COMM 353: Extra credit

For 30,000 extra credit points ...

In what large East Coast city does the New Yorker have its editorial offices:

a. Illiopolis
b. Riverton
c. New Berlin
d. Petersburg
e. New York

Post your answer as a comment below. To make the system work, please be sure to tell your classmates who are not present today what you did to earn the 30,000 points.

COMM 353: SCHEDULE -- SPRING 2012

COMM 353 – Spring 2012

Schedule – Bulldog Bytes
 April 5 – layout deadline
 April 10 – “camera-ready” PDF

Written work for class
 5- to 8-page paper on “Years With Ross” (which may or may not resemble blog posts) due April 5
 5- to 8-page self-reflective essay in which you evaluate their perceptions of the course material and its impact on their

COMM 353: Assignment for 5- to 8-page essay on "Years With Ross"

Among the written assignments stipulated in the syllabus for COMM 353 is a reflective essay on “Years With Ross.” It is due Thursday, April 5 (with a grace period to Tuesday, April 10). Please note that as we draw near the end of the semester, I am only giving you a half week's grace period. In order to avoid a last-minute scramble that will put us all in a bad mood, you should get the essay in on time.

The focus of your essay is something I've been asking about and you've been blogging about for several weeks now. In a well-written, thoughtful essay five to eight typed pages in length, discuss how The New Yorker reflected the spirit of its times what what lessons it might have for journalists who wish to reflect the spirit of our times in a magazine format (in print, broadcast of digital media, or a combination of all three). At the end of "Years With Ross," James Thurber has this assessment of the founding editor of The New Yorker:

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.

In athis evaluation, please address these questions: (1) How was the New Yorker situated in the unique culture of its day? (2) How did that culture (Zeitgeist or whatever you want to call it) differ from ours today? (3) In what ways was that Zietgeist like ours? (4) Who is responding to the spirit of our times in ways that are like the New Yorker? (5) What opportunities are there today to create something new, "that had not happened before in his country, or enywhere else, to literature, comedy, and journalism?"

Background. A Zeitgeist, according to Wikipedia, is the "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age." That's the literal meaning of the German: "Zeit" is their word for time, and "Geist" is the word for spirit. Wikipedia explains, "Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era." Web resources on the New Yorker and the 1920s, 30s and f0s are linked below.

COMM 353: In class, Hiroshima, the spirit of the age and long-form journalism

At least two turn-of-the-century surveys identified the atomic bombing of Japan as the most significant news story of the 20th century. And the definitive account, a 31,000-word article on the destruction of Hiroshima by foreign correspondent John Hersey, appeared in The New Yorker. It relates to what I've been asking you to think about - how does a magazine refelct its Zeitgeist? and how can you as budding writers, publishers and communications professionals refect the spirit of our new age.

Hersey's Hiroshima took up the whole New Yorker issue of ____ 00, 1946, and it has come out as a bood. A very good introduction to Hiroshima by Harvard graduate Steve Rothman of Arlington, Mass., who began his website (linked below) as a grad school term paper at Harvard, sets the stage:

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.

By any measure, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a big story. One measure of its importance was a Time magazine essay by James Agee Aug. 20, 1945. It must seem badly overwritten today, but in its time it expressed how people felt. Agee later wrote the novel A Death in the Family, a book on Depression-era sharecroppers called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the screenplay for The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. In an on-deadline essay the week after the bombs fell, he said:

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.

How did The New Yorker respond to the biggest story of the 20th century? What does James Thurber say about it in Years With Ross? Surf Steve Rothman's website at http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/ - be sure to click on the link where Rothman says, "You can see the first page of the article" and click again the enlarge it so you can get a taste of Hersey's writing). What do you think of it? What would you say the biggest story of our time is? How would you cover it if you were editing a magazine?

COMM 353: Rubrics ... ** UPDATED 04-03 **

I'm working up a rubric - a set of criteria for evaluating an assignment - for the outside readers of Bulldog Bytes, and I thought I'd show you the rubrics I'm working from. There are two that look especially useful:

• For a magazine project at Sagemont School, a college prep school in suburban Miami.
  
  
  
• For a graphic arts project developed by Aaron T. Kennedy, based on MidLink Magazine, a project of North Carolina State and the University of Central Florida

.Some others below at the bottom of this post, but they seem a little too high school-ish for our purposes, but I'll copy and paste the URLs below.

