Most Blogging does not Equal Journalism

Hamilton Nolan, writing on writing at Gawker.com, is a mean, nasty man, who said mean things that hurt me.

Am I doing it right?

So far, so good. I’ve taken a great bit of writing (or an event or result or poll or whatever) and found a way to immediately insert myself smack in the middle of it.

I am part of the problem.

And there I go doing it again.

Seriously, however, ditch this post right now and read what Nolan writes in “Journalism is not Narcissism.” He’s absolutely right (Warning, there be salty language ahead. F-bombs and such, but not liberally used). His thesis: the preponderance of first-person essays masquerading as journalism is demeaning to the profession and leading writers down “a path that ends in hackdom.”

He writes:

The demoralizing truth is that there is a huge appetite for first-person essays of this sort. The pages of Salon, and Slate, and Thought Catalog, and XO Jane, and women's magazines, and lowbrow-masquerading-as-highbrow publications like parts of the New York Times, and Gawker Media are absolutely overflowing with them. At their very best, they offer some amount of insight learned through experience. Mostly, they offer run of the mill voyeurism tinged with the desperation of attention addiction. For those who own the publications, they're great—they bring in the clickety-clicks. But for the writers themselves, they are a short-lived and ultimately demeaning game. They are a path that ends in hackdom. And young writers who've paid good money to attend journalism classes should not be set on that path.

Why does this concern me? (Ah! Did it again! I’m good at this!) Because I teach young writers, and a lot of their writing tends to go this direction. One of our principal assignments focuses on students’ most strongly-held beliefs Somewhat like this (Bazinga! Did it again!). Though we tend towards the “insight learned through experience” end of the spectrum as Nolan describes it, I still wonder about the wisdom behind the assignment. I see the rationale, however: Write what you know. Draw a straight line between that and the royal I, you’ve got plenty of fodder for a 500- to 750-word essay for a bonehead English class.

What’s interesting to watch is the students struggle with subsequent assignments, when the navel-contemplation is greatly diminished. They find out writing is more work than they’d first suspected. When we write about ourselves, we can typically produce – even the novice writers – especially the novice writers, per Nolan; they haven’t used up all their good material yet – stories by the foot. And then can go on to a successful, if rather banal, blogging career.

(Paul Yarrow, News Raider. Guy in turtleneck inserts himself into the news for the laffs.)

First-person writing, and writing where the writer may insert himself or herself for effect can be used sparingly, but I agree with Nolan when he says it’s not the only thing on the menu.

Movies I Watched over Christmas Vacation that Made me Bawl Like a Baby

With only a little preamble, I present:

Movies I Watched over Christmas Vacation that Made me Bawl Like a Baby

Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. I have only vague recollections of watching this as a kid, and they generally circulate around the weird crescent-moon shape the characters’ pupils take on when the Rankin-Bass (and these were the Pixar folks of the 1960s and ‘70s as far as I’m concerned) characters get all squinky-eyed. I was even fully-armed with snark when the narrator donkey revealed his name was “Speiltoe,” or something to that effect. So I didn’t anticipate any strong reactions, watching this as an adult with my kids.

Wrongo.

The tears flowed like wine right after (spoilers if you haven’t seen it) Nestor’s mother died protecting him from the snowstorm and didn’t stop until, inexplicably, Nestor went back to Olaf and the horrible snowbound farm where everyone treated him nastily as a kid.

Mr. Krueger’s Christmas. This film (also starring Jimmy Stewart) always gets me, when Mr. Kreuger delivers his speech/prayer to the Christ child. I know the moment is coming and think I’m braced for it, and yet every time it comes, it’s Niagara Falls, Frankie Angel.*

It’s A Wonderful Life. Watched this film in full for the first time in my life this year. Bawled like a baby. And not at the scenes everybody thinks of. The part that gets me is when George Bailey’s daughter exclaims “Oh Daddy,” as she’s at the piano, scared as he barks at her to continue playing the Christmas carol he’d just barked at her to stop playing a few moments ago. Guess it’s the gruff dad in me saying, dammit, Jim, don’t you EVER do that to your kids. Again.

