The Mechanic & the Muse

Blogging's ugly side

I’ve often cited “Creating Passonate Users" and one of its chief bloggers, kathy Sierra, as a favorite site, rich with humor, wisdom and solid advice.

So I was totally bummed out by this latimes.com piece

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-internet31mar31,0,4064392.story?coll=la-home-headlines

that reports threats have forced her to cancel appearances and worst of all, to shut down her blog. (sorry i can't embed the links in the text. I'm using a loaner machine that's playing tricks.)

Go to her post, "Death Threats are NOT "protected speech" http://headrush.typepad.com/

and you’ll understand why, in the face of such hate speech, she’s scared to leave her yard and is not sure she’ll ever blog again. What a loss! What a crime (is it?)

What can/should/is being done about it?

Memoir: A survey course

Attention!

• Memoir writers
• Would-be memoir writers
• Fans of memoir
• Memoir bashers
• Memoir subjects, voluntary and involuntary

Whichever group you fall into, Slate.com this week offered “Memoir Week: The Stories We Tell about Ourselves,” a three-day word-fest of essays and dialogues, including a history of memoir-bashing by Ben Yagoda, and several others which deal with telling family and friends about the spotlight put on them by such luminaries as Mary Karr and Frank McCourt, and other diverse and provocative takes by memoir writers and critics.

As someone with a memoir in progress (here are two published excerpts: one and two), as well as  an idea for another, I’m looking forward to diving in. Here’s the list, all of them hot-linked.

"A Brief History of Memoir-Bashing: It's almost as old as the memoir itself," by Ben Yagoda. Posted March 30, 2007.

"For Whom the Memoir Tolls: How to write about the dead," by Allen Shawn. Posted March 29, 2007.

"Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone," by Elizabeth Rubin and Mike Vazquez. Posted March 29, 2007.

"Collateral Damage: How I told a former lover I had written about him," by Edmund White. Posted March 29, 2007.

"Just Screw It: Writing about my family's feud over the Sweet'n Low fortune," by Rich Cohen. Posted March 29, 2007.

"Momma's Boy: How I wrote a memoir about the mother I once hated," by John Dickerson. Posted March 28, 2007.

"Inside Autism: What two memoirs can tell us about the disease du jour," by Ann Hulbert. Posted March 28, 2007.

"Ivory-Tower Ambassador: The studying, and selling, of America," by Christopher Benfey. Posted March 28, 2007.

"In a Land Far, Far Away: How I wrote a memoir about my father," by Danielle Trussoni. Posted March 28, 2007.

"Publish, Then Flee: How to tell your family you're writing about them," by Sean Wilsey. Posted March 28, 2007.

"Road to Nowhere: My life as a victim of Hurricane Katrina and the ineffectual Road Home program," by Blake Bailey. Posted March 27, 2007.

"When Irish Tongues Are Talking: How I told my colleagues, family, and former countrymen I was writing about them," by Frank McCourt. Post March 27, 2007.

"The Woman Warrior at 30: Maxine Hong Kingston's secrets and lies," by Jess Row. Posted March 27, 2007.

"My, Myself, and I: The role of autobiography in contemporary poetry," by Dan Chiasson and Meghan O'Rourke. Posted March 27, 2007.

"What the Little Old Ladies Feel: How I told my mother about my memoir," by Alison Bechdel. Posted March 27, 2007.

"The Liars' Club: How I told my friends I was writing about my childhood—and what they said in return," by Mary Karr. Posted March 27, 2007.

Whatever your position on the memoir, I hope you'll start a dialogue here.

Don't Stop, Go! When the learning is hard and long

What does Flash, a sophisticated software program  for creating interactive websites, digital animations, have to do with with Go, the ancient Chinese board game that originated in China?

Read this blog post by Mindy McAdams, who holds the Knight Chair for journalist technologies and the democratic process at the University of Florida and is author of "Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages." In it she compares her experience learning and teaching Flash to her students to her attempts to master Go.

Two statements from her first Go teacher speak to those of us struggling to to master the tools of multimedia.

“Go is a hard game.”

“Go is a long game. ”

While her focus is Flash, these Zen-like statements can be applied to any technology that put journalists  in the uncomfortable position of replacing their competence as reporters, editors, photographers , and designers with a dismaying sense of incompetence.

