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Kerr and Rothstein

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Postprandial Ruminations

By Edward Rothstein
Posted Thursday, March 11, 1999, at 4:59 PM ET

Dear Sarah:

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Now I'm really on the spot. I'm going to have to filter out from my prose all signs of narcissism, desperation, ideological rigidity, false modesty, and dilettantism. If I do that, what will be left?

But seriously (... to use a Catskills line ...), this kind of quick conversation is, as you say, more difficult than it seems. It is riskier than ordinary conversation because the words appear in immutable text; it is riskier than ordinary writing because there is no time to rework, discard, destroy, or postpone. The consolation is that in a few days, it will all be lying in the cyber-compost heap.

What is interesting though, is that "The Breakfast Table" makes writing about newspapers seem very similar to writing for newspapers. A lot of these sensations are familiar to me from life as a critic. I spent about eight years reviewing between three and seven concerts a week, writing reviews (between 200 and 1000 words) for the following morning, and sometimes rushing back to the office to file important reviews within an hour so they could make it into the next day's paper.

It is a life of personal exposure, done with few safety nets; errors rankle; lost opportunities and undeveloped ideas cause dismay. Watch details and the big picture blurs; keep your eyes on the big picture and the little detail slips by. I recently found out that a peculiar slip of the typewriter keys that turned the word vibrato into the word rubato in a music review was taken by some readers as a sign I knew nothing about either.

But what I do like about all this, and it is probably the reason I continue to court these ridiculous deadlines, is that hanging really does concentrate the mind. The limits on time and space enforce a ruthless focus. Metaphors have to resonate; arguments have to be stripped down to their bones; unnecessary rhetorical flourishes awkwardly stick out. Discoveries are made.

The problem is that I have just realized I haven't made any discoveries since breakfast. And aside from Slate deadlines, there's an editor here at the New York Times waiting for me to cut 100 words from an essay; there are two movies to watch and a book to read before I write a column for tomorrow afternoon; and ... well, sometimes I think I'm always sitting at a breakfast table. But this time around, I've enjoyed sharing it with you.

Best,