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People ask me, Tom, what’s your proudest accomplishment? Turn’s out,
that’s an easy question to answer. It’s not any journalism prizes, book
titles, or even paternity

It’s having an indie rock song named after me. A DC group called the Gena Rowlands Band, led by a guy named Bob Massey who was once a news aide at the Washington Post, wrote a song that seems to be about someone waking up in someone else’s body — which was either inspired by or made Bob think of Old Souls, my book on cases of small children who appear to recall previous lives. It’s called Tom Shroder’s Blues, a tribute no doubt to the immortal 1976 Tom Waits ballad, Tom Traubert’s Blues (which may be my favorite Waits tune of all, and his best lyrics).*

Actually, the Gena Rowlands Band isn’t bad at all. You can hear some of their work on YouTube, though unfortunately not Tom Shroder’s Blues, (only 99 cents at the i-Tunes Store!) Not that I’m shilling for it. I don’t get a cut. Though maybe I should.

*Tom Traubert’s Blues

Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did
Got what I paid for now
See ya tomorrow, hey Frank can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you?
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

I’m an innocent victim of a blinded alley
And tired of all these soldiers here
No one speaks English and everything’s broken
And my Stacys are soaking wet
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

Now the dogs are barking and the taxi cab’s parking
A lot they can do for me
I begged you to stab me, you tore my shirt open
And I’m down on my knees tonight
Old Bushmill’s I staggered, you buried the dagger
Your silhouette window light
To go waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

Now I lost my Saint Christopher now that I’ve kissed her
And the one-armed bandit knows
And the maverick Chinaman and the cold-blooded signs
And the girls down by the strip-tease shows
Go, waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

No, I don’t want your sympathy
The fugitives say that the streets aren’t for dreaming now
Manslaughter dragnets and the ghosts that sell memories
They want a piece of the action anyhow
Go, waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

And you can ask any sailor and the keys from the jailor
And the old men in wheelchairs know
That Matilda’s the defendant, she killed about a hundred
And she follows wherever you may go
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda
You’ll go a waltzing Matilda with me

And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal
No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey
And goodnight to the street sweepers
The night watchman flame keepers and goodnight to Matilda too

Afraid of letting Hank Stuever run away with the day, Joel Achenbach dug deep and came up with a classic post on Achenblog, vintage Achenbach — smart, funny, self-referential to a self-deprecating degree, and actually making a good point that needs to be out there, ie: Tiger wasn’t really fooling anybody about being Mr. Family Man. As Joel notes:

The argument has been made a million times in the past two months that Tiger held himself up as a great guy and squeaky-clean family man, and earned all that endorsement money, and has now been exposed as a fraud and deserves whatever humiliation and agony he has endured. Weirdly, despite spending a fair amount of time staring at the TV, I somehow missed all the Tiger Woods Christmas Specials where we joined the Woods family as they sipped eggnog and discussed what’s going in the stockings. I barely knew the guy had kids. The one thing for sure is that he hasn’t faked beating the crap out of Phil Mickelson and everyone else for the last 13 years.

Just being clever can only get you so far. Real humor, like any other kind of writing, requires keen observation, and something interesting and novel to say.

Hank Stuever is just now shifting into high gear in his new role as Washington Post TV critic. He totally kicked ass with his review of the new Spartacus. What other TV writer would think to begin as follows?

I am Spartacus’s trainer: We worked his core group for three hours a day, then did lower body strengthening for another two hours, then an hour of cardio, and then a Pontius Pilates cool-down. Every day. He ate nothing but egg whites and grilled chicken breasts. And now, just look at him.

I am Spartacus’s stylist: In the first episode of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” (Friday night on Starz), he’s still a Thracian villager joining the Romans in war, and he’s a bit Visigothy, so we went with a wig of shoulder-length tresses with only the softest bit of curl. At first it was too “Spinal Tap,” and then it just came to me: Viggo in “Lord of the Rings”! Right? Later, in the second episode, thank God the story picks up the pace and Spartacus is captured and sent to that gladiator camp. Because then we come to that scene where they whack his hair off. But, hello? With a knife? Honey, we labored on that haircut. I didn’t want it to look too-too Caesar.

A Pontius Pilates cool-down? A bit Visigothy?

All his schtick is the perfect way to bring home the silliness inherent in these over-the-top costume dramas that really and truly are more about abs than Abyssinia. And nobody can be quite as convincing as Stuever is in loving something even as he cuts it to confetti, a la Edward Scissorhands.

