Note:
Thanks to the stellar service of
ATT, cursed be their corporate person hood, internet service at the World Wide
Headquarters of Heretic, Rebel, a Thing
to Flout has been down a week. Allegedly
a repair technician will arrive to solve the problem late Tuesday afternoon. But as I type this, I am still bereft of
modern communications and research capacity.
Because
of the miracle of the World Wide Web a writer now has at his or her fingertips
pretty much the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, lore, and artistic production of
human kind as long as he/she can figure out the right search term in Google.
This has made writing a regular blog immeasurably easier. I can do at least a cursory research of any
topic and generally put together an entry that can fool most people into
believing that I know what I am talking about in a few hours.
It
was not always so. Not so many years ago
any article of average blog post length was the equivalent of a semi-major
college paper and require some times days of research in both at home and in
libraries and the production of copious notes.
For a lone wolf writer without a research department at his or her beck
and call and without copy editors the kind of daily production I now attempt
would be impossible.
Let’s
revisit those quaint times. We will
begin with resources kept at hand, preferably within arm’s reach of the writer’s
trusty manual typewriter—that’s a whole other story. Here are some of the basics upon which I
relied.
· Dictionary.
I used my mother’s old blue-bound Webster’s Complete Collegiate Dictionary for
years until it literally fell apart. I
replaced it with a fat red paper back with tiny print—The Miriam-Webster
Dictionary. Both invaluable
tools, but you often need to actually know how to spell something to successfully
look it up—a draw back for a writer who never met a spelling test he couldn’t
flunk. Roget’s Thesaurus was a
must to avoid using the same word in a sentence two or three times.
· Style book.
A must for any writer, I dabbled in the AP stylebook, the standard of newspaper
journalists, but generally followed an old friend from college—The Elements
of Style by William Skunk and E. B. White, the now dated Bible of more formal writing. However for narrative writing, both factual
and fiction and of course poetry, I untethered by ship from any style anchor in
the service effect. Despite the scorn of
modernists it has firmly anchored me to such requirements as the Oxford comma
and two spaces after a period ending a sentence.
· Almanac. These amazing versatile
single volumes were a cornucopia of statistical, geographic, historical,
biographical, and odd-ball assorted facts.
There were options available, but I preferred The World Almanac and Book of
Facts which I purchased annually even when the $5.00 or so cover price
for the paperback at the drug store seemed like an enormous sacrifice. It also contained several nice, shiny pages
of color plates including The Flags of the World and the United States, and a
basic Atlas. Each new edition also
include noted obituaries and longer articles selected by the mysterious whim of
the editors
· Encyclopedia.
A must-have, but a forbidding expense unless you were willing to settle
on a twenty to thirty year outdated version on sale at a garage sale for about
a penny a pound. Door to Door salesmen
were still pitching the World Book, Book of Knowledge, and even the gold standard Encyclopedia
Britannica on monthly payments that would stretch into the next millennia. I settle on the basic but serviceable Funk
and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia which I bought one volume a week as a
premium offer at Dominic’s Supermarket in
Chicago. I also swallowed hard and
subscribed to its Annuals which I kept getting for ten years or so to more or
less keep the set current. Anything I
need greater detail on required a library visit to the temple of the Britannica.
· Atlas. I had an enormous National Geographic World Atlas with
that publication’s elegant and detailed maps and which included maps of the
solar system and universe. A treat for
the eyes, but unwieldy. I also had a
more manageable Funk and Wagnall’s atlas
from Dominic’s and for a time a relief globe of the world I had in high
school. The trouble with atlases and
globes is, alas, that in the turbulent modern world geographic boundaries,
place names, countries, and empires change continually.
· Bible.
Even if you are not writing specifically about religion, the Good Book
was an essential reference and a key to much history, philosophy, and literary references. There were even then numerous available
translations, but then—and even now—I stubbornly used the King James Version of the Bible with
the Words of Our Lord in Red Letters.
This is a choice mocked by biblical scholars who regard it an unreliable
second or third hand translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek
and Latin. But it is the edition I grew
up on and as a poet I genially admire its majestic passages and cadences. So many modern translations grate on the
ears.
· American History.
I needed a fairly comprehensive single volume U.S. history source. Perhaps I would have been better served with
James and Mary Beard’s New Basic History of the United States, but
I chose The Oxford History of the American People by Samuel Eliot
Morison published in 1965. Morison was a
Boston Unitarian most noted as a Naval historian, but his book took into good
account religious, cultural, artistic, and technical aspects of American history
as well as the usual parade of Great Men, politics, and Wars. Later Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United
States provided a much needed bottom up view of history and took into
account the real lives of ordinary people.
