Tiny Town, USA – Two weeks running now The Ithaca Times has succeeded in catching my attention. In both cases the catch was negative.
First off, their toothless piece about Farm Santuary with its redundant front page titled "Safe Haven." As a former abuser of this redundancy it is with much sympathy to the editors for not catching this trifle. A haven is a safe place.
We could run some headlines we botched in my 10 years at the Ithaca Journal that are trophy pieces. The best? Following the death of Princess Diana, it was decided by the Ad department to soak the tragedy for all it was worth with a two-page inside puff-piece stuffed with piffle about Lady D's laudable works.
One of these random acts of kindness was her unknown work on behalf of sea animals. We broke the story. We made it clear to the world in filigreed wedding cake font that adorned the margins of the special section that Lady D was "The Princess of Whales."
Readers had a lot of fun with that. As was our intention. You know, add a little levity. We also printed much less flagrant violations of course, like this truism: "NEA Grants Subject to Pubic Scrutiny."
Don't LOL yet. Remember people, the know-nothing fundamentalists had issued the Christian equivalent of a fatwa on Andres Serrano, the crap photographer whose image of a crucified Jesus serving as a stir stick in a kitchen tumbler full of urine (which explains why it isn't in the permanent collection at the MOMA). Pubic scrutiny -- you bet!
Now onto my comments about a far more egregious error committed by Reporter Warren Greewood, whose byline makes him the lead suspect in this crime against journalism. Oh heck. I like Mr. Greenwood. So let's just say this is one of the more "amateurish" feature pieces I've bothered to glance at in this once respectable watchdog of a weekly now turned chambergram.
Picking on Mr. Greenwood is tantamount to bullying. When a sports team loses, it's always the key player and the coaching staff who take the heat. So let's include any editors involved with moving Mr. Greewood's piece to publication.
The article in question is a tribute of sorts to James McConkey's 90th tear on this planet. What Jim really has to say about being 90 is unprintable.
For a brief bio of McConkey, I've included a piece from 2005 and published in The Cornell Chronicle. Too bad Mr. Greenwood didn't Google it. He could've stole some quotes from sources other than he, himself, Mr. Greenwood, and Mr. McConkey.
Let's just cut to the chase scene: Mr. Greenwood's first two sentences offer important clues to the subject of the story.
He starts: "I have wanted to write about James McConkey for some time. I first became aware of James McConkey's work in 1987."
Stop right there. Give me rewrite: This is not a lead into a story. This is a guy on a 25-year old deadline scratching dry skin into the spaces around his keyboard. The reader here must assume then, that Mr. Greewood has wanted to write about Jim McConkey for two decades at least (it's still early in 2012 so let's give this McConkey bug a little time to crawl around).
Interesting! It took about 25 words to tell us that in 25 years all the author has done is think about writing something about something he is now just getting around to writing about. Well,we all got on of those stories, don't we?
However, the reporter then (with the exception of a McConkey excerpt) takes more than 220 words to get to the point of his story. And what would that point be perchance?
It seems to be a hidden history of the reporter himself, sneaking behind a major American man of letters. Worse than the time it takes to get to the piece on dear old, poor old Jim-- Greenwood's first three sentences begin with "I" and he used the Imperial "I" eight more times in his 220 word intro, an intro designed to move the reader along to that ad on the back cover for $5 off an oil change at Bruce's Pit Stop.
Other regrets about this piece: Greenwood compares McConkey to John Updike, that jimmy-leggin' turbo-Prot and onanist who should've kept his considerable talents for criticism right there.
I can think of other authors McConkey is NOT like: all of them. But authors he resembles? Only the honest ones.
Lastly, McConkey's books never sold terribly well. But he has a tribe, a loyal band of people who not only love his writing, which like water seeks its own level, they adore the man. As good as he may be at writing, McConkey as much or more than any other English professor at any American university shared his extremely rare gift of helping other writers find their own voice.
Also, his hard work at Cornell helped to develop the Creative Writing Program at Cornell. Go look at the list of authors who have passed through that MFA program since its founding back in the mid-1960s.
In closing, let me add as a corrective to Mr. Greenwood's poorly edited work -- it's not his fault, really. All is forgiven. But do take a look at the following quote:
"Noel Perrin, the late author and Dartmouth professor, said that McConkey's writing defies categorization.
"The genre in which McConkey does his best writing has no name. He invented it," Perrin once wrote in a review for USA Today . "What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life ... he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time."
