On starting the day: Good faith or a dancer's lost limb?

I’ve often wondered about how I start my days. Today was pretty typical.

I put the water on for the coffee then retrieved the newspapers from the stoop. I’m an old-fashioned guy, but I could have easily clicked in to the computer. Later I did just that.

As usual, the headlines set the tone for my Wheaties and Grapenuts.

“Employers’ health care maze” read the Oregonian’s main headline.

Another read, ambiguously, “Vatican reveals its procedures for abuse.”

The front of the New York Times offered:

“Civilians Killed as U.S. Troops Hit Afghan Bus”

“Leg Lost, Dancer Is Caught Between Caregivers.”

All this before my first cup of coffee. Bitter stuff.

It took Thomas Jefferson to bring me around.

Today is Jefferson’s birthday, a matter of singular note in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. The Almanac’s extended entry quoted Jefferson, writing John Adams, on the very topic of how to start my day.

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus (“A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man”) and Thucydides (“Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured”), for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier."

As substitutes for The Times and The Oregonian, I’ve considered Marcus Aurelius and Lao Tzu, among others.

Imagine starting the day with one of these:

Here’s Aurelius: “Whenever you notice someone else going astray, immediately turn and examine how you yourself have gone astray” or “For each thing you do, stop and ask yourself if death is to be feared because it deprives you of this.”

Try Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: “Those who are of good faith I have faith in. Those who are lacking in good faith I also have faith in. In so doing I gain in good faith.” Or “Much speech leads inevitably to silence. Better to hold fast to the void.”

We can be grateful that Jefferson, born on this day in 1743, chose to live at great distance from “Leg Lost, Dancer Is Caught Between Caregivers.”

We should be equally grateful for following his path.

At tip of a writer's hat to typewriters

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac today touched on the history of typewriters and on how three writers — Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson (shown here in a crazed state) and Jack Kerouac — bonded with them in strange ways.

Keillor might have mentioned that two contemporary authors, Paul Auster and Larry McMurtry still use typewriters, an Olympia and a Hermes respectively.

About four years ago I began collecting these beautiful, fascinating machines. Now I like to think of myself as a "typewriter archivist." If one comes my way worth salvaging, I'll "archive" it, often simply to save it from scavengers who cut keys from old machines and make jewelry out of them.

Blasphemy!

Fifty typewriters line shelves along a wall of my basement. I'd like to sell a few and keep only those I can identify as being models used by the likes of Hemingway, Kerouac and Thompson. (The photo of the great Gonzo journalist shows him drawing a bead on his IBM Selectric.)

You might want to visit my "Backspace Typewriters" blog to get a feel for my "archive."

Much to my joy, I've discovered on the Internet a lively, devoted "typewriter community." Here in Portland, our Mecca is Ace Typewriter over on North Lombard.

Perhaps the Writer's Almanac entry will add to our typewriter community's ranks. We can hope.

A different kind of bad news

Has this ever been a bad news day!

No, I’m not talking about just Iranian election results or more car bombs in Pakistan.

The bad news started with an Oregonian’s front-page story telling me that “more than 2 million households are in danger of seeing their major broadcast TV channels disappear into a fuzz of static when analog service ends Friday.”

Danger? Did I read “danger”?

What’s the danger? Suddenly 2 million people have to eat dinner together and converse. The real danger is that a reporter could write such non-sense. Try replacing “in danger of” with “will be inconvenienced by” or possibly “will be irked by.” I personally like "will be potentially enriched by."

Next it is on to my daily feed of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. There I’m told that it is the birthday of Anne Frank and that her Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has sold more than 25 million copies, and it is “the second-best-selling nonfiction book in history, after the Bible.”

The Bible non-fiction? It certainly has its much-heralded truths, but really, non-fiction?

Parting the Red Sea, the virgin birth, feeding the multitudes, walking on water? Suddenly overheated, mythological metaphor becomes "non-fiction," and no one blinks.

Not even Garrison Keillor.

So it’s now the end of the day and I finally get to New York Times columnist David Brooks. His subject is our stampeding American debt. He writes: “The ratio of debt-to-personal-disposable income was 55 percent in 1960.” He goes on to tell us that “it” (presumably this “ratio”) grew to 133 percent in 2007.

What ratio?

Here’s one of our brainiest columnists writing in one of the world’s most respected newspapers,and he doesn’t know the difference between ratio and percentage.

Worse, neither do his New York Times editors.

All three stories had news, all right. None of it reassuring.

Maybe the food additives and pollution are finally getting to us.

Keillor omits Portland from Le Guin profile

Today's "Writer's Almanac" has a sketch about Portland's Ursula Le Guin.

Oddly, Garrison Keillor's description neglects to mention the Northwest and Portland, where Le Guin has lived for 50 years.

