What's a mackerel wrapper?

"My work is being destroyed almost as soon as it is printed. One day it is being read; the next day someone's wrapping fish in it." -- Al Capp, syndicated cartoonist

"All newspaper writers have heard that the stuff they compose today has an excellent chance of being used to wrap tomorrow's mackerel." -- Ira Berkow, New York Times

It's hard to believe ... I've been blogging nearly a month now. Over Christmas, I started reading up on blogs over latte at Springfield's big box bookstore, carefully taking notes on paper napkins, wondering if I could do one of those things too. What it'd look like if I did. So I was planning, planning, planning ... focusing. Then, with a week to go before spring semester, I started filling in a trial blog template, hit the wrong key and posted the darn thing to the World Wide Web ... and I got hooked.

So, anyway, that's my introduction. I guess it's as good as any.

I'm calling my blog "The Mackerel Wrapper." Newspapers used to be called fish-wrappers because they're highly perishable. (Remember newspapers? Back before talk radio and the Internet?) I like it as a name for the blog, because any commentary I indulge myself in is highly perishable, too.

So are mackerels, as it turns out. Here's what Wikipedia says about them:

Mackerel is a common name applied to a number of different species of fish, mostly, but not exclusively, from the family Scombridae. They occur in all tropical and temperate seas. ... The meat can spoil quickly, especially in the tropics, causing scombroid food poisoning - it must be eaten on the day of capture, unless cured. For this reason, mackerel is the only fish traditionally sold on a Sunday in London, and is the only common salt-cured sushi.

So now we know.

I like the name, too, because there's a lot of variety on the blog. Probably too much. Media analysis, literature, writers writing about writing, a few links on Native American themes and music. And doesn't the name Scombridae roll trippingly off the tongue? Think of the blog as focusing on scromboid media content.

Mostly I see the blog's purpose as a way of quoting some of the more provocative stories I read on the 'net, and preserving links to archives where I can find them again if I need them. (Most newspapers don't archive on the website past seven days, but they're more than happy to sell acess to their data bases. So dead links usually take you to a form where you can register to use their archives.) There's some commentary on my part. But I'm more interested in preserving the links, so I can go back and find archived stories. Somebody once classified blogs as being written by "thinkers" and "linkers," and I want to be counted with the linkers.

But I honestly don't know how the blog's going to turn out. Already, in the three weeks since I started posting, it's evolving differently than what I'd expected. I'm willing to roll with that, see what happens. In fact, when you get down to it, it's why I started blogging.

Drugs, lies and printer's ink

Oprah Winfrey's repudiation of a bogus "memoir" is having reverberations in the book publishing world, and that tiny niche of the greater U.S. media market that cares about books. The upshot, according to unusually informative articles today in The Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer, is publishers are on notice now to fact-check more carefully ... but given the state of the book trade these days, we maybe shouldn't expect a lot of change.

The Inquirer's article is the best thing I've seen on this whole sorry mess. Written by Carlin Romano, the paper's book critic, it came out today. Romano quotes publishers who said they expect to see more fact-checking to screen out things like James Frey's now-discredited tale of what he described as "addiction" and "recovery" A Million Little Pieces. Oprah had endorsed it, then back-peddled when a website called The Smoking Gun documented it was not a true account. Romano says:

Already yesterday, one could see signs of vindication over Winfrey's turnaround, and hints of enhanced responsible behavior among publishers.

"I read it with jubilation," William Zinsser, editor of Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir and author of Writing About Your Life, said of the about-face.

"I'm delighted that Oprah had the grace to change her mind," he said. "I feel that it's an important turning point in this controversy and the whole matter of truth in non-fiction writing."

Romano said Oprah is "the Queen of All Media," and she can clout a book onto the best-seller list book club simply by plugging it ... as she did with A Million Little Pieces.So her word carries weight.

But will it change the publishing world? Romano quotes Zinsser again:

Zinsser would love to see that happen, but color him skeptical, given corporate pressures on editors and profit margins, that anyone will be hiring a bunch of in-house fact-checkers soon.

"Publishing has become the land of the nonreturned phone call," he said. "Editors are either in a pre-sales conference, a sales conference, a post-sales conference, or at the Frankfurt Book Fair. They have no time for editing."

Romano suggests, "Greater pressure on book publishers may come, in fact, from literary journalists, if they decide to emulate the Smoking Gun instead of turning out puffy author profiles."

In the meantime, today's Chicago Tribune has a story by Patrick T. Reardon and Susan Chandler quoting Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, who said "it would be a very slow-witted publisher who wouldn't ask The James Frey Question: `What exactly have you done with the truth in this memoir?' "

But Reardon and Chandler also said there may not be a lot of change in the industry:

A key reason for this is the nature of literature as an art. Great art comes from the unexpected, and you can't get the unexpected by putting down too many rules about what can and can't be said.

"A book, unlike a newspaper, is the universe of its creator," said Osnos. "You should be able to say what you want in a book, but you have to be clear about what is and isn't a fact. I would have no problem with someone writing a [non-fiction] book and saying, `OK, here's what I made up.'"

There are practical reasons as well. Even major publishers don't have the staff to check the facts of a manuscript unless the company lawyer raises questions or something just doesn't ring true.

But Osnos told the Trib authors and publishers alike should be on notice now not to lie.

"We, as a society, always make a big fuss over lies," Osnos said. "Richard Nixon learned that. Bill Clinton learned that. And the latest to learn that is Mr. Frey."

