A friend who is a longtime employee of the Los Angeles Times leaked the paper’s most recent internal cost-cutting announcement:

From: Hartenstein, Eddy
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 12:02 PM
To: zzTrbAllHandsLAT; zzMediaGroups
Subject: Important Message

Colleagues:

As you know from reading our front page and our homepage, not a day goes by that we don’t give our readers the latest news and analysis on the deepening troubles of the US economy. The same challenges that face the companies we report about also are affecting us.  We need to implement changes to our flagship print product, and throughout our organization, that will ensure our future as the #1 source of news and information in Southern California.

In the coming weeks, we will introduce a number of changes to the way we do business, including a new sectional line-up for the paper.  These are necessary to facilitate greater efficiencies in how we approach our operations, production and distribution and, as a result, we expect to eliminate approximately 300 positions.

Beginning March 2nd the paper will be presented in four main news sections:

A/Main News will be repositioned to present local, national and international coverage and opinion together – as each informs, impacts and shapes the others in our everyday lives. The California section report will lead A, followed by The Nation, The World and then Opinion.  The result will combine the stories and reporting of our two most widely-read print sections into one cohesive section.

Business will be the second section in the paper, and the report will be enhanced by bringing back the “Company Town” feature, which will serve as the anchor for our “business of entertainment” coverage.  The obituaries and weather pages will remain at the back of this new B section.

Sports will be the third section, and we’ll be moving the classified advertising pages to the back of this new C section.

Calendar will be the fourth section, and this move allows its deadlines to be pushed deep into the evening (aka “second-daily”), allowing us to make our primary space for entertainment coverage more news-driven. This will enrich this current “must read” section even further, enabling us to add features such as overnight reviews.

The feature-section lineup will remain unchanged, with Health on Monday, Food on Wednesday, Home on Saturday and Image, Travel and Arts & Books on Sunday.  The Sunday lineup also will be unchanged, except for the California report appearing in the A section.

These moves are designed to help us deal with the economic realities of the day, while continuing to allow us to deliver a high-quality product to our readers and advertisers.  We remain unwavering in our commitment to serve our community and to our mission.

We’ll be providing more details in the days ahead.

eddy

No matter how it is presented, this further shrinking of the paper is indeed sad news to me. I have been a loyal subscriber to and reader the Los Angeles Times for 20 years.

At the same time, I can’t help noting that while it’s not unusual in history for new technologies to displace pre-existing technologies — where are the telegraph lines now? — the Times’ particular predicament is largely a result of mismanagement.

In the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, and indeed until probably 2003, The Los Angeles Times was very profitable. The paper had double-digit profits — an enormous result compared against other companies its size, which make do on 3-6%.

Was any of this invested in the future? Was any of this set aside for a rainy day? While the editorial writers bemoaned Sacramento’s profligate spending, did they ask hard questions of the Chandler family or any of a number of Times Mirror management teams? In a different world, wiser heads would have realized that the Times was in the news business (rather than the newspaper business) and would have monetized the internet more quickly. What’s the difference between Craigslist and LATimes.com? The former makes a substantial global profit. And it was started by one guy named Craig in his house.

Instead of making appropriate investments, the paper has made one cut after another so that a string of owners — Sam Zell being only the latest — can fund their empires and maintain their stock prices. Which only makes me feel all the more foolish for maintaining a paid subscription to a newspaper that has no Book Review, no Opinion section, no Metro section, no Outdoors section, no Lifestyle section — and which maintains all its content utterly free online, where others can see what I’m seeing without paying for it. There are only two reasons I keep my subscription:  1) I’d rather read the comics in a newspaper than online, 2) pure sentimentality from someone who has loved newspapers all his life and who got his first job, with a newspaper, at age 14. And the sentimentality is wearing thin.

So yes, I bemoan what has befallen the Los Angeles Times. What especially saddens me is that its community of readers, as well as everyone else who relies upon the paper, is paying for the gross negligence of management.

I guess if Julian Barnes calls Updike’s “Rabbit” quadrilogy “the great masterpiece of postwar American fiction,” then I should read it. (Or them.) Because I’ll follow Barnes anywhere. And I’m certainly enjoying his latest right now.

