I am not a fan of newspapers.  No one has ever seen me read the newspaper on the subway.  Unlike Martha Quest, the heroine of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series, I do not read several daily newspapers to chart political events, environmental disasters, and wars in the Middle East.

We, too, live in a problematic era.  What is true, what is false?  We haven’t stopped reading the papers altogether, but we rely increasingly on the in-depth reporting in magazines.  We’re not in Lessing’s world, but in some ways it is parallel.   

I am a bit more like the narrator of Lessing’s brilliant dystopian fable, The Memoirs of a Survivor, who stops reading newspapers because they have become an organ for the government (not true here), and instead relies on information gathered from friends and strangers about where to buy canned fruit and the rise of violence as gangs of kids pass through the city and camp in various neighborhoods on their way north. (There is cannibalism.)  It is rumored that the north is the place to go, but nobody comes back.

The thing I learned in the days when newspapers throve:    you can write for a newspaper without ever reading one.  What that says about journalism I cannot say:  perhaps “Any intelligent person can do it,” or “Only a minimal skills set is required.”

I used to enjoy writing for now-defunct, quirky  little magazines and journals, but I avoided the news.  I wrote a few profiles of extremely unimportant people, who interested me far more than the famous. I listened to them talk – the interviews were non-directive – and the story revealed itself in time. My favorite of these articles was a short profile of Sparkle, the wife of the lead guitarist of a little-known band, Stutter.

The whole project could have been a disaster.   I was supposed to meet Sparkle at  a very dark club lit mainly by Christmas lights.  There were few chairs, and the few customers had to stand.  I stood at the bar, ill at ease, nursing a Perrier.  An hour passed.  I grabbed a chair. Then another half hour.  No sign of Sparkle or Stutter.  I called a cab and sat on the steps.  It was 11:00, past my bedtime, and I thought Sparkle was very rude.  Finally the band arrived.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“It’s OK.  I called a cab.”

“Shall we talk here?” 

“Till the cab comes. “

Some would have whipped out a notebook, but I was tired. I turned on the tape recorder. Sparkle was a fascinating talker, obviously a night person. She’d grown up in the Bible belt, the daughter of an evangelist preacher; majored in drama at the University of Kansas; worked on costumes for a repertory company in Colorado; played Ariel at a Summer Shakespeare company in Maine; sold “antiques,, i.e., junk,” at a market in Old Town in Chicago; and then met her husband at a Wilco concert. “He was impossibly arty.” “Is that a good thing.” “No, not at all.”

She played tambourine and sang back-up for the band.  Usually when they traveled they crashed with friends, “but I can’t say I’ve made lasting friends.” She went to the movies alone a lot.  They were leaving for California later in the week.

“Good luck to you.”

“I’ve gotta go on stage now.”

“Break a leg.”

Sparkle and her husband were really sweet. A kind couple, not really “too arty.”

Did I write many profiles of ordinary people?  No, because readers want star power. God knows why. I guess because most of us are ordinary people. So give us glitter!

Or, since it’s summer, avoid the news and read a good novel!