For those who have a vested interest in decently compensated professional journalism, a sentimental fondness for it, or a core belief that what it contributes to democracy is essential, a recent OJR post by Robert Niles is important, if severely depressing, reading. I’d recommend  the whole piece, but the killer paragraph comes at the end, after he establishes that there is no real hope for replacing income lost to newsrooms forever:

“It’s time to … find a publishing and production model that allows a news publication to live within its current income means. That’s where the real change will happen in news publishing – the expensive, labor-intensive, manual newsroom model will give way to new, distributed, communal reporting and editing models, ones that are now being forged by journalist entrepreneurs. I wish that news businesses, foundations and journalism schools spending resources on searching for new funding models would abandon those futile efforts, and instead redirect that funding toward cultivating and studying innovation in news gathering and production. And in doing that, I wish that industry would quit looking to print editors and broadcast station managers for leadership and instead look toward online publishers and editors who are making nascent efforts work.

“Unfortunately, too many print and broadcast veterans don’t want to change their production model. So they instead devote their time and energy toward getting someone to fund another doomed quest to look for their revenue model Holy Grail.”

I think he’s nailed an inconvenient truth here. But he’s also glossing over what to me is the most troubling implication. By “distributed, communal reporting and editing models” he means some variation on “citizen journalists” and Wikipedia-type open source editing; newsrooms consisting of thousands of individuals with their laptops more or less volunteering their time, plus  whatever automated data dumps, gee-gaws and hoo-has can be innovated.

Anyone who has ever tried to produce high-quality, groundbreaking, earth-moving journalism — the kind that often requires individuals to ignore all other aspects of their lives, including family, physical health and sanity — understands just how unlikely it is that communal journalism will produce the same. It’s the equivalent of firing Shakespeare and hoping a million monkeys working together will produce Hamlet. Some journalism, and I would argue the most important kind, requires trained and experienced individuals to dig deep, break through every wall and wade through every swamp to get to the heart of  the matter — not to mention the talent and energy to make sense, and in some cases literature out of it.

Hard to volunteer for all that, without at least the solace of a decent pay day at the end of the slog.

But Niles’ point is that there’s no purpose served whining about it. And he’s dead right. An historic,even tectonic, shift is at work here. It used to be publishers had to own a printing press, a warehouse full of paper and a fleet of trucks. Now all you need is a $500 laptop. There’s no going back to the old economics that aggregated the wealth in a handful of large media companies, which in turn divvied up a portion of that to a group of carefully selected journalists.

Now those journos are increasingly on their own.

But I remain convinced that even as the new realities diminish the best kind of work the old order produced, the need and desire for that work will not diminish. At the same time, the tectonic shift that destroyed the old order makes it dramatically easier to build a new one.

To an ever increasing extent, an individual with the journalistic goods will become his/her own publisher, publicist and distributer. The cost of  finding and connecting with an audience based on interest, rather than geography, will approach zero. The economic scale will suddenly favor small operators, and make targeted, hightly motivated audiences available.

To adapt an Army rectuiting slogan, we can all become A Media Conglomerate of One.

The pathways to get there still have to be hacked out of the jungle, of course. But I recommend we all sharpen our machetes.

Can you guess what well-known personage made the following statement?

“I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”

The personality who said this would have been a natural writer. In a handful of words, he (ok, I’m giving you a hint, it was a man) not only manages to create an unforgettable, totally original  image that instantly conveys a complex activity — but he does so in a way that makes you burst out laughing. (The humor comes mainly because the two frames of reference, preaching and bee-keeping, are so discordant, yet when you think of the image, so perfectly apt.  The joke is that maybe they aren’t so dissimilar after all.)   It describes perfectly and lampoons brilliantly in the same phrase.

Now that I’ve written that last sentence, I realize I  could only be referring to one of two people: Mark Twain, and the man who actually uttered this remark.

One more hint:

So I loved the book, admired the heck out of the craft. But there were two things I would have pushed if I were editing it. One of the central themes of the book, demonstrated beautifully, was that in spite of being one of the best in the world, Agassi HATED tennis. Really hated it. If I were Moehringer, I would have pushed him harder on that: Clearly he hated the pressure of expectations. He hated the toll it took on his body. He hated the loneliness and isolation, the endless repetition and the way it consumed his life. But did he hate the way it felt when his body executed a virtuoso maneuver, when he was able to leap from the court, swing perfectly, meet the ball at the sweetest possible spot and drive it over 100 miles per hour to the exact square inch of the court he’d chosen? When he was able to do that over and over again? Did he hate the challenge of the intricate chess match? The way tennis forces you to live in the moment, experience the primal fullness of battle without severed limbs and rotting corpses?

In addition, he discusses all the ways in which he rebelled, hoping that he’d get him tossed out of the Florida tennis academy which felt like a prison to him. But Moehringer needed to make him address why it was that he didn’t do the one thing he could have done to insure getting tossed out. Play badly, lose consistently, stop getting better. If he hated tennis so much, that would have seemed like the easy, obvious way out, yet he couldn’t do it.