This post, where I said that I read one to two books a week, was greeted with much curiosity by people I’ve run into around town. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, the questions ran the gamut from A to B: “How do you do that?” and “Oh yeah? What were they?” The first is easy to answer: by doing that. The second is the reason behind this post.

I just finished The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Five years ago, my brother Ray, who hadn’t read a novel in perhaps 20 years, marveled over it and warned me that it would make me cry (as it did him). He was right. It made me cry twice. That’s tough to do. (I’m very much of the school “Get over it.”) It had another result as well: Now I hate the Taliban more than ever. That’s the power of fiction.

A side note on this book. In that same post, I noted the conversation with businessmen who read No books. Nothing. None at all. Yesterday I had a meeting with three guys in pharmaceuticals, two of them owners of the company. They’re obviously smart men. I said to them what I say to a number of people I write corporate copy for: “I still read great Russian novels, but nobody else does.” This is shorthand for: The text has to be brief. But this time, still under the spell of “The Kite Runner,” I added, “Right now, I’m reading a novel by an Afghani.” Guy #1 says, “What is it?” I tell him. He says, “I read that.” Guy #2 chimes in: “I read that too.” Then we talk about the book, three men in their 40’s or 50’s who’ve been deeply moved by the same novel. (What are the odds?) And my brother being the fourth. One of the guys volunteers, re the author’s latest, “His new one’s even better.” On the way out, the one partner started to talk art with me — visual art. It turns out that all the paintings in the office are by him. And they’re really good. What did he want to discuss? German Expressionism. It was tempting to hang out just to talk about that further. (I almost brought up “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” my obsession for which continues (as I discussed here and here and here.))

I also read How The World Works by my friend Doug Hackney. This also made me cry, but for a different reason: I wish I knew then what Doug knows now. Doug was in business intelligence business before people knew what business intelligence was. If this book is any indication, beauty may be skin deep, but smarts go all the way through.

Last year I attended a business seminar out of town. On the first day during lunch I found myself seated with five other guys roughly my age who come from worlds very different than my own. To wit:  When I said that I read between one to two books a week, they gasped. They couldn’t believe it. Some of their questions:

•  “When do you have time?”
• “What kind of books?”
• “How do you pick what books you’re going to read or not?”
• and, most penetratingly, “WHY?”

Because, you see, these guys didn’t just read fewer books than I do. They read NO books. Ever. Every one of them seemed smart and successful, but they read no books. Ever.

(In fairness, I watch no sports. Ever. Even in bars.)

Today on the LA Times’ site I came across this interview with someone who read 462 books last year. No, that’s not a typo. Four hundred and sixty-two last year. (So far this year, she’s above 10 books. And today is January 9th.) Reading this, my questions were remarkably familiar:

• “When do you have time?”
• “What kind of books?”
• “How do you pick what books you’re going to read or not?”
• “WHY?”

My immediate reaction was, “Well, certainly she isn’t retaining much.” But then I tried to remember the plot of the Brad Meltzer book I read two years ago and couldn’t. (What I could remember were the plot twists I saw coming from miles away — which says less about my cleverness than it does about my glee at the time about being right.) Is this Meltzer’s fault or mine? Probably both, but somewhat more Meltzer’s:  there wasn’t a memorable character in the book, and novels should be about people. Checking out Meltzer’s site also helped me feel better about this, because even after looking at the titles of his novels I couldn’t pick out the one I’d read, and even after reading the plot descriptions it was a toss-up until I remembered that the book involved brothers in a bank. Meltzer, who seems like a nice guy and who is a very successful writer with legions of fans, isn’t writing books for me. So I don’t find them memorable.

On the other end of the spectrum, I can remember large swatches of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and “Everyman,” as well as Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” “No Country for Old Men” and “All the Pretty Horses,” all of which I read in the same timeframe. So I’m not slipping into dementia.

