An article in today's New York Times reports from the trial of a commandant of a notorious prison run by the Khmer Rouge in which an estimated 14,000 people were tortured and executed. It is the first trial of a senior Khmer official -- 30 years after Pol Pot was driven from Cambodia.
When considering the actions and behavior of seemingly regular, unremarkable people during events like the Killing Fields or in Hitler's Germany, I think it's instructive to consider the words of Primo Levi:
"Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions."
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
It Is Difficult
Here is an excerpt from an introductory frontispiece of IT IS DIFFICULT, a book about Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project from 1994-1998.
Jaar quotes Nigerian writer Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991.
In "A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING," Orki writes:
Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead.
But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses outside.
The dead in the school were--forgive the paradox--alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against at wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race. I prayed--knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time--but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well.
And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover's--I sang all through the recognition.
I sang silently even when a good-hearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world--and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.
Jaar quotes Nigerian writer Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991.
In "A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING," Orki writes:
Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead.
But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses outside.
The dead in the school were--forgive the paradox--alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against at wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race. I prayed--knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time--but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well.
And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover's--I sang all through the recognition.
I sang silently even when a good-hearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world--and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Walker at the Met
An exhibition of some 700 of the 9,000 postcards collected by Walker Evans during his life is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times ran a review of the show and said of it, "Although small and prosaic, [it] is also richly resonant."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Clarity and Purpose=Project Completion
Here are some powerful ideas that can help us work and live with more vitality, clarity, and purpose:
1. On the door frame outside his workroom, [writer William Styron] tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
2. “A task left undone remains undone in two places - at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. They siphon off a little more of your personal power every time you delay. No need to be a perfectionist, that’s debilitating in an imperfect world, but it’s good to be a ‘completionist’. If you start it, finish it - or forget it.”
– Brahma Kumaris, quote courtesy of David Allen
1. On the door frame outside his workroom, [writer William Styron] tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
2. “A task left undone remains undone in two places - at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. They siphon off a little more of your personal power every time you delay. No need to be a perfectionist, that’s debilitating in an imperfect world, but it’s good to be a ‘completionist’. If you start it, finish it - or forget it.”
– Brahma Kumaris, quote courtesy of David Allen
Friday, March 13, 2009
Stranger With A Camera
Elizabeth Barret's 2000 documentary from Appalshop, "Stranger With A Camera," raises many provocative issues we need to consider as journalists and students of journalism. Irate about media outsiders coming into his community, Hobart Ison of eastern Kentucky shot and killed Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor in Jeremiah, Kentucky in 1967. The documentary raises, among others, questions such as:
What is the role of someone who uses a camera to document a community?
What is the role of an outsider who goes into a community with a documenting camera? What is the role of an insider who wants to document his or her community?
In your comments on this blog, consider other questions and issues that the documentary brings to your mind.
Consider how Barret, as an insider of a particular kind, told her story. What raw materials did she use? What points of view?
How does this documentary work fit into the work of Agee and Evans in Hale County, Alabama; Shelby Lee Adams in Kentucky; Birney Imes in Mississippi; Jacob Riis in New York's Lower East Side; Rory Kennedy's in Kentucky; August Sander's in Germany; Adrian Le Blanc's in the Bronx; Alex Kotlowitz's in Chicago. And Nellie Bly, Barbara Einreich, Jonathan Kozol. And many more?
BH
What is the role of someone who uses a camera to document a community?
What is the role of an outsider who goes into a community with a documenting camera? What is the role of an insider who wants to document his or her community?
In your comments on this blog, consider other questions and issues that the documentary brings to your mind.
Consider how Barret, as an insider of a particular kind, told her story. What raw materials did she use? What points of view?
How does this documentary work fit into the work of Agee and Evans in Hale County, Alabama; Shelby Lee Adams in Kentucky; Birney Imes in Mississippi; Jacob Riis in New York's Lower East Side; Rory Kennedy's in Kentucky; August Sander's in Germany; Adrian Le Blanc's in the Bronx; Alex Kotlowitz's in Chicago. And Nellie Bly, Barbara Einreich, Jonathan Kozol. And many more?
