I’m going to miss nights like this next year. I’m going to miss G-Heav, and the seemingly miserable experience that is staying up through the night to complete a paper or another assignment. After three-plus years here, I’ve become good at working within the requirements and rhythms of college, so I now thrive in and enjoy these challenges. What am I going to do next year?
Here I am, working for my fourth or fifth consecutive hour on a paper I should have completed before the point at which I began seriously writing it. The sun’s about to come up. I’m not sure when I’ll go to sleep. But the paper’s decently good. And I’m really enjoying crafting it. I’m being creative and serious, and I’m pulling together something I wouldn’t have thought of had it not been assigned, but which I’ll ultimately be proud of. These challenges, as much as I resent them, are inspirations and great gifts to us in the long term.
What’s going to be asked of me next year? I dunno, but I easily may choose a path without as many intellectual challenges as school gives us. I think that’s often what happens when people leave school. And the break from these requirements will be appreciated. But I’ll miss these exercises. (And G-Heav.) Hopefully I’ll find new ones that are as fulfilling.
I guess what I’m saying is: I love college.
[Note: I know I haven't posted in two months. I've meant to post several times; then I've felt too busy, or too interested in other things, to take the time to write anything. I may be effectively done blogging. More likely, I'm mostly done blogging until at least June. (Who knows what'll happen then?) I don't expect to post often through the rest of this school year. I'm trying to get everything I can out of this last year in school. So far succeeding, and the outlook looks good for the next seven months. See above.]
Filed under: Personal, Photos | Tags: New York, New York City, NYC subway, Subway
I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ve had a great summer in this city, my hometown. I don’t know when or whether I’ll live here again. Until I do, I’ll miss the place.
Filed under: Personal, Photos | Tags: Central Park, Flying, Frank, Great Lawn, kite, kite master, New York, summer
A couple weeks ago, a friend emailed, joking: “Hope I run into you sipping wine and flying a kite in a park around the city somewhere.” Well, the wine never happened, but I took him seriously on the kite part and made myself a big orange beauty of wood, paper, and string. Enlisting other free friends to join in, I took to the park twice to attempt the miracle of flight, as we tried our hardest to get these two heavy Ben Franklin things up in the sky. Little luck (or air) took hold of our creations, but the second time out my struggling four-deep crew noticed, hundreds of feet above our heads, a single kite floating, soaring, barely moving, resting in the sky. Then another joined it. After a Corona each and a shared mojito courtesy of an ambling vendor, we took off to find the kites’ sources–and found them to be the same. At the north end of the lawn, our new friend Frank had tied one kite to a tree while he let the other kite up up up to join the first. We began the conversation, but he supplied the zingers. “What, did you make those things in kindergarten?” he asked as he threw a glance at our clunky orange diamonds. When I asked how he got his kites in the air so effortlessly, on a day with no wind, how he got his kites up so high, he shot back, “Well, you start when you’re four…” We defended our huge monsters by saying we saw the design on the internet, but Frank was having none of it. “See that?” Frank said to his friend, a younger man who was watching for the day, planning to buy one of Frank’s homemade kites for his nephew, “the internet is wrong.”
As he talked to us, one of his kites took a dive and disappeared behind some trees. One of my buddies piped up to tell him the kite was gone, for Frank had taken his eyes off the sky to show us how to build a good kite, a kite that would actually fly. “The kite is gone? That’s what I get for teaching you.” But there was no malice in his voice. Frank had done this, surely, thousands of times. And what’s the point of flying kites in the park if you’re not going to show some kids–even when the kids are young men? Frank showed us, taught us, inspired us to try again, with better kites next time. If I get the guys to make another set with me, we’ll use materials like the ones Frank uses. And in fifty years–or maybe just next time, if we’re lucky and good–we’ll get them to actually fly.
New memories, shared here.
Filed under: Personal, Photos | Tags: Central Park, Great Lawn, Jeff Scher, L'Eau Life, New York Times, softball, summer
I wish this were every day.
And this video, “L’Eau Life,” by Jeff Scher for The New York Times‘ website (therefore unfortunately unembeddable), is the most fun and beautiful summer-inspired art I can remember seeing. I wish I could live in that world. For the last month I almost have. Soon this will be over for a long time.