And the prayer at Martini’s bar. Kills me. Just kills me.

* I will NEVER be ashamed of my tears. This is part of my life that I live totally awake, and in a state of total amazement, per Joe Versus the Volcano. They day I stop crying at these scenes is the day I am no longer a human being.

Grumpy Instructor Ahead

Trust me, college students, you’re not the only ones dreading the beginning of next semester.

I’ve been teaching online English classes at Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg now for, what, a year and a half? Two years? Something like that. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it. I have to confess that I’m an unremarkable instructor, one who’ll get you through the course (most likely) but also (very likely) be an instructor you’ll quickly forget. While I am taking measures to become better at what I do, part of me accepts that I won’t ever be a star instructor. So know that as you come in.

Last semester was pretty rough. Rough in that I had students who weren’t particularly motivated combined with stress at my full-time job where I became the sole technical writer on a pretty busy project, meaning I had less time at work to moonlight. That’s a good thing, because I shouldn’t be doing that anyway. Nevertheless. I’ll chalk last semester up as practice on being a rotten teacher. Things will be better now.

Or will they? Sometimes, like Balki here, I have to remind the Cousin Larry part of me that the students in my class are probably just waiting for the bus.

I also have to remind myself that as an instructor I can’t come into the semester with a bad attitude. If the instructor comes in looking gloomy, that’s going to rub off on the students very quickly. I’ve got to be a beacon of enthusiasm and jollity, which could in of itself be pretty annoying as well.

Yeah. Gunplay in a cartoon about school. And a bombing. Not too funny these days.

The Prid of Ankh Morpork

We have no cultural or political divides in this nation.

What we’ve got is a pride gap.

We’re proud of what we are, or what we are supposed to believe.

If we’re proud of the Second Amendment, say, we’re proud that we espouse that freedom to, you know, wave guns about in a patriotic manner

At the same time, I see, there is selectivity in our pride. Those who are proud of the Second Amendment, say, seem not so enamored of the pride others see in the First Amendment when it applies to government not supporting one religion by allowing nativity scenes and such on public property.

Maybe that’s not what the First Amendment intended. Maybe the right to patriotically wave guns about is not what the Second Amendment intended. What certainly was not intended is a cafeteria approach to supporting rights and suppressing rights by calling on the same document, in our pride, to do so. And that goes for those who love the First Amendment but don’t particularly like the Second.

It’s pride.

Pride is what allows us to be overly selective. It’s the same in politics. Pride blinds us to the errors our side makes, or allows us to think that the wrongs our side performs are justified because the other side does them to, but to a greater degree. Murdering five people is more acceptable than murdering ten. The death penalty for criminals is more morally acceptable than abortion. And other such nonsense.

Pride is what leads us into the Internet echo chamber. Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, says in his youth it was pride that stopped him from studying the scriptures – pride put him in en echo chamber:

“I was not in any state to be able to enter its mysteries, or to bow my head to climb its steps.”

“The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them. I disdained to be a little beginner. I was puffed up with pride, and incorrectly considered myself a mature adult.” 

I catch myself doing the same things, of course, with scripture and politics and a lot of other stuff. It’s easy to do, and not so easy to stop doing.

But CS Lewis cautions us that stop we must:

The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course, it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty…: we may come to love knowledge -- our knowing -- more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

Humblers. Little reminders that we, on our own, do not know it all.

The older I get, the more listening I do. That's what Ezra Taft Benson, prophet of the LDS Church when I was a kid (mostly) brings up in his famous sermon on pride (emphasis mine):

Pride is a very misunderstood sin, and many are sinning in ignorance. In the scriptures there is no such thing as righteous pride—it is always considered a sin. Therefore, no matter how the world uses the term, we must understand how God uses the term so we can understand the language of holy writ and profit thereby. Most of us think of pride as self-centeredness, conceit, boastfulness,arrogance, or haughtiness. All of these are elements of the sin, but the heart, or core, is still missing.

