Credit where it's due: I got it from comedian Rollie Williams, who posted it under the headline "Every Beauty Ad Ever In 58 Seconds" to Upworthy at http://www.upworthy.com/, a social media site that's heavily critical of the fluff in media, especially the Internet, and defines its mission like this: "Hi, we're Upworthy, a new social media outfit with a mission: to help people find important content that is as fun to share as a FAIL video of some idiot surfing off his roof." .
When I say newspapers are as dead as the passenger pigeon and the great auk, I'm thinking more about the ink-on-paper platform. Have you seen the Patch.com websites up in the Chicago suburbs? They have a business model like you descirbe, a few professionals who coordinate the output of community bloggers, etc., in "underserved communities." That means little towns without a paper, inner-city neighborhoods or the suburbs around Chicago that don't get covered by the Trib or the Sun-Times. I first ran across it when I was following the Occupy profests in California, and I think the basic concept behind it could be adapted to a small campus like ours. Go to http://www.patch.com/ and click on "About Us."
In class today, Robyn mentioned Picasso's painting "Guernica," his response to the terror bombing of a Basque city during the Spanish Civil War. Turned out today was the anniversary of the bombing, on April 26, 1937, the town of Guernica destroyed by German aircraft supporting the fascist revolution that brought Spanish Gen. Francisco Franco tp [pwer/ Today the German newspaper Der Spiegel had a writeup on the bombing and its aftermath that fills in the story behind the painting. Reported Annika Müller of Der Spiegel:
The Basque town of Guernica was bustling with activity on April 26, 1937. "It was market day, and there were finally some sweets on sale once again," says Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea, who was 14 years old at the time. There was a cloudless sky, the 89-year-old adds, and glorious spring weather.Estimates of the death toll range from 200 to 3,000, in a town of 7,000. It was the first time heavy bombing had been unleashed on a civilian population, and Picasso, who was Spanish, was horrified. He was already commissioned to do a mural for the Spanish exhibit at an international fair in Paris, and he did the painting we know as "Guernica" instead. According to Wikipedia, which has an unusually good article on the painting, "Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace."The diary of a German pilot who took off in his "Heinkel" bomber in Burgos at around 3 p.m. that day confirms Iriondo's recollections. "We couldn't have asked for better weather for the operation," the pilot wrote. Over the next few hours, he and 37 other pilots belonging to the "Condor Legion" would shower Guernica with thousands of bombs. They were supported by a squadron of fighter planes that flew so low "that one could make out the pilots' faces," according to reports from survivors.
* * *
In the evening, when the bombers were finally gone and Iriondo could leave his shelter, the town that had been the spiritual and cultural center of the Basques was engulfed in flames. As the British historian Gijs van Hensbergen has written, by 7:45 p.m., Guernica had practically ceased to exist.
Hardly any of the houses, which were built primarily with bricks and wooden framing, remained intact. The town hall, the church and the hospital had been completely destroyed. That evening, the only thing remaining in its previous place was the sacred oak tree. What's more, not a single bomb had landed on the Astra weapons factory or the bridge in the suburb of Renteria, which was supposedly the primary objective of the attack.
Despite initial claims to the contrary, the Germans were not primarily concerned with clearing a path for Franco's troops. When testifying during the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring, the leading Nazi figure and aviation minister since 1933, said that this effort to support General Franco was much more about having an ideal opportunity to test out his still young air force and examine in a live-fire situation "whether the material had been adequately developed."
Thus, Guernica was a dress rehearsal of sorts for the blitzkrieg and a new breed of warfare that held no regard for civilian populations. ...
In class today, we were talking about art. By anybody's definition, the "Guernica" is a work of art.
After Franco's death, it was returned to Spain. When I saw it, the painting was still in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was powerful, and a reminder that sometimes the best art is political in a way that transcends the issues of the day. The picture above is of a tiled wall in Guernica that reproduces the Picasso painting. It is available in Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
* Did you notice the in-class writing assignment cleverly embedded in the headline? Details are at the bottom of the post, in boldface type.
There's an interesting interview with a New Yorker copyeditor on literary agent Andy Ross' blog. Dated Sept. 20, 2009, it features Mary Norris, whom we know as the author of a piece on punctuation I posted to our blog a couple of weeks ago, and it's full of little random glimpses of the sense of craftsmanship The New Yorker is famous for.