Yesterday Ezra Klein wrote this (emphasis mine):
One of the problems with the whole discussion over the death of the traditional newspaper business model is that so much of it is done by newspaper writers. That leads to a focus on the journalism side of things rather than the business side. But good journalism hasn’t stopped being profitable. It simply never was profitable. The problem is that advertising has collapsed, and readers have moved online, and department stores have merged, and all the rest of it. If Gawker, and everyone else, was more fastidious about links, there’s no evidence that newspaper revenue would rebound.
Upon reading that, I immediately felt stupid. Why had I never realized this before? It’s so obvious, and yet I hadn’t connected the dots that way before Klein did for me.
And then I became skeptical, and felt stupider. If that’s true, I wondered, how come I hadn’t read anyone else point out that fact sooner? And why am I so willing to call it fact so quickly? What do I know, really?
Not much. I came of age in the internet era, so I speak on little knowledge when I talk about the times before my own. But the highlighted sentence of Klein’s post, as soon as I read it, spoke like truth to me. Here’s what I think I know:
- Newspapers made vast amounts of money off advertisements until very recently. Of course they could do so because many people read their papers. But ads, not consumers, paid for the content directly. Consumers subsidized, and made all the revenue possible by reading.
- People read newspapers for lots of reasons, and journalism was only one of them. People did and do buy newspapers for access to advertisements, for crossword puzzles and sports scores, and for much other content that is not rooted in journalism, that requires no reporting to obtain.
- Before the internet, much of this information would have been available to consumers through media besides newspapers, but: a) most content was only available through specific other media, not all other media; b) media like TV and radio, through which information like sports scores and weather has always been available, transmit content at specific times, and thus must be followed at the right time to acquire the right information; and c) no other medium included all the information that newspapers did and do, every day and every week.
I’ve started and stopped about half a dozen posts now about the future of journalism. My ideas about where journalism is headed mean nothing; I really know nothing about this industry. But, as a consumer and as a hopeful producer before too long, I’m not content to say or hear, “Journalism is dying.” Newspapers, in broad terms, may be. But we need to keep pressing to understand which forces are doing what to the news media in general, and what that means for journalism. Newspapers themselves are not worth saving for any public good; their journalism is.
So let’s make sure we know who paid for journalism and how. Klein, I believe, is on to something that gets far too little attention in this whole discussion. And, though my thought, “Why haven’t I read this elsewhere? Could it really be true?,” is a good test to put most ideas through, it shouldn’t be a stumbling block here, for a reason Klein points out in that paragraph: “One of the problems with the whole discussion over the death of the traditional newspaper business model is that so much of it is done by newspaper writers.” There’s no conspiracy here, but it seems silly to ask newspaper writers to admit that their product has never been profitable. Value, in our economy, is most easily and permanently determined by profit.
Postscript: At the end of his post, Klein links to this piece by David Simon in the Columbia Journalism Review (which was also sent to me tonight by a friend. HT: DGP). Though I don’t believe he’s right in insisting that an immediate paywall at The New York Times and The Washington Post is the only or even necessarily the best route for American newspapers, the piece is maybe the best, most thoughtful, and most fair analysis on newspapers’ pasts, presents, and futures. Most of all, I take from it that HBO, more than anything else, is the model to follow, somehow.
Filed under: Personal
“Mr. Snow’s body, meanwhile, was taken to New Jersey and cremated.”
Filed under: Personal, Writing | Tags: Burghers of Calais, Free time, happiness, Hirshhorn, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Met
I’ve worked really hard in the last year, far more than I had ever worked before, more and more intensely than I had previously believed I could. I met a lot of deadlines, many daily, some hourly. I can do it, I showed myself.
Now I’ve got a break for the next month. I went to the Met with my dad this weekend, just to walk around and chat. Since then I’ve been seeing friends, reading, trying to write. I’ve got no schedule, no deadlines or timelines until late August. I used to live like this all the time; now I’m recapturing something quaint–free time–holding on to it and treating it almost like a guilty pleasure
I know this feeling, if not the specifics:
I can’t go to the Met without getting this overpowering feeling that I’ve wiled away too much of my brief life. You look at the Burghers and wonder how much care that took. How hard he must have worked. And you wonder if you’ll ever be so fortunate as to work that hard at anything. I got up at three this morning and worked on some writing about DOOM. I have been up ever since.
