Start the week #91
Terry Freedman Has A Cold
Featuring:
A competition to win a copy of Gay Talese’s A Town Without Time
A mini review of A Town Without Time
The Johnny Sax Chronicles
My 60 Minute Writers course
Late Lines
More writing courses
Spike Milligan talking about his time in the army
Articles you may have missed
Greetings!
Isn’t getting a cold a right pain? The cold that a generous person gave me some weeks ago now kept reinventing itself. Anyway, I thought perhaps I should explain my absence recently, so here is the situation:
I caught a cold and had a bad cough. Maybe it was Covid, who knows? Could have been, because I’m one of those people who almost never get ill, but when I do it’s like being hit by a truck1.
That left me feeling really tired. I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had this and they report similar symptoms.
Because of the tiredness plus other pressures, such as getting reviews written for Teach Secondary magazine, other things built up, which sees me in a rather furious phase of catching up.
Catching up meant not attending the London Book Fair, meaning that my lovely media pass lies on my desk looking at me accusingly, and me not writing very much.
But enough of this persiflage! I really wanted to tell y’all about the new Gay Talese book that’s been published. The publisher (Harper Collins) very kindly sent me a PDF, and then sent me a hard copy. As I suspected, it’s quite brilliant. More below, along with information about how to try and win a copy.
Terry
Quick look: A Town Without Time
Anyone who is familiar with Talese’s work will know that he has an eye for detail, and an ear for dialogue. The very first essay in this book is called New York Is A City of Things Unnoticed, and it exemplifies both of these characteristics.
For example, Talese makes a point of speaking to the concierges outside hotels, because they see and hear everything, and are, at the same time, almost invisible. The concierge outside a hotel down the street from a theatre hears people talking about the play as they walk past. He says he can tell whether a production will be a flop or a success withon ten minutes of the curtain call.
In a section where he is discussing the statue of liberty, Talese writes:
But most neighborhood folks pay no attention to the statue. The gypsy fortune-tellers who work to the left of it do not; the habitués of Mrs. Stern’s tavern below it do not; the soup slurpers in Bickford’s restaurant across the street do not. A New York cabby, David Zickerman (Cab No. 2865), has whizzed by the statue hundreds of times and never knew it existed. “Who the hell looks up in this town?” he asks.
The devil is in the detail, and reading that passage is almost as good as being there!2
There are several other articles, some of which haven’t seen the light of day for ages, and a delightful article about the feral cats in New York3. Also included is the essay that Talese regards as his finest, Mr Bad News, which is about the then obituary writer for the New York Times:
“Furthermore, he admits that, after having written a fine advance obituary, his pride of authorship is such that he can barely wait for that person to drop dead so that he may see his masterpiece in print.”
I’d better not say any more because I have been asked to write a review of the book for Teach Secondary magazine. However, the kind PR person at Harper Collins has agreed to offer a copy as a prize. To be in the running, you have to do four things:
Identify what the subtitle of this issue of the newsletter alludes to.
Live in the UK.
Subscribe to Eclecticism.
Fill this form in and submit it by midnight British Summer Time on 26th March 2025.
The Johnny Sax Chronicles 🎷
Yo, cats. Let me clue y’all in to the sounds going down in these parts. I’ve had an interesting couple of weeks. As you may know if you’ve been reading this publication for a while, I’ve been following Mae West’s advice: Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you. In my case it’s a diary of my sax playing skills (or lack thereof). I mean, check this out one time:
Ain’t that just the killer, as Fats Waller once said? Being a sax maniac and keeping such meticulous notes pays off. I have been trying for ages to play a low C, low Bb and low B without overtones (In layperson’s terms, not playing higher notes instead), and nothing seemed to work. But then I looked through a page of my reeds evaluations, such as the one shown here, and discovered that a synthetic reed called Legere French Cut 2.0 gave me the perfect sound. I tried it again and it it worked! Perfecto. I was so pleased that I was going to change my name to Johnny Cool. But you know what they say: hubris comes before a humbling, or something like that.
Last Saturday David Harrison, my sax tutor at the City Lit, decided to get us all playing low notes. Not only did I play the low C with an accidental overtone, I even forgot the fingering for all the other low notes — and I’ve been practising them for months!
As it happens, though, this turns out to have been a good thing, because David explained what overtones are and how to play — and therefore how to avoid — them. So the homework this week is to practise playing overtones. This is great because the next time I fumble a piece by playing an overtone I’ll just tell everyone it was deliberate. 🎶
Another interesting thing happened during the week. My usual method of playing is to look at the score to determine what note to start on, and what key the piece is in, and then just play the tune from memory. The reason is that, as I keep telling myself, I can’t read music. Well, the other day I couldn’t remember how the tune of a particular song went, and I couldn’t be bothered to find it and listen to it on Youtube. I also forgot that I can’t read music. So I grabbed the score, played the notes as written, and miracle of miracles, the right tune came out! Like painting by numbers.
This reminded me of when I was five years old, and my mum took me to school. There was a dodgy paving stone. Every day my mum told me to be careful, and every day I tripped over it. One day she forgot to warn me, and I forgot to trip. It really is astonishing how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can affect what we do.
I do know this of course. For example, I very quickly put a stop to the students in my writing course (see below) posting their work to the Google Classroom with a note saying “This is cr*p but…”. I don’t allow self-denigration4.
My 60 Minute Writers course
This is a course I’m currently teaching at the City Lit. Only two more sessions to go, and I will miss it. The students are consistently producing brilliant writing. Obviously, having an incredibly talented teacher helps, but even so. Being serious for a moment, my role mainly was to introduce them to different writing techniques, various works (like the ones by Gay Talese) and to give them the self-confidence to submit stuff for the scrutiny of others. I’m hoping that one day they will have work accepted for the Late Lines event at the City Lit (see below) or the Beneath The Lines anthology.
Late Lines
Last week I attended the Late Lines event at the City lit, in which students read out their poetry or prose.
It was pretty good. I think it takes an enormous amount of courage to submit something and then read it out. In the days when the works were collected into a printed anthology, I submitted an article about my mother’s decline into dementia, and it was accepted. But given that I’d choked up in the writing class in which it first saw the light of day, I bottled out of reading it. I said merely that I was worried that the final sentence would seem rather callous, but that people in the writing class had assured me that it wasn’t, and left it at that. (If you would like to read it and make your own judgement, you can read the article here: The Long Goodbye.)
The guest speaker was a novelist called Rose Diell, who read from her new book Fledging.
Rose writes beautifully and because of that I wanted to bring her first novel to your attention. As I said to Rose, I don’t think it’s my kind of book — a mix of magic realism and dealing with the question “should I have children?” — but I can appreciate its beauty nevertheless. I have thought of asking for a review copy, but I’m not sure I could do it justice. There are snippets of reviews on the publisher’s website, and if you go to the Amazon link you can download a sample from the Kindle version. If you buy the book and like it, you can vote for it at the People’s Book Prize website. But you have to do so by 30th April 2025.
Rose’s connection to the City Lit is that she did a creative writing course there a few years ago. Me too, but creative nonfiction.
More writing courses
On the subject of writing courses, the City Lit has plenty. Here’s the link to a list of a few hundred: writing courses. I’ve signed up for one myself: Writing About Music, taken by Katy Hamilton and Ed Breen.
I’m teaching a couple later in the year:
Creative Writing Using Constraints, and Writing for Blogs. The constraints one has already started to gain enrolments even though it doesn’t take place until June.
Spike Milligan talking about his time in the army
Spike Milligan’s tombstone reads “I told you I was ill.” Here he is talking to Bob Monkhouse about his army days.
Articles you may have missed
Collected stories: ancient Greece (£):
“Far be it for me to criticise Robert Graves, but this book is impenetrable. Now, I’ve read impenetrable books before, or tried to. I’m rather proud of the fact that I once managed to read up to page 19 of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before I had to give up and have a two week detox in the form of Batman comics. But I didn’t even get that far with this one.”
Collected stories: The Dominican Republic:
I get the impression that any ‘outre’ technique or even mistakes can be explained knowedgeably (and smugly) as an example of postmodernism. Doing so puts you on reasonably safe ground because 90% of people don’t know what the term means, including me. But also, if addressing the audience or the reader is a postmodern technique, then that means that Chaucer, who was pre-modern, must have been postmodern, because he often addresses the reader
"Someone has to clear up some sick", I announced. I didn't think saying that I was the one who had to clear it up would add anything of value to the statement.
Experiments in style: Neologisms Are you guilty of producing Manuscraps?
I’m afraid I have a lot of Substack reading to catch up with, so cannot link up to many other articles right now. My epistolary partner
has written about naming things: The Naming Game, which is quite jolly. It is my turn to write to her, hopefully by Wednesday.
Well, that’s it for now. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this.
This is genuine, not the all-too-typical male thing of taking to your deathbed at the first sign of sniffles.
It isn’t, but you know what I mean.
By “cats” I mean the four-legged kind, not jazz freaks.
I told one lady that her piece was brilliant, and that I was giving her a mark of eight out of ten. However, because of her self-derogatory remarks I was deducting nine marks, thereby giving her a score of minus one. That’ll learn her in future.
Words like sax diary and sax maniac just crack me up! So many other possibilities:
sax fiend, sax appeal, saxploitation, saxuality, saxpot, saxting, and, of course, the 1991 hit by Right Said Fred "I'm too saxy for my shirt."
And, I am embarrassed to admit, I thought Gay Talese was a woman....thank you for improving my education.
Terry, what a fantastic start to the week! This line is gold dust: ‘It really is astonishing how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can affect what we do’ and is exactly the reminder I need right now, so thank you!
I first heard of Gay Talese in an early session of your terrific 60-minute writer course, and I’m delighted to have come across his work.
Your sax diary is absolutely terrific - it’s such a great idea to record your thoughts, successes, failures, process and progress in this way. And colour coded, too! I always love to see the notebook pages of others!
Speaking of which, thank you so much for the recommendation to read ‘Writers and their Notebooks’ - it’s one of the best things I’ve read this year!
I know the answer to your prize draw question, but the reason I know it is thanks to you so I declare myself ineligible to enter! 😁