I think we can take  comfort in McAdams’ story (I certainly do)  as I return to photography for the first time in decades, try to learn audio recording and the editing software these technologies demand.

iIt's a hard game.
It’s a long game,

It brings to mind the statement attributed to the 19th century French novelist, Gustave Flaubert:, that has consoled me as I struggle to master the writing process

“Talent is a long patience.

Just because something is hard and can take a long time to learn,,” McAdams say, “doesn’t mean you can’t learn it. But it’s not a quick or simple process. Hart things take time. Hard things offer great rewards. Learning a hard thing is more mind-expanding than learning an easy thing..”

Wise advice.

(Image source:Detail of The Four Accomplishments, by Kano Eitoku. One of six folding screens: ink on paper. Shows people playing Go. Japan, Momoyama period, 16th century. On exhibit at the Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Published under Wikipedia Commons.)

Time shifters--Moviemakers and their disordered narratives

David Denby, the New Yorker’s astute film critic, focuses his attention on movies that play with time and their audiences in an article of interest to storytellers, regardless of medium.

The entire piece is thought-provoking, but one passage in particular jumped out at me; it’s an homage to narrative that is under assault in movie theaters around the world.

"Storytellers, relying on sequence and causality, make sense out of nonsense; they impose order, economy, and moral consequence on the helter-skelter wash of experience. The notion that one event causes another, and that the entire chain is a unified whole, with a complex, may be ambivalent, but, in any case, coherent meaning, not only brings us to a point of resolution; it allows us to navigate through our lives."

But Denby’s focus, propelled by this year’s Academy Award nominated “Babel,” is about movie storytellers with a different impact, leaving “the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.”

Just as audiences became accustomed to non-Hollywood endings that refused to give us what we wanted (enemies falling in love, sympathetic characters who were not snatched from the jaws of death), Denby says we’re getting used to structures that bend time.

“All these movies draw on a sophistication about cinema that is now almost universal. We know that a film is not a piece of life; we know that it is something made. And we’re used to being shoved around in time—we may even be doing some of the shoving ourselves.”

Technology makes “new non-narrative movies” possible, for established filmmakers as well as anyone with access to ripping software who wants to create their own structure.

“Twenty-five years ago, the videotape transfer of a film sustained the notion of a movie as a continuous track: you could run it forward or backward, but the film was “printed” on magnetic tape, and you remained on the track. Digital information, on the other hand, can be infinitely manipulated; you can jump from one place to another or cut the movie into pieces. At home, kids create “mashups”—chopping sections out of a feature film, mixing the excerpts with their own material, and posting the result on the Web as a madcap original creation. “

But all that digital time-shifting, may come with a hefty price.

“The danger of instant editing, of course, is not just disordered time sequences but glibness. Some of the big Hollywood action films move so quickly that they eliminate the most rudimentary emotional attachment to the material. It would be terrible if computer editing wiped out the proper emotional resistance to making a cut—the lingering grave affection for a face, a landscape, an interior, even the resonance of an empty space.“

Here’s a filmography of the ”topsy-turvey narratives’ Denby discusses in the piece. You can learn more about them from the Internet Movie Database at imdb.com

Babel
Amores Perros
21 Grams
Adaptation
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Traffic
Syriana
Miami Vice
Betrayal
Pulp Fiction
The Good Shepherd
Un Chien Andalou
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Muriel
L’Avventura
Memento
The Lives of Others

From Africa, a boy soldier's tale

One of the treasures of Portland, Ore. is Powell’s Books, with what seems like million miles of book shelves, a literary labyrinth you can happily get lost in.

Powell’s connects those of us not lucky enough to be in the neighborhood with a monthly newsletter. My favorite element is the interview with an author. Here’s the a sketch about this month’s author and his book:

“Ishmael Beah became a soldier at age thirteen, one year after rebels attacked his village, flushing him into the forest to survive as a fugitive with other boys his age. In ”A Long Way Gone,“ Beah describes Sierra Leone's civil war as he knew it, entirely absent of political context. Kill or be killed — these were a homeless orphan's options. "Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice," Publishers Weekly raves, "this memoir seems destined to become a classic." On the eve of publication, Beah discussed rehabilitation, forgiveness, hip-hop, moving walkways, and more.”

