COMM 353 - b/log - Week 1

Note to students: I'll be blogging along with you in class, at least in the beginning of the semester, partly as an example of I how go about using the medium to develop my voice as a writer. (Think of it as a voice exercise, like singing do mi sol do sol mi do as a warmup.) You certainly don't have to sound like me. But I encourage you to use your own blogs to exercise your own voice. Blogging is a form of publication, but it's provisional, transitory, written on the run. It isn't a finished product, and doesn't pretend to be. So take advantage of that freedom as you write your own blog. - pe

Getting started ...

In the tentative calendar, I assigned for the first week:

Writing: On your own blog, answer these questions, among others I will post to The Mackerel Wrapper. What can you learn from the two introductions [to the books we'll read this semester] that you can use in your writing and editing career? Who’s blogging for the New Yorker’s website these days? What is their slant on things? What are their backgrounds? What can you learn from them?

Some of that we'll do in class Thursday. But I just went flipping through the introductions. And here's a couple of things I learned.

From Carol Fisher Saller, "The Subversive Copy Editor" I get the following:

• Saller deals a lot with the nits we pick under the heading of "grammar," but she isn't concerned primarily with the picking grammatical nits. She certainly does like footnotes, though. Some of that freshman English-y stuff you never get away from. Even it isn't what's most important.
  
• She certainly does get a lot of questions for the Q&A column at University of Chicago Press. And - guess what? - the questions are about "grammar." That's what the general public thinks about when they think about editing. I guess it's something we all have to get used to.
  
• Saller tips her hand, says what she's doing. (Which is why I assigned the intro.) Says it flat out: "You won't learn the fundamentals of copyediting from me. Rather, consider this a 'relationshp' book, because I'm going to talk about the main relationships in your work life - with the writer, with your colleagues, and with yourself - in ways that you might not have considered before. Ways that might be considered subversive."
  
• A grammatical nit: I'm noticing Saller uses the "Oxford comma," that comma before "and" in a series - and I'm going to have to get used to it. Associated Press style omits it. University of Chicago keeps it in. My favorite example of why to use it (even though I usually don't) is the hypothetical book dedication to "the people whom I admire the most, my parents, Mother Theresa and the Pope."
  
• Back to relationships, and what I consider the collaborative nature of editing. I really like this: "Who knows? If we're lucky, in the course of figuring out some strategies for getting along with our authors, our bosses, our colleagues, and ourselves, we might also happen to learn something about getting along in life."

You'll no doubt find other things you like - or don't like - about Saller.

And 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:

• 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 blieve, if there remains onlyh one weird and moving fact, one writer to point at it, and one reader to take heart at its presence."

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?

An animated version of "The Last Flower," Thurber's cartoon fable published in November 1939 (two months after the outbreak of World War II), is embedded below. There's a very nice soundtrack to the YouTube clip, but it isn't Thurber's. He drew "The Last Flower" as cartoons on the printed page. So after a minute or so I turned the soundtrack off.