UPDATE (April 3): Here is an email I sent out this morning to people I'm asking to serve as jurors or outside readers:

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!

http://download.intel.com/education/Common/my/Resources/AP/plans/biographies/biographies_magazine_rubric.doc

http://www.morgan.k12.ga.us/mchs/Lisa_Adams/Autobiographical%20Magazine%20Project.doc

http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/modtasteofsask/extras/appendix/magazinerubric.pdf

http://mabryonline.org/blogs/kaplan/Rubric%20for%20Magazine%20Unit.doc

http://www2.brandonsd.mb.ca/crocus/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/CAA30S-Magazine-Layout-Rubric.pdf

COMM 353: For class, week of March 27 **UPDATED 03-29 **

Who - or what - was the "little old lady from Dubuque?" Why does she matter? Discuss. Post your thoughts as comments below. What are you going to do for the little old lady from Dubuque in Bulldog Bytes?

If you're following the Affordable Care Act argument before the U.S. Supreme Court this week ...

The best source - I would say the only source - for up-to-the-minute reporting and analysis of Supreme Court cases is SCOTUSblog at http://www.scotusblog.com/. "SCOTUS" is the Associated Press' abbreviation for the Supreme Court of the United States, and Lyle Denniston, who covers high-profile cases for the blog, is arguably the best legal analyst in the business. He isn't a lawyer, by the way. He's an old courthouse reporter.

(So am I, but who's to say I'm biased?)

A close second is Dahlia Lithwick, of Slate.com. Click here for her analysis "It’s Not About the Law, Stupid."

COMM 353: An alternative weekly free-lance writer on Strunk, White, prolixity and long-form journalism

In the current issue of Illinois Times veteran free-lancer Jim Krohe has a reminiscence about writing long-form journalism for alternative newspapers. They're kind of a creature of the 1970s. (Don't knock it: So am I.) IT is an example. Riverfront Times in St. Louis is an example. The Chicago Reader is an example. In fact, The Reader is a great example because it was one of the first, and it's still one of the most successful.

Wikipedia, which has a pretty good page on alternative papers, says they're "a type of newspaper, that eschews comprehensive coverage of general news in favor of stylized reporting, opinionated reviews and columns, investigations into edgy topics and magazine-style feature stories highlighting local people and culture." They come out weekly, and they're a haven for long-form journalism.

Boy, do I mean long-form. Krohe says he developed a taste for it writing for The Chicago Reader:

... 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.

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.”

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:

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.

Harold Ross' New Yorker was the next best thing in the 1930s and 40s. Alternative were for the generation (mine) that came along in the 70s and 80s. What's going to be the next best thing for your generation?

COMM 353: For class Thursday ... ** UPDATED A LITTLE (see underlined text below) **

Go to the New Yorker website at http://www.newyorker.com/. Post your top-of-the-head thoughts to your blog ... or as a comment to this post ... or to whatever post you're posting it to ... or both ... or all three.

How does today’s New Yorker website compare to the magazine that Harold Ross created? The one you’ve been reading about? How does the New Yorker reflect the spirit of our age? (Also see definition of "Zeitgeist" below.) How would you describe is the spirit of our age, anyway? Post your thoughts as comments to this item.

Click here for a secret Mackerelwrapper message!

COMM 353: The New Yorker, the spirit of the times and the uncertainties of the 21st century

At the end of "Years With Ross," James Thurber has this assessment of the founding editor of The New Yorker:

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.

In class Tuesday, March 13:

We'll start by familiarizing ourselves with a website called Urban and Urbane: The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s, put up by students in American Studies at the University of Virginia at

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug02/newyorker/newyorkerhome.html.

By the way, this was a student project. Does it give you any ideas for our student project? Just askin'.

Read the Editor's Introduction and the thumbnails of the New Yorker staff. How did these people collaborate to create a magazine? Then we'll surf around the UVa website.

