Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim

4. The 215,000 Word Habit

78 4 The 215,000 Word Habit Should I Give My Life to The Times? This article about the New York Times and the power it has over its readers was published in The Nation in 1988 and reprinted in Best American Essays 1989. It is an excellent example of how Krim—like the best comedians —turns exasperation and complaint into laughs. The article lambastes the Times for its outrageous girth, which humbles the poor reader who equates its consumption with intellectual respectability. The great model for the Beat generation—Krim included—was Walt Whitman, who praised the beasts of the field because “not one is respectable” (1944, 67). Krim never met an intellectually respectable position he liked and never gave one a break. Nothing beat the Times for respectability, so Krim tears into it. Readers secretly wish to put the paper down “for a minute and look out the window. But you just can’t do that, it’s like masturbation used to be for the current senior-citizen generation—God is watching.” Laughs aside, Krim here continues his worthy attack on the ideal of endless self-improvement through education that he started in “What’s This Cat’s Story?” (chapter 1). Krim’s work has offered me many opportunities to think about Saul Bellow, and here is another one. Bellow identified Herzog as a “negative Bildungsroman.” Moses Herzog does not educate himself, said Bellow. He de-educates himself. As Bellow put it, over the course of the novel Herzog “comically divests himself of an appallingly bad education” (Cohen 2008, 11–12). Krim also understood how important such a de-education project could be. The 215,000 Word Habit . 79 E xcuse me while I put my New York Times aside and try to write this piece. It’s now 8:35 in the evening, absolutely no baloney, although we used to use a shorter word, and I’m still working on Section B, page 4—“For Ferraro, Lost Friendships But Stronger Family ,” continued from page Bl. I’ve already had my supper (broiled tilefish, little potatoes, bean salad, a glass of Boucheron blanc de blanc), not my breakfast, and I still have twenty pages of Section B to go plus Sections C and D. Let me not wring out the page count here—the real situation is monstrous enough—actually, the upcoming eighteen pages of Section B are nonreading materials, only classifieds. But what with hard news, features and reviews, tonight I still have forty-three pages to mow down before tomorrow begins in three hours and fifteen minutes and the same torment awaits me! What’s happened? What’s going on? Was The Times always like this except we didn’t notice—of course not, even I know that, but when did it start becoming pointedly pathological as a daily read? When did it really start getting out of hand for all but the professional human mice who spend their days in the stacks nibbling away at print? There’s no exact telling when it passed over the line, but obviously it first began during the tenure of A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal as executive editor, 1977–1986. Rosenthal himself has said that he picked up new journalistic finger foods from that preppy innovator Clay Felker, when Clay was at the helm of New York magazine during the 1970s—before Mad Dog Rupert ate little Clay up and spat him out for jaw-strengthening exercises. But what did Rosenthal pick up that has now made The Times into such a Frankenstein of unrestrained virtues, or did it turn into a noble glandular case for other reasons also? What we know is this: Rosenthal took from Felker all the magazine-type concepts he could newspaperize —things that Mr. Prep had originated as consumer service features, like The Passionate Shopper, The Underground Gourmet, Best Bets, How the Power Game Is Played, etc.—and fleshed out (why? why?) what was already a portly paper. The answer to the mystifying question posed just now flashes in: yuppie readability, entertainment. If you’re in print, why should the mags have it all in the Age of Plush and newspapers continue to trod the same old grim rut of who, what, when, where—how square! 80 . Missing a Beat At the same time old shrewdie Abe was adding ice-cream colors to his paper’s sober garb, that garb itself was also...