That quote is taken from an article Franklin Crawford wrote about Jim McConkey, a man who at once embraced me as a fellow writer and a friend. There are none like him. So, Ithaca Times is at least to be thanked for reminding us that Jim is still here:
CU's McConkey authors Telescope in the Parlor, a collection of essays (Jan. 2005)
ITHACA, N.Y. -- James McConkey, Cornell University's Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature emeritus, didn't think he had another book in him. But when Paul Dry, owner of an independent publishing house in Philadelphia, suggested to McConkey that perhaps he'd already written his next book, it was a wake-up call of sorts. The result is The Telescope in the Parlor: Essays on Life and Literature (Paul Dry Books Inc., 2004), a compilation of previously uncollected writings and McConkey's first new book since The Anatomy of Memory, an anthology he edited in 1996.
Telescope covers a range of topics, including McConkey's abiding interest in the works of Anton Chekov, E.M. Forster and the late Cornell poet A.R. Ammons, a friend and colleague. In addition to vivid recollections of romance, family life and the world of words, McConkey writes poignantly of poet Anne Silsbee, also a friend, whose works were just gaining recognition at the time of her death. The title is literal and, as with his celebrated Court of Memory works, metaphorical: There is a telescope in the parlor at McConkey's home. There's also McConkey and his telescopic mind.
Three of the book's essays appeared in Phi Beta Kappa Society's literary journal, American Scholar , including "Happy Trails to All," an essay McConkey composed in 2001, thinking it might be his last bit of writing. Anne Fadiman, then-editor of American Scholar , thought otherwise. She published "Happy Trails" and two subsequent McConkey essays: "On Being Human" and this collection's title piece, "The Telescope in the Parlor."
McConkey, 83, is a beloved figure in the Cornell community. With the exception of the Mind and Memory lectures -- a highly popular series he initiated in 1996 exploring the use of creativity across the disciplines -- he hasn't taught in more than decade. Yet his legacy as a kind and generous creative writing teacher remains undiminished. During a recent visit to Cornell, alumna Lorrie Moore praised McConkey for "bringing to the discussion of writing not only an appreciation of the private mystery of each individual piece of fiction ... but ... a great sense of his own sharing in our endeavor, that we were all working with great difficulty and loneliness at the same thing."
Readers who discover McConkey's work tend to remain lifelong fans.
Dry said he started reading McConkey long before he ever thought of starting a publishing company. In 2000 Dry reissued To A Distant Island , McConkey's re-creation of Chekhov's 6,500-mile journey to Sakhalin, the Siberian penal colony. That effort led to a regular correspondence and a visit from Dry to McConkey's oft referred to "Greek-revival farmhouse" outside of Ithaca. During their meeting, Dry suggested that McConkey assemble a book of his uncollected essays. It was a case of history repeating itself. In 1993 David Godine, Boston-based publisher and longtime McConkey fan, reissued Court of Memory and simultaneously published Stories From My Life With the Other Animals .
"When you find writing you love, it is nice to know you're not alone. There are people who love Jim's writing and want to keep bringing it back," said Dry. "Listening to his writing, you can hear Jim listening to others; he imparts his sense of how to listen to a writer ... [and] he looks closely at the world around him -- with care for what he's seen, and for those who listen he describes what has come into his ken."
In describing his "ken," McConkey eschews the term "memoirist." The tradition of his own work, he says, goes back to St. Augustine's Confessions and McConkey calls it "life writing."
"Memory is a fiction, but it's a fiction that's true to us," he says. "It's a kind of writing in which the writer is trying to understand the self -- the psyche. The only tool is the psyche, and it requires an apprehension of something of value beyond the self. If I didn't think my writing were representative, I don't think I could have written. And I certainly don't think it would get published."
Noel Perrin, the late author and Dartmouth professor, said that McConkey's writing defies categorization.
"The genre in which McConkey does his best writing has no name. He invented it," Perrin once wrote in a review for USA Today. "What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life ... he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time."
Fadiman writes that McConkey "uses his own memory as a tool -- a telescope with a view of the entire universe. I can't think of another writer who uses that tool with as much precision, delicacy and love."
One of the essays from Telescope, "Idyll," is in the January-February 2005 issue of the Cornell Alumni Magazine, which subscribers will receive around the first of the new year. "I'm a big fan of McConkey's work and was really pleased we could have this in the magazine," said Jim Roberts, editor and publisher.
– Franklin Crawford, writer and photographer: photo of Jim McConkey, circa 2006
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