Things go Yeatsian for people like us
Kevin Wood Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
People Like Us
By Chris Binchy
Macmillan, 244 pp, 10.99 pounds

Chris Binchy's People Like Us, the story of a Dublin family's implosion, brings to mind the work of another Dublin writer, William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Living in a small house in Dublin, Paul Walsh and his family are driving one another to distraction for lack of elbow room. The three children bicker incessantly, Paul and his wife, Ruth, have no privacy, and 17-year-old Clare is sharing a bedroom with her 7-year-old sister, Louise, while brother Fin, the middle child, has only "a box" of a room to himself.
When Ruth suggests moving to a larger home in the housing estates on the edge of the city, Paul has his doubts, but since Ruth is the one who always seemed to know what was best for the kids and family, he keeps them to himself.

While North American suburbs tend to be the domain of the middle class, it is clear that to Walsh the move is step down the social ladder, to a place just a hair above the slums, not the sort of place for "people like us." Gangs of bored teens hang around the neighborhood with nothing to do but drink, fight and antagonize the neighbors, not at all the sort Paul wants his older daughter involved with. But as with the move, Paul is powerless to stop things once they are in motion and before long his daughter is moping about the house giving him the silent treatment, driving a wedge between her parents.

As things spin out of control, violence erupts, innocence is lost and Paul finds himself doing and saying things in anger he never thought he would, driving his family farther apart every time he tries and fails to make a stand, while Clare pushes him in all the wrong directions with the furious righteousness peculiar to teenagers.

While Binchy is no Yeats, his prose is not without a certain rough poetry of its own. He skillfully creates a mounting sense of unease, illustrating Paul's discomfort in his new surroundings. He takes the reader into the minds of not only Paul and Clare, but also Robbie, the budding psychopath who leads the local gang of yobs, and Joe, the slightly odd neighbor who is the target of much of Robbie's scorn.

In Paul, Binchy shows us a well-intentioned but weak man, who defers to his wife to avoid rows, getting up on his hind legs and speaking his mind at precisely the wrong time and in the wrong way. Paul's pent-up resentment leads to explosive anger the reader can empathize with even while it repels them.

His portrait of Robbie, a bored boy who delights in trouble if only to break the monotony, is a nuanced look at someone whose inability to articulate or examine his own feelings has made him brutal and ambitionless.

Clare, with her selfish emotional manipulations and indignant teenage outrage at her father's failure to trust her, also becomes in the end a "rough beast, its hour come at last."

People Like Us is an insightful, engrossing examination of how things fall apart.

"You can be sure and be wrong"
Ron Suskind's long article on Bush's faith that he is God's instrument on earth in the New York Times is worth registering with the paper

Anyone else feel a draft in here?

Not content with limiting protesters to Orwellian "Free Speech Zones" the Republicans are now threatening legal action against group that talk publically about the possibility of a draft.

Common sense on the march
Jon Stewart is the best journalist on television today for one reason only-he speaks the truth. He is the little boy telling the realm that the emperor is buck naked. He also hates media whore pundits who wouldn't know the truth if it bit them on the ass. Take at look at this transcript and smell the fear in the heart of pundit land as
Jon Stewart hands Tucker Carlson his ass in bag or watch the video.
Meanwhile, veteran high-quality scribe Helen Thomas, who has covered more campaigns than some of us have had hot meals, has these words of wisdom about the use of the L word

Relax, everything is fine in Iraq

Soldiers are following orders, well most of them. The Green Zone is impregnable. And by invading, George W. Bush has made sure that WMDs, especially nuclear weapons, won't ever get into the wrong hands.

Meanwhile back in the US of A we are assured the votes will all be counted fairly

And that's today's news from Bizarro World. Hello!

Preemptive fact checking
Ladies and gentlemen, the prescient Paul Krugman

Democracy on the retreat

There doesn't seem to be any depth to which the pseudofacist thugs running the Republican party will not stoop, from shredding voter registrations by Democrats to denying blacks the vote and staging "Third Rate burglaries" - I wonder if they will find G. Gordon Liddy's prints ?

