Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading. Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one). Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.
Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I tell myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head) and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage.
Four days of the week I go to Kass at Trib or check out Dennis Byrne or Krauthammer and look for some crisply traditional raking of city, county, and state muck in either paper — especially Sun-Times, as by Tim Novak et al. and Fran Spielman, who gets more out of a Daley presser than any man or other woman I know about.
It’s getting worse. Size of paper I can live with, but boring biases and crippled imaginativeness I cannot.
So I look around and today found something worth spilling coffee on. It’s, lo and behold, Our Sunday Visitor, which by definition is not a daily paper but is definitely a newspaper not a magazine and which I am receiving on a trial complimentary basis.
More later, I trust, with special attention to [the late] Russell Shaw’s columnizing. Its web site takes some study, but you can start here.
Blithe Spirit 