"... he isn’t saying. (Gottlieb himself uses a Mac.) Turn Every Page plays up the drama of the editing process, emphasizing the (offscreen) sparring between the two men on subjects great and small. (There were, apparently, many blowups about punctuation, most especially the semi-colon: Caro for, Gottlieb against.) According to Gottlieb, these contretemps barely count. 'I would say if there were any real disagreements between us,' he says genteelly, though I doubt he would tell me or anyone. The men did allow Lizzie to film them working together side by side — but only with the sound off. This hands-on, cheek-by-jowl editing, once rare, is now basically extinct. 'Publishing has grown more and more corporate,' he says. 'I think it’s all changing. Luckily, I don’t have to deal with any of that.'"
From "Bob Gottlieb Is the Last of the Publishing Giants/The 91-year-old editor waits for his 87-year-old star writer, Robert Caro, to turn in his book" (NY Magazine).
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14 comments:
I've read the Power Broker and the 4 LBJ books. I'll read book # 5. But I think it'll be a while. My hunch is that Caro is in no rush to finish his life's work.
Looking forward to Caro's last volume. I guess you write slow when you're over 80.
It is wonderful to see how heavily edited Caro's work is. When I set my mind to it, I can be a good writer - it takes time. And I frequently edit the writing of the attorneys I work with. We all bristle at editing. While I say I welcome editing (and intellectually, I do - it improves my product), I still bristle.
I would love to have three framed pages (a triptych) of this work to hang on the wall.
If your thoughts have semicolons, you should use them; it's a question of your authentic voice.
Do you suppose there are calls for these two ancient men to step aside so the younger generation can take over?
I look forward to that book. All of them to date have been such terrific reading. I received Master of the Senate in my first year of law school and have since read the others. LBJ was often a jerk, but he was very smart and extremely crafty and hard working. Also corrupt. Caro's worrying is so enjoyable and he chose a very interesting subject
I'm currently reading a professionally published book that consistently drops "L"s out of words. "Deflect" is printed as "defect", "flail" as "fail". They almost fit in the context, and it took me a while to realize what was happening.
I don't think these men mean copy editing, but I wish the standard would return.
I suspect that the fifth volume will attempt to resurrect LBJ's reputation. All the bullying, lying, nastiness, stealing, dishonesty, faithlessness and cynical manipulation will be atoned for by his massive successes in growing the government, increasing the share of the population in government dependency, and giving the elite the lies they needed in order to feel as though they were both virtuous and fully in charge.
Blogger Ampersand said...
I suspect that the fifth volume will attempt to resurrect LBJ's reputation.
I doubt it. Caro really is pissed at Johnson. The last volume will be about the Vietnam War. Unlikely to be something Caro supports. I've read the first four volumes several times. We've also listened to the audible version several times.
You mean Caro, the biographer, who smeared Robert Moses by declaring racism was behind many of his decisions. Debunked, as liberals often are. But because of Caro, people will think that Moses, a genius, was a racist because the parkways on Long Island had low clearance under the cross road bridges so that buses full of Negroes could not access the parks.
Marcus B. THEOLDMAN
People think Moses racist because of building cross Bronx expressway among other projects through minority neighborhoods. Common practice in urban areas. Here in LA white affluent able to stop 710 thru S Pasadena and a freeway by Century City.
I'm not up to reading thousands of pages about LBJ. A weakness, I admit.
CS Lewis and Joy Davidman wrote Till We Have Faces together, with her editing cheek-by-jowl and sometimes writing sections. (See the sections of Orual and Bardia, and then especially with Bardia's wife, and her interactions with Redival. More than one reader has noted that those could not have been written by a man, and Douglas Gresham substantiates this.) This has never been usual, but was unsurprising in the 1950s.
Also of interest, she did not want her name in as an author because she thought it would depress sales - not because she was female, but because she was Jewish, which she thought was the kiss of death in literary circles in England at the times.
The very end of Caro's final volume will be something akin to "the Castle Aaargh...": "He must have died while typing." I hope the editor leaves it in.
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