Coming of age in Chicago



Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

An Unfinished Season

By Ward Just

Houghton Mifflin, 251 pp, 24 dollars


There is a long tradition of coming-of-age stories in Western culture. Some are comic, some are serious and most deal with first or at least formative experiences with love, death, sex and finding one's way in the world.

In that sense Ward Just's excellent An Unfinished Season fits the mold, but his story of Wils Ravan's 19th summer is much more than a simple coming-of-age tale, adding to the above themes such topics as class and generational conflicts, loyalty and social conformity, with observations on the nature of the press and the exercise of power.

Underlying all this is an exploration of how different our individual subjective perceptions of reality are and how loose ends cannot always be tied up.

Setting his story in Chicago during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, Just paints a nuanced but carefully limited backdrop of the world of North Shore debutante balls, corrupt politics and gritty, chaotic newsrooms in the City of the Big Shoulders.

A war correspondent in Vietnam and a former Washington Post journalist, Just has a reporter's eye for detail and hasn't lost the knack for writing a great lead. An Unfinished Season opens with: "The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago."

Just loves to bait his hook with a whiff of mystery concealing a metaphor. Wils, narrating his own story from much later in life, notes that the newspaper story everyone was talking about at the time was "the account of a young colored woman found frozen solid in an alley on the Southside and taken at once to the city morgue, where an alert doctor discovered the faintest of heartbeats. She was revived, thawed as you would thaw a frozen piece of meat, and in the course of the subsequent examination was found to have so much gin in her veins that, 'Jeez, it was like she had swallowed antifreeze,' the doctor said."

The mystery of who the woman was and where she went when she left the morgue resurfaces at odd moments throughout the book.

Owing to a serious illness that kept him out of school for a year, Wils is a solitary boy, too much of a loner for his father, a self-made man who parlayed a college scholarship into a law career and a printing business. Teddy Ravan is secure in his knowledge of the world, and equally sure that things are going to hell--the workers at his plant are on strike, the country is being infiltrated by communists and his son isn't interested in team sports. Ravan senior takes the labor strife personally, brings in strikebreakers and has his childhood friend, the sheriff, tap the union's phones.

When the union pushes back with harassing phone calls, threats and finally a brick through the window, the pressure proves too much for Wils' mother, the daughter of Connecticut WASP gentry, and the marriage begins to dissolve. She goes east to care for her dying, perpetually disapproving father, leaving Wils and Teddy alone. Just explores a favorite theme of his--the close but tense relationship between fathers and sons--as Teddy spends lonely evenings trying to instill some of his life's wisdom into the admiring but contrary Wils.

Teddy and his wife reconcile following the death of Wils' grandfather, mainly due to Teddy's reluctant surrender. Just paints a spare portrait of Teddy as his varied fires are left to burn down to embers. He sells the business, lets his wife drain the pond he played hockey on all his life and agrees to take her on a second honeymoon to Havana. He even stops carrying the gun and generally loses interest in the Communists and almost everything else as his wife slowly comes to dominate the household.

With Wils' parents leaving the scene, the second third of the novel deals with his double life as a copy boy at a tabloid Chicago newspaper by day and a tuxedoed guest at North Shore debutante parties by night. Wils finds himself much in demand for his scurrilous tales about the real stories behind the headlines, but the debs and their parents look down on him for working where he does.

One party guest scolds: "Your father has a perfectly respectable business. Why would anyone want to be a newspaper reporter? It's so sordid, what you have to see and do. It's so...vulgar. That colored girl, for example. The stories about her throw such a bad light on things, accentuating the negative, makes us all feel rotten, as if we're being accused of something. I'll tell you this. I won't allow your paper into the house. I don't want the maid to see it."

In this social whirlwind, Wils takes up with Aurora Brule, the headstrong only daughter of a divorced Lincoln Park psychiatrist with an impressive circle of family friends. Dr. Brule won't talk about the wartime experiences that left him emotionally scarred, but upon first meeting Wils, he preaches him a sermon on how hate diminishes the human soul.