Ask yourself: (1) How was the New Yorker situated in the unique culture of its day? (2) How did that culture (*Zeitgeist or whatever you want to call it) differ from ours today? (3) In what ways was that Zietgeist like ours? (4) Who is responding to the spirit of our times in ways that are like the New Yorker? (5) What opportunities are there today to create something new, "that had not happened before in his country, or enywhere else, to literature, comedy, and journalism?" Keep these questions in mind. They won't go away. In the meantime, if you find something interesting that we ought to look at as a class, post a link as a comment to this post.

(*I'm throwing around a kind of a scholarly buzzword there, so maybe we'd better take a closer look at it to make sure we all mean the same thing by it. The Zeitgeist, according to Wikipedia, is the "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age." That's the literal meaning of the German: "Zeit" is their word for time, and "Geist" is the word for spirit. Wikipedia explains, "Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era." It's kind of pretentious, but it's late at night and I can't think of a better word at the moment.)

Find out as much as you can about the Roaring Twenties, the pop culture of the day, sports (Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were at the top of their game in the 20s), "flappers," prohibition, jazz, movies and the literary scene especially in New York City. Post links to stuff we can all look at. Here are some good starting places:

• Directory of Roaring Twenties webpages by Jerrie S. Cheek of Kennesaw State University at http://webtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek3/roaring_twenties.htm
  
  
• The Roaring Twenties: A Historical Snapshot of Life in the 1920's. http://www.1920-30.com/
  
  
• Wikipedia has a list of trends, events and a little bit of everything that shows what a bewildering period of change it was at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s#Literature

As yourself the same questions: How did the New Yorker situate itself in its Zeitgeist? How did it change? What opportunities are there to do something similar in our time? Or are there any?

Thomas Moore "The Meeting of the Waters"

Lyrics at http://www.free-scores.com/download-sheet-music.php?pdf=8805

PDF file for voice and piano at http://www.free-scores.com/download-sheet-music.php?pdf=8805

Lesley Nelson Burns at the Contemplator has this background: "Inspired by a visit with friends to the Vale of Avoca (in County Wicklow), Thomas Moore wrote these words to an old Irish air, The Old Head of Dennis." It's an old melody, and the tune was published in "Irish Melodies" in the 1820s. Several good versions (and a couple of awful ones) on YouTube.

A couple of the good ones:

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. ANÚNA, soloist Michael McGlynn & Linda Lampenius (violin) join the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Conductor John Finucane), Ireland's leading orchestra, for Michael McGlynn's arrangement of "The Meeting of the Waters". This was recorded at the National Concert Hall, Dublin in July 2010.



The Wolfe Tones have a cover called the "Vale of Avoca" -- on YouTube with nice pix



Lyrics and notes from "Sing, Sweet Harp of Erin: Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies (1808)." Folkworld http://www.folkworld.de/37/e/moore.html

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" 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.

From Fiddlers Companion (via keyword search on old Ceolas version linked to Mudcat Cafe):

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.
***
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).

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:

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 scene
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.

And so on

COMM 353: Week of March 13-15

BY THE WAY: I've been expecting to get emails from some of you with your completed midterms and links to your blogs. (You know who you are.) In fact I have been pining ,sad and lonely, by my inbox all weekend, and I am getting impatient. Federal law does not permit me to discuss the grades of individual students in public, but I believe I am allowed to discuss certain mathematical truths. One of them is the concept of zero (0). If I don't have your midterm, your grade is a zero. A zero is not a grade you want to have. DO I MAKE MY MEANING CLEAR?

Notes from class - edit board ... Thursday, March
 supermemoryman at gmail dot com for 2nd edits by Tuesday morning, march __
 pix at same time email articles


Keep your edits.

In class Tuesday, March 13:

Find out as much as you can about the Roaring Twenties and the literary scene in New York City. Here are some good starting places:

• Directory of Roaring Twenties webpages by Jerrie S. Cheek of Kennesaw State University at http://webtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek3/roaring_twenties.htm
  
  
  
  
• The Roaring Twenties: A Historical Snapshot of Life in the 1920's. http://www.1920-30.com/
  
  

COMM 353: Week of March 6-8 -- some thoughts and links on editing, an opportunity to express yourself in writing and a start on the week's assignments

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

Editing for publication is about more than grammar, punctuation, spelling and the nits we used to pick in freshman English. As Carol Saller suggests in her "Subversive Copy Editor," it's about relationships. Writers' relationships with their readers. With other writers. With all the other people involved in getting a publication on the street (or up on the World Wide Web). A good editor mediates those relationships, helps the writers relate to all those proofreaders, layout people, compositors, typesetters and -- foremost and always -- all those readers.