The one I liked best was a little throw-away remark at the end of a long reminiscence about working under the New Yorker's editors from the 1980s to the present. It came at the very end, after a fascinating tangent on "hot type" (i.e. type that was cast in hot metal instead of the photoengraving processes used now). So you should read the whole thing to get to it:
Andy: You have worked under [editors] William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Do you have a sense that there was a "golden age" of TNY or are we living in it now?There you have it: A good writer can make you care about anything. Even the nit-picky craft agenda of a copyeditor for The New Yorker.Mary: Hmmm. Sometimes when I have occasion to look back at an issue from the Shawn days, I am moved by the beauty of those vintage magazines: the lines of type were fitted character by character, the hot type is very alive, the black-and-white columns of print have a classic purity. Bob Gottlieb was careful to maintain that, though he introduced some changes. Tina Brown brought in color and photography, and shortened the length of pieces (and probably the attention span of the general reader). I think that what David Remnick has done is bring his newsman’s nose to the job. Remnick has succeeded in making The New Yorker a vital part of the national conversation. We seem to have found our voice after 9/11.
On the other hand, you find fewer quirky pieces that may not be particularly newsworthy but that readers love. For instance, “Uncle Tungsten,” by Oliver Sacks. (I still regret making him spell “sulfur” our way, with the “f,” when he wanted to spell it the old-fashioned British way, “sulphur,” which he’d grown up with.) Ian Frazier’s two-part piece on his travels in Siberia is a good recent example of a beautiful, funny, interesting, old-fashioned piece of writing. A good writer can make you care about anything.
That's my favorite. What's yours?
Craftsmanship is part and parcel of the New Yorker's brand, and Norris is all about craftsmanship. Merriam-Webster defines a craftsman as: "1 : a worker who practices a trade or handicraft; or 2 : one who creates or performs with skill or dexterity especially in the manual arts." What's your definition of craftsmanship? What's the difference between a craftsman and an artist? Do you consider yourself a craftsman? How important do you expect craftsmanship to be in your career as a writer, editor or communications professional?
Did you learn anything about craftsmanship in COMM 353? From working on Bulldog Bytes? From reading the how-to advice from Carol Saller and Nancy Brigham? From reading about Harold Ross and The New Yorker? How craftsmanslike was James Thurber? In your opinion, was he more of an artist or a craftsman? Did you pick up anything you can take away with you? (Or is that the same as the first question?) Can publications today be as careful as The New Yorker? Can you?
Please post your thoughts as comments below.
As we put Bulldog Bytes together, we opted for a combination of the first and second methods. With the benefit of hindsight, let's review that decision.
Background. I thought we made the right decision, based partly on my own experience and my suspicion from reading between the lines that Brigham had tried the third - group editing - and swore she'd never do that again. But with hindsight, I think we would have caught any misspelled bylines if we'd had a group process. If I were doing it again, I might try for some combination of all three of Brigham's methods. But that's what I think. I want to hear what you think.
So here's the question. How well did our editing process work? What worked? What didn't? What would you recommend to the next group of students in COMM 353 as they begin their class project? Post your preliminary, top-of-the-head thoughts as comments. And let's discuss.
A few days ago, cable’s TNT unleashed a “We Know Drama” ad that, ironically, is really funny. You may have seen it by now, but it’s well worth an in-depth look as an example of branded entertainment. In the world of online video, it’s not enough to simply display a bunch of dramatic TV shows and movies that your brand specializes in, you have to grab the viewer’s attention with something special, perhaps original, and definitely something that people will talk about later. TNT’s ad takes the “Improv Anywhere” model and runs with it very successfully. ...There's more. I think that reference should be to a group called Improve Everywhere, based in New York City. Anyway, it's a combination of improv and flash mobbing. And it does add drama.
Writing (skills) courses. A skills course is one where you learn, or practice, a skill like writing. If you're taking freshman English or journalism, you'll be thinking -- reflecting -- about how you've grown as a writer. What was your writing like when you began the course? Is it better now? Are you more confident? Do you know where to look stuff up? Are you mastering the inverted pyramid format? (Basic newswriting is both a skills course and a content course, by the way, so if you're taking COM 209 look at my tips for content courses as well.) Consult the goals and objectives in our syllabus, or the "competencies" in the Illinois Articulation Iniative guidelines for the course. They'll suggest what you're supposed to learn. Be specific. What specific strategies, techniques or skills have you learned? It never hurts to be specific.And here is a link to a very good discussion of self-reflective writing from Fairhaven College, Western Washington University. I especially like this:
A VITAL POINT: Try to write in a way which communicates information about the content of a course or independent study. Do not just speak in abstractions and personal feelings, such as "This class was extremely important to me because through discussion and the readings my thinking developed immensely." What subject? Which discussions? What did you read? think about what? developed from where to where?? A reader who does not know what the class studied should be able to gain an idea from your self-evaluation. One should be able to form some judgment about how well you understand a subject from what you say about it, not merely that you claim to understand it. In other words, BE SPECIFIC, BE SPECIFIC, BE SPECIFIC, BE SPECIFIC, BE SPECIFIC, and, finally, BE CONCRETE.And this, which will help you evaluate all your courses, not just COMM 353 ...
