want his kind of help. They regarded him as a representative from a different world, a world they were not a part of, so that his advice was irrelevant to their needs. What did some rich white kid know about the problems of the ghetto? What kind of help would he be when they were threatened by gangs in the street? Was he going to be there when the cops showed up asking questions about the drug dealers? But it wasn’t just him, it was this whole school charade. They knew they weren’t ever going to go to college like Mr. Stafford had, for college was for people from a different world. They had to learn to survive on the streets, to deal with the problems of the ghetto, and it didn’t tell you anything about that in any of those fancy books. Mr. Stafford knew those fancy books because he came from a family with money, a family who lived in a nice neighborhood, a family that wasn’t going to be shot at if they talked to the cops about criminals. But why would Mr. Stafford ever do so, unless he himself was robbed, or mugged, or beaten? But those kind of things didn’t happen in the world he came from.
The object of Mr. Stafford’s assignment was to try to get the students to see that they were part of a large country with many different kinds of people, of which they were just one kind. He hoped, moreover, to get them to see that America was a country where everybody had a chance, that you could rise up the social and economic ladder and make something of yourself. This simple American concept, however, was something they just could not grasp, and their social peers and ghetto culture denied that such was the case. They were raised on the idea that their situation was terrible, that they were discriminated against, that they had few or no opportunities, and that life was, essentially, a dead end street, ending in the ghetto. This was reinforced by the fears they had, for people, human nature being what it is, like what they know, and what they knew was the ghetto. They knew that they did not fit in to places like Baltimore Waterfront, where there were many high class chain hotels and restaurants. The only time people from the inner city appeared there were during massive protests, like when Freddie Gray was killed in the Police van, and people came in and broke the windows on the Starbucks and the Seven Eleven on the edge of the Waterfront. But that night, the massive protests were almost entirely in the ghetto, where CVSs and other stores were looted and burned to the ground, for protesters in the ghetto were far less likely to get arrested than if they had the nerve to cross the line into high society. Crossing such a line, to people of the ghetto, was an indication of their feeling that America was a nation of economic classes of people, not a country where the poor could work their way up to a better economic status.
Quotes from German Writers
When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live on beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts. -Michael Ende
Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general. -Novalis
Humor is one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it’s very ambiguous. You have it, or you don’t. You can’t attain it. -Heinrich Boll
We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth. -Eric Maria Remarque
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. -Hermann Hesse
Writers know that sometimes things are in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them. -Gunter Grass
Appearance rules the world. -Friedrich Schiller |
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The Beginning of the End for Newspapers
What will replace them?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has become the first major city in the nation without a print newspaper every day, as the
Pittsburgh Post Gazette announced that it was cutting back to publishing a print edition only five days a week. Newspapers have declined in other ways, however, as just about every major newspaper is a shadow of its former self, and they publish much smaller editions than in years back in the day, when millions of Americans had newspapers delivered by paper boys on a daily basis. Today’s newspapers lack or have much smaller versions of many of the elements that attracted people to read them, such as book and restaurant reviews, fashion sections and movie reviews. The Post Gazette contends that it reaches far more people via its digital edition, yet the income from such readers does not permit it to hire the large number of reporters that they formerly did, and journalism employees have been faced with bleaker and bleaker possibilities on the job front, as the computer revolution has changed the world they formerly knew.
The Village Voice, long the voice of the left in New York City and nationally,
has closed its print and digital editions, which many view as a somber prediction of things to come. Viewed by some as the conscience of a capitalistic nation, the Voice will no longer be there to expose fraudulent landlords or question overpaid corporate chiefs. Such being the case, one might ask, if newspapers are going to disappear, who will be the conscience of the nation? Will prominent publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post retain a high level of national influence in digital editions as they had with print editions? These are difficult questions to answer, of course, but the more important question, perhaps, is will the public be as well informed with out the depth of coverage of events that newspapers have provided? If one were to judge where the power of newspapers has been transferred to, one might suggest that the twenty-four hour news cycle has taken their place, but surely watching television does not give viewers the depth of knowledge that the reading of a Sunday Newspaper would. 
