Barack Obama, Editor

from

THE ATLANTIC      FEB 19 2013, 1:16 PM ET

inShare4by James Fallows

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on Dreams From My Father, was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer. Not as a pro basketball player, which might have been his original fantasy (or pro golfer, despite recent tips from Tiger Woods); or as a game-show host or famous disc jockey, where you can imagine Bill Clinton being a big success; or as commissioner of baseball, the path-not-taken for G.W. Bush; or as a backstage legislative master, like Lyndon Johnson or even Teddy Kennedy. But in nonfiction writing, he coulda been a contender.

He might also be vying for the ever-dwindling number of editor jobs that are available. Three years ago I posted the picture of his hand-edited version of his address to a Joint Session of Congress on health-care reform. Now we get this White House photo of his reworking of last month' inaugural address. Click for a zoomable detailed view.



There are lots of fascinating details and insights from the edits Obama has made here, and from comparison with the final version he delivered six days after this draft. I'll leave most of them for you to find and will mention only one.

As I noted at the time, early in the speech Obama made a very powerful allusion to Lincoln's second inaugural address:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.

That line isn't in this draft shown in the picture --  at least not the part we can see. But Obama is working toward it with this handwritten insert at the top of the page:

 Through blood and toil ____ we learned that no nation founded on these principles could survive half-slave and half-free.

He recognizes that "toil" is not right -- "blood and toil" would be an allusion to Churchill, not Lincoln -- but he also knows that for cadence he needs another word after "blood," where he's crossed out "toil" and left a  ___  mark.

At some point between this draft and delivery time he or his assistants figured out that the most elegant approach would be simply to use Lincoln's phrase -- and, part of the elegance, just to use it as an allusion, an element of the national heritage Americans either should know or could know, rather than lumbering it with a heavy "in the words of our Sixteenth President" attribution. Much as our Sixteenth President himself had once used the phrase "a house divided" without having to tell his audience that he was quoting the Bible. There's much to observe in this one image. Thanks to reader KP.

__

Update: I mentioned earlier that I "remembered" a line from Obama's 2004 Democratic convention speech that he hadn't actually uttered. Reader TZ, in California, gives another explanation for why I "heard" something different from what Obama said:

As others may have pointed out, in the movie Man of the Year, Robin Williams character Tom Dobbs speaks this line:

But the last few years we've been divided. Red states, blue states.
There are no red and blue states, there's only the United States of America. That's what we're about.

You can find this article at this site for the The Atlantic.

Things You Can't Unsee
(and What That Says About Your Brain)

Are you ready to find more? Go.
from The Atlantic, May 5, 2014
by Alexis C. Mardigal

1B: Six-Word Story Guidelines

Six-Word Story Guidelines

WILLIAM FAULKNER FAMOUSLY SAID that a novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet. Hemingway, with his creation of the six-word story, combined poetry and drama into a short form that has grown in popularity while remaining difficult to achieve. Narrative is looking for six-word stories that can stand alongside the best that have been written. Here are a few:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn. —Ernest Hemingway

Longed for him. Got him. Shit. —Margaret Atwood

          All those pages in the fire. —Janet Burroway

           First sex. I came. She didn’t. —Sherman Alexie

WAR. Nineteen. I was older then. --Stanton S. Coerr

You can find more at Narrative Magazine.  Go to http://www.narrativemagazine.com/sixwords for more information.

To see more examples of six word stories read the Atlantic Monthly, August 27, 2013, "Describing My Experiences in Afghanistan in 6 Words" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff. His article includes a link to "A Glimpse of War Hemingway-style" in Stars and Stripes, August 8, 2013. It is also devoted to six word stories. More six-word stories by veterans can be found here.

                                                               photo by Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters

Came home. Moved on. Couldn't forget. --Thomas Gibbons-Neff

1B: Larry Levis (1946 – 1996)

The Poem You Asked for 

by Larry Levis

My poem would eat nothing.
I tried giving it water
but it said no,

worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the light,

turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.

It grew sullen, like a toad
through with being teased.
I offered it money,

my clothes, my car with a full tank.
But the poem stared at the floor.
Finally I cupped it in

my hands, and carried it gently
out into the soft air, into the
evening traffic, wondering how

to end things between us.
For now it had begun breathing,
putting on more and

more hard rings of flesh.
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,

beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,

said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.

Said it was going
over to your place.