To quote former Fairhaven dean Phil Ager, "It is a fiction to measure learning in a single way which therefore can be recorded by a single letter grade." Instead, he argues, there are at least four different kinds of learning:
Cognitive. Your new understandings and knowledge? What is the most important single piece of knowledge gained? What will you remember in a year? five years? How has your knowledge grown? changed? become more sound?
Skills. New skills gained? old skills improved? your ability to solve problems, think, reason, research? Did you actually use these skills? What skills do you need to develop next?
Judgment. Do you understand the difference between process and content? Can you apply principles? to other classes? life? If you took the class again, what would you do differently? Has your way of thinking changed?
Affective. (emotions and feelings) Did you change? your beliefs? values? Was the class worth your time? Do you feel good about it? the single most important thing you learned about you? Evaluate your participation in discussion. Did you discuss and learn with other students? How has the course altered your behavior? Did you grow? shrink? stagnate? float?
To: Outside readers, Bulldog BytesAttachment 2: RE presentation in comm 353?
Thanks so much for agreeing to evaluate Bulldog Bytes, the student project in Communications 353 (advanced seminar - magazine editing). The magazine is finished now, and a PDF file has been saved to the faculty computer in Dawson 220. Plans now are to get it to you Tuesday. If the file can be compressed sufficiently, it will be emailed to you; if it can't be emailed, the students will copy it to flashdrives and deliver it to you in your offices. In either event, I will email you to let you know how we're handling it.
Since we're getting the completed project to you a few days later than we had anticipated, I am moving back the deadline in order to give you more time to work it into your schedules. (When we planned the production schedule, we made sure to build in enough time for contingencies like this.) The deadline is now a week later, on Tuesday, May 1.
We also tentatively plan to present the magazine to the university community during our class period, at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, May 3. We'll send out invitations as our plans develop; in the meantime, we hope you'll be able keep your schedules open so you can drop by Dawson 220 at that time.
Student layout editor Stacie Taylor has asked me to let you know that the document should be viewed by clicking on "book" and "two-sided" options in the pulldown menus in the PDF-viewing software; please change the setting under the "new" drop-down menu. She advises that the layout is best viewed at 50%, and content is best viewed at 100%.
To this message I am attaching an evaluation questionnaire. As I said in my earlier email, I'm asking jurors to consider things like whether the design and layout are attractive; the content is interesting and targeted to its intended audience of readers in the BenU-Springfield community; the articles are well written and observe the conventions of correct usage; the pictures and graphics enhance the story; and an overall judgment call of whether the product looks professional. I'm not asking you to grade the magazine (although you should feel free to recommend a grade if you wish), and I'm focusing on the product rather than the process.
If you have any questions, comments and/or suggestions, please don't hesitate to get back to me.
- Pete Ellertsen, instructor
Monday, April 16, 2012 5:31 PM
From: "David Logan" [ADDRESS REDACTED]
To: "'peter ellertsen'" [ADDRESS REDACTED]
Looks good to me. Any opportunity for them to get up and present is a good one.
I'll try my best to attend.
David Logan
Chair & Associate Professor, Division of Arts and Letters
Prose Editor, Quiddity International Literary Journal
Benedictine University at Springfield
-----Original Message-----
From: peter ellertsen [ADDRESS REDACTED]
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2012 9:32 PM
To: David Logan
Subject: presentation in comm 353?
David -
I'd like to have the students give a public presentation of the class
project for COMM 353 - mostly so they'll get some added experience for the
kind of presentations they'll do as graduate students (most of these kids
are going on to grad school whether they know it yet or not) and/or
professionals in the communications industry - and I plan to have Jason send
out blast emails to students, faculty and staff on the Springfield campus.
But I thought I'd better run it by you first and get your blessing, along
with comments and suggestions (!), before getting too far along with the
planning. We would do it during our last class period, at 2:30 p.m.,
Thursday, May 3, and I imagine it would last 20 minutes to a half hour.
