Read novels to learn narrative style

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski
HarperCollins, 2008, 566 pp., $25.95

Glimpse the world’s soul. Know death in the midst of living. See tragedy ennoble as in Hamlet.
This is Shakespeare’s plot line, after all, this narrative of Edgar Sawtelle. Oh, don’t mistake the literary art as artifice or as an American imitation or as a literary homage.
David Wroblewski, the first-time author, seizes the most famous drama in world literature for its pattern of eternal meaning. He has a myth to weave, a universal truth told in story form.
So a classic story mold reinforces what you might mistake as ordinary, even as a tale about dogs and their people.
You understand Hamlet better for seeing Edgar Sawtelle rise, discern his place in the mystery of life, avenge his father and suffer his own fall along with everyone around him even as the things that count – that really count – continue on their perpetual way.
Edgar was born in 1958 to a couple who raised and trained an idyllic breed of dogs on their northern Wisconsin farm as Edgar’s grandfather had done before. The house and a barn fitted out as kennel form a living stage. It produces the family story of companionship with each other and with nature. But the farm also is womb for an uncle’s unnatural evil.
A mythic journey of self understanding must take place before Edgar resolves the conflict.
While he’s away we lose the Ophelia character in a manner to break every dog lover’s heart.
Anna Quindlen last year wrote a sad book about pets — Good Dog. Stay. John Grogan wrote Marley & Me, soon to be a movie, based on his newspaper column about his funny, foolish, faithful pet.
Those are animal stories.
The dogs in Edgar Sawtelle’s life are different. They drive the constant, considerable action. They communicate in their canine fashion, because they were born mute like Edgar. In the womb, a seer explains, God told Edgar a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know. So the young man signs. And he acquires wisdom deep inside.
With Edgar we all learn dogs are not the beasts in this story. You wonder what God told them.
Insight and even vision — literally — aren't the brilliance of this narrative. The story, always the story, carries us a remarkable 566 pages.
The natural elements in those north woods plot the way through explanations of things we didn’t know we wanted to know. Breeding and training and even of how to play canasta and the characters buffeted by action in and out of their control and the descriptive details, yes, the wonderful details — those all make this book.
I tell journalists to read novels to learn narrative style. This is the book for them.
Yet The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is not journalism or a Shakespearean knock-off or ordinary fiction.
The thought crosses the mind of Edgar’s mother Trudy: When we accept life, we take contradiction with it.
You wonder if even Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude understood the tragic idea held in this legend, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

George Carlin: A journalist appreciated

We all laughed with George Carlin. Journalists should have taken him more seriously. He had better instincts than many.
Carlin had an ear for usage. Write for the ear, we teach, not the eye. But too few do, producing a stilted tone instead of conversation.
And he thought. He thought about society. He started in radio. He ended in books.
His mastery of words and how to use them rose to the level of philosophy or at least of philology, the love of language and its meaning.
That’s because Carlin always sought the underlying sense and not just superficial correctness, the level where most users of the language stop drilling.
“Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway,” he asked.
That equals my favorite conundrum of how a vacuum bottle knows to keep hot things hot and cold things cold.
Comedians play a special role in our society. They are court jesters where the republic is monarch. They tell us what we need to hear in a way that overcomes our reluctance to listen.
Carlin will receive the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for humor posthumously to underscore his specialness.
Now there’s a pair to tickle St. Peter’s funny bone, Carlin and Twain. Add Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers to the circle. They all represent the poetic truth: “Scratch a humorist, and you’ll find a bitter man.”
Carlin put the thought differently: “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
So, Carlin said about Ronald Reagan’s defense of the Nicaraguan Contras: “If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?”
I am not alone in my respect for the ability to assess others’ use, abuse and misuse of language. The official wordsmith of The New York Times Magazine, William Safire, paid tribute after Carlin died at 71.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06wwln-safire-t.html?ex=1372824000&en=5757a8a4aded95b1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Safire saw a perverse value in “the seven words you can’t use on television” routine by Carlin. By devaluing the shock value of those adolescent obscenities, Safire thought, the performer had done a service to the language.
Wouldn’t you like to have a copy editor who believed in modernizing speech? Most copy editors enforce a tedious regimen.
Never write that a person died “suddenly,” they lecture, because everyone is alive one instant and dead the next.
I’ll be damned, I can imagine Carlin saying, because I spent my whole lifetime not dying, and it was pretty damn sudden when I finally did.
Too bad he can’t cite the exaggeration his predecessor Twain did about reports of his death
The life of Twain was a cover story in Time for his social criticism on race and excesses of the Gilded Age, which he named. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html

It took 98 years after his death to get the coverage.
Let’s see if a century passes before his successor George Carlin achieves the recognition of a man so funny he’s seriously important.

Arts and Letters was a horse, no press release at all

The art of the public relations agent comes out in press releases, which generally are artless.
They can be elaborate. They can entice. They can blare, rarely trying the subtle approach.
They are why city editors have messy desks.
They are the stuff of the logo, the release date, the contact information.
No tree should have to give a life for one. No electron should have to spin a tizzy over one.
But press releases are not going away, no more than their authors in media relations departments.
Press releases can be the cry of the Sirens, who seduced the crew of Ulysses on his odyssey. Tough men, they, but prone to have their heads turned by sexy maidens. Or, press releases can be terse, useful guides to the morning line for reporters to take slight notice of and then discard.
So we need to put them into perspective.
New York Times business writer Joanne Kaufman does not. She does dignify the press release with a story http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/media/30toxic.html?ex=1372478400&en=109705c354560eb5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
We find out the best words a PR writer can use to attract the attention of a journalist for exposure in the media.
A kind of a science as well as a recklessly purported art figures in Ms. Kaufman's article: The proper technique uses words most likely to be picked up by an Internet search engine these days.
We even learn a book by PR stunt planner David Seaman is due out in October, "Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz." Makes you feel dirty just thinking about it.
The biggest little secret in public relations, it turns out, is timing. Make sure the press release comes out on a slow news day, the Times article concludes.
Well, there's no true conclusion. I will supply one. The story is dutifully non-judgmental. I will be, dutifully.
A press release has one value and one only, as a tip sheet. The best ones in my experience are so labelled, "Tip Sheet." Trust it any further and you're liable to tip over. Even phone numbers and addresses are suspect, to be checked and verified while the journalist re-reports any information in the release, which is never to be quoted or treated as valid information from an original source.
Did you get that, young journalist?
Ms. Kaufman did not report the journalistic value of press releases. Allow me. There is none.
Journalism is what a reporter brings to an idea. The idea may come from a tip by a useful press agent. But the journalism is value-added.
Oh, me, oh my!
You will depart this blog post with the thought journalism is an art and public relations is a service industry whose product is mechanical, the press release.
You think correctly.