I don’t plan on wiling away any more of my life. Really, that period is over. I once regretted not pushing myself harder. Now laziness and boredom are in the permanent past. But when and where does happiness–calm, spontaneous, unexpected–fit in to life led under gun or deadline? Maybe question is what this month is about.
The whole post excerpted and linked above is A-plus. I trust I’m not the only one it speaks to. Day in, day out, TNC is great, but that post is the best of the man. It’s the best of blogging.
Update 7/30/09: Walking along the Mall in D.C. earlier this week, I spotted hands that looked familiar. They were the Burghers’, displayed at at the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden. I entered the garden and walked around the statue a couple times, not moved the way TNC had been by the cast at the Met, but still very impressed, captivated even for a couple minutes before I had to move on.
Filed under: News, Personal, Writing | Tags: editing, Globalist, Sarah Palin, speech, The Yale Globalist, Vanity Fair, Writing, Yale Daily News, YDN
At dinner two night ago, a friend reminded me that I had told him he had made me a better writer with a single piece of advice a few years ago. He had read a paper I had written for school and ridiculed me: “Do you ever write a sentence with fewer than seven clauses?” Point taken. Now I try to write shorter sentences and think about sentence rhythm, and I make sure no sentence has seven clauses.
A few other, similarly pithy and equally valuable lessons have come my way via my peers. One of the three great editors I have worked under at The Yale Globalist once educated me: “Most of what people call ‘their style’ is actually just bad writing.” When Sean told me that, early in my sophomore year, it both gave me confidence to be a forceful editor and the humility to let others modify my manuscripts. My “style,” I quickly internalized, was not special, nor so clever it should override established rules of clear and concise writing. I’ve since shared that lesson with other Globalist editors, and I’ve applied it to many writers. No writer successful defends against my editing pen by saying something is “her style.”
But the lesson is not as dramatic as Sean conveyed it, or as I once understood it. Some elements of personal style do little but obscure clarity or add unnecessary length. Many others, however, add flair and capture readers, even if the unorthodox additions are objectively unnecessary or even against the rules. I came this see this middle ground over my year of daily editing at the Yale Daily News, and I tried to reach a balance between style and objectively “good” writing in most of the pieces I edited in the spring.
It became easy for me to edit by default: I’d strip unnecessary words (“in order to” became “to” every time, etc.), tighten up meandering sentences, bring arguments to the front, and encourage writers to make their points with as much force as comfort allowed. A lot of editing, especially when I didn’t slow down to think, was almost mathematical. I did a lot of subtraction, and I cut out nuance that didn’t have an obvious point. Most of the time, I think I improved pieces. But I was concerned that sometimes I was not improving pieces as much as I was making them uniform, just more like each other, and more like how I would have written them.
My struggle (which has to be a common struggle among editors) is illustrated colorfully, though not purposefully, in this feature in Vanity Fair. The magazine’s editors have taken their pens to Sarah Palin’s disastrous resignation speech, correcting errors of grammar, punctuation, and fact. But they’ve also done a lot of what I did to columns I edited: They’ve stripped sentences down to the fewest words necessary, and they’ve removed all the personal quirks of Palin’s speech that lend it character, that make it her speech and not anybody else’s. The nonsense she spews is painful to listen to and more so to read, but need it be removed entirely? I’m not sure. Only now that I see the speech edited do I think maybe there was a reason to give it in original form.
Update 8/4/09: This Slate piece by a grammarian, which I just refound in my bookmarks, shows how Sarah Palin’s sentences are complete, nearly indecipherable nonsense. Here’s a taste: “To me, [her speech is] not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (“with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.”
Filed under: News, Personal, Politics | Tags: census, Harry Reid, Robert Groves, Talking Points Memo, TPM
I spent parts of the last two weeks researching the census and looking into the stalled nomination of Robert Groves to lead the Census Bureau through the 2010 count. President Obama had nominated Groves on April 2, and, though he sailed through his confirmation hearings in May, anonymous Republican senators have maintained holds on his nomination since then. Today Roll Call revealed the senators who had placed the holds and reported that Majority Leader Harry Reid would try to bring Groves up for a vote this week or next.
My story had to change quickly: I had planned on writing about why an anonymous hold might be placed on Groves and how long it might last. And though much of the original inspiration for the post was voided, I jumped on the new story. I got Reid’s office to confirm late this evening that the senator would be filing for cloture on the nomination vote, and I broke the news.
