That's Katherine Anne Porter (KAP), of course--the same woman behind the short fiction "Flowering Judas," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," the novel
Ship of Fools.
This blogger is leaning hard on this forebear, KAP, although I would've wanted to begin my beguine with Cole Porter instead. If I'm sounding a tad irritated on this holiday, it's because some colleagues, even younger ones still green in the game, tend to denigrate and dismiss journalism for the kind of race-against-the-clock writing that my friends and I do to tie and ribbon the shredded edges of our dignity.
Most times we're dismissed as hacks or masters and mistresses of "fluff writing" or "the quickie" or non-writers not quite able to rise enough to some literary standard or persons/perverts vulnerable to the temptations of various handsome Satans and cohorts (some public relations practitioners and/or spin doctors who think the Truth is a commodity as easy to purchase off the shelves like Argentinian corned beef).
A wise older daughter always likes to remind me, "
Nanay,
don't make patol." It's her way of encouraging me in the work I love and revere, in the profession that has almost caused my life partner, her father, Rolly Fernandez, to lose his eyesight.
I have a hunch, yes, a hunch deep in my gut that is protected by belly fat, that our writings in the near future will be more heightened, enriched by detail. And it all has a lot to do with choosing to be reporters for life.
That said, I dust off my imaginary top hat, put on my tux and soft shoe my way to a late lunch. God continue to give me and my supportive family our daily rice and fish. AMEN!
Take it away, Ms. Porter:
"A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself--or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being."
***
"They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not."
All images and two KAP quotations from the creative commons in the World Wide Web