Until the novel's very end, the reader is left guessing as to whether the horrors of war alluded to by Jack Brule were committed against him or by him. He keeps a human skull in his office, one with a bullet hole in the temple. He dotes on his adoring daughter, who is waging a cold war with Dr. Brule's live-in girlfriend, a vivacious Greek nightclub singer. When the crisis in the Brule household comes to a head, Aurora demands that Wils choose a side, and his inability to see the situation from one side only dooms their relationship.

With summer drawing to a close, Wils finishes his work at the paper. When he tells the city editor he thinks stories like the tale of the frozen woman are the best type because they are mysteries that just can't be solved, the editor tells him he will never be a reporter: "You like mystery. You don't care much for the truth. But that's not what reporters do."

One wonders if the lecture is something out of Just's own past, as he seems to prefer leaving a few unsolved questions. A final chapter finds Wils in late middle age working for the United Nations. On a visit to Cyprus, he manages to track down Jack Brule's old girlfriend and get a few loose ends tied up, but the larger philosophical questions remain unanswered.

An Unfinished Season is serious, almost somber in tone. While at times nostalgic, even sentimental, it does not look back with rose-tinted glasses. Nor does the author distract with flashy postmodern techniques. He simply tells an excellent story. Just has constructed a mature novel of considerable depth and beauty with enviable craftsmanship.





Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

Why Jon Stewart should be hosting Meet the Press

okay, it's from last week, but here is everything you need to know about the first presidential debate

Ladies against women
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES tells us all about Mrs. Cheney and her "Ladies against Women" group is getting involved in the Iraq troughing.
thanks to Atrios at Eschaton for giving me the link to Echidine in the first place

"The U.S. Department of State has awarded a major grant to the Independent Women's Forum to promote women's political and economic participation in Iraq. Yet the organization, whose board emerita includes Lynne Cheney, the spouse of the vice president, is devoted to countering "the dangerous influence of radical feminism in the courts" and combating "corrosive feminist ideology" on college campuses, among other things, according to its Web site. "


Not such a minor goddess at all. She posted this one today

"The Fairness Doctrine in Media

One would think that the U.S. media is obligated to provide time and space for both sides in a political debate. One would be wrong. The so-called fairness doctrine was abolished during the Reagan years"

Cheney by name, dick by nature
Rude Pundit has the right idea . Cheney is a professional weasle who turns everthing he touches to disaster. As this excellent piece in Rolling Stone demonstrates

Vote early and vote often
The new electronic ballot in Florida

Looping, loopy novel takes quantum leap into metafiction
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Andrew Crumey has clearly taken the dictum "write what you know" to heart, and with his PhD in theoretical physics and job as literary editor at a major weekly newspaper, Scotland on Sunday, what he knows makes for a interesting mix.

In his fifth novel, Mobius Dick, Crumey combines quantum theory with literary and scientific history to produce an imaginative, erudite and playful novel of alternate realities peopled by such historical luminaries as authors E.T.A. Hoffman, Herman Melville and Thomas Mann, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composer Robert Schumann and scientist Erwin Schrodinger.

When Scottish physicist John Ringer receives a mysterious text message--"Call me: H"--on his new "Q-phone" he wonders if it could be from his former lover, Helen.Visiting a former student at a secretive research center, Ringer is offered a chance to work on a new kind of communications and computing technology based on quantum theory and meets Helen's double.

Things get progressively stranger and more mysterious for Ringer as coincidences mount and his memory starts to play tricks.
Ringer's story is intercut with excerpts from a metafictive novel supposedly published in 1949 by Cromwell Press in the British Democratic Republic. Heinrich Behring's The Angel Returns relates a visit by Goethe's mistress to Schumann in a mental hospital and a capsule history of Schumann and his wife, Clara, in which Brahms appears as Clara's lover.

Next, in another narrative thread that could be part of Ringer's world, Behring's "reality" or another metafictive excerpt, we meet accident victim Harry Dick who may be suffering from false memory syndrome along with partial amnesia.

