All Posts Tagged With: "Writing"
The Black Nerd King
The following is my final product from Prof. Leon Dash’s Immersion Journalism class. Prof. Dash is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Rosa Lee and a great professor. Immersion Journalism allows journalists to conduct extensive, personal, in-depth interviews with a single person over multiple weeks, months, or years. Read more…
Transient Power, Infinite Ideas
I recently read Edward Abbey’s Good News. The book describes post-apocalyptic skirmishes between good and evil in America. Some kind of nuclear war destroyed civilization. The West is wild again. I have not been able to find good discussion of this book on the Internet; I have a dim hope that this post will initiate some. I wrote an essay about the book, but I am only going to post a small portion of it.
Abbey makes frequent mention of brand names being dead and buried in the sand. Cars that used to be expensive and cherished line all lanes of the highway attempting to escape from Phoenix. Abbey mentions these decayed brands to show their insignificance and transience. The post-apocalyptic world does not value them. It doesn’t care for them. Human necessity and roots do not give a damn about them. They are transient. Abbey wrote:
They ride at a brisk walking pace, due west, up the broad avenue littered with fragments of paper and glass, flanked now with dehydrated palm trees, abandoned automobiles, decaying office buildings with sagging walls of lathing, chicken wire, stucco, crumbling bastions of cinderblock. Old voices speak from dangling signs, dead for a decade: Lou Grubb Chevrolet: “the Friendly Folks”; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; Ace Liquors; Goldwater’s; Ramada Inn East’ Fannin Makes It Move!; Big Surf; Food Giant; Yellow Front; Checker Auto Parts; McDonalds: “Over Two Hundred Billion Served”; Denny’s; Valley National Bank; No-Tel Motel: “Adult Movies in Every Room” . . .
Abbey’s description of decayed decadence reminded me of a poem taught to me by John Bottiglieri in my High School English class. Thanks, Mr. Bottiglieri. I coincidentally saw him a couple of weeks ago at the Ebert Film Festival. We attended Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. It’s a cool and weird movie, my preferred flavor.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem called Ozymandias in 1818. I love it. Ozymandias is another name for Pharaoh Ramesses the Great. The poem reveals the transience of power. It implicitly argues that ideas, like Shelley’s poem itself, endure. The genuine kings of humanity write or speak about ideas. The student rebels in Good News cherish the one remaining music record that they have. The piano player only wishes to play beautiful classical music until humans regain their sanity. Shelley purportedly wrote the poem for a friendly competition with Horace Smith. They wrote on the same subject and published their poems in the same magazine. I prefer Shelley’s poem. I was not aware of Smith’s poem, but it coincidentally relates to Good News. The conclusion of Smith’s poem has a “Hunter” wondering at the ruins of London in what could be a post-apocalyptic world or simply the fall of London as a major city. I have copied the two poems below:
Ozymandias – Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ozymandias – Smith
IN Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
“The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Soldiers of Good
The following essay is my submission for the 2009 Nick Kristof Win-a-Trip Contest. Every year Kristof takes a student with him to Africa on a reporting trip. Of course, I lost the contest. I did not expect to win, but I have delusions of hope in all aspects of my life. Enjoy…
I am a twenty-five year old boy from the suburbs of Chicago. I am a boy, because I have never left the United States. I am a law student at the University of Illinois, but I do not hope or plan to walk a predictable path. In recent months, my legs have grown a festering itch to travel. Aside from a few small gestures, I have done little to help anyone but myself. I now set out to change.
During my undergrad years I accomplished many things that allowed my parents to brag to their friends. I was a columnist for the Daily Illini; I started a blog that has blossomed to host many contributors; I participated in 13 public policy debates; I served on many committees and started a new student organization; I won multiple awards and I finished 3 majors. In law school I worked as former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar’s research assistant and have served on other committees. None of that matters. I used to boast of these things. Today, I do not. Who did I help? Where did I travel? No one and no where. I do not feel shame or guilt; I feel inspired and burning to change.
What makes my perspective unique and interesting? Nothing. But that is my value. There are many people in my generation who have humanitarian ambitions. However, many more people in my generation have chosen the safe life. Many of these people fit my description: white, middle-class and conservative. I grew up among that large swath of Americans who prefer to shop at the suburban Woodfield Mall for five hours rather than volunteer for an hour on Chicago’s South Side.
