Reading:

• American Lightning

Writing:

• Bring a 250 word response to today’s reading with you to class.

Reading:

• The Wordy Shipmates
  

Writing:

• Bring a 250 word response to today’s reading with you to class.

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Reading:

• Everything Bad is Good for You

Writing:

• Bring a 250 word response to today’s reading with you to class.

Listenings:

• Opening Night
• Musicians Classifieds
• The Salesman
• Mr. Loh’s Not Afraid to Be Naked

Readings:

• “Forewards and Afterwards” (KiT 62-64)
• “Frame” (KiT 65-67)
• “Tape Recording” (KiT 145-147)
• “Reporting for Narrative” (TTS 24-28)
• “To Tape or Not to Tape” (TTS 28-30)
• “Interviewing” (TTS 30-33)
• “The Psychological Interview” (TTS 34-35)

Listenings:

• “Flight vs. Invisibility“
• “The Greatest Phone Message of All Time“
• “Squirrel Cop“
• “True Detective“
• “Watching the Detective“

Readings:

• “Family  Members as Characters” (KiT 59-61)
• “Getting Inside Characters’ Heads” (KiT 68-69)
• “The Lyric Essay” (KiT 95-96)
• “Montage Writing” (KiT 103-108)
• “Navel-Gazing” (KiT 113-118)
• “The Roots of Memoir” (KiT 138-139)
• “No Shell, Just a Ghost“
• “The 46-Year-Old, First-Time Smoker“
• “Arachnophilia” (on  BB)
• “The Pain Scale” (BCN 65-84)
• “Consumption” (BCN 57-64)
• “Full Gospel” (BCN 85-87)
• “Trapeze Lessons” (BCN 105-115)
• “Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” (NKNF 62-85)

• “The I” (KiT 79-81)
• “The Memoir Craze” (KiT 97-99)
• “Truth” (KiT 148-149)
• “Use of Imagination” (KiT 150-152)
• “The Vagaries of Memory” (KiT 153-155)
• “Whose Story to Tell” (KiT 156-158)
• “The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character” (TTS 78-81)
• “First Person Singular” (TTS 81-83)
• “The Line Between Fact and Fiction” (TTS 164-169)
• “Ethics in Personal Writing” (TTS 184-187)
• “Taking Liberties” (TTS 187-189)
• “Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” (NKNF 198-211)
• “The Hostess Diaries” (NKNF 362-373)
• “Fortune’s Smile” (NKNF 412-452)
• “66 Signs…” (BCN 238-246)
• “Chores” (BCN 44-52)
• “The Truth About Cops and Dogs” (BCN 88-101)
• “The Rationality Project“
• “Mississippi Drift” (on BB)

Writing:

Much like last week (for those of you who did not submit your intro’s for the workshop), this week I’m asking you to write a response focused on your “favorite” of this week’s (non-technique oriented) readings; your response should reference what you found particularly compelling about that piece. Also like last time, you need not post them before class this time around – simply bring the response with you to class.

Readings:

• “Facts” (KiT 53-55)
• “Fact-Checking”(KiT 56-58)
• “Psychoanalzying Characters” (KiT 126-129)
• “Quotation Marks” (KiT 130-132)
• “Profiles” (TTS 66-69)
• “The Ladder of Abstraction” (TTS 70)
• “Every Profile is an Epic Story” (TTS 71-73)
• “The Limits of Profiles” (TTS 73-74)
• “Writing Complicated Stories” (TTS 145-148)
• “How I Get to the Point” (TTS 148-149)
• “The Emotional Core of the Story” (TTS 149-154)
• “The Cipher in Room 214″ (BCN 1-12)
• “Notes on Frey” (BCN 116-132)
  
• “Wild Flavor” (BCN 247-270)
• “Host” (NKNF 212-270)
• “Tales of the Tyrant” (NKNF 271-313)
• “Regarding the Torture of Others“
• “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know He Knows About Abu Ghraib“
• “Falling Man“

Writing:

Those of you who are having your rough drafts for Project One intro’s workshopped for next week should drop e-mail those intro’s to me as word doc, RTF or PDF before 9 AM on Tuesday – I’ll print copies for the class. Those of you who are not submitting your intro’s should write a response focused on your “favorite” of this week’s (non-technique oriented) readings that references what you found particularly compelling about that piece. You need not post them before class this time around – simply bring the response with you to class.