In the meantime, in a tongue-in-cheek squib in today's Washington Post, op-ed columnist E.J. Dionne put Oprah's name in nomination today for president in 2008. Without mentioning the names of any other presidents who have been accused of lying, Dionne says "it's tempting to consider a draft-Oprah movement after she demonstrated a talent so missing here in the capital city: the ability and willingness to admit error and apologize."

Oprah and The Trib in a north-end cafe

It was the new media brought Oprah Winfrey back to earth, as an investigative website compelled her to change her mind about a lurid "memoir" she'd promoted. But her turnaround, live on TV, occasioned some delightful old media-style journalism in The Chicago Tribune. To make it all a perfect moment, I got to read all about it this morning over an old-fashioned breakfast of corned beef hash and scrambled eggs at a north-end cafe on 9th Street.

Oprah, as the whole world must know by now, announced Thursday she no longer believed James Frey's tale of his self-described "recovery" from "addiction" in a book titled A Million Little Pieces. He was first caught out on The Smoking Gun, a website that specializes in running police reports on celebrities, after Oprah heavily promoted his book on her show and in her book club. At first she defended him, most prominently on the Larry King Live show. But apparently she changed her tune after addiction treatment professionals questioned both the book and her endorsement of it. And Thursday she let him have it with both barrels, on her TV show aired on WLS-TV of Chicago.

So Friday morning, the Oprah story was bannered across the front page of The Trib under the headline "Oprah shreds Frey in a million pieces." It bumped the story on Hamas' landslide election victory in Palestine, which took up most of the rest of the front page, and smaller stories on an ongoing Trib investigation into contaminated tuna fish and two indictments in Chicago city government.

A good old-fashioned, Chicago-style news day to go with the hash and eggs, in other words.

"To me, a memoir means it's the truth of your life as you know it to be and not blatant fictionalization," Oprah told Frey, a studio audience, TV viewers nationwide ... and people like me who read about it in The Trib. "I feel that you conned us all," she added. "I think the publisher has a responsibility ... I'm trusting you."

That's the important point. Frey's book started out, by his account, as a novel. But it was marketed as non-fiction, apparently at the suggestion of his publisher, the Doubleday imprint of Random House (itself a subsidiary of the multinational Bertlesmann AG conglomorate of Germany). Non-fiction is supposed to be true. Period. Paragraph. End of story.

"It is difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped," Oprah told Frey, as quoted in a transcript printed verbatim in Friday's Trib. "I feel duped. More importantly, I feel you betrayed millions of readers. And I think, you know, it's such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly. And so now as I sit here today, I don't know what is truth and I don't know what isn't."

Also weighing in Friday morning were the Trib's Internet critic Steve Johnson, media columnist Phil Rosenthal and cityside human interest columnists John Kass and Mary Schmich. In a perceptive column, Rosenthal noted that "what was being saved on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' was the Oprah brand." He explained:

Lest we forget, Oprah and Oprah's Bookclub are registered trademarks of Winfrey's Harpo Inc. ... They are symbols of an expansive realm that includes television, film, publishing, philanthropy and, most recently, even a Broadway musical.

Rosenthal, who suggested he's covered Oprah too long to completely buy her on-air explanation, said "this incident may prove worthy of future college study," however it turns out.

Other commentators, away from Chicago, were perhaps a little less cynical. The New York Times editorialized, "In a remarkable moment of television, Ms. Winfrey did what we have so often waited for public figures to do: she admitted openly that she had made a mistake in supporting Mr. Frey." And in a commentary on the MSNBC website, cultural critic Amy Alexandersaid it helped re-establish "the once-solid line between fact and fiction in commercial publishing." She said the implications go well beyond the book trade:

Despite the public’s apparent willingness to live with lies tricked out as truth —- embodied by reality shows, the government’s trumped-up evidence of “mushroom clouds” emanating from Iraq, and most recently by Frey -— such faux facts have no place in nonfiction book publishing, journalism or government.

These are serious issues. We do have a culture of obfuscation and cover-up on the national scene. But the Trib's treatment, and the age-old spectacle of a Chicago newspaper making hay with one of the star attractions on a competing TV station, made awfully good breakfast reading.

Oprah, the truth ... and the President

It goes beyond ironic ...

Oprah Winfrey, on live TV today, turns on James Frey, whose work she had championed both on her own show and a call-in to the Larry King Live show when his memoir was fact-checked, if you'll forgive the metaphor, into a million little pieces ... she all but accuses him of lying, and his publisher of negligence ... she says he "duped" her ... visibly angry, she stands up for the truth ... and then smack in the middle of the show, her TV station cuts into the program for a press conference with President Bush.

Here's how the Chicago Tribune's web critic Steve Johnson captured the moment in today's "Hypertext" blog:

In a galvanizing telecast Thursday morning (or at least the beginning of one), she admitted that she was wrong for defending him in the first place. "I regret that phone call [to `Larry King Live,' where Frey was appearing]. I made a mistake, and I left the impression that the truth does not matter, and I am deeply sorry about that.... To everyone who has challenged me on the issue of truth, you are absolutely right."

She had called Frey back to her show for a live (in Chicago) broadcast, and instead of trying to find a way to buttress Frey and the book, she flat-out called him on the carpet. "It's difficult for me to talk to you because I really feel duped," she told Frey. "I'm just wondering, why do you have to lie about that?"