· Telephone directories. Modern life was impossible without them and
they were magically delivered to your door annually. In Chicago there were two enormous tomes—the White Pages and the H.H. Donnelly
Yellow Pages.
· Miscellaneous.
The Book of Lists By David Wallechinsky,
Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace was both a fun discovery and turned out to be a
goldmine of trivia and obscurity—right up my alley.
· Wish I had. The reference I
did not have and most wish I did was Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Oh, what countless hours of searching
that might have saved me.
A
writer also had to be versed in current affairs and periodicals were they key.
· Newspapers. I was always at
newspaper junkie. Back in the day I
regularly got both Field newspapers—the
Chicago
Sun-Times in the morning and the Daily News, home of Mike Royko and famous for its worldwide pool of correspondents. Alas, the News
folded, Royko moved to the Sun-Times which
also had Roger Ebert, Bill Mauldin, and a descent selection of op-ed columnists. But when we moved to Crystal Lake more than
thirty years ago I switched to the Chicago Tribune which offered
reliable home delivery, despite its odious editorial policy. Since then both papers have suffered deep
cuts to reporters and editorial staffs, but the Sun-Times has been reduced to a mostly pitiful shell. For local coverage out here in the boonies,
our local daily, now known as the Northwest Herald provided essential
community coverage despite various deficiencies. But few sub-urban areas in this country still
have the luxury of a daily paper.
 |
| I had been reading Time regularly since at least 1963 when it crowned Richard J. Daley as the Mayor of the City that Works. |
· Magazines.
A newsweekly was a must. I had
been subscribing to Time since high school.
Henry Luce was a reactionary you could be well informed if you kept in
mind built in bias. Time was still considered the most comprehensive alternative to the
more liberal Newsweek or even more conservative U.S. News and World Report. I
read Time weekly for so many years
that my regular readers might notice the influence of some of its somewhat
peculiar style in my own writing. This
is not a point of pride. For
more left leaning news and analysis I sporadically subscribed to The
Progressive, The Nation, and In These Times often depending on
deals offered by Publisher’s Clearing House so that my wife could enter the
sweepstakes with a clear conscience. In
the same way I sometimes received childhood treasure The National Geographic
and handsome hard-bound American Heritage.
If
none of these resources proved fruitful it was off to the Library. In Chicago sometimes the old branch library
at Fullerton and Sheffield by the L would suffice before it was torn down to
make room for DePaul tennis courts. But
often if meant a trip the glorious and inspiring old Main Library at Michigan
and Madison where working in the elegant main reading room was a pleasure. Later, however, it meant a trip to the dismal
and depressing warehouse where the stacks were moved and kept for years before
the Harold Washington Library finally opened.
That sucked the joy out of the trip.
 |
| The magnificent old Chicago Main Public Library, a treat to visit for research, has long been stripped of its stacks and is now the Cultural Center. Another loss was the huge news stand that stretched down Madison from the corner of Michigan to the side entrance of the building. There you could find a newspaper from every important city in the world with in a day or so of publication as well as a comprehensive selection of U.S. periodicals. |
In
Crystal Lake it most often meant a 45 minute walk each way to the library. Nice folks and a very well informed Reference
Desk. It meant combing the endless
drawers of the card catalog with a slip of paper and a stub of a pencil in hand
to note my discoveries then searching the shelves for them. Of course scanning the shelves often tuned up
unexpected discoveries and I often went home with unintended books. Often older or more obscure books were
unavailable locally, but I could often get them after a few days wait through
the state-wide inter library loan system.
I remember finally getting a copy of the first volume of Henry Adams’s The
History of the United States in the Jefferson and Madison Administrations in just such a way.
Of
course sometimes even greater depth was required. But access to university and specialized
libraries was often difficult or impossible without academic credentials,
verifiable employment with a recognized publication, or sponsorship by an established
scholar. All mostly insurmountable
hurdles for an independent scribe without a degree or pedigree. Even if permission could be obtained it
usually involved travel to the institution.
That was tough when I sometimes barely had bus fare.
Locating
an out of print book without haunting used bookstores was a real challenged
particularly in specialized areas like labor history. The book was likely out there someplace, but
damned if you could find it. After the Industrial
Workers of the World ran out of copies it took me 15 years to run down a copy
of the book I co-authored—The IWW—Its First 70 Years: 1905-1975. Copies were out there languishing on
the shelves of obscure radical book shops and used bookstores from San Francisco
to Timbuktu but damned if I could find them.
Of
course, all of that was then, the very quaint then dimly remembered by a
grizzled few. Tomorrow thanks to the
blessing of the gods Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and the mercy of ATT I
will compose and post a blog entry probably without getting off my ass in a
tenth the time the same piece would have required if I had researched and written
in back in the Stone Age. So it goes.