Readings:

• “Travel Writing” (TTS 74-78)
• “Writing About History” (TTS 86-88)
• “Adventures in History” (TTS 88-89)
• “Details Matter” (TTS 128-129)
• “Setting the Scene” (TTS 136-139)
• “Guiding the Reader” (KiT 70-71)
• “History into Nonfiction Narrative” (KiT 74-78)
• “Metaphor” (KiT 100-102)
• “Reflection” (KiT 136-137)
• “Detroit Arcadia” (on BB)
• “Downtown Time Capsule
• “For Keeps: The Christian C. Sanderson Museum” (on BB)
• “The Lost Twin“
• “No-Man’s Land“
• “Selling Sex in Honeymoon Heaven“

Writing:

• Once again I’m asking you to drop a comment on these readings before 9 AM on Monday. Once again I’m also interested in your general response to the readings as well as how you can relate the “technique” pieces to the longer expository works. This time, however, I also want you to choose a passage each from two different “writing about places” works (the last six listed above) that you found particularly compelling. Reproduce (or identify in some other way) these passages and explain why you thought they were of a particularly high quality.

Houskeeping:

• Are You Keeping it Real Yet?
• People Page  – and two week head-start
• A second look at our first project
• A volunteer for next week

Readings:

• “Finding Good Topics: A Writer’s Questions” (TTS 20-22)
• “Finding Good Topics: An Editor’s Questions (TTS 22-24)
• “Participatory Reporting” (TTS 35-39)
• “Being There” (TTS 39-45)
• “Gunkholing: Finding a Story” (KiT 72-73)
• “Immersion” (KiT 82-84)
• “Reconstruction of Events” (KiT 133-135)
• “Subjectivity” (KiT 142-144)
• “Writer’s Responsibility to Subjects” (KiT 159-162)
• “What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine?” (BCN 220-231)
• “The American Man, Age Ten” (NKNF 144-159)
• “Among the Thugs” (NKNF 160-197)
• “My Republican Journey” (NKNF  374-388)

Writing:

• Send me an e-mail with your requests (types of writing, topics, subject matter, etc.) for the course. Include a photo or link to a photo if you’d like me to add it to the PEOPLE page on our site [DUE by 6 PM Thursday, Jan 22]
• Write a response to this week’s reading (minimum 250 words). Generally respond to what you found compelling about the readings, but please relate one or more of the last four readings to one or more of the techniques described in the others. (For example, you might write how “What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine?” uses some of the techniques described in “Gunkholing” or “Immersion” – or how it uses other techniques not addressed in those chapters for a similar purpose.) [DUE as a comment to this entry by 9 AM Monday, Jan 26]

Notes:

“The American Man, Age Ten”

• Challenges of expository structure: I was completely dismayed. First of all, I had to figure out what I’d had in mind when I made the suggestion. [...] He was a wonderful kid, and I still marvel at 0how lucky I was to have stumbled on someone so endearing, but the truth is that if you set out ot write about a ten-year-old boy, any boy would do. (144-145)

• Responses:
  
  • Theme: Orlean examined the emerging dichotomy between child and adult, and her hands-on approach with the child allows readers to gain unique insight into a rapidly maturing mind. No longer are children entirely innocent. Topics such as money, abortion, and real estate have trickled down to affect the thought processes of even our fifth graders. Perhaps the most interesting theme of the work is the balance between youth and adult. Colin expresses interest in marriage, but for classically juvenile reasons. The author puts this view in perspective when she says “if Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks,” “wear big shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes,” and “be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II.” Additionally, “we wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other, and, magically, babies would appear in our home.” This intriguing priority shift, that apparently begins quite young in the development of American children, would have remained hidden to a neutral observer. Susan Orlean is able to expose this attitude via her dedicated involvement with Colin’s everyday life.
  • Subjectivity: What’s great about Susan Orlean’s story is that sometimes she gives us a view of Colin, the ten-year-old, from her own perspective as an outsider, and sometimes she speaks as if she’s channeling his own thoughts and dreams.
  • Ethics and Perspective: Indeed, though none of the questions she asked revealed anything deeply personal, one could still argue that as a result of this story Colin’s privacy is somewhat breached when compared with other children his age. In this, Orlean shows she has her higher purpose–the story–in mind the whole time, and even though she presumably formed a bond with Colin and his community, she nonetheless discloses what she finds and commentates upon it without reservation.