I have to wonder if it’s good to read 462 books in one year. This would certainly help me tidy up my nightstand, where the stack of “books in waiting” has seemingly through meiosis become the two stacks of books in waiting.  I’m almost finished with the biography of Brian Eno (invaluable, although written by a sycophant) and the Inhumans graphic novel “Silent War,” I’ve made a good start on Julian Barnes’ latest (a meditation on death), and I’ve got only two stories left to read in the T.C. Boyle collection “Tooth and Claw.” But that still leaves the histories of Germany under the Nazis, the history of the Roman Empire, and God knows what’s waiting at the bottom. (And, atop it all, is last week’s New Yorker with Barnes’ latest short story, which I’m halfway through.)

But if I could read all of this times 60 in the course of one year, would any of it prove to be notable? And what would be the rest of the price paid? In 1795, someone named J.G. Heinzmann listed the physical consequences of excessive reading: “susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melancholy.”

Ouch.

Sam Shepard was arrested yesterday in Illinois for drunk driving. According to news reports, his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. I don’t have any sympathy for drunk drivers, and I hope that if Shepard is convicted a judge won’t either.

But what I really want to talk about is this mug shot, which propels Shepard into the rarified ranks that include, say, Nick Nolte.

Well, he certainly looks drunk. And I know we all age (if we’re lucky). But my first thought after seeing this was about potential future roles for Sam. It now occurs to me that if Sam Shepard writes a sequel to “True West” (as Albee wrote a prequel to “The Zoo Story”), then Shepard seems perfectly disposed to play Dad. Because he looks like a toothless old man who lives in the desert. Yes, Sam Shepard, early action playwright and former hipster and lover to Patti Smith has become… a coot.

Today I finished reading two especially timely articles in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

In one, a former financial insider explains why Wall Street never learns its lesson, and will always shuttle between boom and bust on about a 30-year cycle. The essential thrust is that inevitably regulations fall away because we succumb to our own greed.

In the other, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings lends some sage advice to those who need him most: us. It boils down to “learn that you aren’t special and you can’t continue to live this way,” and “be nice to us, because you need to be nice to us.”

I thought about these two pieces while driving home tonight from the liquor store. I would think that most Americans reading these pieces would need to stop at the liquor store.

Here’s what was awaiting me when I got home: four different “you’re pre-approved!” offers from credit-card companies. Two were for Visa cards attached to airlines, one was from American Express, and one was from Discover. The beginning interest rates ran from 9.99% to 14.99%. All four cards were adjustable-rate. Behind all these cards, in one way or another, was bailout money that we recently borrowed from the future with money printed today. I shredded all four applications.

But not before wondering if I couldn’t accept these cards and charge them up, default on the payments, use the money to buy some historically low stocks, have the government bail me out, and then stick the Chinese with the bill.

My friend Adam Chester is a very funny and talented man. If you saw “What’s My Line – Live on Stage” last year, you’ll remember him as the one-man band who always had the right song to cue guests on or off, and as the singer-songwriter behind such memorable tunes as the Counterintuity jingle, which I promise — promise! — we’re going to post one of these days. Adam is a gifted musician and lyricist and songwriter and singer and you don’t have to take my word for it, because Elton John and others have noticed all this as well.

Adam is gifted. But as they say, behind every gifted Jewish man, there’s his Jewish mother. And now that I’ve learned a little more about his mom, it’s no wonder Adam has turned out so well. Adam is smart, but his mother is a sage. As you can learn by reading his blog, which is over here, over the course of 27 years, Adam’s mother has written him some 600 letters advising him on the do’s and don’ts of surviving the hell that is adulthood in the big city. To wit: be careful of intruders, get new tires, beware of killer bees, and don’t eat sushi.

For me, you’re going to want to watch the video below and then click over to YouTube to comment. And you are going to want to do this, trust me.

But first, let me just add this: This wonderful video provides a fascinating look into how the other half lives. Because this is utterly counter to how my stern German Lutheran mother raised us. Example: If you were going to cry, you were told to “Go cry on the steps.” And the steps were outside. What might life have been like with Adam’s mom? And if I had saved all those letters, my mother would have said, “Why?” This video opens an entire new realm of experience to me!