And, Johnson says, the moment was important:

[Winfrey's fan base], in Chicago live and elsewhere when the show airs this afternoon, was hearing from on high that real truth (not emotional truth, or essential truth) matters very much. That if you read and love a book (a person, a politician, etc.) that turns out to have been based on a lie, the proper response is not to blindly defend, but to question it harshly and learn from the mistake. That, perhaps most important in this era of covering up mistakes by pointing fingers elsewhere, it's okay to admit simply that you were wrong.

It was shaping up to be a great performance, proof that I was wrong in my skepticism of her, and a reminder of why Winfrey has been able to remain central in American culture for so long. She retains, despite her wealth, fame and the insularity they bring, a strong moral compass and great instincts. One of the greatest of those is the ability to say, simply, "I was wrong."

Here, again in Johnson's words, is what happened next:

And then WLS-Ch. 7, the station where her talk show originated, shockingly cut off the program by cutting to live ABC coverage of President Bush's news conference. Important, potentially, but in the usual order of things, nothing more than a restatement of existing positions. It could have been much better handled with a little creative thinking: Run a screen crawl saying the press conference is happening, and we'll break in if there's news. Or let the screen crawl pass along Bush quotes.

I will leave it to others to assess Oprah and Bush, their respective reputations for truthfulness and how each might have contributed to our culture "of covering up mistakes by pointing fingers elsewhere." But let it be recorded that according to the White House transcript of the press conference, Bush said, "We're going to stay on the offense in the war against terror," and added, "... we'll do all this and at the same time protect the civil liberties of our people."

Presidential news conferences are important, even when the President doesn't have anything particularly new to say. But a screen crawl, or an audio stream on the station's website (like Chicago public radio station WBEZ-FM carried) would have done the trick for this one.

Rehab counselors upset by Frey's memoir

James Frey's lurid memoir A Million Little Pieces, which landed Oprah Winfrey in continuing controversy over its truthfulness, is under fire now by professionals at the rehab center where Frey allegedly was treated for alcoholism and drug addiction. They came forward, they told The New York Times, because "they feared that Mr. Frey's portrayal of rehabilitation was more likely to scare people away than lead them to seek help."

The Times also said producers of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" were told "by a former counselor at the foundation that runs the Minnesota treatment center reportedly used by Mr. Frey that his portrayal of his experience there grossly distorted reality."

It puts a new light on the controversy. Among other things, The Times reports:

None of the former Hazelden employees who have decided to speak out ever met Mr. Frey during his stay at Hazelden; nor could they talk about it if they had. But each of them said the regulations and procedures at Hazelden were subject to rigorous review by groups of counselors, so that the many breaches of protocol described by Mr. Frey would have been unlikely to go unnoticed.

Carol Colleran, who worked for 17 years in the Hazelden system, including two years at the Minnesota locations, said that unlike Mr. Frey's contention on "Larry King Live" that only about 5 percent of his book is in dispute, "98 percent of that book is false" in its descriptions of how Hazelden works.

Ms. Colleran, now a certified addiction professional in West Palm Beach, Fla., said she sent her complaints about the book to the Winfrey program by e-mail in November. Ms. Colleran also posted questions about the book on Amazon.com that month.

"I have had young people say to me that if they had a child who was having problems, they would never send them to treatment after reading that book," Ms. Colleran said.

A former psychologist at Hazeldon raised the same issue:

"It's hard enough for people to get accurate information about treatment because of all the confidentiality rules," said Mic Hunter, a psychologist who worked for four years at Hazelden-related treatment centers in Minnesota. "So many people have negative feelings about treatment to begin with. Why would anybody want to send anyone to a treatment program where they would be treated like this? He is claiming it is true, but it's not."

One of my problems with Frey is the way he tries to discredit drug and alcohol treatment. Perhaps he got clean and sober on his own. If so, more power to him. But he shouldn't discredit an accepted treatment regimen that works for others, even if it boosts sales of his book.

New World: Evening up the score

While I think the review of The New World in Indian Country Today is important, it doesn't tell the whole story. According to the Rottentomatoes.com website, a little more than half the reviewers liked the movie. Specifically, it has a "Tomatometer" rating of 54, which isn't enough to qualify it as "Fresh" but does put it in the upper range of "Rotten" movies.

(Here's the methodology: The Tomatometer rating is obtained by dividing the number of good reviews by the number of reviews. Movies with a 60 or more qualify as "Fresh" and all others as "Rotten." The New World has 62 good reviews out of 115. Rottentomatoes.com collects a lot of reviews, and it's by far one of the most useful websites around.)

Anyway, Terrence Malik is a filmmaker to reckon with, and the movie got favorable reviews from The New York Times, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times, among others. Roger Ebert's review in The Chicago Sun-Times doesn't miss the cultural angle:

The are two new worlds in this film, the one the English discover, and the one Pocahontas discovers. Both discoveries center on the word "new," and what distinguishes Malick's film is how firmly he refuses to know more than he should in Virginia in 1607 or London a few years later. The events in his film, including the tragic battles between the Indians and the settlers, seem to be happening for the first time. No one here has read a history book from the future.

There are the familiar stories of the Indians helping the English survive the first winter, of how they teach the lore of planting corn and laying up stores for the winter. We are surprised to see how makeshift and vulnerable the English forts are, how evolved the Indian culture is, how these two civilizations could have built something new together -- but could not, because what both societies knew at that time did not permit it. Pocahontas could have brought them together. In a small way, she did. She was given the gift of sensing the whole picture, and that is what Malick founds his film on, not tawdry stories of love and adventure. He is a visionary, and this story requires one.