• Intro. [1]: “Snapshot” of Colin and of the narrative/perspective structure of the piece – (1) If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. [...] We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life. (145)
• The “Particulars” [2-6]:
  • Physical description [2],
  • town he lives in [3],
  • Colin’s school – In his opinion, the most popular boy in his class is Christian, who happens to be black, and Colin’s favorite television character is Steve Urkel on Family Matters, who is black, too, but otherwise he seems uninterested in or oblivious to race. [4],
  • Colin’s worldview/perspective – The collision in his  mind of what he understands, what he hears, what he figures out, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he pretends to know, and what he imagines makes an interesting mess. [5],
  • Colin as child/adult – “Well, if you’re grown up, you’d have a car, and whenever you felt like it, you could get into your car, and drive somewhere and get candy” [6].
• Children’s minds/adult issues [7-11]: These jolts of sobriety in the midst of rank goofiness are a ten-year old’s specialty. Each one comes as a fresh, hard surprise, like finding a razor blad in a candy apple – AIDs, Environmental crisis, Abortion, Morgan Freeman is the coolest person in the world, the world is more important than Game Boy
• Gender and Video Games [12-36]: By ten, according to Nintendo studies, teachers, and psychologies, game prowess becomes a fundamental, essential male social marker and a schoolyard boast
• Gender Again [36-38]: Psychologists identify ten as roughly the age at which  many boys experience the gender-linked normative developmental trauma that leaves them, as adult men, at risk for specific psychological sequelae often as deficits in the areas of intimacy, empathy, and struggles with commitment to relationships. In other words, this is around the age when guys get screwed up about girls.
• Colin on commercials and products [39-52]: Also, he happens to like ads. He also likes television commercials. Generally speaking, he likes consumer products and popular culture. He partakes avidly but not discriminately. In fact, during the time we spent together, he provided a running commentary on merchandise, media, and entertainment:
• Colin on Money [53-54]: I do not think this presages a future for Colin as a high-stakes gambler; I think it says more about the powerful grasp that money has on imagination and what a large percentage of a ten-year old’s mind is made up of imaginings.
• Colin and the backyard [55-59]: With that, he dropped the spool, skipped up the stairs of the deck, threw open the screen door, and then bounded into the house, leaving me and Sally the dog trapped in his web.

“Among the Thugs”

• Responses:
  • Immersion and Perspective:
    • Buford manages to tell the story he sets out to write just from the inside – occasionally lapsing over into becoming the subject, himself. Following many of the guidelines from “Being There”, “Participatory Reporting” , “Reconstruction of Events” and “Immersion”, he manages to blend in and out of being the main character of his story without confusing or frustrating the reader. Bill Buford is neck-deep in escalating chaos, yet still he manages to document the violence with vivid, often alarming detail.
  • Tone and Description:
    • The immersion evoked Buford’s creative skills as a writer, causing him to juxtapose the violence by associating it with “soft sounds”, “sensation of the sound” and “series of stimulants.” By applying such descriptions he not only adds to the story’s emotion, he also becomes metaphoric.
    • Among the Thugs” uses many of the techniques presented in our texts; nevertheless, it reads as gracefully as a novel. It includes a substantial amount of dialogue, which allows one to gain a greater sense of the subjects’ society. Buford uses “the language of the people” as describe by Hull in “Being There”. He also employs her rule, “pay attention to the sense of place” by describing the cafés, arcades, political affiliation, and even the profound writers and artists. By doing so, the reader begins to feel more familiar with the time and the surroundings. He does not act dishonestly by misleading the reader and pretend to be one of the British. Instead, he remains an observer but includes his own thoughts from time to time as well. However, he seemed to have maintained a seperateness from the subjects that allowed this observation to be very successful. Using these techniques along with others, Buford was able to give the reader an front row seat into the life of British soccer fanatic.
• Intro [1-6]: Clayton had  a number of troubles but his greatest one was his trousers. [...] The effect was immediate: these were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English Nation.
• On the Way to the Game [7-18]: A police escort is an exhilarating thing. [...] I wondered: if I had been a citizen of Turin, what would I have made of all this?
• The Plaza [19-20]
• The Journalist Immersed [21-32]:
  • For a moment I had the unpleasant experience of seeing myself as I must have appeared: as an American who had made a long journey to Italy that he shouldn’t have known about so that he can stand alone in the middle of what was by now several hundred Manchester United supporters…
    
  • I made a point of removing moral judgment like a coat. With all the drink and the luxurious Italian sun, I wouldn’t need it. Once or twice, facing the spectacle of the square, the thought occurred to me that I should be appalled.
• Mick, Tony, and Roy [33-56]: I wasn’t cut out to be a journalist.
• Gurney and the “hooligan” question [57-103]: Until finally I was telling them, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know: you’re just here for the drink and the laugh and the football, and, for the first time, despite myself, I wanted to believe it.
• The Reporter [104-106]:
  