So here's a preliminary draft, abelow the 3-em dash, subject to changes I'll
solicit from the students in class Tuesday. Please let me know what you
think.
Thx a million!
- Pete
---
Students, faculty and members of the administration at Benedictine
University at Springfield are invited to the presentation of "Bulldog
Bytes," a magazine on physical fitness opportunities for BenU-Springfield
students. The magazine was planned, written, edited and produced by students
in Communications 353 (advanced seminar - magazine editing). The
presentation will be at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, May 3, in the computer lab at
Dawson 220. The magazine xxx [I think the students should supply this
description].
Students in COMM 353 are Nick Jachino, John McCarthy, Robyn Nadziejko,
Stacie Taylor and Van Wirth. Instructor is Pete Ellertsen.
... the point is that when you restrict the use of the serial comma solely to those instances where a genuine ambiguity exists, then every time you come to a series you have to stop and think. By adopting the serial comma, we have more energy to devote to sprinkling in commas elsewhere.
Reddit user kittymonzo posted a YouTube video of her cat viciously mauling what is identified as the owner's homework assignment on the kitchen counter. Okay, so maybe not viciously, but the feline is certainly going to town on that piece of paper.By the way, if you haven't turned in your midterm yet and you're still taking the course (you know who you are), you can still get full credit if you produce a sworn affidavit from your cat testifying that said cat did in fact eat your midterm. If you don't have such an affidavit, you can still get enough partial credit to make a passing grade in the course. But you really, really need to contact me and/or show up in class.
H.W. Ross had a world and wealth of warming and wonderful things to look back upon as he lay dying. He had been a great success, he had made hundreds of friends and thousands of admiers, he had contributed soetmhing that had not happened before in his country, or enywhere else, to literature, comedy, and journalism, and he was leaving behind him an imposing monument. He had got his frail weekly off the rocky shoals of 1925 and piloted it into safe harbor through Depression and Recession, World War II, and the even greater perils of the McCarthy era. His good ship stood up all the way. (273)From your reading of Thurber and from websites like the the Editor's Introduction and the thumbnails of the New Yorker staff in the a website Urban and Urbane: The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s put up by students in American Studies at the University of Virginia, please evaluate how Ross and the others at The New Yorker collaborated to create a magazine.
The article, written by John Hersey, created a blast of its own in the publishing world. The New Yorker sold out immediately, and requests for reprints poured in from all over the world. Following publication, "Hiroshima" was read on the radio in the United States and abroad. Other magazines reviewed the article and referred their readers to it. The Book-of-the-Month Club sent a copy of the article in book form to its entire membership as a free selection. Later that fall, "Hiroshima" was published as a book by Alfred A. Knopf and has remained in print ever since.One of the surveys, I think the most significant, was conducted by the journalism school at New York University. It lists "The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century" ... Hersey's Hiroshima is first. (The second, to give you some context, was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), and the third was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate investigations for the Washington Post in 1972-73. Fourth was Edward R. Murrow's "This is London . . ." radio reports for CBS on the German bombing of London in 1940.) The other survey, by the Newseum in Washington, D.C. The museum's historian Eric Newton said, "Americans have by a provocatively close margin picked the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as the top news story of the 20th century." Some 30,000 members of the public ranked the atomic bomb as the most important, as did a sample of professional journalists. Men and the journalists ranked it most important, while women ranked it in fourth place, tied with the 1969 moon landing.
e greatest and most terrible of wars ended, this week, in the echoes of an enormous event—an event so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance. The knowledge of victory was as charged with sorrow and doubt as with joy and gratitude. More fearful responsibilities, more crucial liabilities rested on the victors even than on the vanquished.And this, as he concluded:
The promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite— with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. The bomb rendered all decisions made [during meetings of the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union] so far, at Yalta and at Potsdam, mere trivial dams across tributary rivulets. When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul, and, in the terrible words of the Psalmist, that no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him.Agee is all but forgotten today, and he was more a competent journalist than a great writer, but I think he captured the spirit of age.
Hi _____ -
Can you do me a big favor? I'm teaching an advanced seminar (COMM 353) this semester, and I need outside readers to evaluate a six- to eight-page magazine project the students are designing and editing. They're calling it "Bulldog Bytes"; they're focusing on physical fitness opportunities for Benedictine University Springfield students; and they plan to have a PDF file of the completed project ready by next week. I hope to have it to readers by the end of the week, and I need it back by April 24.
