Rooney - Out of My Mind
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- Book:Out of My Mind
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- Publisher:PublicAffairs
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- Year:2011;2007
- City:New York
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Out of My Mind: summary, description and annotation
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Preface; Part 1. Daily Life; Were Wasting Away; Just Another Day; States by the Numbers; Weathering the Storm; Forget the Birthday Greetings; The Junk Building Boom; Life Becomes Less Neighborly; The Retractable Wedding; Better by Far; Wedding Dumbbells; A Job Easily Done; Some Thoughts on Vacations; The Smell of a New Car; Expensive Bed, Bad Breakfast; The Rain in Spain and Here; Ring a Ding Ding; Easy Pass for Airlines; The Agony of Flight; Going Nowhere Fast; Take a Stay Home Vacation; The Perfect Pat Down Person; Technologically Illiterate; No-Show Repair People.;Celebrate the holidays with a new collection by Americas favorite commentator and best-selling author.
Rooney: author's other books
Who wrote Out of My Mind? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Sarah Lizabeth Barker
Kelly Bare
Edger
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Table of Contents
PREFACE
I thought to myself, lying in bed one night, in an uncharacteristic moment of modesty, How much do I have to say that anyone cares about reading?
If you write for a living, you have to put modesty out of your mind. It is a great privilege to have something you have written preserved in type and printed as a book.
One thing I know is, you can make an essay out of anything. There are times when Ive written on subjects about which I know very little. A writer can do that. He has the advantage of being able to look things up, to ask questions of other people more knowledgeable than he. He can sit back and think before putting anything down on paper. This puts the writer one up on readers and often makes him sound smarter than he is. I try to do that. It doesnt seem dishonest. I comb my hair and try to wear decent clothes so Ill look better than I would naked, so why shouldnt I try to write in a style that makes me sound smarter and more interesting than I am?
This book is made up of all essays. The essay is a grand and classic writing format. Igor Stravinsky, the musician, tried to write at one point in his career. He said, I experience a sort of terror if I sit down to work and find an infinity of possibilities open to me. No effort is conceivable.
Stravinsky said he conquered that terror by turning his creative urge to the seven notes of the scale and writing music. For then I have something solid and concrete, he said. I am saved from the anguish of unconditional liberty.
I turn not to the piano, but to the essay form. The essay offers a writer a great deal of freedom but falls short of offering the unconditional liberty that stopped Stravinsky. The essay provides a writer boundaries within which he can go to work. Confinement is conducive to creativity.
I am not a great writer, but I dont write badly very often. This passes for good writing. As a matter of fact, theres just so much good writing anyone can take. To some extent, its like acting. If you notice the acting, it probably isnt good. Good writing shouldnt call a lot of attention to itself, either.
Something happens to a lot of people when they write. Their voice changeseven on paper. They tighten up and are not themselves. One thing of which I am certain is that no one writes as he speaks and no one speaks as he writes. When a writer is faced with the choice of styles, it is always better if he writes more like he speaks. If you know the writer, you should be able to hear his voice as you read the words.
You cant take the idea too far because when we talk we are hesitant, discursive and repetitive. If you make a verbatim transcript of a conversation, it invariably needs to be heavily edited before being printed.
The writer gets a good break in newspapers. His or her name is right there up front, available for credit or blame on whatever has been written. In the arts, it has always bothered me that the writer takes last place. The credits on a movie or a play almost always list the writer in small type where its hard to find. I never knew why this was because actors are a dime a dozen and good writers are hard to find. The production of a play or a movie or the publication of a book stands still until the writer gets the words down on paper. No one can do anything until the manuscript appears. There are a dozen editors, publishers, directors, producers and investors waiting for one writer to get something down on paper. Then they change it.
Writing an essay is, for me, always a pleasure because people tend to leave it alone. An essay isnt important enough to change.
The essays in this book were written over the past four years. Some of them show their age. I have rewritten small parts of some of them for that reason. Margie, my wife of sixty years, died in 2004 and her name does not appear as often as it originally did because it hurts too much to write it.
ANDY ROONEY
PART ONE
Daily Life
We all look for that perfect day when we have enough to do but not too much.
WERE WASTING AWAY
Last Saturday, I filled the trunk of my car and the passenger seats behind me with junk and headed for the dump. There were newspapers, empty cardboard boxes, bags of junk mail, advertising flyers, empty bottles, cans and garbage. I enjoy the trip. Next to buying something new, throwing away something old is the most satisfying experience I know.
The garbage men come twice a week but theyre very fussy. If the garbage is not packaged the way they like it, they wont take it. Thats why I make a trip to the dump every Saturday. Its two miles from our house and I often think big thoughts about throwing things away while Im driving there.
How much, I got wondering last week, does the whole Earth weigh? New York City alone throws away 24 million pounds of garbage a day. A day! How long will it take us to turn the whole Planet Earth into garbage, throw it away and leave us standing on nothing?
Oil, coal and metal ore are the most obvious extractions, but any place theres a valuable mineral, we dig beneath the surface, take it out and make it into something else. We never put anything back. We disfigure one part of our land by digging something out and another after we use it and throw it away. I say away, but theres really no such place as away.
After my visit to the dump, I headed for the supermarket, where I bought $34 worth of groceries. Everything was in somethinga can, a box, a bottle, a carton or a bag. When I got to the checkout counter, the cashier separated my cans, boxes, cartons, bottles and bags and put three or four at a time into other bags, boxes or cartons. Whatever came to her hand on the conveyor belt in a bag, she put in another bag. Sometimes she put my paper bags into plastic bags. One bag never seemed to do. If something was in plastic, she put that into paper.
On the way home, I stopped at the dry cleaners. Five of my shirts, which had been laundered, were in a cardboard box. There was a piece of cardboard in the front of each shirt and another cardboard cutout to fit the collar to keep it from getting wrinkled. Clipped to the front of each shirt was a cloth tag that identified the shirt as mine. The suit I had cleaned was on a throwaway hanger, in a plastic bag with a formfitting piece of paper inside over the shoulders of my suit.
When I got home, I put the groceries where they belonged in various hiding places in the kitchen. With the wastebasket at hand, I threw out all the outer bags and wrappers. By the time Id unwrapped and stored everything, Id filled the kitchen wastebasket a second time, already getting ready for next Saturday.
It would be interesting to conduct a serious test to determine what percentage of everything we discard. It must be more than 25 percent. I drank the contents of a bottle of Coke and threw the bottle away. The Coca-Cola Company must pay more for the bottle than for what they put in it. Dozens of things we eat come in containers that weigh more and cost the manufacturer more than what they put in them.
Weve gone overboard on packaging in the United States and part of the reason is that a bag, a can or a carton provides a place for the producer to display advertising. The average cereal box looks like a roadside billboard.
The Earth we inhabit could end up as one huge, uninhabitable dump.
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