Posnanski and the Paterno book

Pos was obviously in an impossible situation, but it's not like this whole thing just erupted last week -- he had 10 months or so to toughen up the book.

Maybe he was under a deadline that the book HAD to be out before the 2012 season kicked off, but I think you could probably tell the publisher, "Unless you haven't been paying attention, quite a lot has been going on in this general field of information -- this book would probably be a hell of a lot better if it came out in January."

He didn't have to rip the whole thing up and rewrite from Page 1, but a lot of the background chapters look very very different now after what has come out in court and the Freeh report (which nobody has really seriously factually challenged).

 

The short answer is that I was referring to the "Posnanski is a coward and a douchebag!!!!!1!!! I'd've done it differently! Suck it, cowardly douchebag!!!!1!!!" we've seen so much of on this and other threads. It's a longstanding failure of this place that craft criticism and personal insult are so often interchangeable.

If more criticism was as sharp, polite and disinterested as yours, for example, we'd learn a lot more here and I'd keep my mouth shut about it. Having said that, I'll try (inelegantly) to address your deeper point. And add some questions of my own.

- I'd be more inclined to accept the terms of your argument if Posnanski had said: "I will define myself by the truth(s) I uncover."

- I would expect any "biographer" trying to sell me a book to say that he or she was looking for "the truth." I don't render a "moral" judgment on them, try to reverse-engineer their character, or insult their motives if they fail to find it.

- I might be inclined to a different judgment, however, if they try to conceal the "truth."

- That a book, or any work of 'art,' fails to produce truth is not necessarily a function of the moral judgment of its author.

- Are we talking about "the Truth" or "a truth," when we talk about nonfiction?

- Are you prepared to run your art-as-moral-imperative argument in reverse? E.g., "Picasso is a moral man in his personal life because he painted 'Guernica,' which is a powerful moral argument against war."

- Is the 'morality' in a piece of art the morality of the artist? Or is it a separate morality inherent in the work of art?

- If a biographer transcribes and presents a lie without judging it, is he a liar, too?

- Is Mr. Posnanski a biographer? If not, why not?


Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

 

I'm certainly not going to defend all of the criticism of Mr. Posnanski that has appeared here, or elsewhere.

But, let's back up a little bit. Joe Posnanski is among the most well respected, and most favored writers on this board -- or at least he was before now.

This isn't Lupica, or Albom, or Bayless, where people have ripped them to shreds for years, with no one coming to their defense because of personal friendship. He's not even someone the board was split on like Hoppes, or someone people like to troll for fun, like Jones.

Posnanski received nearly universal love here.

And, because he's so respected, people expected more, and are greatly disappointed. Posnanski isn't some hack, like Lupica or Album, who we'd expect this from. And, he's not some PSU apologist or house organ, we'd expect spin from.

And, so, when in the opinion of some, he "whiffs" isn't it reasonable to ask why? Isn't a little amateur psychoanalysis to be expected?

If Lebron James has a crappy NBA Finals, we don't just say, "well, he whiffed," and move on. We'd try to explain it, understand it. We'd want to know what caused it, because ,clearly he has the talent.

When a star quarterback "chokes" in the big game, we inevitably see sports columnists rip him and question his "guts". Happens every year.

When a big name athlete signs with a team in New York City, and under performs, the question is asked whether or not he's tough enough for the big city, or if he was up to the task.

So, I'm not sure why people think Posnanski should be immune from the same scrutiny.

As Hyman Roth might say, "this is the business we’ve chosen."

Well, you guys did at least.

 

I'm about halfway through. There is, to be certain, a lot of Saint Joe material. And I think that it bothers a lot of critics, both professional and (and I use this word not in any way perjoratively) amateur.

However, I think that there is a very justifiable purpose, from a storytelling standpoint, to Saint Joe, and that is to brick-by-brick build up the house of cards that Paterno and his growing army built up, so that we can understand later why he worked so desperately to keep it from tumbling down.

We have been told again and again, and we have stated ourselves again and again, that Paterno wanted to protect his reputation and his good name above all things. I feel like Posnanski is trying to deepen the reader's understanding of exactly WHAT that reputation is and WHAT went into it, while other writers - with space and time constraints - have merely asked us to accept the premise.

I don't know if he succeeds in the execution yet because I'm not finished. But I think that a lot of reviewers read a couple hundred pages of Saint Joe, presented largely unskeptically, and are so turned off at that point that they may become blind to what Posnanski is actually trying to do. And that may be, again, somewhat Posnanski's problem in the execution. But I feel like he's at least trying to do something admirable, from a storytelling standpoint. Like I said many, many posts ago, I thought that Posnanski would see Paterno's fall from grace as Shakespearean, and write it that way. It appears he has done just that.

One other thing I'm struck by, on a different note: I'm shocked at Paterno's lack of introspection. I think that it frustrated Posnanski, too. At one point, he asks Paterno whether his drive to succeed came from his father, his mother, etc., etc. Paterno brushed off the question with, "I don't know. I don't like to be analyzed." This was a man, we are told, who devoured the classics in college, who could, according to Posnanski, lecture about why Hemingway was superior to Fitzgerald. But he's not introspective enough, in his dying days, to at least entertain such a basic question about the roots of his traits? It's bizarre.

 

I absolutely agree on the typo. I tell my students all the time, the FIRST thing you've got to be checking before a story goes out are names.

The last two typos I made were spelling someone's name Kerry instead of Kerri and "sneak peak" instead of "sneak peek." I felt 10x worse about the former. Nobody would give a damn about the latter, if they even noticed it, I suspect.

DO NOT MISSPELL NAMES.

 

Does Salon not copy-edit before it posts a piece?

 

Does anybody any more?

* At this point, I must note that my semi-regular freelance employer puts my copy, and presumably everyone's, through the wringer. They fact check every minute detail. So there are definitely, blessedly, some hold-outs.

 

I'm read and re-read - at least twice - before I even get a copy edit, so yeah. And Salon isn't someone's blog, it's been a major player in online content from the very beginning of the form.

Anybody with first hand knowledge of Salon's workflow, please pipe up.

 

Thought Fatsis, not surprisingly, had a pretty thoughtful review.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/books/2012/08/joe_posnanski_joe_paterno_the_coach_and_his_biographer_both_come_off_badly_in_the_insta_book_paterno_.html

 

In this passage, Fatsis experienced the same frustration with Paterno's lack of introspection that I referred to earlier:

(I)ts subject isn’t capable of meaningful self-reexamination, like Robert McNamara in Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War. When Posnanski asks Paterno if he was driven because his father died young or his mother stressed achievement, the coach replies, “Yeah, sure, all of that.”

I want to read another Paterno biography to see if I change my mind, but he sure doesn't seem like a very compelling subject, though I understand why Posnanski thought he would be. He tries to make him one. There are multiple pages devoted to Paterno's philosophy of changing offensive high school stars to defense. But as far as I know, that's pretty common. It sure is today, and I suspect it has been the case for many decades. In fairness, maybe he was extreme. He recruited Jim Kelly to be a linebacker.

 

This is a large part of what I was trying to say, and Fatsis said it in 10 words. That's probably why he's on Slate and NPR and I'm a lawyer now.

 

How many American football coaches are lyric poets of introspection?

David Maraniss seemed able to build an interior life full of color for Vince Lombardi, despite the fact that Lombardi was a) not at all introspective and b) dead.