The Canadian Newspapers; why I love journalism

I'm reading a book called Canadian Newspapers, The Inside Story, which was edited together by some old journalist named Walter Stewart. It's hilariously stuffy and was published in 1980, just as a slew of interesting (mainly terrible) things were happening to Canadian journalism.

The people who wrote, in 1980, of their careers and time at various Canadian papers are ridiculous. Here is one excerpt, for my journalist friends, from its section on the Globe and Mail:

At one point in the sixties, the Globe was the only paper in Toronto, perhaps the only one outside Singapore, whose police reporter was augmenting his income by smuggling drugs into the country from Africa. He and a deskman in the "Report on Business" brought the dope in from Kenya, hidden inside African lampstands. They weren't very good at it. They were arrested one night shortly before deadline by a bunch of Mounties and city cops wearing hockey windbreakers.

Don't we all, though?

I have wishes of a simple nature.

I yearn to be shoeless, barefoot and bribing a uniformed officer in a small, garbage-strewn railway station between provincial towns in northern India; leaves blowing across the platform and swirling around the stumps of legless beggars; bound for Varanasi, and without baggage, I would have no tickets and no friends; nothing but the money in pockets torn ragged and the sand in my hair.

Saying "Namaste," a young boy would slide across the floor to where I sat, cross-legged and contemplating the beauty of the dung-cake huts that flitted past the windows, arraying themselves chronologically in my memory; stirred at stops I would be, by small cups of chai in chipped clay cups, dutifully thrown through the window's bars and onto the tracks - collected as the train hissed out into the dusk by leperous shadows wrapped in bandages and sadness; with Varanasi on the horizon; its glimmering lights and boats with candles and lanterns; its burning bodies and tearful widows, with eyeless tourists struck with fever wandering aimlessly like zombies among the funeral pyres, having their pockets picked and their hamstrings sliced asunder.

I miss much of what I have seen in this world and desire very much to lose myself again in its utterly joyous madness.

The Boy in the Newsroom, an excerpt from An Awkward Love Blossoms

"He collected nothing of interest, read books of no controversy and formed opinions and wrote articles that nobody remembered, quoted, laughed at, or even read through; to all of this, he was oblivious; he was self-content in the way that people who don’t think too hard often find themselves."

- Iain Marlow

On Happiness

Happiness is not necessarily the companion of modern sanitation and the vote, nor is honesty necessarily to be got from listening to radio or reading the daily newspaper.

- in Gorkha: The Story of the Gurkhas of Nepal, by Francis Tuker