A couple of days ago, a military jet crashed from the sky into a suburban house in San Diego, killing a woman, her two baby daughters, and her mother, while the pilot ejected to safety. Yesterday, the tearful widower, a South Korean emigree, held a news conference to ask people not to blame the pilot for this accident. “I pray for him not to suffer for this action,” he said. “I know he’s one of our treasures for our country.”

This story intrigues me for several reasons.

It interests me because it sounds eerily close to the inciting action of any number of Paul Auster novels. In these novels, the protagonist, a man who is usually in his 30’s or 40’s, suffers a disastrous personal loss — a reversal of fortune or, often, the sudden death of his wife, sometimes with children — that is often coupled with unexpected financial fortune. (As Dong Yun Yoon will no doubt see.) The man, having lost everything important but gaining financial security, then sets off to find the new him and his place in the universe. This is the essential plot of “The Music of Chance,” “The Book of Illusions,” “Oracle Night,” “The Brooklyn Follies,” and, for all I know, next year’s scheduled release, “Invisible.”

It interests me, of course, in the way that roadside accidents interest all of us, as we express concern while slowing down to catch every detail, glad that it didn’t happen to us.

It interests me mostly because I can’t remember when recently I’ve seen this sort of grace, the sort that in the face of a loss of this magnitude doesn’t resort to casting about for blame. It takes strength of character not to wish the pilot dead too.

Or is it cultural? That’s my wife’s theory. She says that because this man grew up in a different culture, his first thought isn’t to lawyer up, but to accept the precarious nature of life and to lend forgiveness. But if that’s so, what’s that say about us? That somehow we’ve become a people who inherently feel wronged, that we are somehow deserving of compensation even when there’s no clear fault?

If that’s the case, there’s little mystery where the financial collapse came from. Yes, some people ginned the system and made off with millions (or billions, now heading into trillions). But to do that, they needed the abetment of everyone else, who felt they were entitled to far more than they could afford. And now all of us collectively are paying for that.

This semester, I’m having immense fun team-teaching a survey class with fellow writers Christopher Meeks, S.L. (Sid) Stebel, and Aram Saroyan.

I realize you may already know this, but Aram is most famous for, secondly, being the son of William Saroyan, and, firstly, being the (in)famous poet behind the poem that first got the NEA into hot water politically, almost 45 years ago. Here’s the entire poem (no need to get comfy, it’s quick):

lighght

That was it. If you need further time, go on back and read it again and we’ll wait here.

Okay. Good. For more about this poem and the controversy it stirred, here’s the full story. Let’s just say that some people were outraged that taxpayers’ dollars were funding such work, and even some well-known and highly respected poets had responses to Aram’s early work that could be best summed up as, “What the fuck is this?”

However one feels about that, here’s how I feel every Monday night:  pretty fucking lucky because I get to hang out with Aram Saroyan. (And, make no mistake, Sid Stebel and Chris Meeks. But we’re talking about Aram at the moment.) Whenever Aram’s lecturing, I learn more in that hour than some people learn in their entire lives. A couple of weeks ago I stirred the pot by getting some students riled up about seemingly bad meaningless poetry just so we could see what would happen. The result was electrifying. Aram never lost his cool, proved that he knows his stuff, and didn’t bother to fall into the trap of defending poetry other people don’t like. “Maybe this isn’t for you,” was the gist of his response, but the general lesson was that he’s deeply schooled in literature and language. It was impressive.

So. Onto last Monday night.

After class, we faculty members usually go drink. (We are, after all, writers.) Somehow or other we got to talking about Aram’s name — that he’s known  for these accomplishments, including the rather strong-selling “Complete Minimal Poems” (which would take less time to read than this blog post, but which will live on far far longer). Aram would have none of it. Despite his produced plays, his widely collected and awarded poetry, his biographies of the Beats, his essays, his novels, his lineage, his personal association with other important writers, Chris and I couldn’t get him to see himself the way we do. Which, no doubt, is good.

So yesterday I’m on Facebook and still thinking about this discussion and I decide to add Aram as a Friend. So I search “Aram Saroyan.” Turns out he’s not on Facebook. But there’s a group devoted to him. Here’s what it’s called:

“The GREATEST poet that ever lived”

Here’s the link.