One component of their grade in the course will be an assessment of the completed magazine project by outside jurors (which is where you would come in, if you can do it). I am developing an informal rubric, which I can get to the jurors along with the PDF version of the magazine. I'll be asking jurors to consider things like whether the design and layout are attractive; the content is interesting and targeted to its intended audience of readers in the BenU-Springfield community; the articles are well written and observe the conventions of correct usage; the pictures and graphics enhance the story; and an overall judgment call of whether the product looks professional. I'm not asking the outside readers to grade the magazine (although you should feel free to recommend a grade if you wish), and I'm focusing on the product rather than the process as I develop the rubrics. I'm making a point designing everything so you won't have to spend more than a few minutes to look over the magazine, fill out the rubric and get it back to me by Tuesday, April 24, or thereabouts.
Please let me know if you can do this. And it goes without saying that if you can, I'll owe you one!
... White and Strunk’s Elements of Style, which urges conciseness and brevity, made as little sense to me as, say, [right-wing tax protester] Grover Norquist on taxes. As a result, I have spent 35 years trying to cram magazine articles into the space of a newspaper column, and book chapters into the space of a magazine article, and haven’t pulled it off yet.Long-form journalism, as no doubt you've noticed reading James Thurber's "Years With Ross," was developed largely by The New Yorker as life got serious with the Depression and World War II. The alternative weeklies, in a way, took what Ross did in New York and replicated the business model in smaller cities. In Chicago, according to a pretty good Wikipedia profile:
I might have been cured as a young professional had I gone to work for, say, a daily newspaper where reporters are typically given only 250 words to tell 500 words worth of story. Instead, like many a bright young boy from small-town Illinois who goes to Chicago, I met people all too willing to indulge my weaknesses for their own profit. I found them not in the drug dens of the West Side but in a converted warehouse in River North, at the offices of the Reader, Chicago’s alternative weekly.
I was to write nearly 60 pieces for that weekly, several of which were some 10,000 words long. By Reader standards, this verged on the laconic. The Reader of yore was a refuge for the endangered species known as long-form journalism. Ben Joravsky’s two-part report in 1992 on the Roosevelt High basketball program, for instance, added up to 40,000 words. This put the editors at odds with much of their readership, which cherished the paper mainly for its entertainment reviews and classified ads. One of the veteran editors, Michael Miner, recently offered this imaginary riposte to those who complained that even a commute on Chicago’s slow-poke el gave them too little time to finish a Reader cover story. “We’re publishing 20,000 words on beekeeping because Mike Lenehan felt like writing 20,000 words, and we know you won’t read 19,000 of them; but if you do, by God, you won’t find a single typo or dangling participle and you’ll learn a hell of a lot about bees. And if you don’t, no hard feelings and good luck finding that apartment.”
The Reader was perhaps best known for its deep, immersive style of literary journalism, publishing long, detailed cover stories, often on subjects that had little to do with the news of the day. An oft-cited example is a 19,000-word article on beekeeping by staff editor Michael Lenehan. This article won the AAAS Westinghouse Science Journalism Award, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1978. ... Ben Joravsky's "A Simple Game" followed a public high school basketball team for a full year. Published in two parts, a total of 40,000 words, it was reprinted in the anthology Best American Sportswriting 1993.Ben Joravsky still covers politics for The Reader and has written five books, including a print adaptation of the TV documentary "Hoop Dreams" about high school basketball in Chicago. Mike Lenehan was for many years the executive editor of The Reader. His beekeeping article, which is famous in Chicago writing circles, ran in 1977 and has been reprinted in a book "The Essence of Beeing" (get the pun? get it? get it?), set in 12- and 14-point Cooper Oldstyle type and illustrated by artist and professor Alice Brown-Wagner. It is 45 pages long and costs $300 postpaid.
H.W. Ross had a world and wealth of warming and wonderful things to look back upon as he lay dying. He had been a great success, he had made hundreds of friends and thousands of admiers, he had contributed soetmhing that had not happened before in his country, or enywhere else, to literature, comedy, and journalism, and he was leaving behind him an imposing monument. He had got his frail weekly off the rocky shoals of 1925 and piloted it into safe harbor through Depression and Recession, World War II, and the even greater perils of the McCarthy era. His good ship stood up all the way. (273)In class during the next few days, we will unpack Thurber's statement. We'll see how well it holds up in light of other evidence we find, mostly on the World Wide Web, and we'll try to determine whether anyone can do today the same kinds of things Ross did in his day.