He meets a fellow patient named Clara and a writing therapist who has never heard of Mann or Gustav Flaubert.

Another supposed excerpt from a Behring novel Professor Faust deals with Schrodinger's sojourn at a Swiss rest clinic where he has come to meet his lover and search for a scientific theory that will make him famous.

Crumey shuffles these four threads until the cards blur together, handling the deck like a professional sharp. Themes examined include causality, dualism, the differences between what is real, what is remembered and what is imagined, and particle/wave quantum theory.

It sounds heavy, but the author leavens the heady mix of provocative ideas and twisting, tailswallowing plot with a generous measure of humor that runs from goofily sophomoric to cleverly self-referential. In the opening chapter, Ringer stumbles on a literary lecture titled "Vicious Cycloids" that absurdly cross-references Moby-Dick, the works of Schumann, Hoffmann and Mann. Ringer scoffs at the false significance given to coincidences in the arts, musing: "No doubt some imaginative novelist could conceive a logical scheme linking everything: Hoffmann, Schumann, Schrodinger, Mann. Some grand unified theory in which Helen and Ringer would be quantum resonances...a narrative inevitability."

Mobius Dick is a pleasurable paradox that leaves the reader smiling, if a little dizzy.

More media follies
This time at the Wall Street Journal, where they spell suspension "l-o-n-g-v-a-c-a-t-i-o-n" (thanks to War and Piece and Atrios for the tip off). Reporter's personal letter about what Iraq is really like gets passed around the internet, newspaper takes reporter out of circulation until after the election.

What is wrong with Amerika- part 57

When the posting of photos like these (warning -graphic depiction of consequences of 'pinpoint' smart bombing) gets the idiotic response it got, you know that some folks out there are swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool.

Evil or just plain stupid?
A question I often ask myself when watching the antics of politicians and my media brethern at the FOX 'fair and balanced' propaganda network. ("Murdoch decides, you do as your told"). Often when howling errors are made it is because someone is just too dumb to know better. Other times the mistake or omission is made to further an agenda. Take a look at these two cases and tell me whether they are evil or just plain stupid.

FOX pulls fake story off web site

Communists for Kerry

Oh sure, they apologized, they claimed the 'manicured metrosexual' story was just a joke by their chief political correspondent that wasn't supposed to be posted on the website. It was just an accident. Yeah, right. If I douse you in gasoline for a laugh and accidently drop a lit cigarette in your shirt pocket, I'm sure you'll forgive and forget. The reporter in question, Carl Cameron, should not have written the joke piece, but I can almost understand how he might have. I've written joke stories before (and they were much funnier) but I haven't passed them up the line to my editor. And if I did, he wouldn't print it. Carl has an editor too, probably several. He doesn't just post stuff on the FOX website without it being seen by somebody.

They knew they would have to pull it off the site in a matter of hours, and they knew the rest of the press would pick up the story of Carl's little joke and would repeat the little joke until everyone had heard that Kerry was effeminate. Bravo, Turd Blossom

Many put George W. Bush down for being an ignorant smirking frat boy, claiming he has the IQ of a piece of furniture. This is a mistake. George wants to be seen as dumb, so that people will give him the benefit of the doubt and not consider him the evil bastard he really is.

"Fruity, with overtones of Welch's, red Kool Aid and malt vinager. A delightfully pink wine that fits nicely into the paper bag and goes well with pork rinds"

I didn't write this, but I felt I had to pass it along. Any additions to the list would be welcome.

Some Walmart customers soon will be able to sample a new discount item -- Walmart's own brand of wine. The world's largest retail chain is teaming up with E&J Gallo Winery of Modesto, Calif., to produce the spirits at an affordable price, in the $2-$5 range.