Indian Country Today pans Pocahontas flick

While Terence Malik's new Pocahontas movie The New World is getting good reviews on artistic grounds, including from The Chicago Sun Times' Roger Ebert, it got an unambiguous thumbs-down from the publication I think matters the most -- Indian Country Today. Here's ICT reviewer Jennifer Hemmingsen:

There are a lot of reasons not to like Terrence Malick's new movie, ''The New World.'' The melodrama is thick, the internal monologues are endless and the soap operatic overuse of the thousand-yard stare is absolutely maddening.

But probably the best reason is this: The story is tired.

It's not so much the syrupy love story that so infuriated Native people in the Disney animation 10 years ago, Hemmingsen says, as one about how English and Native cultures collided. She adds:

In this latest version of the founding of Jamestown, Malick spins the same tale about the explorer and the explored that white men have been hawking since Shakespeare: he's just dressed it up with historically accurate props.

The production crew says 'The New World' is not a history, but a fictional love story between Captain John Smith and Matoaka, aka Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, the powerful chief of the Powhatan Confederacy of Tidewater Algonquian tribes. But it's not really a love story, either. With Smith playing the colonizer and Pocahontas the 'good Indian,' it's actually a metaphor reinforcing the tragic inevitability of the conquering of America - a story we've heard too often already.

But like just about every other reviewer, Hemmingsen was taken with Q'orianka Kilcher, the 14-year-old (now 15) who played Pocahontas.

Kilcher, whose father is a Quechua Indian from Peru, said she was drawn the Pocahontas story as she learned how much more there was to it than in the Disney cartoon ... and how tragic it was:

When Kilcher began rehearsing for her role, she started at square one.

'Like everyone, I just knew the cartoon,' she said.

But as she learned more about the history of the famous Powhatan girl, and started acting out her struggles, she suffered along with her character.

'I was very emotionally raw,' she said. 'I would go home and sometimes cry for four or five hours straight.'

Unfortunately, Kilcher said, many of those scenes - where Pocahontas is grieving for her lost family and lover Capt. John Smith - were cut from the final edition of the film. She hopes they'll reappear on the DVD release.

So, at least judging by Indian Country Today's review, should we all.

Joy Harjo: Lifted by a poet's blog

While I was getting ready for tomorrow's Native American cultural expression class a few minutes ago, I came across something new (at least to me!) that blogging lends itself to. It was Joy Harjo's Web Log. Harjo is a poet and musician of Muscogee (Creek) heritage, and one of my favorites; I haven't taught her since we stopped doing literature in our freshman English classes a couple of years ago, and I didn't know she's taken up blogging.

What it is, as far as I can tell: It's a writer's journal. Drafts of poems ... scraps of correspondence ... tributes to the late Vine Deloria, author of Custer Died for Your Sins, who died in November ... a speech by Oglala medicine man Sidney Has-No-Horses on how we destroy the environment ... more poetry ... thoughts, still in the process of being formed into words, about the spirit and other things that matter. What a gift to have this artistry up on the web, and what an inspiration to have it up there while it's still coming into being, before it's ossified in an "intro to lit" anthology.

A passage written Dec. 26 that reminds me why I like Harjo's poetry so much:

Every day is literally the beginning of a new year, but this particular time which marks a changing of the seasons, towards winter and introspection. I'm concerned about the direction of the tribe and a lack of a cohesive and energetic vision, I'm concerned about the general state of compassion or lack thereof, about the fascist governement in power in this country, about the squeezing of my heart with the pressures of sadness that is all of the family (blood, in laws, ex laws, outlaws, etc etc) stories and recent deaths around alcohol, drugs, abuse, about the recent destructive trends in weather--all of this has been predicted. We have been duly warned that if we do not actively take part in and acknowledge the gifts of this earth, and the very spirits of the earth and skies then we will forget who we are and it will all fall apart.

We are in the falling apart. And we're in it together. We have to keep going.

Tonight I figure I'm either exhausted or depressed. Tomorrow I will get up and the sun will give me energy to keep going--I am going to have to find another way, though--this particular route has been exhausted.

What delighted today, however, was a monk seal who crawled up on the beach and enjoyed the sun with all the picnickers and surfers and (a few brave) paddlers (I wasn't one of them...did not wish to brave the break). They are rare. And the three whales frolicking just off shore.

And then there's what I don't write here, what I don't say, the ghost blog. Maybe next time.

It came in the middle of a longer, kind of philosophical passage, but reading about that seal and the whales did for me what Harjo's poetry so often does, it lifted me. What a gift!

Will internet kill news biz or revive it?

Today's courant.com, the web edition The Hartford (Conn.) Courant, has an encouraging story about career prospects for journalism students. Newspapers may be in bad shape financially, says an article by staff writer Joann Klimkiewicz, but j-schools are gearing up to prepare students for tomorrow's ways -- whatever they may be -- of getting news in the hands of readers.

"Newspapering, industry folks sigh, is a dying tradition," says Klimkiewicz. And what's killing it, according to conventional wisdom? Why, the Internet.

But, no, wait a minute, says Klimkiewicz: "Not just yet." She quotes several j-school deans and professors who say "applications to their programs are steady, and in some cases climbing."

Quoted prominently in the story is Jamie DeLoma, editor of the school paper at Connecticut's Quinnipiac University, who said "in a roundabout way, I think the Internet is what's going to save print journalism, because it gives print the one thing it lacks. That's immediacy."