  • The thing about reporting is that it is meant to be objective.
  • He could not, therefore, recall much about the bus ride apart from a dim, watery belief that there were fewer people in the bus this time. The other thing he remembers is that he arrived.
• The Buses Arrive, We all Become Targets [107-114]
• I will Not Shit Myself [115-120]: I kept thinking of the reporter from the Daily Star, the one who ran off when things got violent.
• Going Off [121-146]: Why hasn’t she passed out? I was waiting for her to lose consciousness, for her muscles to give up, but she didn’t pass out. The scream went on. Nobody around me was saying a word. I could tell that they were thinking what I was thinking, that she was going to have a fit, that she was going to die, there, now, pressed up against them. It went on, desperate and unintelligible and urgent. 
• Conclusion:
  
  • What was the duration of what followed? It might have been twenty minutes; it seemed longer.
    
  • Two other Manchester United supporters appeared. One kicked the boy in the ribs. It was soft sound, which surprised me. You could hear the impact of the shoe on the fabric of the boy’s clothing. [...] I was surprised that I could tell, from the sound, when someone’s shoe missed or when it struck the fingers and not the forehead or nose.
    
  • It was an excitement that verged on being something greater, an emotion more transcendent – joy at the very least, but more like ecstasy. There was an intense energy about it; it was impossible not to feel some of the thrill. Somebody near me said that he was happy. [...] They were well-behaved fans of the sport of football. They were once again the law-abiding supporters they had always insisted to me that they were.

“My Republican Journey”

• Responses:
  • Immersion and Tone:
    • Another interesting piece was “My Republican Journey” by Dan Savage mostly because it quite humorous. However, the author also becomes a part of the story through “immersion” and of course “subjectivity.” He explores his own reactions and offers solutions to Republican Party’s discrimination again homosexuals. He is able to insert himself into the Party he is naturally against, to the point of evoking confusion from the original members.
    • Only by submersion and active participation is Dan Savage able to see past the shining face of the “Grand Old Party” for a good look at the dark insides.
• Part One - The Plan & the First Meeting:
  • How [did] a commie-pinko drag fag sex-advice columnist with a fourteen-year-old boyfriend (kidding) manage to find a a home in the hate-mongering, gay-bashing republican party?  Well, let me tell you something, pal: the Republican Party is  big ten, a huge tent. There were no ideological litmus tests at the Republican Party caucuses I attended last Tuesday Night.
  • The second shock of the evening was the tremendously diverse group of Hill Republicans in the room. There were old white people, young white people, short white people, male white people, female white people, skinny white people, fat white people, socially maladapted white people, and white people with a full complement of social skills. There were, of course, a few of those troubling gay white people. That the Republican Party is a collection of homogenous, flat-earth motherfuckers is obviously a lie of the sneaky liberal media elite.
  • Wait a minute: Didn’t I join the GOP to pull the party to the left, to change it (for the better) from within? Why then did I vote for the more conservative candidates? Well, I have this theory: The scarier and more conservative the Republican nominees, the better the Democrats will do in the fall. And the better the Demos do, the sooner the Repubs will realize their “social” conservatism is a losing game. Then they’ll give up the gay-bashing, immigrant-bashing, female-bashing, race-baiting bullshit.
• Part Two – Exposure and the Second Meeting:
  
  • I won’t bore you with the Robert’s Rules of Order stuff, or the impossibly convoluted process by which the eighty of us in the cramped, steeple-roofed, flourescent-lit room elected seventeen delegates to the State Republican Convention. Suffice it to say it was crushingly dull.
  • Well, that got people going: one woman wanted to know why she should support gay people, since gay people didn’t support her when her home was burned down by arsonists. The arsonists weren’t gay or anything, but where were gay people when you needed them? Another pointed out that some had broken the windows of the Republican Party headquarters – so who’s oppressing whom?
• Part Three -The Convention: Try to imagine now that you are a homophobic Republican jerkoff, which might be a triple redundancy, at your county convention. You came for the speeches, an anti-Clinton T-shirt for your collection, and a hot dog. This is what you do for fun, whoohoo, but these three guys keep introducing pro-gay-rights amendments, moving to have anti-gay amendments struck, and generally messing with your afternoon. You didn’t come to the convention to defend your party’s homophobia, and you certainly didn’t come expecting to listen to gay  men giving speeches all day long. Who are these guys? And why is that one wearing a Craswell hat? OK, you’re this person, what do you do? You get mad. Very, very mad.
• What I Learned: Here’s what I learned about Republicans this weekend. They don’t like homos very much. They certainly don’t like having to talk about us, and they certainly like listening to us even less. But they do like beating up on us in their platforms. So, King County Republicans, I’ll make you a deal. Leave us out of your platform in ’98, the next convention cycle, and I’ll stay away from your convention. But, if we’re in the platform, I intend to return.
  