"Meeting of the Waters" is usually scored in A, but Digital Tradition has a lead sheet with lyrics transposed to D. The thread "Tune Req: Meeting of the Waters" at Mudcat Cafe has dates of Thomas Moore's "Irish Melodies," also relationship (or lack thereof) of his air -- "The Old Head of Denis" -- and a Scottish pipe also titled "The Meeting of the Waters" but with a different melody. links to an early version of Andrew Kuntz' "Fiddlers Companion" w/ tune families, etc. AS ALWAYS, THE MUDCAT THREAD IS A VERY GOOD SOURCE AND HAS MORE INFORMATION THAN WHAT I'VE SUMMARIZED HERE.
Moore's notes:
[1] "The Meeting of the Waters" forms a part of that beautiful scenery which lies between Rathdrum and Arklow, in the county of Wicklow, and these lines were suggested by a visit to this romantic spot, in the summer of the year 1807.
[2] The rivers Avon and Avoca.
A bronze bust of Moore marks the spot, and a plague records the tribute offered by Eamon de Valera: "During the dark and all but despairing days of the nineteenth century, Thomas Moore's songs kept the love of country and the lamp of hope burning in millions of Irish hearts here in Ireland and in many lands beyond the seas. His songs and his poems and his prose works, translated into many foreign tongues, made Ireland's cause known throughout the civilized world and won support for that cause from all who loved liberty and hated oppression."
In James Joyce's "Ulysses," Leopold Bloom remarks about the Moore statue in College Green Dublin: "They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters."
MEETING OF THE WATERS, THE [1] (Ceann Deiginse). AKA and see "Todlin Hame," "Gage Fane", "Na Geadna Fiadaine," "The Wild Geese," "Armstrong's Farewell," "The Old Head of Denis," "My Name is Dick Kelly," "An Bacac Buide," "The Origin of the Harp," "Old Ireland Rejoice." Irish, Air (6/8 time). A Major. Standard. AB. The title appears in a list of tunes in his repertoire brought by Philip Goodman, the last professional and traditional piper in Farney, Louth, to the Feis Ceoil in Belfast in 1898 (Breathnach, 1997). Roche Collection, 1982, Vol. 3; No. 31, pg. 9.And this, the tune that Moore cites as the air in Irish Melodies:
OLD HEAD OF DENIS, THE (Sean Ceann Doncad). AKA and see "Meeting of the Waters," "Helen," "The Wild Geese." Irish, Air (6/8 time, "with feeling"). G Major. Standard. One part. The melody was used by Thomas Moore for his text "The Meeting of the Waters," but was the vehicle for a number of hymns and ballads, including many cowboy songs such as "The Dreary Black Hills" and the Catskill Mountain (New York) collected "Rock Island Line" (Cazden, et al, 1982). O'Neill (1850), 1903/1979; No. 526, pg. 92.The tune is related to the Irish lament for the Wild Geese who fled Ireland after the wars of Cromwell and William III:
WILD GEESE, THE [1] (Na Geadna Fiadaine). AKA and see "Gage Fane," "The Origin of the Harp," "Old Ireland Rejoice," "Armstrong's Farewell," "The Old Head of Denis," "The Meeting of the Waters," "Todlin Hame," "My Name is Dick Kelly," "An bacac buide," "An Cana Draigeann Eille," "Tis believed that this harp." Irish, Slow Air (3/4 time). A Major (O'Neill, O'Sullivan/Bunting): G Major (O Canainn). Standard. One part. This Irish air dates back to the mid-17th century and has often been used as a song tune. Perhaps the first lyrics were written in 1670 by John Fitzgerald, son of the Knight of Glin. In the next century a version called in Irish "Na Geandna Fiadaine" had its title mangled into English as "Gage Fane" and appeared in several collections. The given title commemorates the thousands of Irish soldiers who fled to France and Spain after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, preferring an honorable exile to remaining in their country when their cause was lost. These exiles sustained the national reputation afterwards under the name of the Irish Brigade in the wars on the Continent.And to quite a few other tunes as well, on both sides of the Atlantic, including the "Rye Whiskey" family and tunes heard at the Belfast harp festival in 1798:
***
A legend has it that the air was sung by the women assembled on the shore at the time the troops embarked after the defeat of the Gaelic chiefs. O'Sullivan (1983) points out this is poetic license for the exodus was gradual, and not an embarkation along the lines of Dunkirk in this century, but (quoting MacGeoghan, who states in his History of Ireland {pg. 599}) "within the 50 years which followed the Treaty of Limerick 450,000 Irish soldiers died in the service of France." O'Sullivan also adds the title "Na Geadna Fiadhaine" is a translation of the English "The Wild Geese," and not vice versa, but that even the Gaelic-speaking majority at the time referred to these men as "Wild Geese," for they flocked before taking flight.