[We saw what immediacy means in newswriting class this morning. We first noticed the report of Osama bin Ladin's latest audiotape on The Chicago Tribune's website. That's print. In five or 10 minutes we chased the story to al Jazeera and CNN, and back to an updated story on The Trib. TV, more TV and the newspaper. And all of it, of course, updated minute by minute on the Internet.]

Klimkiewicz said declining newspaper circulation is a real problem, and so are staff layoffs across the country. She said j-schools don't minimize the problems, but they're still upbeat:

Bottom line, journalism deans and professors tell their students: There will always be jobs for the talented. And there will always be an appetite for news, a need for hard-nosed investigations and impassioned storytelling. It's just a question of how people will prefer to get that information that will change.

And so the tack many programs are taking is to get their students proficient across all media. Good journalism is good journalism, no matter the vehicle.

She quotes an official at Quinnipiac, who wants students to learn broad skills they can adapt to the changing demands of different media platforms like print, broadcast or the Internet.

"The most important thing we can teach our students is to be platform-agnostic," says Rich Hanley, graduate program director for Quinniapic's school of communications. "The more you can learn, the more you can market yourself.

"A story is a story. At heart, you're still a reporter," Hanley says. "Despite the changes in distribution mechanisms, the skills of a reporter are timeless: Report the facts, report the information objectively, and write clearly."

Good advice, I'd say.

The Hartford Courant, by the way, has been through a change in distribution mechanisms or two. Its first edition hit the streets Oct. 29, 1764, and one of its innovations was publication of Noah Webster's Blue Back Speller.

Appalachian dulcimer 1830s-style

Editor's note -- This is a story I wrote for The Prairie Picayune, the volunteer newsletter at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site, in September 2000. I'm posting it to the blog, even though it's several years old, because it's a good introduction to some of the writing I do now about playing the Appalachian dulcimer in an 1830s living history village. I'll add links below.

Dulcimer: Home-made Southern upland music

NEW SALEM -- When Appalachian dulcimer players tune up their instruments during a festival at New Salem, they’re playing in a tradition that’s always been part of the Southern highland culture the settlers brought here.

While the instrument itself dates only from about the same time as New Salem [the 1830s], playing the dulcimer is a home-made way of making music as old-fashioned as beating time with a kitchen spoon and as up-to-date as the washtub bass in a down-home bluegrass band. It’s easy to play the dulcimer, too, the old-time way.

Sometimes I’ll tell visitors in New Salem village this is what you did before radio and CDs -- if you wanted music, you made your own. Most of the time, kids will react with the pained tolerance kids usually show when they hear that kind of stuff from adults. But now and then, they’ll nod their heads and say something like, “Cool.”

When I play a dulcimer in the village, I like to use it to interpret the culture brought to New Salem by people like Mentor Graham and the Onstotts of Kentucky, James Rutledge of up-country South Carolina and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. I play the old ballads, fiddle tunes and folk hymns of the Southern mountains, and I talk about Anglo-Celtic musical traditions.

First, a little background.

Technically, the dulcimer is a three-string “fretted zither.” That means it’s played by pressing strings against a fretboard mounted on the body of the instrument. Old-timers used a rod or stick, called a noter, to produce each note on a melody string while they strummed across all three. It’s as easy as picking out a tune on the white keys of a piano.

The mountain dulcimer appears to have evolved in the early 1800s out of a Pennsylvania German zither called the scheitholt. As Germans moved down the hills and up the Wilderness Road in the late 1700s and early 1800s, their scheitholts were adapted to playing fiddle tunes and other Anglo-Celtic music. Out of that adaptation came the dulcimer.

In 1913 a writer for Harper's magazine named William Aspinwall Bradley said a typical Kentucky dulcimer player would note it “by pressing the string nearest him with a bit of reed held in his left hand, while his right hand sweeps all three with a quill or a piece of not too flexible leather. The two strings that are not pressed form a sort of bourdonnement, or drone-bass accompaniment, like a bagpipe. The tonal quality is very light -- a ghostly, disembodied sort of music ...” Most accounts suggest the dulcimer was a solo instrument, kept around home to play hymns, ballads and fiddle tunes.

“Dad always used the old turkey-quill pick,” says Jean Ritchie, who grew up in eastern Kentucky during the 1930s, “and he never seemed to hurry or get excited, even on fast hoe-down pieces, but the music would set even the most religious feet to tapping. ... He used to get the dulcimer down on rainy days when we couldn’t work in the cornfields, or on the soft moonlit evenings out on the porch, after supper, or on long snowy nights around the fireplace, in winter.”

So when I play dulcimer in New Salem village, I like to sit on the steps of my station and use a pick and noter to play fiddle tunes, ballads and old shape-note hymn tunes. When visitors come up, I’ll set the dulcimer aside and interpret the building. If they ask what I’m playing, I’ll explain it’s like the home-made instruments Southern highlanders would have brought into New Salem and played on rainy days or after supper.

If they want to hear more, I’ll tell how the Scots-Irish developed the dulcimer out of the scheitholt. I’ll play a few bars of “Ach du lieber Augustine” and segue into a folk hymn like “Amazing Grace” or a modal fiddle tune like “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” I’ll ask if they hear a drone that sounds a little bit like bagpipes, and I’ll say the music is an expression of the culture of Scots-Irish settlers from the Southern highlands.

Sometimes when older kids look really interested, I’ll ask if they already play an instrument. If they say yes and I think they’ll be careful with mine, I’ll show them how easy it is to play a scale and let them pick out a tune on my dulcimer. “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” maybe, or "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” And when they hear what they’re playing on a new instrument after only a minute, their eyes light up.