The central feature of pride is enmity—enmity toward God and enmity toward our fellowmen. Enmity means “hatred toward, hostility to, or a state of opposition.” It is the power by which Satan wishes to reign over us.

We are tempted daily to elevate ourselves above others and diminish them. The proud make every man their adversary by pitting their intellects, opinions, works, wealth, talents, or any other worldly measuring device against others. In the words of C. S. Lewis: “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.”

That's what I'm striving for: Finding the beams in my own eyes while not worrying (yet) about the mote in others'.

Dugout Dick

NOTE: A bit more for the Hermit. Every hermit needs another hermit to despise.

Pick and shovel.

Pick and shovel.

Pick and shovel.

“Built my dugouts all with a pick and a shovel,” he said. “No dynamite. No drills. No cutters. And certainly no high-powered lasers.”

I grew tired of the frazzled hair, the greasy hats, the smells and the voice.

The voice.

Speech full of eeees and arrrs, kind of a mix between Walter Brennan and Dorothy’s Scarecrow. When he is not strumming the guitar or wheezing his loose teeth into his harmonica, he is talking, constantly talking, running his white face with his grubby black hands.

“Came here from Michigan, jumped a freight train in Nebraska, got here and there was nothing to build a house with but rocks, so I built a house of rocks. Sometimes I stacked ‘em. Sometimes I found some that fit together like a big ol’ jigsaw puzzle. Ya see I make my own shoes. I make them out of ol’ rubber tires, shingle nails, and . . . old shoes.”

I came to know there’s a fine line between making your own shoes and nailing rubber onto some old shoes and saying you make your own shoes.

The smells, one grows used to. They blend together like fine teas with other odors of my own sweat and the ancient dust and rock and ichors I melt to make my refuges. But when I work with the laser, above the whine and the explosion of sublimating rock, I hear the voice. And the ears never tune out. Unlike the nose, which can be ignored. The ears always listen and latch on to the annoying sounds and deliver them to the brain where the hatred and resentment begins to fester.

Don't be surprised. Every hermit needs another hermit to despise.

Sideshow.

Always the sideshow.

One does not expect a garrulous hermit. Then again, Dugout Dick is no hermit. He’s an entrepreneur, hermiting it up for the yobs who come to gbawp at him living in holes in the sides of a rough-cut mountain. Hermits do not sell cassette tapes of their wheezy singing, nor rent out their vacant dugouts to the curious for the night. They do not spin impossible yarns about ghost girlfriends just to keep the yokels interested so they’ll rent a room or drop something in the begging bowl, so to say.

A true hermit, with his greasy, wild hair, dirt-stained hands and reedy voice, says go away.

I suppose that is why I have selected Iapetus. It is rare indeed for me to have anyone to say go away to. And if they don’t go away, I walk away from the transmitter or computer. I don’t shut it off; true hermits want to let those they shun know they’re being shunned.

Dugout Dick, however, won’t take a hint.

He will not go away.

Fortunately, he favors the kilometer-high cliffs at Engelier, and I have since abandoned the refuge I built there. It is for him and his ghostly bride-who-never-was.

And for his damn pick and shovel.

