There Is a Season.

I wrote earlier this week about a precept from my favorite living author, Robert Caro. Caro is a two-timer. Two times he won the Pulitzer Prize. Two times he won the National Book Award. As Sullivan, Preston Sturges' directorial alter-ego said in "Sullivan's Travels" (one of the greatest movies ever) about a movie he wanted to shoot, "It'll put Shakespeare back with the shipping news."

Caro is an historian who believes history writing should be held to the same literary-standards as literature itself. He not only writes of his topic, he writes beautifully. He writes with style good enough to subdue the bushwa about disappearing attention spans. In fact, of Caro Mr. Gossage might have said, "People don't read history. They read what interests them and sometimes it's history."

The precept I previously wrote about was Caro's dicta, "find out how things work and explain them to people." I think that's a good policy whether you're working on a car, a burger joint, a perfume or a technology. Or even a politician you're trying to get elected. Dissection might be the best form of inspection and introspection.

The Caro-ism I'd like to underscore today might be a codicil of what's above. It's about a doggedness of approach. A relentless belief that the truth sells, but that finding the truth (which sells) takes work.

That bon mot (or bone mot as Sparkle, my 2 1/2 year old golden retriever might joke) is "turn every page."

Turning every page--as a modus operandi has been MBA'd out of the advertising business today. 

We no longer talk to customers. 
We no longer go to the grocery story and look at products.
We no longer try things or use things ourselves.
We no longer talk to engineers or visit factories.
We seldom even read the volumes of pixelated prolix emauled to us late at night.

Today our dogma might well be rendered "turn every page you can in the 90 minutes you were scoped assuming you don't have seven 12 minute minutes before the initial tissue session that demands, no tissues, but snotty tissue detritus we call "work" with a level of finish that would make Reubens look like a slacker.

Turning every page is no longer, in short, allowed. Not after 35 years of MBA-Holding Company hegemon.

Turning every page is the single essential of good work. And, I suppose, because the aforementioned hegemons can't figure out how to "monetize" it, they ignore it. They default instead to an array of insipidities, like "being part of culture," or something on the order of a "shorty" award, or even a Cannes award. 

So much of so called communications today reminds me of Macbeth's "Tomorrow" soliloquy from that little number called Macbeth. I started to highlight the portion I usually recite--the bit Faulkner pinched--but then I read the whole thing and realized Billy Boy turned every page.

And wrote every phrase.