***
Source for notated version: Bunting noted the tune from Patrick Quin, the harper, in 1803. Holden (Collection), volume II, 1806 (appears as "Gage Fane"). Mulholland (Collection), 1810 (appears under the erroneous title "The Wild Swan"). Neale (Celebrated Irish Tunes), pg. 25. Ó Canainn (Traditional Slow Airs of Ireland), 1995; No. 51, pgs. 46-47. O'Neill (1850), 1979; No. 170, pg. 30. O'Sullivan/Bunting, 1983; No. 113, pgs. 162-164. Thompson (Hibernian Muse), c. 1789 (appears as "Irish Air"). Island ILPS9432, The Chieftains - "Bonaparte's Retreat" (1976). RCA 09026-61490-2, The Chieftains - "The Celtic Harp" (1993).
BACA(C)H BUIDHE, AN (Lame Yellow Beggar). AKA and see "Bacach Buidhe Na Leige" (The Yellow Beggar of the League), "The Lame Yellow Beggar," "The Wild Geese," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Todlin Hame," "The Meeting of the Waters." Irish, Air (4/4 time). B Flat Major (O'Sullivan/Bunting): G Major (Flood). Standard. AAB (Flood): ABB (O'Sullivan/Bunting). The great Irish collector Edward Bunting's 1840 publication attributes composition of this melody to the famous Ulster harper Rory Dall O'Cahan in the year 1650. Though born in Ulster, O'Cahan performed primarily in Scotland, and this tune is "said to have been composed by him in reference to his own fallen fortunes, towards the end of his career." {See note for "Give Me Your Hand" for more information on O'Cahan). Audiences heard the air in "The Beggar's Wedding" (1728), an opera by Charles Coffey of Dublin, and it was printed in the score in 1729. The title was reported by the Belfast Northern Star of July 15th, 1792, as having been a tune played by one of ten Irish harp masters at the last great convocation of ancient Irish harpers, the Belfast Harp Festival, held that week. Bunting, who was in attendance at the festival, claimed to have noted it from harper Charles Byrne in his manuscript, though he attributes harper Daniel Black in 1792 as the source in his 1840 published work. The melody may also be found in Neales' Celebrated Irish Tunes, pg. 26 and Holden's Old Established Tunes, pg. 36, reports O'Sullivan (1983), and is a variant of the melody known variously as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Todlen Hame," "Rye Whisky," "Jack of Diamonds," "Drunken Hiccups," etc. Flood, 1905; pg. 80. Murphy (A Collection of Irish Airs and Jiggs, 1809 or 1820; pg. 22. O'Sullivan/Bunting, 1983; No. 20, pgs. 34-35.There's an American parody "The Meeting of the Waters of Hudson & Erie" by Samuel Woodworth. It begins like Moore's, "There is not in the wild world a Valley so sweet ..." but gets off into the brave new America vs. tired old Europe meme pretty quickly:
Yet it is not that Wealth now enriches the sceneAnd so on
Where the treasures of Art, and of Nature, convene
'Tis not that this union our coffers may fill
O! no - it is something more exquisite still
'Tis, that Genius has triumph'd and Science prevail's
Tho' Prejudice flouted, and Envy assail'd
It is, that the vassals of Europe may see
The progress of mind, in a land that is free.
I know a writer who refuses to let a word of his prose be altered. You’ve never heard of him. It’s a shame. His small press books would sell much better if he would.
I also know a best-selling author of Civil War historical novels who recently released his third book. I came up to him at a literary festival and blurted out, “You’re brilliant!” He blushed. “Shucks,” he said, “my editor made me cut out 200 pages.”-- Charles J. Shields, "The Editor of the Breakfast Table" Qtd. in About.com
A helpful editor should have the following qualities: understanding of and sympathy for writers; the editorial talent to recognize and appreciate journalistic and literary talent; an openness to all kinds of such talent; confidence and strength in his own judgment; resistance to fads and fakery in publishing; resistance to corruption and opportunism, to exhortations from people, including writers and other editors, who are concerned with "popularity" and "the market"; moral and mental strength, and the physical strength to sustain these; energy and resourcefulness in helping writers discover what they should write about; literally unlimited patience with selfishness and egotism; the generosity and character required to give away his own creativity and pour it into a group of greedy and usually ungrateful writers.On the seventh day, presumably, the helpful editor rests.