Whenever you have an apparent contradiction in a set of facts, that’s exactly where you should concentrate your questioning, and where the answers will prove the most revealing.

The related issue is: Agassi never addresses what it was that made him, someone who hated what he was doing, stand out above all the other driven and pushed prodigies in the game. What was it that made him special, even among the tennis elite? He never even tries to address that, which would have been fascinating.

Open by Andre Agassi (and perhaps more relevantly for the purposes of this post, J.R. Moehringer) is a master class in how to engage readers by creating a story arc. Especially in biographies/autobiographies, there is a deadly tendency to include huge laundry lists of events and facts about a life just because, well, it’s a biography. Open includes plenty of facts that might have been groaningly boring, down to the minutiae of long ago and long forgotten sequences of strokes on an obscure  tennis court somewhere. But every single one of them is included only if it makes a point in the larger argument of the story.

It’s an axiom among tennis players that the surest sign of amateur play is hitting strokes with no purpose in mind beyond getting the ball over the net, or hitting it hard. Any expert player is trying to accomplish something very specific, something that itself fits into the frame of a larger game plan, with every swing of the racquet. The same is true of writing. The real pros are loath to waste a single word that doesn’t add to the larger meaning of the piece as a whole.

But how is it possible to tell a fairly complete tale of a life history in a random world without throwing in random facts? That’s where having vision comes in. Agassi wasn’t just writing a book because his famous career could command a seven-figure advance, he was writing it because he’d come to see his life as a desperate search for meaning, meaning that he ultimately found. His arc begins in a hell on earth, under the tonnage of his father’s thumb and the heat of his rage, then ascends through the central paradox of his life – that in order to save himself, he must learn to love the very instrument of his torture — to a hard won wisdom.

Agassi had a story to tell, and Moehringer was expert enough to help him tell it in the most riveting way.

Perhaps the greatest verbal and narrative genius currently in operation is the PR team guiding Tiger’s damage control. The wording of his statements has been pure poetry. And the overall strategy is unerring. His statement today about taking “indefinite leave” from golf is the latest tour de force of PR thinking. His team realized the damage was so severe, they could never spin out of it. They had to create an entirely new narrative: The Resurrection and Return. So first, Tiger had to go away, disappear, die, in a sense. Only then could he reemerge after some “indefinite” amount of time (to be determined by his PR team taking the national temperature), at which point the story would be no more about Tiger the Hound, the Big Disappointment, but the New, Chastened, Rededicated and Refocused Tiger. The Comeback Kid.

I had this great encounter with Pete, the uber-personal trainer at the Y. He’s a guy you might take for a stereotypical jock.  He’s normally all about new ways to stress your core, but the other day he’d just read a book — a BOOK! — that had bowled him over, and he couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like someone newly (and gaggingly) in love who can’t stop going on about his beloved. And they say narrative is dead. Before we write the obit, we’ve got to account for Pete.

We did a small personality piece on Pete in The Washington Post Magazine, and in talking with him about that, it became apparent he didn’t read the magazine, or even the newspaper much. So his passion for the book, Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield about the battle of Thermopylae, doubly surprised me.

“When I started getting near the end, I began to slow down because I didn’t want it to stop. And then when I read the last page, I almost began to cry,” he said.

Yes, the book, which is really about the culture of the Spartan warrior, does feature some rather extreme training methods (and by extreme I mean frequently  fatal). So clearly, that got Pete’s professional attention. But it’s not what made him want to cry when he ran out of pages.

Pressfield does a great job of immersing his readers in an alien world, featuring unspeakable brutality, yet full engagement in the real stuff of life (which always includes the proximity of  death). And he’s a master at building a narrative, creating characters you care about and constantly putting them in situations of high suspense.  He also deeply understands the technique of leaving key storylines hovering  in the background while he forges ahead with another high-action sequence. The unresolved issues, usually emotional ones, make the characters much more highly charged as they face the physical and tactical challenges of battle. The tension and excitement in the foreground effortlessly takes on a third dimension because of what you know about the emotional challenges pushed out of sight, but not forgotten.

Also, there is an oddly romantic appeal, especially to guys like Pete, of a life that is immediate, physical, close to the elements, purged of the falseness of modernity. A movie might also move Pete, but movies happen to you. You don’t feel like you are a participant, up inside the screen with all the characters. The power of written narrative is it brings the reader inside the pages, allows him to live there in his imagination. The “END” on the final page was a rude eviction notice, one worth crying over.

“I’m just waiting long enough to forget some of it,” Pete said, “then I’m going to read it again.”