The Roast Issue .....................table of contents..... download it
Jess Wilton
The Editor Hits the Court
Among graduate students at Carnegie Mellon, Jeff’s squash game is legendary. Few have seen him play, but he clearly thinks a great deal about the game, and has matched racquets with some formidable opponents. The sheer amount of time devoted to discussion of Edward Said’s squash game in Jeff’s Said seminar indexes the seriousness with which he approaches the game. Granted, the legend of Jeff’s squash skills is in some sense self-created. But my purpose here is not to evaluate his game—a task I’m wholly unqualified to perform, given my extreme inadequacy on the squash court.
As one of the lucky few who have played squash with Jeff, however, I’d like to point out some of the more telling similarities and differences between Jeff’s squash game and his editing style.
For starters, Jeff won’t turn down a squash game just because the other player is incompetent. He simply wants to play, regardless of how embarrassing it might be for the other person. In fact, he seems to take as much delight in taking apart a hapless squash novice as he does in ripping apart a poorly-written essay. He doesn’t pull any punches, whether he’s aiming a squash ball at my back for that extra point or running a blue pen across an entire page of my writing. Whether he’s shutting me out for the fourth game in a row or upbraiding me for my persistent lack of concision and focus, Jeff is always good-natured with his critiques. On the court and in his editorial comments, he never fails to build me up after he takes me down. With Jeff, any novice writer or squash player will improve by leaps and bounds, despite the occasional sense of humiliation and defeat they might feel along the way.
The differences between Jeff’s squash game and his editing style are more trivial than the similarities. For instance, he doesn’t keep score when editing, as far as I know, although a running tally of his victories over sloppy bits of writing in a given essay would probably not be out of place. The editing scores would be higher though, because squash games end after only nine points. He most likely sweats less while editing, though it’s hard to know for sure. And he certainly spends less time discussing the various merits of different pens than of different racquets. Ultimately the differences are few and insignificant.
In squash as in editing, Jeff measures my strengths and weaknesses with speed and precision, and serves them back to me in a series of character-building defeats. It may not always be pleasant, but I always walk away with a sense of hope and determination—the knowledge that with a lot of sweat and concentration, I can produce better work in the future.