I have Keillor's Almanac e-mailed to me every day, mostly for its anecdotes about writers. Usually they don't disappoint. Often Keillor shares an illuminating, influential aspect of the chosen author's childhood. He does that in today's piece about Le Guin.

But where a writer lives — the writer's vantage — is also important to his or her writing and should be given its due. Tellingly, the view from Le Guin's northwest Portland home is of Mount Hood).

After placing the author, the description should give some sense of how the place has influenced the writer's work — the settings, the characters, the plots, the tone etc.

I'm no expert on Le Guin so I'll leave it to others to comment, but The Corvallis Gazette-Time's Theresa Hogue touches on the subject in a recent Q&A interview with Le Guin.

Le Guin's answer is short but tantalizing.

Hogue: As a long-time Portlander, how has the landscape of the Pacific Northwest influenced your work? Do you think that your characters or settings sometimes reflect your experiences as an Oregonian?

Le Guin: I grew up in Northern California and have lived in Oregon for 50 years, and those sceneries are all through my stories and poems. The novel “The Tombs of Atuan” grew from my very first trip out to eastern Oregon . . . and “The Lathe of Heaven” is a kind of inside-out love song to Portland, and “Searoad” is another one to the Oregon beach towns . . . The West Coast is my place and its people are my people.

The ellipses beg to be filled in.

An Orwellian Writer's Almanac tribute

I have buried in my stack of well-worn t-shirts, one I rarely wear. I displays a large caricature of a gaunt George Orwell. A cigarette droops from his lips, and a giant depiction of Big Brother looms behind him.

For some reason my hand went to it today, and I put it on even though it made me look slightly cartoonish. I’m wearing it now and will for the rest of the day, for reasons that follow....

Greeting the day with Orwell's image on my chest, I did my pre-Cheerios-and-coffee e-mail check largely to read the daily “Writer’s Almanac” from Garrison Keillor. Yes, you can have the written script of the NPR “Writer’s Almanac” e-mailed to you. I recommend it, though, as you will see, it needs to be read skeptically.

After offering the customary poem, the almanac launched into it’s main item:

“It's the birthday of the man who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), George Orwell, born Eric Blair ….”

How serendipitous.

I’m noting in my PDA that June 25th is Orwell/Blair’s birthday. The note will include a reminder to wear the Orwell t-shirt to mark the occasion.

Keillor’s short sketch couldn’t possibly have done justice to Orwell’s sprawling, heroic life, although the item included a unfamiliar (to me at least) anecdote or two.

Sadly, Keillor also did Orwell an Orwellian injustice when he distorted a quote from Orwell’s famous essay, “Why I write.”

Here’s the quote as presented:

"Every line of serious work that I have written [since the Spanish Civil War] has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism."

And that’s where Keillor ended it, with a period. At the very least he should have inserted ellipses because here is the rest of the sentence:

“…against totalitarianism, and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” (the emphasis is Orwell’s)

Yes, Orwell was a democratic socialist, and yes, my fellow patriotic Americans, democracy and socialism can be compatible. The question is, in light of our current predicament: Are democracy and capitalism compatible, if capitalism is indeed what our economy is? Or does capitalism simply buy off democracy?

If you read Orwell’s works and learn more about his life, you’ll understand why he was a democratic socialist.

Keillor would do well to do so.

Meanwhile, Happy Birthday, George.

Gratitude for George Orwell on his birthday

The Writer’s Almanac, written by Garrison Keillor, has a tribute to George Orwell today, his birthday. He was born in 1903 as Eric Blair.

His success writing under the pen name George Orwell led him to use it in his everyday life as well.

I’m amazed that so few young people today have heard of, let alone read, Orwell. Those who have usually know him only for “Animal Farm” and, of course, “1984.”

Rarely will a student have read Orwell’s stirring essays, such as “Shooting an Elephant,” “A Hanging,” or “Why I Write.”

My hope is that one day schools and colleges will teach Orwell as routinely as they do Shakespeare.

It may have been Orwell who first welded my attention to the inhumanity of grotesque income disparities, a topic I repeatedly write about here.

Orwell called for a tax policy that would limit income inequity to no more than ten to one. Today it is in the thousands in parts of our economy. CEOs frequently make 500 or 600 times as much as their lowest paid workers.

In “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell wrote, “A man with £3 a week and a man with £1500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot.”

Near the end of his essay “Why I write,” Orwell shared with his readers a desire to write another novel after a seven-year hiatus. Of his expectations for the novel, he wrote, “It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.”

His clarity of purpose, and clarity of prose, ensured that the book itself would prove him wrong.

The book was “1984.” Far from being a failure, it became a frightening classic, a warning that rings as loudly today as it did when it was published in the summer of 1949, a mere six months before Orwell died at the age of 46.