Does That Make Sense?: The Best of Joe Blundo - Softcover

Blundo, Joe; Decker, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814255310 ISBN 13: 9780814255315

Verlag: Trillium, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Joe Blundo began his writing career at the Columbus Dispatch in 1978 and has been writing about Columbus ever since. In 1997, Joe was given his own column titled “So to Speak,” which quickly became one of the most popular sections of the paper. Raccoon dinners, Abe Lincoln impersonators, and things in nature that aren’t fair are just a few of the topics Blundo explores in this collection of the best of his newspaper columns. The columns range from hilarious to poignant to indignant—but all contain his unique voice and somewhat tilted way of looking at life. He’s especially drawn to the quirks that make Columbus what it is, people with a passion they can’t stop talking about, and recording the milestones in his family’s life. Sometimes he spouts off on the big issues of the day but more often he looks for the little things that others might not notice.

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Joe Blundo has won legions of fans in the Columbus area with his long-running column for the Columbus Dispatch. He is the 2002 recipient of the humor writing award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

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If you’re holding this book, chances are you already know about Joe Blundo’s wry humor, his twisted wit, and his knack for finding stories in everyday events that—to the rest of us—wouldn’t even register as events. Unless you’re a writer, you might miss another of his strengths. Three times a week, I marvel at Joe’s ability to say so much in so few words.

Back when I was just getting started as a newspaperman, an editor imparted a bit of print journalism truth that has stayed with me for a quarter-century. In newspapers of yore—a time not so long ago but before the wild and wooly Internet threw print journalism into its nail-biting identity crisis—the biggest commodity was space. There is only so much editorial real estate in a printed newspaper. We call that the newshole—the empty space that remains once those money-making display ads are on the pages.

That space is measured in column inches, and reporters still fight hard for their share of it. Every day is a push-and-pull between reporters who insist they cannot properly tell their tale in under 20 inches, and editors who know that any writer worth a damn could do it in 10. I was engaged in just such an argument when my editor put me in my place. “The only stories worth 18 inches,” he said, “are the Second Coming and a good fishing feature.” A bit of hyperbole, perhaps, with truth at its core. Stories don’t have to be long to be good. And in a related bit of wisdom often misattributed to Mark Twain, it is much harder to write short than long.

That’s what strikes me about Joe’s columns. He illuminates life’s littlest absurdities but also its greatest joys and griefs, and he does it in half the words it would take other writers. If the writing game were Name That Tune, Joe would be a returning champion:

I can tell that story in 500 words.

Joe Blundo, tell that story!

If you don’t write, this may not seem significant. Trust me, it is. Consider that the end of this paragraph brings this foreword to nearly 400 words. In this space Joe can tickle your ribs, illuminate your life, and break your heart. Who but Joe would see a beef between Upper Arlington City Council and a nightclub’s penchant for blasting “gangsta rap” as an opportunity to pen a uniquely Arlington rhyme?

Cruising down Tremont in my stepfather’s Quattro,

Sipping on a 40-ounce caramel macchiato,

I suspect it would take a monumental force of will to stop reading after this opening line to a column from 2016:

The 8-foot woman stood talking to a juggler in a sombrero—just outside a room with a one-man band, Abraham Lincoln and a guy with a monkey on his shoulder.

Later we learn that the monkey “furiously licked a red lollipop,” an image made infinitely better because Joe, A.) took note of the candy’s color, and B.) knew to share it with readers. Yet he never confuses brevity with levity. On the death of a pet, he writes, “I’ve always thought that a key part of the canine mystique is the adorable way they misinterpret our world.”

In another column from this collection, he shares the story of a woman who, as a child, thought St. John Arena was named for her father, an ironworker who died in a fall there in 1955.

If there is a downside to Joe’s writerly economy, it may be the sense that a column has ended too soon. But Joe is pro, and inevitably his columns end exactly where they should. To adapt a line from another column in this collection, they end when Joe has “said all that needed to be said.”

A man of few words, Joe Blundo speaks volumes.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Trillium
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0814255310
• ISBN 13: 9780814255315
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland