Protection from themselves?
Sep. 1st, 2009 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinI was recently perusing Happy Alchemy, a collection of pieces by Robertson Davies on the theatre and music, which is pretty much one for the Robertson Davies completist, i.e. not the place for anyone to start with him.
And I came across this passage, apropos of a short play of his own, The Voice of the People, which he described as a jeu d'esprit, and commented:
[T]his play has been a favourite with many newspaper people, all of whom are familiar with the subscriber who regards the paper's letters column as his megaphone and his platform. Newspaper people know that writers of Letters to the Editor, who are unaccustomed to the pen, often need protection against themselves, when indignation has triumphed over common sense.
Does this not resonate with so much of the agitation that we observe on the internet? Alas that this role of gatekeeper has been lost in the days 'Comment is Free' online (which also has the disadvantage that one cannot immediately identify the voluminous epistles in purple ink on graph paper...)
It also brings to mind the episode in, I think, John Moore's Portrait of Elmbury, in which a local councillor complained that the local press were not reporting his speeches as given. In the next issue his speech was reported in all its ungrammatical, malaproptastic, and rambling splendour.
There are people whose indignation is expressed cogently and coherently. There are others for whom one wistfully wishes that there were someone to intermediate their effusions.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 05:11 am (UTC)The writer with whom I am best acquainted worked as a secretary before achieving sufficient writing success to make the latter her full-time job. She told me once that she had a parallel experience as a secretary: bosses would always tell her that she was great because "those other secretaries never sent letters as dictated, but messed them up." She, of course, edited any such letters heavily before sending them; checking old files, she found that the previous secretaries had sent letters exactly in what she knew to be the bosses' dictation styles, without editing or rewriting.