BH
A Note About Balance
Here is an email I got today from David Allen, who thinks deeply about Getting Things Done. See davidco.com
He says this:
[Balance is tough enough when you are aware of all your goals, values, projects, and commitments. But it’s impossible if you don’t revisit the whole game consistently.
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world." – James Fenimore Cooper]
So this reminds us to spend an hour or two each week--I do it on Friday or Saturday mornings usually--reviewing all of our projects.
This time is not spent DOING the projects. It is spent going over the project list, adding to or subtracting from the list, of what is important and what needs to get done in the short term, medium term, and long term. It is spent thinking about the discrete parts of the project and what are the Next Steps.
Keep a notepad, virtual or otherwise, close by. Your mind will remind of things undone. You can also keep a list of the items you can do in two minutes or less. And you can schedule a time to tackle a batch of those. It can be SO SATISFYING to complete quickly some of those tasks. Set a timer. See if you can finish some of them in two minutes. You will become more aware of what can be done quickly and what cannot. You will see how you may or may not misjudge time.
In the end, you will get more accomplished of what you want to accomplish.
If you have other ideas about how to get things done, share them with comments here, in class or with your small group.
BH
He says this:
[Balance is tough enough when you are aware of all your goals, values, projects, and commitments. But it’s impossible if you don’t revisit the whole game consistently.
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world." – James Fenimore Cooper]
So this reminds us to spend an hour or two each week--I do it on Friday or Saturday mornings usually--reviewing all of our projects.
This time is not spent DOING the projects. It is spent going over the project list, adding to or subtracting from the list, of what is important and what needs to get done in the short term, medium term, and long term. It is spent thinking about the discrete parts of the project and what are the Next Steps.
Keep a notepad, virtual or otherwise, close by. Your mind will remind of things undone. You can also keep a list of the items you can do in two minutes or less. And you can schedule a time to tackle a batch of those. It can be SO SATISFYING to complete quickly some of those tasks. Set a timer. See if you can finish some of them in two minutes. You will become more aware of what can be done quickly and what cannot. You will see how you may or may not misjudge time.
In the end, you will get more accomplished of what you want to accomplish.
If you have other ideas about how to get things done, share them with comments here, in class or with your small group.
BH
Monday, March 9, 2009
Writing about Writers: Flannery O'Connor
By Joy Williams
FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O'Connor. By Brad Gooch. Illustrated. 448 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
In Sunday, March 1, 2009, NYT Book Review, writer Joy Williams writes about the new book on the quirky and amazing Flannery O'Connor.
Here is the lead. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy’s assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.
Here is the ending. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.” She found sickness “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” She was buried the day after she died. Robert Giroux sent a copy of “Wise Blood” to Evelyn Waugh hoping for a blurb, and Waugh replied, “The best I can say is: ‘If this really is the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ ” One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt. The civil rights movement interested her not at all. When she received a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, “The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.” Her kinship, she believed, was with Hawthorne. She also described herself as being “13th-century.” She is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes.
FLANNERY A Life of Flannery O'Connor. By Brad Gooch. Illustrated. 448 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
In Sunday, March 1, 2009, NYT Book Review, writer Joy Williams writes about the new book on the quirky and amazing Flannery O'Connor.
Here is the lead. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. She liked to drink Coca-Cola mixed with coffee. She gave her mother, Regina, a mule for Mother’s Day. She went to bed at 9 and said she was always glad to get there. After Kennedy’s assassination she said: “I am sad about the president. But I like the new one.” As a child she sewed outfits for her chickens and wanted to be a cartoonist.
Here is the ending. What can you learn about writing from reading this?