Cool. Yeah, I think it’s cool.

Link here for the original of this article on my faculty website, complete with links and Works Cited.

Link here to go to my "Pick and Noter Pages" on historical styles of playing the dulcimer and its predecessor instruments in Germany.

Link below for other posts on my web log about playing folk hymns and other traditional music on the dulcimer:

Gospel Hits of the 1830s? A playlist

Is blogging 'revolution' oversold?

"What's in a name? That which we call a blog / By any other word would smell as sweet." -- with apologies to Shakespeare

Just when I get started blogging, along comes Simon Dumenco, media columnist for AdAge.com and the print edition of Advertising Age, and tells me there's no such thing.

Dumenco has a thought-provoking column in the current issue of AdAge.com, titled "A Blogger is Just a Writer With a Cooler Name." His point: Good writing is good writing, no matter what its platform is:

It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast -- it’s instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It’s unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It’s voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It’s about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It’s, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn’t?). [Parentheses in the original.]

Judy Miller, of course, was the New York Times reporter who got snookered so badly by the Bush administration's propoganda about WMDs in Iraq ... hardly a poster child for the traditional, "dead-tree" media.

I'm not sure I agree 100 percent. I still think there's something different about the way people write in a blog, and there's something in the medium that helps make it happen that way. I'm not sure what. One of the reasons I started a blog was so maybe I can find out. But Dumenco has a good an excellent point. And web publication is still publication.

For Dulcimer: Gospel Hits of 1830s?

Here's something I wrote for the November 2005 issue of The Prairie Picayune, the volunteer newsletter at New Salem.

-- pe

The first time I sang with the New Salem Shape Note Singers in the historic village nearly 10 years ago, we sang a tune attributed to the Rev. Peter Cartwright [a 19th-century circuit rider from nearby Pleasant Plains, Illinois]. We were strolling in front of Sam Hill’s grocery store, where Cartwright used to hang out, and it was like hearing something ancient and unbridled brought back to life.

The song is called “Hebrew Children,”and it goes like this:

Where are the Hebrew children? (repeat twice)
Safe in the promised land.
Tho’ the furnace flamed around them,
God while in their troubles found them,
He with love and mercy bound them,
Safe in the promised land.

It’s an old camp meeting song, anonymous words set to a modal Anglo-Celtic melody in the same tune family, as New Salem singer Berkley Moore likes to remind us, as the sea shanty “What will we do with the drunken sailor.” It isn’t quite in a minor key, and it isn’t quite major. But it’s clearly one of the haunting old modal tunes that got handed around in southern Appalachian oral tradition.

“It is one of the old melodies of America, and has a long time been a favorite of many of the older people in their younger days who are now living,” said Joe S. James, editor of the 1911 edition of The Sacred Harp. “Peter Cartwright was a minister of the gospel, and used this song in his camp meetings long before it was ever placed in notation.”

James was an old-fashioned country lawyer with a love of history, and his 1911 footnotes preserve a great deal of musical lore that otherwise would be lost to us. So I’m convinced Cartwright really led “Hebrew Children” in his camp meetings, and James heard about it from an oral tradition.

In November the New Salem singers will join Sacred Harp singers from Charleston and the nearby Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site in a singing at the fall conference of the Midwest Outdoor Museums Coordinating Council. I’ll be presenting a paper there, too, and working on the paper got me to thinking about our music at New Salem.

Several of our songs have strong local connections. We like to mention those connections to visitors when we sing them, and I thought they might interest readers of The Prairie Picayune as well.

In her 1922 history of Rock Creek Presbyterian Church, Alice Keach Bone describes how at camp meetings the Rev. John M. Berry “would give out the hymn, read it, line it, and, in a strong voice, lead the singing himself, the people joining in one after another.” She recalled singing “On Jordan's stormy banks I stand” and “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,” both favorite 19th-century hymns, and she quotes at length from “There is a fountain filled with blood.”

Laura Isabell Osburn Nance, also a daughter of old settlers, recalled singing “How firm a foundation” at Rock Creek, along with several camp meeting songs with floating verses and “Old Hundred,” probably ending with the Doxology “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.” Edgar Lee Masters, the poet, recalled “There is a fountain” and “I will arise and go to Jesus” at Concord Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the late 1800s.

There’s one more song I’ve got to mention! At Springfield’s first public hanging in 1826 the defendant, who was from Athens, sang all the verses of a text by Isaac Watts that begins, “Hark! From the tombs a doleful sound, / Mine ears attend the cry.” We sing it in The Sacred Harp to the same tune as “Auld Lang Syne.”

So from this can we reconstruct a playlist? Chart the top gospel hits of the 1830s? Not really. Our sources are too fragmentary for that. But when we sing the old songs, often we’ll notice visitors joining in with us. Songs like “How firm a foundation” and “There is a fountain” were favorites then, and they’re still favorites now.

Music for “Hebrew Children” is available on line in copyright-free GIF files in the online 1853 edition of Southern Harmony maintained by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. It’s in three-part harmony with the melody in the tenor (middle) line. To play it on a dulcimer, tune to DAA or DAC (I prefer DAA but DAC brings out the modal sound) and start playing on the fifth fret. I’ve tabbed it out. Contact me by e-mail if you want a copy.

Columns target drunkalog, ethical issues

James Frey's drunkalog has drawn some pretty good satire. And a column in The Chicago Sun-Times that I think is: (1) funny; (2) well-written; and (3) a very clear statement of the ethical issues raised by Frey's liberties with the truth.

