Big Think Interview With Calvin Trillin | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Calvin Trillin

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A conversation with the author and journalist.

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Calvin Trillin:

Calvin Trillin is a journalist, humorist and novelist. Best known for his humorous writing about food and eating, he is also the author of several books of fiction, nonfiction essays, comic verse and plenty of more serious journalism.

Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935. He received his BA from Yale University, where he was chair of the Yale Daily News, in 1957. In 1963, after a serving in the U.S. Army and then working at Time magazine for a short time, Trillin joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine, where his reporting on racial integration at the University of Georgia eventually developed into his first book, An Education in Georgia: Charlayne Hunter, Hamilton Holmes and the Integration of the University of Georgia. Trillin's 1967-1982 column "U.S. Journal" for The New Yorker documented events throughout the nation, both funny and serious; since 1984, he has written a series of longer, narrative pieces under the title "American Chronicles."

Trillin is also a longtime contributor to The Nation magazine - is, in fact, the single most prolific contributor to that magazine to date. From 1978-1980 he penned a column called "Variation"; from 1984-1990 another called "Uncivil Liberties"; and from 1990 to the present a weekly one called "Deadline Poem" consisting of humorous poems about current events.

Calvin Trillin's most recent novel is Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme (Nov. 2008)

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How has journalism changed since you started?

Calvin Trillin: Well, when I started it was not totally print. I mean I guess you’d tell there was television as well, but around the time I started was a transition time for the big the magazines – Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers; all of which eventually went out of business presumably because television could bring those sort of images to people faster and better more immediately than they could, although I sort of miss Life. I liked the idea that at the end of the week whatever sort of grainy picture you saw in the newspaper or maybe one you hadn’t seen in the newspaper would be a full page in Life, and you could actually see what happened. The one I saw closest up was Life because I was working for Time then in the Atlanta bureau mainly, and they sort of flailed around trying to find various ways to avoid what was really I think a foregone conclusion. One of the things that I found I did a book of some years ago on a college classmate of mine who was a sort of golden boy who we all expected to be president, and Life had covered his graduation, and Alfred Eisenstaedt had photographed his graduation. And when I went back to look at that issue of Life, I was surprised because I hadn’t remembered how many just consumer ads there were, almost supermarket ads, for Ketchup and Jello and things like that, so that whole business has changed, and it’s changing again obviously.

It doesn’t seem that long ago when papers were thought of as sort of cash cows. I can’t remember the wonderful euphemism they had for the legislation that made it possible essentially to have a monopoly in a city. It was something like failing newspaper act or something like that. It gave people just sort of a license to print money, and even when they started to get in trouble, they got in trouble even though they were making profits, but Wall Street said they weren’t enough, and then unfortunately, many of them decided that the way to save themselves was to cut down on the service that they had. So they cut people who were doing news stories, cut particularly people who were doing stories that took some time, and I think that’s the part that’s not gonna be replaced, I mean I think that’s the really dangerous part. Even though there’s a sort of inside blogosphere kind of culture that leaks stories and has whistleblowers and everything; the reporter spending weeks or months on a story finding out something I think is soon going to be a thing of the past. And I mean the statistics you read some paper I don’t know I think it was the Philadelphia Inquirer used to have this many people covering City Hall; now they have that many, a tiny fraction of that, so their stories are gonna escape those few people that can’t possibly do them, and they can’t spare those people to work weeks or months on a story. So I think that part’s gonna change, and I don’t think it’s a good change.

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