William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were men who changed the public consumption of information in the opposite direction, for these two newspaper magnates very much increased newspaper circulation in the late part of the nineteenth century. Most Americans have a vague memory of their influence from their American History survey course in regard to the newspaper circulation war the two had during the Spanish American War in 1898. From that event the term yellow journalism was applied, so that people tend to have a pejorative view of both Pulitzer and Hearst as sensationalists who thought more of their own pockets than the good of the public at large. This judgement is somewhat unfair, for though that circulation war was a black mark on both their records, it is unfair to judge them solely because of it. Before Joseph Pulitzer, newspapers were only read by the upper crust, and he was the first to use banner headlines and scandalous stories to attract ordinary people to read newspapers. Pulitzer wanted immigrants like himself to start reading newspapers so they could become more informed about the injustices they were being subjected to during the Gilded Age, and gain some political power.
The question of who will help the little guy as newspapers fade from the scene is, of course, an important one, as well as a query about whether the news outlets online will succeed in getting people to read in depth articles about the events of the world as newspapers once did.
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New Reviews of
Who was Joseph Pulitzer? |
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This is a good book. Like most people, I suppose, I’ve heard a lot about the Pulitzer Prize and the people who win them. Journalists who win the prize, for example, are recognized for their courage, professionalism, determination and skill in the practice of their craft. But I knew very little about the man after whom the Prize is named: who was Joseph Pulitzer?
Terrence Crimmins gives us an answer in his relatively short and very readable book – Who Was Joseph Pulitzer? A Novel. Frankly, I was surprised by what I learned. I expected to be shown how Pulitzer came to represent the highest standards of journalism and why the Pulitzer Prize of today is a fitting reminder and representation of its namesake. Not so.
So who was he? The young Pulitzer was a Hungarian immigrant who served with the Union Army in the Civil War. Afterwards and without funds, Pulitzer was waiting tables in St. Louis where he met the newspaper men who would give him a job as a fledgling reporter. Before long, in 1878, he bought the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, still very much in business today. Incredibly, only five years later, he had set up shop in New York City and purchased the New York World from the robber baron Jay Gould. The year was 1883 and Pulitzer quickly made the World into a dominant force in the city.
Unlike the much longer biography by Swanberg, the use of novelization allows Crimmins to economically create in the reader a feeling that she understands the phenomenon of Pulitzer: an extraordinarily bright and courageous man who had a carefully honed gift for seeing his world and writing about it in a way that pulled the reader in. He didn’t just give a scissors-and-paste, plodding account, he wrote stories that had structure and were condensed, always condensed, so the average reader could get a quick take on the news as Pulitzer saw it. He wrote and designed his paper for the common man at a time when other papers wrote for the well-educated and the well to do. He provided gossip and the lurid. This was both the path to his success and a reason for his association with the Democratic Party, its urban agenda and the candidacy of Grover Cleveland for president.
In chronicling Pulitzer’s rise, Terrence Crimmins shows how his success was formulaic. It was a pattern available to be copied by anyone who might want to challenge Pulitzer in the marketplace. That competition appeared in the person of William Randolph Hearst, ironically, a man whom Pulitzer originally brought into the newspaper business. In a nutshell, Hearst combined Pulitzer’s strategy with his own deep pockets. In this battle, truth became a casualty. And Pulitzer was at a disadvantage because Hearst was receiving virtually unlimited financial backing from his mother, whereas Pulitzer had to compete in subscription price wars with his much more limited resources. Moreover, Hearst would steal Pulitzer’s best reporters by offering two or more times what Pulitzer was paying. It was a battle Pulitzer could not win. But he fought on, making demands upon his body that it could not support. The end of the story is a sad cartoon of the absurd: a broken man, running a newspaper in absentia through dictation until he could do so no more.
Looking back and picking up the question of the title once more, we ask again, “Who was Joseph Pulitzer?” Crimmins’ primary focus is – quite understandably – on the incredible accomplishments from modest beginnings. And it truly is an amazing story of achievement. But it is also a cautionary tale. If we press beyond the “what” of his accomplishments to the “who” of the man behind the action, we find a basket full of symptoms: Crimmins calls him a control-freak, a man of resentment, fear of being dismissed, a man seemingly incapable of friendship, a poor, emotionally unavailable husband. This is a familiar story, after all. We think of Steve Jobs who in our day accomplished much but who had no idea of what truly mattered in a human life until he was consumed by cancer and was at death’s door. There is no indication that Joseph Pulitzer had even that late awakening. He was a wind-up toy that kept on and on until, one day, it stopped.
So thank you to Terrence Crimmins for a great, if sad, story, well told.
-David Nixon
I was given a copy of this book to read. I found the book to be a very detailed timeline of the man and his history in the publishing industry. The book was well researched and informative. Easy read.. enjoyed it throughout.
-Arthur Berman
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