There's a cute op-ed piece in Wednesday's New York Times that doesn't mention Frey's book, titled "A Million Pieces." But ... it doesn't have to. Under the headline "A Million Little Corrections," comedy writer Tim Carvell seeks to correct "some inadvertent errors, omissions and elisions" in a fictitous autobiography.

Carvell, a writer for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," says:

In writing a narrative, it is sometimes necessary to compress or combine certain incidents for dramatic effect. I did much the same thing in the chapter of my book dealing with my prison term, although in reverse: in the interest of dramatic clarity, I expanded my 1993 arrest for jaywalking into a seven-year stint in Sing Sing for manslaughter.

Okay, it wasn't so much a jaywalking "arrest" as a ticket.

Fine, it was a stern warning. Happy now?

Carvell ends by saying "my life did not, in fact, shatter into a million little pieces. I just went back and recounted. It was six pieces. Consider it a rounding error."

I don't think any comment on my part is necessary.

LATER: This just in ...

Newspaper staff writers are having a field day with Frey, too. In today's Chicago Sun-Times, lifestyle columnist Debra Pickett riffs on Frey's recent claim his story has "emotional truth" even if he made up some parts of it:

Frey appeared on CNN's Larry King Live on Wednesday night to defend his work. And, in response to King's not-exactly-brutal questioning -- 'James, with the kind of incredible life you've had, why embellish anything?' -- Frey admitted that 'there were embellishments in the book, that I've changed things, that in certain cases things were toned up, in certain cases they were toned down, that names were changed, that identifying characteristics were changed.'

But he went on to say that '. . . the essential truth of the book, which is about drug and alcohol addiction, is there. ... You know, the emotional truth is there.'

And Oprah, who phoned in to the show, backed Frey up on this, saying 'the underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me.'

Pickett says all this is "excellent news for liars everywhere" ... but especially in Chicago, where the U.S. attorney's office is trying a Republican governor and investigating a Democratic governor at the same time. She suggested at times "truth is a relative thing" to Chicago's leaders:

There is the truth of what you said and the truth of what you meant and, to go along with these two conflicting truths, the long-standing and absolute truth that it isn't your fault if someone else somehow got the impression that a bribe might persuade you to speed certain things along.

Because the truth is that you never told him such a thing.

Outsiders, like certain federal prosecutors, who hold up wiretaps and witness testimony as a superior kind of truth, don't seem to understand the flexible nature of this Chicago-style truth-telling.

But Oprah surely does.

Pickett concludes on a serious note:

The Oprah argument -- that if something resonates, it doesn't matter whether it's factually true -- is an easy one. It makes simple moral lessons out of complicated lives. It fuels myths and smoothes over complexities. It tells stories that offer hope, even when hope is unfounded.

The appeal of Frey's made-up life story is obvious. If a violent, out-of-control criminal hooked on drugs and booze can clean himself up enough to sit charmingly on the couch and share his wisdom with Oprah, then surely all the other addicts out there can do it, too.

And if they can't, they're just not trying hard enough.

It's a compelling idea.

But unfortunately, it's just another Chicago scam.

Again, other than to say I think Debra Puckett is absolutely right on the ethical issues, no comment on my part is necessary.

'Smoking Gun' shoots down drunkalog

Newswriting students (COM 209) please take note: There's a very nice bit of investigative work at a website called The Smoking Gun. I don't usually pay much attention to the site. They mostly run police mug shots of celebrities, and I'm not too interested in celebrities even before they run afoul of the law. But this week they published an investigation into a supposedly autobiographical best-seller by James Frey, who claims to be a recovering addict and whose gripping life story got him lots of favorable publicity on the Oprah Winfrey Show. In Alcoholics Anomymous, they call these stories "drunkalogs" (as in "travelog" and "monolog"). Frey's doesn't ring true.

Oprah and Frey's publisher are standing up for him him, at least so far. But The Smoking Gun discovered a lot of Frey's drunkalog is exaggerated at best and parts of it, well, look like outright lies. Some of the website's writing is a little over the top, IMHO, but the way they went about nailing down the story -- searching the records, talking to the cops and, last of all, talking to Frey -- is classical investigative reporting technique. The small-town police procedures ring true to my newspapering experience, too.

Here's how the investigation unfolded.

It was after the Oprah show aired that TSG first took a look at Frey. We had simply planned to track down one of his many mug shots and add it to our site's large collection. While Frey offers no specific details about when and where he was collared, the book does mention three states where he ran into trouble: Ohio, Michigan, and North Carolina. While nine of Frey's 14 reported arrests would have occurred when he was a minor, there still remained five cases for which a booking photo (not to mention police and court records) should have existed. ...

However, repeated dead ends on a county-by-county records search turned our one-off hunt for a mug shot into a more prolonged review of various portions of Frey's book. In an attempt to confirm or disprove his accounts, we examined matters for which there would likely be a paper trail at courthouses, police departments, or motor vehicle agencies.

What they came up with ... nothing, well, almost nothing. A few misdemeanor arrests, enough to convince them Frey did have a drinking problem. But nothing like the violent criminal record and hard-core drug addiction he claimed in his book.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states.'

My favorite quote is from the cop who said, yeah, Frey's name did come up in a college drug investigation, but added, "We're not talking Detroit here. ... It's like Biffy and Buffy saying, 'I think we should steal a stop sign.'"