While wine connoisseurs may not be inclined to throw a bottle of Walmart brand wine into their shopping carts, there is a market for cheap wine, said Kathy Micken, professor of marketing at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. She said: "The right name is important."
So, here we go:The top 12 suggested names for Walmart Wines:
12. Chateau Traileur Parc
11. White Trashfindel
10. Big Red Gulp
9. Grape Expectations
8. Domaine Walmart "Merde du Pays"
7. NASCARbernet
6. Chef Boyardeaux
5. Peanut Noir
4. Chateau des Moines
3. I Can't Believe It's Not Vinegar!
2. World Championship Riesling
And the number 1 name for Walmart Wine ...
1. Nasti Spumante

One badass hamster

TOKYO — A man in his 40s from Saitama Prefecture fell into a coma after being bit on the finger by his pet hamster in February and subsequently died, his doctor said Monday. The man, who was asthmatic, fell into anaphylactic shock, — a life-threatening allergic reaction — after being bitten.
He bred hamsters over the past several years and was bitten several time, the doctor said. He is believed to be the first person in Japan to die from a hamster bite. (Kyodo News)

Jillette socks it to readers
Kevin Wood Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Sock
By Penn Jillette
St. Martin's Griffin
228 pp, 12.95 dollars

From the first page, Sock pulls no punches. While some books seduce the reader with sweet prose and others entice with promises of a clever plot, Sock grabs you by the shirtfront, headbutts you in the face and throws you in the trunk of a stolen car before speeding off with the cops in hot pursuit.

First-time novelist Penn Jillette, better known for his inspired rants and carny barker spiels as "the larger, louder half" of comedy-magic duo of Penn & Teller, does not merely deconstruct the murder mystery, he pulls it inside out.

Sock has most of the standard elements of the genre--a big tough New York cop and his buddy breaking the rules to hunt a serial killer who murdered the woman he loves--but eviscerates the cliches. The tough cop is referred to as The Little Fool and is a sensitive, teetotaling, possibly bisexual police diver who gets pedicures from his buddy, a gay hairdresser, and gets fired for breaking the rules. The murdered woman was enthusiastically lapdancing her way through law school. And the narrator is a stuffed animal the hero has had since childhood.

Dickie the sock monkey is to Winnie the Pooh what William Burroughs is to A.A. Milne. A work sock stuffed with nylon stockings with the buttons off a gambler's sharkskin suit for eyes, Dickie is "the baddest wammerjammer monkey."

"Hustlers eyes, lumberjack skin, the heart of woman's legs and a grandmother's spoiling love. I got it all baby. I got it all, my little baby boy. Drool on me. Grab me. Carry me. Rip me apart. I'm a bad monkey."
Penn Jillette writes the same way he speaks on stage; with manic intensity. Sock has the energy of On The Road, the poetical outrage of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the rhythm and animal sexiness of Mick Jagger circa 1972. He is wholly unpredictable, digressing into philosophical riffs on faith, sex, Ed Wood, death, Charles Darwin, strip clubs, grief, friendship, privacy and other topics too numerous to list.

Dickie is the Muhammad Ali of postmodern narrators, floating like a butterfly above the usual literary conventions and stinging like a bee with rapid-fire wisecracks. Virtually every paragraph ends with a line from a song, movie or some other cultural catchphrase. Dickie is a sock monkey who doesn't fear the reaper and loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

This is not a book for the faint of heart or the easily offended. Dickie is a delightfully, inventively foul-mouthed monkey and decidedly politically incorrect. Jillette has nothing but disdain for prudery of any sort and Sock is liberally laced with meditations on sex, some of them less philosophical than others.

Jillette plays with the medium as well as the message, injecting a few little doses of metafiction, occasional side stories, authorial asides, and a brief shift in narrative point of view.

Jillette's dark humor and flashy in-your-face stylistic bobbing and weaving mask a deep and often beautiful novel that takes on the big questions of the meaning of life and death without hedging.

Penn & Teller first hit the big time by confronting and criticizing what they refer to as fake magic. They constantly poked fun at the rabbit-from-a-hat, endless-rope-of-silk-scarves crowd and committed the cardinal sin of telling the audience how tricks were done.