I see a battle between good and evil in the world, as well as large groups of apathetic gray. I have written a song that conveys this sentiment. I believe in the kind of righteous might that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy have promoted. I believe in pragmatic idealism and in the humanitarian good of economic development. I went to law school to craft a sword. I have many passions and journalism has always been one. Nick Kristof’s brand of journalism is righteous might.
I recently co-founded a Chicago crime data blog that empirically investigates the ingredients of violent and property crime. Nothing turns me on more than browsing international development statistics. Many scholars have produced great research, but we need more soldiers of good. The brand of journalism that Kristof practices inspires new humanitarians in the developed world. Although praise will sound disingenuous in the context of this contest, I hope to be one of many who follow Kristof’s position in journalism. He travels to the poorest places in the world and puts his family at risk of violence in order to show the most privileged people in the world a naked glimpse of the covert cruelties that still flourish in the blood of developing societies. I hope to do the same this summer alongside Kristof and someday I will do the same even without the good fortune of his aid.
When people ask me how I am doing, I reply, “I’m always good.” I justify the improbability of my claim by explaining that I judge my condition against all human life, not just against my neighbor. I cannot think of a cogent argument for why any single human life should be more valuable than any other single human life. Trivial and artificial boundary lines prevent humanity from efficiently allocating its vast wealth. How much more good would a couple of $700 billion international aid packages do for humans than a couple of $700 billion stimulus packages? Humans are humans. Writers will convince us of this.
My generation dances on a historical fulcrum. Previous generations had substantial wealth, but my generation has enough wealth to create the luxury and the duty to help people outside of our families, our communities and our borders. My grandfather said to me that every one should leave something good for posterity. He left grandchildren and the opportunity for me to become a natural-born world saver. Watch out – I am coming. The soldiers of good are on the march.
David Foster Wallace Sparking All Over Charlie Rose’s Desk
I have not yet read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I am not a well-read person. I am trying to change this and I have succeeded in recent months. I will read Infinite Jest soon. Wallace killed himself in September of 2008. Laura Miller wrote a beautiful tribute to Wallace on Salon. A recurring theme among Wallace fans is their ability to identify with him. He exposes himself. He exposes his insecurities. His father still teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois.
I mention all of this as an introduction to a video where Charlie Rose interviews Wallace. The video shows you his sparking mind and his insecurities. The interview struck me as incredible.
Got to Beg Louder
Ya Got to Beg Louder Boy (In Chicago)
The City passes you by without saying hi
The City doesn’t care if you’re lonely or high
The City breathes with metallic lungs
And speaks in a rambling tongue
And coughs on the beat of his makeshift drum Read more…
The City That Lost Its Heart
During the late 20th Century, those on the two coasts of the United States spoke disparagingly about Chicago, calling it the “Second City” and ridiculing the Midwesterners who lived there as much as the losing sports teams that SNL’s Superfans supported without question. Read more…
Wild Genetic Life
I received a letter in the mail today from the University of Illinois thanking me for donating to the “Wildlife Medical Clinic.” After assuming the letter was the act of my pal Josh fulfilling his long standing promise to donate to “liberal” causes under my name, I was astonished to recall that I had made the donation.
I made the donation because I found a bird violently rasping his wings against the pavement of a parking lot in downtown Champaign. He could not fly. His flight had become suspended by either a physical or a neurological malady. I took the bird to the only 24 hour emergency wildlife clinic in the state of Illinois, which fortunately happened to be just a 15 minute drive from the rasping parking lot. I donated $10 to the clinic and left the bird to the volunteer hands of the Vet-Med students.
Now I have questions for myself and for you. Did I help this bird because of a sense of pure altruism? Did I help her to avoid feeling guilty for not helping her? Did I help her to later impress people with the story? Is any human being capable of doing something for purely altruistic reasons, i.e. they expect no notoriety and they are not motivated by an expectation of guilt? Am I writing this blog post simply to influence readers to believe that I am a caring and a tender and an altruistic person or am I writing it for purer reasons? Do the accumulated ancient pressures of evolution and the human genetic constellation prevent us from acting in a purely altruistic way? How do the answers to these questions relate to how we organize society, i.e. do selfish human genetics prevent socialistic governments and economies from succeeding? Who the heck are we?
