E-mail: higgens@aol.com
Newsman Batton Shanks encounters both in Warm Spit, a novel of Texas crime and culture by Charles Stough.
Stough is Chief Copyboy for the Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild (BONG), a cyber newsletter for Fourth Estate insiders, when he isn't chief copy editor of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News.
Newsroom labor organizers and guardians of the Old School of Journalism, Stough and Shanks are one and the same. Both despise yuppie denizens of today's editorial departments.
Stough (Shanks) is more at home with spittoons, eyeshades, copy pencils, armbands, money belts, glue pots, Teletype and Linotype machines. The novel underlines his scorn for the sterility of today's computerized newsrooms.
Combine that with a homicidal maniac who targets print and broadcast newsies in coastal Texas and you have the guts of Warm Spit, a magnificent read. (11 JUNE 2000)