What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the wisdom of the ages. He is not only handsome, but he has the physical strength which enables him to perform great feats of energy. He can go for nights on end without sleep. He dresses well and talks with charm. Men admire him; women adore him; tycoons and statesmen are willing to share their secrets with him. He hates lies and meanness and sham, but he keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as the profession; whether it is a profession, or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it. When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.
He did not, as some people imagine, rewrite the works of his starry charges; instead he gave them advice on structure, selection and where their creative instincts were taking them. Oddly, for an editor, he was sloppy about punctuation, spelling and proof-reading. His letters were written in a slapdash tirade of half-connected thoughts, linked by commas and plus signs. This, for instance, to Hemingway: "I'm glad you're going to write some stories. All you have to do is to follow your own judgement, or instinct + disregard what is said, + convey the absolute bottom quality of each person, situation + thing. Isn't that simple!!... I can get pretty depressed but even at worst I still believe... that the utterly real thing in writing is the only thing that counts + the whole racket melts down before it. All you have to do is trust yourself."According to Holywood Reporter, Sean Penn was being considered for the role of Perkins' character, by the way. That was in the summer of 2010. Nothing heard of it since then.
... these are some of the things that struck me in James Thurber's "The Years With Ross" about the early glory years of the New Yorker under founding editor Harold Ross:Notice how the world wars, WWI and WWII, defined the New Yorker's moment in history? What defines our moment in history in the early years of the 21st century? How is it different? How is it the same? How can it shape our careers as writers and/or journalists?
- First thing I learn right off the bat: I really ought to go back and look at the damn book before I write out assignments! This book doesn't have an "introduction." It has forewords. A couple of them. The first, and most important, is by the New Yorker's cultural affairs writer Adam Gopnik.
- Gopnik tells us what to look for in the book, too. Here's one thing: "... the story it tells [is] about how writers and editors together, in the years between [World War I Gen. John] Pershing and Pearl Harbor, made a new kind of American music ... a style emerged that still strikes a downbeat for most good American writing today." Gopnik is using "music," of course, as a metaphor from writing.
- And this: "... there is something permanent in The Years with Ross about how a writer learns to write, what an editor can teach him, and how the tone they shape together can be around for other writers when both of them are gone."
- A comment about Thurber, but it applies as well to the "music" or prose style that The New Yorker did so much to develop: "No one worked harder or went further to slim down the space between American speaking and writing voices, between the way we talk and the way we write."
- Gopnik writes for The New Yorker, and he says that style survives today. "Those of us who draw our paychecks at that particular window think it still goes on at the magazine itself, and we knock ourselves out trying to make sure it can. But it doesn't belong to us any more than it ever did. ... I sometimes think of Thurber's late, lovely fable of the last flower, where the world contines because one man, one woman, and one flower are left after the Apocalypse to continue it. Ross's years, Thurber's tone, will go on, I believe, if there remains only one weird and moving fact, one writer to point at it, and one reader to take heart at its presence."
Week 5 (Feb. 14-16)
• Reading: Thurber, ix-35 (this includes reading Thurber’s foreword and re-reading [Adam] Gopnik’s [we read it the first time back in January], which may give you some indication of how important I think it is).KeepStart following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging if you've started a blog, and start blogging if you haven't. As you start reading Thurber, ask yourself how this story of a very idiosyncratic guy who founded a magazine nearly 100 years ago can have any relevance to our world of bewildering change in media. Blog about it. Keep it in mind as you read on.
• Editing: [deleted - we're going to handle the edits differently in class, but for now the main thing is to get going on Bulldog Bytes]
Week 6 (Feb . 21-23)
• Reading: Thurber, 36-99.KeepStart following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/. As you read more of Thurber, you’ll notice he isn’t exactly writing a straight biography. He’s tricky. What’s his attitude toward Ross? How does he convey it? What can you learn about editing – and about writing – from reading it? Are there principles and practices, tricks, techniques or odd little bits of information you can apply you own career?
• Writing: Keep blogging about your experience and your reading. My questions under the reading assignments are intended to be blogworthy, and you should address them in the blog.
• Editing: [deleted - see above]
Sean McManus was first published in a computer magazine while at school and now has ten years experience researching, writing and editing for business and consumer publications. He has written for several magazines you've heard of (such as Personal Computer World, Marketing Week and Melody Maker) and plenty you probably haven't (including World Highways, Customer Loyalty Today and Bridge design & engineering).So here's another guy who's out in the marketplace hustling free-lance gigs, and using the web to promote himself. Doing the kinds of things we have to do in today's economy, in other words.