Here’s the description:

Aram Saroyan the author of the famous award winning poem, Lighght. We come together to support this amazing man.

You can see all of his amazing work here:

http://www.ubu.com/historical/saroyan/saroyan01.html

No, it wasn’t started by Aram. Or a relative.  It was started by a young woman in Washington, DC.

So I emailed this to Aram:

Subject: OK, Aram, TELL me you’re not so famous

On 11/29/08 12:25 AM, “lee@leewochner.com” <lee@leewochner.com> wrote:

There’s a frickin’ Facebook group DEVOTED TO YOU!

And it WASN’T started by you! (Some girl on the East Coast.)

And it’s called — drumroll please —

“The GREATEST poet that ever lived”

(Boy, you’d better NOT have started that!)

Here’s the URL:  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18400632419

No, I haven’t joined the group. I mean, don’t misunderstand, I like you, but there’s this Shakespeare guy, and I kinda like Rilke, and Eliot is pretty good… I’m sure  you understand.

I’m standing by my debt to Shakespeare, Rilke, Eliot, and some others (Whitman, Dickinson). But hey, as Aram jestingly suggested when he emailed back, maybe these other poets ultimately led to him.

The new issue of the Atlantic arrived today in the mail. It provides interesting reading for anyone who has been following the recent presidential  campaign closely.

“The Front-Runner’s Fall,”  by Joshua Green, details what went wrong with the Clinton campaign — from the inside. After it was over, Green contacted many of the people who worked on that campaign, and they were quick to oblige by supplying him with insider emails and memos that, I assume, advanced their individual agendas. (I.e., “It wasn’t my fault.”) You won’t find anything terribly surprising — the view from inside looks just like the view we all got from outside:  of a campaign at odds with itself, and hobbled early on by crippling hubris — but I did come away again relieved that Hillary Clinton has no shot at the presidency, at least not right now. If you’re disinclined to read the whole piece, allow me to pull out the single most salient insight:

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

We’ve currently got a quote-unquote president who makes decisions —  albeit all too quickly and poorly. Imagine following the current catastrophe with someone incapable of making any decision and incapable of managing a staff, even the rather small staff of a campaign. You can’t be “leader of the free world” if you need your husband to make the final call on whether or not to air a TV ad. (An incident revealed in Green’s piece.) Say what you will about Obama, but he has certainly managed his campaign well, mounting an effective insurgency that continues to impress.

Elsewhere in the issue, James Fallows views and critiques all 47 (!) of the primary debates.  If you thought cleaning the Augean Stables was a job unfit for most, imagine watching 60+ hours of shifting statements about Iraq, illegal aliens, and the meaning of the word “bitter.” Fallows shrewdly decides out that Obama “won” the Democratic debates by playing a consistent character, where Clinton kept redefine herself to do better. For some of us, this is an uncomfortable reminder of 2000, when George W. Bush telegraphed the boorish cluck he would prove to be, but was seen as doing “better than expected” and praised by the press for his consistency. (While Al Gore went from extravagant sighing in Debate 1, to careful reticence in Debate 2, to finally finding his voice — when it was too late — in Debate 3.) The Atlantic website carries some videos that back up Fallows’ analysis; chiefly, the video of Carter and Reagan serves to remind me why I was a supporter of John Anderson that year.

Fallows makes this forecast for the eventual McCain-Obama debate:

Once he gets on the stage, McCain will try to remind Obama of Hillary Clinton—that is, of someone he must take seriously, someone who is willing to challenge him and even insult him to his face. Obama “is vain about his idealism and ‘nobility,’” a staff member for one of Obama’s Democratic opponents (not Clinton) told me on the phone. “He is thin-skinned about having his motives and competence questioned, so that’s what you do.” Grizzled pols like Hillary Clinton or her husband would laugh off such an attempt; Obama may still be innocent enough to be shaken by it. McCain made many dismissive references to Obama after Obama became the presumptive nominee. The easy next step is to do so while looking at him.

This sounds like good advice for McCain. We’ll see if Obama is dumb enough to get rattled by it.