The Poetry Foundation

1B: Quincy Troupe

A Poem for Magic

by Quincy Troupe

take it to the hoop, “magic” johnson,

take the ball dazzling down the open lane

herk & jerk & raise your six-feet, nine-inch frame

into the air sweating screams of your neon name
“magic” johnson, nicknamed “windex” way back

in high school

cause you wiped glass backboards
so clean, where you first juked and shook

wiled your way to glory

a new-style fusion of shake-&-bake

energy, using everything possible, you created your own

space to fly through–any moment now

we expect your wings to spread feathers for that spooky takeoff

of yours–then, shake & glide & ride up in space

till you hammer home a clothes-lining deuce off glass

now, come back down with a reverse hoodoo gem

off the spin & stick in sweet, popping nets clean

from twenty feet, right side

put the ball on the floor again, “magic”

slide the dribble behind your back, ease it deftly

between your bony stork legs, head bobbing everwhichaway

up & down, you see everything on the court

off the high yoyo patter

stop & go dribble

you thread a needle-rope pass sweet home

to kareem cutting through the lane

his skyhook pops the cords

now, lead the fast break, hit worthy on the fly

now, blindside a pinpoint behind-the-back pass for two more

off the fake, looking the other way, you raise off-balance

into electric space

sweating chants of your name

turn, 180 degrees off the move, your legs scissoring space

like a swimmer’s yoyoing motion in deep water

stretching out now toward free flight

you double-pump through human trees
hang in place

slip the ball into your left hand

then deal it like a las vegas card dealer off squared glass

into nets, living up to your singular nickname

so “bad” you cartwheel the crowd toward frenzy

wearing now your electric smile, neon as your name

in victory, we suddenly sense your glorious uplift

your urgent need to be champion

& so we cheer with you, rejoice with you

for this quicksilver, quicksilver,

quicksilver moment of fame

so put the ball on the floor again, “magic”

juke & dazzle, shake & bake down the lane

take the sucker to the hoop, “magic” johnson,

recreate reverse hoodoo gems off the spin

deal alley-oop dunkathon magician passes

now, double-pump, scissor, vamp through space

hang in place

& put it all up in the sucker’s face, “magic” johnson,

& deal the roundball like the juju man that you am

like the sho-nuff shaman that you am
like the sho-nuff spaceman you am

Following his poetry reading at St. Mary’s, Troupe was asked whether he planned to write poems for other basketball greats (Michael Jordan then the reigning monarch).  I don’t remember his exact reply, but the gist of it was that he was not so much portraying individuals as capturing the spirit of basketball at its best. My sense is that, having written the perfect basketball poem once, any further poems about particular players would seem superfluous.

http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=3022d

1B: Alice Walker (b. Feb. 9, 1944)

The official website of Alice Waker is a good place to start to learn about the writer, best known for her novel The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.  Find more information about Walker at the New Georgia Encyclopedia and make a visit to her pages at the Poetry Foundation and at Biography.com. Watch the video documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth that was broadcast on PBS: American Masters.

In an interview (The Guardian, March 9, 2013) Walker discussed the film and her life as a writer:

Interviewer: Pratibha Parmar's film Beauty in Truth, about your life and work, makes for fascinating viewing: you've done so many different things in so many different places with so many different people. Is that how it feels to you?

Walker: I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens. But, yes, I live in Mexico, I live in Hawaii and I live in northern California and all my life has been like that. It's as if I got all of this energy from ancestors who were not permitted to leave the plantations for 400 years and I got all of their desire to be part of the world.

Interviewer: The film begins with your upbringing in Jim Crow Georgia, one of eight children, the daughter of sharecroppers. Your family had very little money, but you did have an extremely determined mother.

Walker: I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

Interviewer: Would you that your first motivation as a writer was to bring hidden lives to light?

Walker: When I was 13, my sister was a cosmetologist – she made up the bodies in the funeral home. One day, she showed me the body of a woman who had been murdered. Her husband had shot her in the face. Now, many people would hear this tale, and they would categorise it; they would try to box it into some little corner, but actually that kind of brutality against women is endemic and it's now coming more and more out into the open.

Interviewer: That's something to see at the age of 13.

Walker: It had a big impact on me. And her daughter was in my class, and had the same name as my own grandmother, who had been shot to death. I think that, when you start out writing, it's often like following the thread of Ariadne: you never know which minotaur you're going to find. But you often find one – or two or three!

Interviewer: You were involved with the civil rights movement and with feminism, the latter especially when you moved to New York and worked with Gloria Steinem on Ms Magazine in the 1970s.

Walker: I love the women's movement and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population. I loved working at Ms Magazine, especially because of Gloria, because she understood that I really needed a room of my own, even there.

Interviewer: What are your feelings about contemporary feminism?

Walker: The conundrum, in a way, is why, after all the struggle, and all the teaching – teaching was so important: we taught each other, and we taught other women and girls – women, at this point, are comfortable referring to themselves as guys, and basically erasing their femininity at every opportunity. I don't get it.

Interviewer: You're very open about what it's cost you in terms of personal relationships, for example with partners and with your daughter [Walker and her daughter, Rebecca, are estranged].

Walker: I accept it. What can I do? I am this being who, for whatever reason, feels completely dedicated to the whole of humanity. I do. I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine. I absolutely always tried to do the very best that I could with the spirit that I have.

Essay by Alice Walker

Oppressed Hair Puts a Ceiling on the Brain

from Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987 

by Alice Walker

I am going to talk about an issue even closer to home. I am going to talk to you about hair. Don't give a thought to the state of yours at the moment. Don't be at all alarmed. This is not an appraisal. I simply want to share with you some of my own experiences with our friend hair, and at the most hope to entertain and amuse you.

Read the entire essay here.

The photograph that accompanied her interview with The Guardian, March 9, 2013.