It's a developing story, one that raises real ethical issues. So far the best secondary account hasn't been in the U.S. but in the "Culture Vulture" blog in The Guardian, a British daily that is arguably the best English-language newspaper in the world. The comments are fascinating. Some, recovering addicts and alcoholics themselves, say if Frey is also lying about how he got sober (as appears increasingly likely), he's giving bad advice and endangering readers who suffer from those addictions. Others say there's always been a market for fiction, so what's the big deal? All are good examples of how web logs, or blogs, can enhance a newspaper's coverage and give readers a say on its pages.

Do newspapers have a future?

Students in COM 150 take note (basic newswriting, too, when school starts back next week): Interesting column by Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the electronic magazine Slate.com, on why newspapers are losing readership to the internet. Well-written, too. He describes the effort needed to get a newspaper on the street, from cutting trees in the Canadian forest to printing and distributing a local paper. The whole process, he says, is "highly physical, mechanical, complicated, and noisy," a holdover from the first industrial revolution (that's the one that started in the 1760s and ended sometime after World War II). So the technology is antiquated, says Kinsley, and it wastes newsprint because we don't read everything in the paper. No wonder the papers are losing readers. But, he adds, there's hope for retaining at least older readers who retain brand loyalty:

That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the 'Post-Intelligencer' more than something called 'Yahoo!' or 'Google,' don't you? No, seriously, don't you? OK, how old did you say you are?

By the way, if you're reading other posts to this blog ... notice how often Seattle gets mentioned? The Post-Intelligencer is in Seattle. The other day, we had results of an online readership survey by its competitor, The Seattle Times. Microsoft Corp. has its corporate headquarters in Seattle. Back in the day, the publishing industry was concentrated in New York. Now it's decentralized. How does the internet affect this trend?

Gospel music shrine burns in Chicago

In Sunday's early edition of The Chicago Tribune, there's a very good story by Howard Reich, the Trib's arts critic, on the burning of Pilgrim Baptist Church in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. It was at Pilgrim Baptist that Thomas A. Dorsey was music director, and it was there that black gospel music got its start. Reich says the church was "sacred space" in more ways than one:

Cultural tourists from several continents routinely made pilgrimages to Pilgrim Baptist, to behold the place where a rousing, life-affirming music first came into its own. Celebrated in feature films such as 'The Blues Brothers' and in documentaries such as 'Say Amen, Somebody,' gospel has been as deeply stitched into the fabric of the South Side as jazz and blues, if not more so.

For though the origins of jazz can be traced to 19th Century New Orleans, and though scholars believe that elements of blues have echoed through African music since antiquity, one man and one church are widely considered the progenitors of modern gospel music.

That man, of course, was Dorsey. Best known as the author of "Precious Lord Take My Hand," his gift was to change black religious music from spirituals to gospel. He started his career as a blues player named "Georgia Tom," backing Ma Rainey, among others. But in the 1920s he turned to the church. He once told the Trib:

"Before that, they would sing 'Spiri-tu-al-fellow-ship-of-the-Jor-dan land.' Jubilee songs. Wasn't nothing to them.

"But then I turned those blues moans on, modified some of the stuff from way back in the jazz era, bashed it up and smoothed it in. It had that beat, that rhythm. And people were wild about it."

The fire was Friday afternoon, and authorities say the building is a total loss. It is a historic loss for Chicago, as well as for America's musical heritage, and the story in Sunday's Trib captures that sense of history.

Note to ENG 111 students: I'd cite the story in the Trib like this: Howard Reich. "History Burns With Church." Chicago Tribune, online ed. 7 Jan. 2006. With all the information about date of access, web address, etc. If you're citing from this blog, I'd add: Quoted in Peter Ellertsen, title, name of blog, date, date of access, web address.

Test, test (taps mike) ... oh no, we're live

All the books and tip sheets I've been reading on how to start a web log say to write an introductory post ... one where you set out what you're going to do, just sort of introduce yourself. Which seems like a good idea, and I do plan to try it sometime.

But in the meantime, it looks like I've started posting. Inadvertently.

No telling how *that* happened. I'm just trying to figure out how to work the software. But here, apparently, we are ... live on the internet, and I don't have anything to introduce. Not yet. I want to use the blog to direct my journalism students to current media analysis and real-world examples of the stories and techniques we read about in our textbooks. But that comes later.

Besides, this is a beta version. No telling what it'll develop into.

In the meantime, here's the story that got the most hits last year on The Seattle Times' website. It's a odd tale about what might be described best as an unnatural sex act. No fewer than five of The Times' top 20 local stories in 2005 dealt with this incident involving a 45-year-old man, a horse and, apparently, a video camera. Local news columnist Danny Westneat observed:

... a lot of the stories on the list are what we serious-minded media professionals would imperiously call 'soft.' There's an article on a vanity license plate that showed the chemical formula for meth. A judge deciding a cat's life is worth exactly $45,480. Congressman Jim McDermott [D-Wash.] being featured in the book '100 People Who Are Screwing Up America.'

There's not much on the so-called 'issues' we're always implored to focus on, such as transportation or education. Nothing on the big campaign topics of the year, such as the [Seattle] monorail or gas tax. And nothing on this paper's major investigations or in-depth series.

No doubt with tongue in cheek, Westneat concluded with some advice:

So we in the news business enter 2006 with one eye on the future and, whether we admit it or not, one eye fixed firmly on our Web stats. It could lead to some schizophrenia, like that old Saturday Night Live skit on subliminal news:

'The state Legislature convened today in Olympia (horse sex), and Seattle officials (bestiality) requested funds for a new viaduct (perforated colon).'

Well, that's one way to leave bait for the search engines!