Those of you who do not live in New York, or do not get the national
edition, might not know that The New York Times is now smaller paper
by an inch and half across its width. The Times as many newspapers are
doing, has to undergo changes to survive and prosper. The idea for the
smaller newspaper is to save money on increased costs of newsprint.
The need to accommodate the steady shift of readers to the Web is
another reason for the attempt or save money used to produce a daily
newspaper. Both are good reasons for creating the new, smaller paper.
Some people have complained that they no longer can fold the paper in
half as they used to. That is a typical simplistic attitude to change
and we should ignore that criticism. However, with the smaller paper,
there is less news. I now read the paper much faster than I once did,
not a bad thing in itself when my time is so precious and I do spend
time on the Web going from site to site for free.
Yet, one problem persists. I have long believed that the film, TV,
theater, music museum and especially architecture reviews were far too
long. They contain too much half-baked philosophy and a sort of
show-off intellectualism by the reviewer and an inability to come to
the point about whether the creative work in question is good or bad.
Despite the smaller paper, and despite less news space in the “news
hole, “those reviews are still too long. I have not counted lines,
column inches or words when making my judgment. It is a feeling from
many years in news. These reviews continue to tell me more than I want
to know about everything and anything and rarely get to the point of
the review – which should tell is what is being reviewed worth my time
to listen to or see. It is as if the editors of those sections did not
get the company memo about how smaller may be better. I can only hope
that eventually The Times will come to its senses and realize that
more is not better, it is just more, and that opinion couched as
information does not allow its reader to make informed judgments about
the arts.
Cormac McCarthy
has a new, powerful book called “The Road.” If you have not heard of
it, you should, and more to the point, if you have not already read
it, you must. I have read most of McCarthy’s works, including
“Suttree, “ “All the Pretty Horses, “ “The Crossing, “ “Cities of the
Plain” and “No Country for Old Men.” All are strong and unique, by a
master of language like no other writer in America today.
At one time being an avid reader of science fiction, McCarthy’s theme
about the end of the world and how only a few people through the
utmost difficulty and frequent hardship, and through tests as timeless
as those in Greek mythology, manage to survive, is nothing new.
However, I do not believe I have ever read anything as poetic about
the apocalypse as I found in “The Raod.” The story is simple. From the
first page it is obvious that most of the world no longer exists. Gray
ash covers everything. Nothing grows. Towns and cities are empty
shells, crushed, melted, overrun with useless fragments, the debris
and the detritus of destruction. Almost no people are alive. We meet a
father and his young son traveling on a road to what the man says is
the south where the father hopes the two will find a better way of
life. The father, known simply as, the man, and his son, known equally
simply as, the boy manage to stay alive in spite of great odds. It is
the story of their survival through all sorts of difficulties,
including having little or no food, and water, hiding from marauding
bands of other survivors, frequent illnesses, and bad weather that
often threatens to end their lives.
“The Road” is Cormac McCarthy at his best, his sentences, each firmly
crafted, each straightforward, simple yet complex, each complete in
themselves that gives this book about what has almost been the end of
the world, a deeply spiritual underpinning. The story ends sadly with
an expected death but with a strange sense of hope. When I finished
reading, I closed its covers wondering who the boy really is and does
mankind have a future. I do not know if mankind has a future that
anyone can imagine. Somehow, though, I think McCarthy feels the world
will survive but it will far different from anything anyone could
envision. I must wonder, though, for of McCarthy’s harsh, unrelenting
realism, is he, after all, a hopeless romantic? Read the book and
judge for yourself. ........................................................................................................................
At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Anti-Matter: