COMM 353: Assignments for week of Feb. 28-March 1. Thurber, Ross and Bulldog Bytes ... and some recycled, but important stuff on "Years WIth Ross"

In class, we'll continue our juggling act:

• We'll touch base on copy and edits for the Bulldog Bytes, and take another look at the handout from Nancy Brigham's how-to book for UAW local newsletter editors. How does she talk about editing? How is it different from the way Carol Saller of the Univesity of Chicago Press talks about editing? How is it different from the way we talk about editing in college?
  
• We'll get some more experience with the Track Changes mode in Microsoft Word, by adapting one of the exercises on the website for British journalism students we looked at last week. I'd like to have you project your edits in class. WATCH THIS SPACE FOR DETAILS.
  
• We'll compare notes on our impressions of James Thurber's "Years With Ross," about the founding editor of the New Yorker, and we'll look at some of Thurber's writing in class. Let's compare notes on that, too. I MAY GIVE YOU THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXPRESS YOURSELF IN WRITING ABOUT THIS. WATCH THIS SPACE, TOO.

James Thurber

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. The book didn't have one, and we don't heed one either. I've always been impressed with how much emotion Thurber could convey with very simple line drawings. And, of course, his wry sense of humor. But I don't want to say too much about what I think. I'd rather hear what you think.



Let's read the following (did I say "let's?" What I meant was you are hereby commanded to read ...):

• A very good and mercifully brief biography of Thurber on Petri Liukkonen's Books and Writers website. It's off the beaten track, but it's an excellent source of literary biographies by a guy with a real appreciation for the arts. Liukkonen is director of The Kuusankoski Library, in Finland.
  
• A quick and painless way of getting into Thurber's head by reading some "brainy quotes" and aphorisms at, well, the brainyquotes.com website.
  
• Two stories by Thurber. They're short. Let's read them both: (1) "The Little Girl and the Wolf"; and (2) "Unicorn in the Garden" ... WHAT'S YOUR REACTION to them?

If you want to go deeper on Thurber, there's also a useful directory on the Big Eye website.

Here's some stuff recycled from last month's Mackerel Wrapper. We didn't do much with it at the time, but it makes some points from Adam Gopnik's intro to "Years WIth Ross" that we shouldn't forget:

... 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 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."

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?