It's about correct grammar and mechanics, too, but they're just part of a much larger picture. A very useful tip sheet on magazine editing at eHow.com lists seven steps in getting an article ready for publication. The first: "Read the article. Re-read the article if time allows. ... Follow your instincts to determine whether this article will be attractive to your readership and, in turn, help increase magazine sales." Notice it's about sales? We're in a commercial world when we write for magazines (or edit them), so we do pay attention to the bottom line.

The second point deals with the tone and flow of a piece. With the third, we finally get to grammar, word choice and spelling ... but even then, eHow counsels, "... be careful not to take away the meaning of that passage. The goal is to make the article more interesting and easier to read." The fourth through the seventh steps are about copyfitting, fact checking, layout and, yes, another roud of editing at the copy desk for "checking for errors in grammar, spelling, statistical or factual errors." Taken together, they're a good summary of the editorial process at most magazines. Let's follow this link and together read the eHow tip sheet. How do these steps build on each other and fit together into a smooth editorial process?

Linked below are several Web pages about editing listed in a directory of writing tips about Editors and Editing on the About.com Grammar & Composition Web site. Before surfing around and finding some advice you find useful, here are a couple I like:

• Lilian Ross, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, once said (in an often-quoted passage picked up by 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.
  
  
• Ross' quote is worth thinking about even though (or because!) it reminds me of what Stanley Walker, a famous city editor at the old New York Herald-Tribune, said in 1924 about newspapering:
  

  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.

  
  
  
• Maxwell Perkins was a great literary editor of the same period as Lillian Ross and Stanley Walker. Perkins shepherded novels by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe into print for Scribners. There's not a lot about him on the World Wide Web, other than a few orphaned quotes on one of those websites that collect Famous Quotes and Authors My favorite: "Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it." A nice summary of Perkins' philosophy of editing in an article article on Perkins by John Walsh, of the London Independent, when a biopic of the famous editor was announced in 2010. It's worth quoting at length:
  

  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.

Now it's your turn: Open up the About.com directory, surf around the pages that are links to it. Don't omit the ones from newspapers. (Have you noticed, by the way, how many of these old geezers had newspaper backgrounds? You're probably aware your editing instructor is an old geezer with a newspaper background, too. What kind of writing gig in today's world is comparable to newspapering in my day?) Now that I've shared with you some of the wisdom I like, share with us the pearls you find as you surf through the linked pages. Quote a couple. Quote them, with an identifying signal phrase, so we know where you got them.

Focus on answering these questions: WHAT MAKES A GOOD EDITOR GOOD? WAS HAROLD ROSS A GOOD EDITOR?

Post your comments to your blogs and send me a link (if you haven't done so already).

For the rest of the week, i.e. the rest of today's class and Thursday's, here's what's in the syllabus:

Week 8 (March 6-8)
• Reading: Thurber, 121-154. How did the New Yorker’s editorial product change from the “roaring 20s” to the Great Depression, World War II and beyond? How did Ross change? Or did he?Keep following the New Yorker’s website at http://www.newyorker.com/.
• Writing: Keep blogging. What insights from the long-ago historical periods that Thurber writes about can offer you guidance for the second decade of the 21st century?
• Editing: [Keep doing what we're doing. It's getting about time to have copy in more-or-less final form and start dummying the publication. What's it going to look like? I feel like we're on schedule so far, but we've also got spring break coming up. And then Easter. So we want to make sure time doesn't get away from us. Just sayin'.]

COMM 353: "One-minute" type essay on course content

NOTE TO STUDENTS: Those of us who were in class today wrote out answers to these questions, printed out copies and emailed backup copies to me. If you weren't in class (and you know who you are), email them to me.

1. What have you learned about editing so far in COMM 353?

2. What did you know at the beginning of the semester?

3. What have you picked up from reading Nancy Brigham, Carol Saller and other handouts/Web sites, etc.?

4. What have you earned so far about editing, production, etc. – the actual process of getting a publication on the street – so far from the Bulldog Bytes project?

5. What would you like to learn in the second half of the semester?