Lessons Learned During Christmas Vacation

1. Getting away from the computer (and most news sites) is therapeutic.
2. Substituting way too much Facebook time for those news sites is ultimately quite depressing.
3. Watching “Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey” and crying over it will NOT increase your man cred.
4. Having a solid knowledge of 1940s radio personalities will make watching “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” a much more enjoyable experience.
5. I have a lot of Facebook friends who are, shall we say, passionate about guns.
6. Windows 8 is not the swirling, sucking eddy of despair that some have made it out to be, though it does have its own interesting little problems.
7. Absolutely NO ONE is at work at RWMC on January 2.
8. Leaving an inverted water bottle in my spider plant at work so it would be watered appears to have worked quite well. Unless someone else was watering it the whole time.
9. The words that make up the sentence “Best BuzzFeedLongreads of 2012” make sense independently, but certainly not in that quoted configuration
10. If an astrological event such as the Leonid meteor shower and a conjunction of the full moon and the planet Jupiter occur, it WILL be cloudy.
11. Your fusspot son – who discards cheese stick wrappers everywhere and covers the floor of his bedroom with discarded toys, clothing, and assorted rubbish – will notice if you spill a tiny amount of orange paint on his carpet as you’re painting his room.
12. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the stories at Not Always Right are either highly overdramatized or just made up. Especially those that take place in coffee shops or subway cars.
13. Thanks to Not Always Right, however, I will never write that someone “storms out” if they’re upset. Completely overused phrase.
14. The phrase “stormed out” is used so much at Not Always Right I have to wonder if the stories are edited and re-written by the same person at the site so each story conforms with the site’s accepted format. Or, conversely, that the monkeys submitting the stories are so completely in sync with the site’s style there is ne’er a variation between stories.
15. I tend to overanalyze things.
16. If your kids get an Xbox for Christmas and one of the games is the LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean they will not be impressed if the only game skill you manage to master is riding the pig pell-mell through the crowd while yelling “Wooooooo hoooooo!"
17. Dropping an Oreo in a full glass of milk and splashing said liquid all over your new keyboard is an excellent way to break it in.
18. Leaving a book you’ve written aside for a few weeks but still thinking about it on the backburner makes for a better book. Or at least more crap to shove into a mediocre book.
19. Same goes for taking a stab at writing a query letter.
20. Buying our new house in Ammon was a good idea.
21. Spending the money to have natural gas heat installed in the new house in Ammon was a TREMENDOUSLY excellent idea.
22. I didn’t do as bad a job installing the new back door as I thought.
23. People who photobomb other people: I want to be your friend.

The Post Where He Introduces Himself to His Students

Note: I am using copyrighted content for educational purposes. No copyright infringement intended under the Free Use Act.

Approaching the Fiscal Cliff

"That guy's dead. You better believe it."

I don't pretend to understand any of this fiscal cliff stuff. I do know, however, that it might be high time to do something about it, rather than continue kicking the problem down the road to be dealt with at a future time. Funny thing about the future, it keeps turning into the present.

I have no confidence that either the Democrats or the Republicans will come up with a fiscal cliff plan, let alone agree on one. Both sides are counting on making the other side look bad so they can score political points, rather than making up a plan that could possibly work. Of course, there's the thing: They'll still get their jobs and pensions and free health care for life whether they come up with a solution or point fingers at each other or end up like Smiler, just kickin' that can down the road a bit further. It works either way, because they get to paly the blame game, which is much more fun in Washington than actually coming up with a plan that works. Or even a workable plan that both sides could possibly agree to.

I don't have any great solutions, either. That taxes should be going up to pay for stuff is probably a given. That some expenses should be cut is also a given. But where to get the money from? Government track records show that they aim for the upper class but tend to hit the middle class square between the eyes. And while you might wonder why, for example, ethanol needs to be subsidized, there are people who have come to rely on their subsidies and have lobbyists employed who will keep screaming about the subsidies until the subsidies are protected just to keep the noise levels down.

But I'm not in charge. Nobody has to listen to me, because the election-time butt-kissin' is over. And I'm no expert in these matters. And the experts in these matters are either on one side or the other or are shaking their fingers at Washington or at home on the Xbox doing some kind of accounting with the Kinect kind of thing that the rest of us are probably better off not knowing about.

The people who are in charge are doofuses. Playing politics when they should be making policy.