Flannery. When asked why she wrote, she replied, “Because I’m good at it.” She found sickness “more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” She was buried the day after she died. Robert Giroux sent a copy of “Wise Blood” to Evelyn Waugh hoping for a blurb, and Waugh replied, “The best I can say is: ‘If this really is the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ ” One should pretty much ignore her own pronouncements on her art, though in her last years she increasingly endeavored to explain her intentions. She was an anagogical writer, of that there is no doubt. The civil rights movement interested her not at all. When she received a request to stage one of her stories, she wrote, “The only thing I would positively object to would be somebody turning one of my colored idiots into a hero.” Her kinship, she believed, was with Hawthorne. She also described herself as being “13th-century.” She is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Po' Folk Journalism
Pointing a camera at the poor, the isolated and the disenfranchised is not a journalistic practice that has gone out of favor. Reading Calvin Trillin's "A Stranger with a Camera" from 1969 reminded me of a recent 20/20 segment "Children of the Mountain" in which Diane Sawyer and her crew "investigate" the lives of the various dentally-challenged, drug-dealing, food stamp-living, unemployed people of Appalachia.
Being from Kentucky supposedly gave Sawyer an "insider's" point of view that was sympathetic and compassionate. Instead, as in so many other instances of this kind of journalism, the people of Appalachia are treated like subjects and types, not as individuals.
No wonder people in this part of the country greet strangers pointing cameras at them with shotguns.
Being from Kentucky supposedly gave Sawyer an "insider's" point of view that was sympathetic and compassionate. Instead, as in so many other instances of this kind of journalism, the people of Appalachia are treated like subjects and types, not as individuals.
No wonder people in this part of the country greet strangers pointing cameras at them with shotguns.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
CheckPoints
By John McPhee
The New Yorker (p. 59)
February 9, 2009
(Excerpt)
ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s experiences with fact-checking. Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer’s called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.” The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler’s story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara’s telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t know about it. Sara finally located a site manager who confirmed that the balloon had landed on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. The fix was made and the piece ran. Sometimes a mistake is introduced during the checking process. This has happened to the writer only once—and nearly thirty years ago. The piece, called “Basin and Range,” was the first in a series of long pieces on geology. Mentions current fact-checker Joshua Hersh. Sara, who checked the “Basin” piece, told the writer that he was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest. Eldridge Moores had apparently confirmed it. After the piece was published, the writer called Moores, who said that it was in fact the Aegean Plate, not the Adriatic, that was moving southwest. Any error is everlasting. Mentions Time and Atlantic. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, and the editor. In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to sweep up behind him, the writer likes to guess at certain names and numbers early on. Mentions Willy Bemis and the Illinois River. Describes the process of fact-checking a piece the writer wrote in 2003 about tracing John and Henry Thoreau’s upstream journey. Mentions Henry Moore’s “Oval with Points.” The writer describes checking parts of a book he was writing in 2002. The task took him three months. Mentions William Penn, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Seccombe.
The New Yorker (p. 59)
February 9, 2009
(Excerpt)
ABSTRACT: PERSONAL HISTORY about the writer’s experiences with fact-checking. Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer’s called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.” The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler’s story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara’s telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t know about it. Sara finally located a site manager who confirmed that the balloon had landed on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. The fix was made and the piece ran. Sometimes a mistake is introduced during the checking process. This has happened to the writer only once—and nearly thirty years ago. The piece, called “Basin and Range,” was the first in a series of long pieces on geology. Mentions current fact-checker Joshua Hersh. Sara, who checked the “Basin” piece, told the writer that he was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest. Eldridge Moores had apparently confirmed it. After the piece was published, the writer called Moores, who said that it was in fact the Aegean Plate, not the Adriatic, that was moving southwest. Any error is everlasting. Mentions Time and Atlantic. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, and the editor. In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to sweep up behind him, the writer likes to guess at certain names and numbers early on. Mentions Willy Bemis and the Illinois River. Describes the process of fact-checking a piece the writer wrote in 2003 about tracing John and Henry Thoreau’s upstream journey. Mentions Henry Moore’s “Oval with Points.” The writer describes checking parts of a book he was writing in 2002. The task took him three months. Mentions William Penn, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Seccombe.
The Power of an Artist's Notebook, Memories
Meditating on modernism
By Pierre Bonnard
The Economist
February 7, 2009
(Excerpt)
Much of the work on view was produced after 1926, when Bonnard and his model, muse and wife, Marthe, moved into "Le Bosguet," an unimposing villa above Cannes. But the many bowls and baskets of luscious-looking peaches and cherries, the plates of cakes and the roses in jugs are not the careful arrangements one would expect a still-life artist to create. The reason for this is that Bonnard did not paint from life. What we see are his memories. To help him recall images that captivated him, the artist always carried a small pocket diary. On its ruled pages he made pencil sketches. Whether his inspiration was a person, an animal, plants or the corner of a room, though, light was his main prey. To help him capture it, he jotted down notes about weather and colours. In one of the four notebooks on display, for example, the words pluvieux froid (rainy, cold) are scrawled across the top of a page.