Before answering these questions, it will help you to read the “poem” that is below. It is completely unedited and embarrassingly rough. During the day of the donation, I wrote on my blackberry about my encounters with nature and the array of human dispositions toward nature. Words that are in parentheses represent questions I have about how it should be written – they are not meant to be read as part of the “poem.” There is something honest about unedited poetry that I hesitate to scrub away…
The Assassination of Notorious B.I.G.
A poor greenback spider
Built a beautiful web outside my
Glass porch door
I considered killing him at first
But was persuaded to be human
I enjoyed his craft everyday
The flies, the beetles and the ladybugs
were his prey
He was large for Illinois so
I named him and posted a sticky note
Beware Notorious B.I.G. – Deadly
And said hello to him everyday
He had terrible eyes and fangs
His legs patterned yellow and black
Fake white eyes on his back
Before we became friends
I hated spiders and killed everyone that I could catch
One night I came home around 2 in the morning
He was still awake having recycled his day old web
He delicately assembled, branch by branch, a new bed
Few friends are awake at such reliable hours
and in accord with my daily whims
I sat with him for a half hour
His art is beautiful and perfect
Though I have played for years
longer than him
I could not criticize any of his chess strategies
With a valuable camera given to me by my first lover
I took pictures of him floating next to the distant half moon
I promised him than I would never ruin his room
A few days passed
And I introduced him to my friend
Paul (find a historical or Biblical name of someone who enjoys destroying beauty. Tyler could be paul’s name because of fight club “i felt like destroying something beautiful”)
Who abruptly opened the door
And pulled out his cheap and bland
gas station lighter
And burned the hairy green belly
and the incredible silk organs of Notorious BIG
He tried pathetically to escape by
jetting down, his web was thick as it exited his abdomen
Its intricacy his dying expression for the world to note
I tried to persuade Paul to stop
But he did not hear me and I did not
physically prevent his unprovoked terror
BIG’s web began to fray and tear from the flame
He stopped from exhaustion
And Paul finished his emotion
He reminded me of Tyler’s desire to destroy something beautiful
The cruelty of the moment
Pushed sadness on me for an hour
I’m sitting next to Paul now on the couch as I
write this poem
In a minute I plan to crush a fly who
buzzes inside my apartment
with a crappy magazine
Now 2 hours later I see a spider’s web
linking my side mirror to my car door, perhaps a farewell, and I realize tthen that
I let the fly live (be)
5 hours later a decaying butterfly on the driveway of my
singing teacher
6 hours later I heard frantic rasping and uneven whipping against parking lot pavement
I discovered a struggling (pigeon bird?) bird
writhing round miserably and violently beating his broken wings on the cement
I am sitting on the curb watching his desperation (rhyme bird and curb)
and writing this poem
(should this be in present tense or in past tense? I think it should be in present tense to put the person right there)
I don’t know of anyway that I can help him aside from
letting him know that I do care
He is convulsing and shivering
But not from cold
A goth girl stopped to help
and put him in a cardboard box that had
“Books” written on it with a black Sharpie
I called around
It so happens that there is only one emergency animal clinic
in the entire state of Illinois that will handle this kind of thing
and it so happens to be on the campus of my college
wonderful, as it is
In the car, he danced in his box to the Bach
played by FM 101.1
He was calm with the music
and madly frantic with the music
When I looked into his small red eyes
He seemed hopeful and to understand
That I came to help him
I filled out the usual paperwork at the clinic
Left the animated box and a 10 dollar donation on the ledge
8 hours later, I ate meatballs made by my Italian mother
and resumed my contradictions
The assassination of Notorious BIG
From the falltops to the trees
I may not have saved the bird
If Paul had not killed BIG
A New Interview
An interview with me has just been published on Travis Heerman’s Blogging the Muse. I met him at the World SF convention in Denver in August and was delighted to discuss all aspects of writing and the creative process.
I hope you enjoy reading my interview, as well as the other thirty he has posted. I feel honored to be in the company of award-winners like John Scalzi. Hell, he even asked me some of the same questions!
Tom