Jillette shows the same sensibilities here. This book deals not with an imaginary action movie world, but with the real world. It farts and scratches itself and gets hungry, horny and tired. His characters screw up and suffer for it. The Little Fool teeters on the brink of a total nervous breakdown, gets fired for breaking the rules at work and for all his heroic qualities, exhibits the same moral and emotional weaknesses we all do at times.

The Little Fool wrestles with love, grief, Pascal's wager and the notion of faith in a very human way and makes a firm, unambiguous decision on the dangers posed by faith in imaginary friends.

In part an atheist manifesto and antihypocrisy screed, Jillette never gets annoyingly preachy or earnest, but constantly entertains, enthralls and challenges the reader.

Copyright 2004 The Yomiuri Shimbun

How to read a newspaper
Between the lines BBC political editor Andrew Marr has spent a lifetime reading newspapers. In an extract from his new book, he gives some tips on how to sort the facts from the froth
Monday September 20, 2004The Guardian

Know what you're buying
Reporting is now so contaminated by bias and campaigning, and general mischief, that no reader can hope to get a picture of what is happening without first knowing who owns the paper, and who it is being published for. The Mirror defines its politics as the opposite of the Sun's, which in turn is defined by the geopolitics of Rupert Murdoch's News International - hostile to European federalism and the euro and so forth. If it is ferociously against Tony Blair, this is probably because Number 10 has been passing good stories to the Sun. Its support for Gordon Brown was, similarly, driven by the need to find a rival when Blair courted Murdoch. It felt jilted. You need to know these things. You need to aim off.

Follow the names
If you find a reporter who seems to know the score, particularly in an area you know about, cherish him or her. In the trade we generally know who is good. If you are interested in social services and the welfare state, Nicholas Timmins, currently writing for the Financial Times, is essential. If you are interested in think-tank reports and the cerebral end of Whitehall then Peter Riddell of the Times is about the only reporter worth bothering with. But if you want investigative journalism that covers Whitehall, never miss David Hencke and Richard Norton-Taylor, both of the Guardian. Books? Robert McCrum of the Observer writes a weekly column that almost everyone in the publishing world will read. The funniest restaurant reviewer in London? Certainly, the Spectator's Deborah Ross. Best Northern Ireland correspondent? David McKittrick in the Indy.

In a crowded market, it is becoming harder to single out individuals since most fields, from sports reporting to the City or food writing, have two or three top acts. And everyone has their own favourites. But the point is, watch the bylines. If you find a friendly style, someone you grow to trust, treasure the name and follow it. My experience as an editor was that many readers were surprisingly attuned to the work of individual writers they knew nothing personally about. Bylines are often the only signal that gold, rather than dross, lies below.

Register bias
Even when you read the same paper every day, be aware that reporters are now less embarrassed to let the bias show. This is rarely direct party-political bias, but you may find that a columnist is favourably inclined towards one politician - say, that Bruce Anderson of the Independent is generally in favour of the Tory leader of the day, whoever he or she may be; and that Donald Macintyre, of the same paper, scrupulously fair, is generally more sympathetic to Peter Mandelson than most of his colleagues; and that Paul Routledge has a powerful partiality for Gordon Brown. This is all completely legitimate, but worth remembering; it may also point to the source of the story. That matters too: no political journalist in the early 2000s would read a story by the Times's Tom Baldwin without wondering whether he'd been speaking to Alastair Campbell. Baldwin has many sources, but Campbell, in the days of his glory, was a key one, giving that reporter's reporting added interest for the Westminster villagers. Again, worth knowing.

Read the second paragraph; and look for quote marks
Surprisingly often, the key fact is not in the first paragraph, which is general and designed to grab attention. Look for the hard fact in the next paragraph. If it seems soft and contentless, there is probably very little in the story. Similarly, always look for direct quotation. If a reporter has actually done the work, and talked to people who know things, the evidence will usually be there. Who are the sources? Are they speaking themselves? Are they named? Generic descriptions, such as "senior backbencher" or "one industry analyst" (my mate on the other side of the desk) or "observers" (nobody at all) should be treated sceptically. They can be figments of the reporter's prejudices or guesses, rather than real people. If you keep coming across well-written anonymous quotes, be highly suspicious: these are probably crumbling bricks without the straws of supporting fact.

