#robert caro

[jumbojohnson]

One thing about reading Robert Caro is he will open up so many new and fascinating possibilities for the length and structure of a sentence. I read a sentence aloud today (just 1) and I had to pause for breath twice (2 times).

[janinaduszejko]

robert caro: the neighborhood was the closest thing to heaven on earth--the people weren't just neighbors, they were a community. with its gorgeous benches, perfect for elderly park-goers, the green fields, used by rosy-cheeked children to play football on. it was the kind of place that showed the american dream wasn't a hope, but a promise.

me: and then robert moses turned it into a ten-lane highway?

robert caro: and then robert moses turned it into a ten-lane highway.

[hamletthedane]

The problem with obsessively inhaling the Life of LBJ books (again) is like….how am I supposed to fanblog about this? There are no gifsets for when you can’t stop thinking about the asshole Majority Leader of the Senate in 1954 masterfully manipulating the southern coalition into increasingly progressive politics, generating so much power in the Democratic Party that even a Catholic Kennedy could be elected president. There are no gifsets dedicated to how geological and environmental factors shaped Texas politics during the dust bowl. I’m losing my mind.

[austinkleon]

In the shack with Robert Caro

He bought the prefab shack, he says, from a place in Riverhead for $2,300, after a contractor quoted him a comically overstuffed Hamptons price to build one. “Thirty years, and it’s never leaked,” he says. This particular shed was a floor sample, bought because he wanted it delivered right away. The business’s owner demurred. “So I said the following thing, which is always the magic words with people who work: ‘I can’t lose the days.’ She gets up, sort of pads back around the corner, and I hear her calling someone … and she comes back and she says, ‘You can have it tomorrow.’”

Caro first composes in longhand, then types up everything triple-spaced, with a carbon copy, in the old newspaper manner. He insists on cotton rather than synthetic typewriter ribbons, because the letters come out inkier and darker, but they’re no longer in regular production. “Ina found somebody out in either Pittsburgh or Cleveland who said that he’d make the cotton ribbons for me if I ordered, I think, a dozen gross, which — I have enough typewriter ribbons to support the entire …” He laughs, breaking off the thought.

That Caro’s work is still done on paper, with no digital backup to speak of, marks him as one of the last of his kind. (He had never seen a Google doc until I offered to show him one. He was mildly startled to discover that, in a shared document, the person on the other end can be seen typing in real time: “That’s amazing. What’s it called? A doc?”) 

In Working, Caro writes:

I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view. That process might take weeks. And then I turn those paragraphs into an outline of the whole book. That’s what you see up here on my wall now—twenty-seven typewritten pages. That’s the fifth volume. Then, with the whole book in mind, I go chapter by chapter. I sit down at the typewriter and type an outline of that chapter, let’s say if it’s a long chapter, seven pages—it’s really the chapter in brief, without any of the supporting evidence. Then, each chapter gets a notebook, which I fill with all the materials I want to use—quotations and facts pulled from all of the research I’ve done.

See also: Robert Caro's corkboard

[phantomfingers]

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert Caro.

[magalis]

In contrast, I have been reading The Power Broker since June 5th and just started part 4 of it, and literally have a physical copy at home and checked a copy out on Libby too so I could read it on-the-go without having to tote the giant print copy along with me, and have been just reading a few paragraphs at a time whenever I have a moment because it's very compelling.

[anton-alog]

I have to say it's kind of wild to study history after being in fandom culture for so long because there's an instinct to have Favorite Characters and to want to play with them like dolls except. that Character is actually a senator or something from long before I was born who is directly responsible for affecting the lives of countless real people in ways good and bad and, as a result, shaping the world as it is today at least a little bit. like don't get me wrong I love him/hate him/recognize the nuanced complexities of how messy people can be as much as the next guy, but also I'm like keeping him in a jar with holes poked in the lid like a bug in my head. I like to shake the jar sometimes

[greenteendreamteam]