Here’s another posting by my friend, Tom Fiske.
A Face for Radio
There’s a guy in the movie, Chicago, who gets to sing a song and even gets face time on the cameras because he is ordinary. The forgotten husband of the star, Roxy, he really seems to have a great face for radio. I have the face for radio, but not the voice.
One thing I seem to have, though, is a face for diaries. Today I was handed a copy of an edited diary of a man who was a 49er. That is, he left his home in Nowhere, Illinois to go to California and hunt for gold in 1849. Right now I am looking at it to see if there is any potential in it.
This is not the first time I have been handed a diary. I have seen several and in only one did I find a potentially usable story. “What made it usable?” you ask. Names of the people on the pages and the style made it useful. There was an inferred irony as the writer made his way from Austin, Texas to New Orleans, LA during the Civil War and met several people who later became famous in history. That was one thing. Then there was the original literary style due to the writer’s singular method of spelling phonetically, and of misusing our “standard” American syntax. He was a genuinely creative writer, and the unintended humor of his words could never be duplicated elsewhere.
But the current diary, by a gold hunter of 1849, has been edited. It has been cleaned up until it has no personality at all. I am afraid it adds nothing new to the history of the areas searched and introduces no historical figures. Therefore I am going to return it to the writer’s great-great-great granddaughter and thank her for letting me have a look at it.
Just as the diary’s writer found no gold in Northern California some 160 years ago, I found no “gold” today among the pages of his handiwork.
Too bad… Maybe I ought to consult a plastic surgeon about my face.
Thomas S. Fiske
Fullerton, CA
November 9, 2009