If the headline asks a question, try answering "no"
Is this the true face of Britain's young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have we found the cure for Aids? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does this map provide the key for peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or oversold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means "don't bother reading this bit".
And watch out for quotation marks in headlines, too. If you read "Marr 'stole' book idea" then the story says nothing of the kind. If quotation marks are signs of real reporting in the body of a story, in the headline they are often a sign of failed reporting. That story may say someone else thinks Marr has stolen the idea for a book; but if the newspaper was reporting that this was really so, those giveaway squiggles wouldn't be there. As with question marks, headline quotation marks are mostly a warning sign, meaning "tendentious, overblown story follows ... " They certainly save my time in the morning.

Read small stories and attend to page two
Just because something is reported in a single paragraph does not mean it is insignificant. Busy subeditors, with their own blind spots and unexamined prejudices, and with limited space, often cut the most interesting or significant piece of news down to a few lines. And for reasons explained above, page two is often one of the richest sources of real, hard news. Here are the painstakingly researched articles and important tales suddenly stripped off the front page by a night editor in the small hours of the morning to make way for something "brighter" that may sell from the newsagent's counter.

Suspect 'research'
Hundreds of dodgy academic departments put out bogus or trivial pieces of research purely designed to impress busy newspaper people and win themselves some cheap publicity which can in turn be used in their next funding applications. If something is a survey, see if the paper reports how many people were surveyed, and when. If the behaviour of rats, or flies, has been extrapolated to warn about human behaviour, check whether the story gives any indication of how many rats, and how much caffeine they were injected with; and then pause for a reality check. If someone is described as an expert, look to see who they work for - and ask, would a real world expert be doing that? Also ask whether they are a doctor, or professor, or simply, "researcher, Jeff Mutt ... "

Check the calendar
Not simply for April Fool's, but for the predictable round of hardy annuals that bulk up thin news lists. Anniversaries; stories about the wettest/ driest/ longest/ wannest spring/ summer/ autumn; the ritual "row between judges" stories designed to whip up interest before annual book awards, and the equally synthetic "public disgust" stories about art shows. Every year there is a slew of tooth-sucking stories about the Royal Academy summer exhibition being a bit disappointing; about the autumn TV schedules being dominated by bought-in US mini-series or reality TV shows; about the disgusting and inane finalists for the Turner prize. You have read this stuff before; you will read it again next year. On a busy day, flick on.

Suspect financial superlatives
Even if the underlying rate of inflation is modest, then in the ordinary way of things, prices for many limited goods - Pre-Raphaelite paintings, or seaside huts, or football shirts, are going to be "the highest ever". For the same reason it is completely to be expected that teachers will get "their highest ever pay deals", however excited the minister sounds about this; and that non-executive directors' earnings will be "the highest recorded", however outraged the minister sounds about that. What is interesting is how these raw increases relate to inflation, and therefore to other prices and to each other. Are Van Gogh prices increasing faster than Picasso prices? Are the superstore bosses being paid more than before, relative to their staff? An informative story, as against a merely sensationalist one, will tell you that.

Remember that news is cruel
Reading the awful things that people apparently say about each other, or newspapers say about them, can be depressing. Is life really so writhing with distaste, failure and loathing? No - only in the newspapers. Acts of kindness, generosity, forgiveness and mere friendliness are hardly ever news; which is why there is a class of readers who turn their backs on newspapers and graze in the sunnier, gentler places of celebrity and women's magazines; or who obsessively trawl favourite internet sites and trusted periodicals to find news sources they feel they can trust, as they cannot trust the press.

Finally, believe nothing you read about newspaper sales - nothing Newspaper sales have been falling in Britain for a long time, and steadily. Yet every newspaper manages to tell a heartwarming story about how successful its sales are, almost every month. Work it out for yourself.

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism by Andrew Marr is published by Macmillan at £20. To order a copy for £18.40 with free UK p&p, call the Guardian Book Service on 0870 836 0875.