Read the interview here

It’s less about writing, but more about the tragic madness ongoing in Africa, a young stranger’s response to the West that lightens his account of “ a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter ”

“When I got on a plane the first time and we landed at Schiphol Airport, I was already so out of it. I thought I was dreaming up the whole thing, being on a plane. We got off at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and they had those... what do you call it? You know, like the escalators but flat?

Dave Welch: Moving walkways.

Beah: The moving walkway. I remember when I went back to Sierra Leone I told my uncle, "They're so improved, they make the ground move.”

Say it again, Sam.

So I’m driving to work the other day and a news report about the death of famed  50’s crooner and songwriter Frankie Laine  comes on the radio.

A phrase jumps out. “In a prepared statement, the family said... .”

“Prepared statement?

What’s the converse: an ”unprepared“ statement.

My colleague, style watchdog Scott Libin, wondered if an unprepared statement requires that ”the words would appear in random order.“

There seems no doubt: prepared statement is redundant. Limit it to ”statement.“ You lose none of the meaning and trim your story by a word.

Stay alert for redundancies in your prose, omitting those speed bumps that distract a listener/viewer/reader.

p.s.I initially described Scott Libin as ”ever-vigilant language watchdog.“ But watchdogs, by their very nature, are expected to be ever-vigilant, as opposed to asleep at the switch. Out went ”ever-vigilant,“ The meaning’s preserved while the story is a two-word hybrid shorter.

You can listen to samples from Laine's "Greatest Hits" album on this amazon.com page.

Plagiarizing imagery

Say the word "plagiarism" and names like disgraced New York Times reporter
Jayson Blair, and chick-lit author  Kaavya Viswanatha come to mind.

It's unlikely  the names Horst and Daniel Zielske ring a similar bell.

But according to an eye-opening slideshow by David Segal that's this morning's centerpiece on Slate.com, the Zeiskes have also been accused of purloining the work of another. I

n this case, the theft includes not words but images, and the victim is not a writer but a visual artist.

"Can Photographers Be Plagiarists?" is also an excellent example of the way that text and images married in a slideshow can be a powerful story, produced outside the traditional box of story and photos displayed in discrete fashion, detached from each other.

What do today's (online) journalists need to be taught?

“Looking for Web journalism teaching tips,” is the title of this interesting forum posted last month on Online Journalism Review (ojr.org).

It was kicked off by Mac Slocum, a veteran online editor and producer and web journalism teacher, who observed that “ Web journalists are often expected to have at least a rudimentary understanding of Web technology, so it's important for journalism educators to provide future journalists with the skills necessary to succeed in the Web environment.”

Sounds reasonable, until you’re faced with tough questions provoked by that philosophy.

“How do we avoid the allure of technology?” Slocum asks. “How do we make sure that the elements of journalism continue to be the focus, even as we teach students HTML, Flash and other tech-centric subjects?”

The answers, from a-half dozen teachers--and one j-student--range from the philosophical to the practical.

They should be required reading for journalism deans, professors, and students who share a common challenge, whether they think of themselves as online journalists.

We are all navigating between the time-honored verities of journalism education and ever-changing technologies that not only change the way news is gathered and delivered, but profoundly alter the way we think about the practice of journalism.

I found the questions and answers they generated thought-provoking and look forward to more posts.

Spinning Blackberries or Vox Populi?

Amid the gaggle of the capital chatterati let free after the President’s speech tonight, there was Suzanne Malveaux of CNN reporting from the White House lawn. Early in her live stand-up, she paused to say she'd just gotten a message on "my Blackberry" from an unnamed White House official expanding on the Bush position. Without a pause, she started reeling off administration spin, verbatim, from the smartphone cradled in her hand. I was struck by the way technology has--and will undoubtedly continue--to change the gathering and delivery of news.

From the moment anchor Anderson Cooper turned to Malveaux, I heard, but couldn’t see, what sounded like a chorus of chants in the background. I wondered if she would explain. And she did, in an aside informing viewers that there were protesters outside the White House.

And another thought came to mind.

What better serves a democracy? Delivering, apparently without much reflection, instant, anonymous and unaccountable arguments via Blackberry, which in my opinion cedes control to your source, or perhaps making another, split-decision: turning towards competing, human voices to report that citizens have opinions, too? And hey, those folks might even be willing to provide their names!

A comforting quote

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless information."
~Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)