President Obama, maybe you shouldn't have gone on vacation. I know you wanted to. So do the rest of us. But I stand a chance of not having a job should we fall off the fiscal cliff, and if that happens I'm packing up my family and moving to DC to camp out on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House in our little camper until things are fixed. and I will not shower or shave and I'll buy a lot of fans that will blow my stink your direction.

Same for you, Congress. Yes, I know you're in a dither about guns right now, with good reason. But that's a sideshow issue. Sideshow. Get back in the big tent and on to the main event.

If anyone loses jobs or health insurance over the country going over the fiscal cliff, y'all ought to be in the front of the line. First to lose it all.

First.

And we'll take away your limos and such.

Read in 2012

Remember, when you get smug about how much you've read, the title of the last book you read is "The Poodle That Killed."

2061: Odyssey Three, by Arthur C. Clarke. 207 pages.
Asking the Right Questions, A Guide to Critical Thinking, by M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley. 176 pages.
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich. 237 pages.
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough and Johy Helyar. 528 pages.
Book of Mormon, The; translated by Joseph Smith Jr., 531 pages.
Book of Sorrows, The, by Walter Wangerin, Jr. 339 pages.
Childe, The; by C.A. Kunz. 411 pages.
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. 233 pages.
Consumed, by Benjamin Barber. 339 pages.
Daisy Chain, The; by James O'Shea. 351 pages.
Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersch. 498 pages.
Diary of A Superhero Kid, by Brent Boyd. 50 pages.
Diary of A Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney. 214 pages.
Diary of A Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, by Jeff Kinney. 224 pages.
Einstein: The Life and Times, by Ronald W. Clark. 718 pages.
Flying Dutch, by Tom Holt. 252 pages.
Forbidden Area, by Pat Frank. 221 pages.
Guardians, The; by John Christopher. 214 pages
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. 240 pages.
Here is Your War, by Ernie Pyle. 306 pages.
Investigation, The; by Stanislaw Lem. 189 pages.
Last Planet, The; by Andre Norton. 192 pages.
Let's Get Digital: How to Self-Publish and Why You Should, by David Gaughran. 210 pages.
Making Money, by Terry Pratchett. 394 pages.
Manhattan is Missing, by E.W. Hildick. 240 pages.
Me and Caleb, by Franklyn E. Meyer. 139 pages.
Medical Detectives, The; by Berton Roueche. 403 pages.
Messenger, by Lois Lowry. 169 pages.
Nixon: A Life, by Jonathan Aitken. 633 pages.
O Ye Jigs and Juleps, by Virginia Cary Hudson. 50 pages.
Parliament of Whores, by PJ O'Rourke. 233 pages.
Quest for Comets, The; by David Levy. 260 pages.
Radio Planet, The; by Ralph Milne Farley. 228 pages
Rama II, by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee. 420 pages.
Rapunzel's Revenge, by Shannon, Dean, and Nathan Hale. 144 pages.
Right Ho, Jeeves. by P.G. Wodehouse, 234 pages.
Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs, by Patrick F. McManus. 198 pages.
Rules of Thumb, by Tom Parker. 148 pages.
Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. 336 pages.
Spouse in the House, The; by Richard Armour. 215 pages.
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, by Harry Harrison. 190 pages.
Tales from the Glades of Ballymore, by Bob Brooks. 300 pages.
The Purple Squirrel, by Michael B. Junge. 238 pages.
Thirty Six, by Daron Fraley. 200 pages.
Thud! by Terry Pratchett. 373 pages.
Turning of the Screw, by Dave Barry. 90 pages.
Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett. 402 pages.
Who's Afraid of Beowulf? by Tom Holt. 206 pages.
World Set Free, The; by H.G. Wells. 316 pages.
Young Frankenstein, by Gilbert Pearlman. 152 pages.
Ze page total: 13,831 pages.

That's What Christmas is All About, Part II