There was nothing of the romantic arists in a garret about Bonnard. He appeared to live a bourgeois life. His studio was a smallish upstairs bedroom; it didn't even have an easel. He would just cut off lengths of canvas and tack them to the wall. When a picture was finished, he cropped off any remaining blank canvas.
By Pierre Bonnard
The Economist
February 7, 2009
(Excerpt)
Much of the work on view was produced after 1926, when Bonnard and his model, muse and wife, Marthe, moved into "Le Bosguet," an unimposing villa above Cannes. But the many bowls and baskets of luscious-looking peaches and cherries, the plates of cakes and the roses in jugs are not the careful arrangements one would expect a still-life artist to create. The reason for this is that Bonnard did not paint from life. What we see are his memories. To help him recall images that captivated him, the artist always carried a small pocket diary. On its ruled pages he made pencil sketches. Whether his inspiration was a person, an animal, plants or the corner of a room, though, light was his main prey. To help him capture it, he jotted down notes about weather and colours. In one of the four notebooks on display, for example, the words pluvieux froid (rainy, cold) are scrawled across the top of a page.
There was nothing of the romantic arists in a garret about Bonnard. He appeared to live a bourgeois life. His studio was a smallish upstairs bedroom; it didn't even have an easel. He would just cut off lengths of canvas and tack them to the wall. When a picture was finished, he cropped off any remaining blank canvas.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Always Running with Luis Rodriguez & Ruben Salazar
Read the articles I have posted on ERES from Rodriguez and Salazar.
Then, if you have time, read the Hunter S. Thompson one. Think about the branches, the webs, if you will, that go out from these writers, articles. Think about the ethnic social constructions embedded in their work, their careers. Think about how mainstream journalism, nonfiction publishing reflects and does not reflect those constructions.
You can also Google, research, seek out more about these writers and others who resemble these writers.
Here is a link to a site for Luis Rodriguez.
http://www.tiachucha.com/nonprofit/index.htm
Make connections when you read.
Post your comments here. Or you can post a link to your own blog where you respond to the reading.
BH
Then, if you have time, read the Hunter S. Thompson one. Think about the branches, the webs, if you will, that go out from these writers, articles. Think about the ethnic social constructions embedded in their work, their careers. Think about how mainstream journalism, nonfiction publishing reflects and does not reflect those constructions.
You can also Google, research, seek out more about these writers and others who resemble these writers.
Here is a link to a site for Luis Rodriguez.
http://www.tiachucha.com/nonprofit/index.htm
Make connections when you read.
Post your comments here. Or you can post a link to your own blog where you respond to the reading.
BH
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Walker Evans and James Agee. LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. Connections With Early Twentieth-Century Hard Times
Julien Gorbach has pointed out this story from NPR
"Tough times can often be a springboard for creativity; when no one's job is safe, no one's house is secure and no one knows exactly what to do about it, artists get to work."
BH
"Tough times can often be a springboard for creativity; when no one's job is safe, no one's house is secure and no one knows exactly what to do about it, artists get to work."
BH
The Play, Flyin' West, Connects With DuBois/Wells/Washington readings
The play, Flyin' West, written by Pearl Cleage, tells the story of a family of African-Americans who settled in Kansas with the hopes they could escape prejudice in a state that had rejected slavery. The play indirectly references Ida B. Wells encouraging her readers to head West to escape bigotry in Memphis.
The play continues it run on March 5-8, 2009, at Rhynsburger Theatre on the MU campus. 8 pm. I saw it last Thursday and recommend it to you. You could also read the play.
BH
The play continues it run on March 5-8, 2009, at Rhynsburger Theatre on the MU campus. 8 pm. I saw it last Thursday and recommend it to you. You could also read the play.
BH
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