What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine?

• Responses:
  
  • What’s the Point?: Now, while three of the four pieces we read used the journalistic method of immersion into a topos/culture to learn from it, I can’t help but feel that this removes a vital part of what makes nonfiction enjoyable. For example, while reading “What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine,” by the time I was through it appeared to have just been a work about an author’s obsession (that would be only a mild curiosity to most readers) in which through the progression of events, he comes to the conclusion that he’s fat—the same thing he knew to begin with. And yes, this is an incredible way of pointing out how we, as a society, tend to ignore the flaws that happen to be shining us in the face, but the process was arduous.
  • Immersion: The story that I found most intriguing was “What is the Future of Diagnostic Medicine” by Rosenwald. It appealed to me because Rosenwald had obviously researched the subject intensely, and he brought out many statistics to not only show the importance of the subject, but to also help move the story along. He found the various labs and their tests through his research, and explained to the reader what modern medicine could now do. I can see how some without health concerns might have found this story a little bland because of the wealth of information provided, but I believe that the narrator helped pull off the story by using this knowledge and also by subjugating himself to a barrage of tests. The narrator immersed himself in the subject and gave an account of what a regular person would go through in order to have these tests done. He even nervously awaited the results of his tests like an average person would. I could not help but be reminded of the reporter Ted Conover, in “Telling True Stories”, who became a prison guard to become closer to the subject he wanted to write about. Both authors had to put time and effort in to their work to form a real experience in which to write about.

• The Setting[1-15]:
  • What’s left of the General Tso’s chicken is on the coffee table
  • In many ways, my editor handed me my dream job
  • Sitting here on our cough, though, my fiancee and I have to acknowledge the peculiar irony that something could, in fact, be wrong with me, that I might be harboring genes that will send me into the ground sooner than planned.
• Betty 2015 & Celera[16-24]:
  • It’s 2015, and I want you to meet someone.
  • Promise of genetic testing
  • Development of genetic testing
  • Controversies over genetic testing
• The Tests[25-28]:
  • I’m lying on the couch watching TV, thinking about popping an Ambien.
  • Charlie Rose
  • Genenentech, Genelex, and Roche Diagnostics
  • I wind up in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, at the stately Greenbrier Resort, which for decades has managed to maintain pristine ratings from the varied likes of AAA and Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Resort despite a design aesthetic build around searingly green carpet.
• Results:
  • I ask Graves about the controversy over CT scans, and he says he can see both sides of the debate. He tells me about a healthy patient who had a history of normal stress tests and EKGs – not an obvious candidate for any kind of scan. But when the machine scanned his heart, snapping pictures as it contracted, Graves could see that the patient’s arteries were dangerously calcified. The man could have dropped dead, but instead got an angioplasty. I am convinced.
  • It’s the waiting that kills you. I’m slouched in my doctor’s office to get news of my genes.
  • I am 80 pounds overweight. My cholesterol is borderline high. My glucose levels are flirting with diabetes. I am a prime candidate for a heart attack or stroke. At that moment, sitting there across from Dr. Graves, I had to face the reality that, until the more powerful tests come online, I am back to where I was before starting down this road: fat. I had been conveniently ignoring the fact that I could have predicted what will be wrong with me just by looking at my body.

Super Fun Author Match Game:

• Which of our authors directs theater productions under the pseudonym “Keenan Hollahan”?
• Which of our authors other celebrated piece include a profile of a man named “Jack Ass” who sued the producers of the TV series and movie Jack Ass?
• Which of our authors offered to be chef Mario Batali’s “kitchen bitch,” setting off a multi-year stint as a dishwasher and prep cook?
• The work of one of our authors has inspired two feature films. The surfer flick Blue Crush was based on one of their shorter pieces, and the difficulty of adapting their book The Orchid Thief was fictionally chronicled by Charlie Kaufman in the film Adaptation. Who is this author?