Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Effective Writing: Clarity
Here is a new podcast! http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3904846/Clear%20Writing%20Poadcast.mp3 (audio only)
Thursday, April 21, 2011
It's/Its Rhyme
In this podcast, I use voice and images to share a writing tip that concerns confusion with it's and its.
To watch and listen to the podcast, click this link: It's/Its Rhyme
To watch and listen to the podcast, click this link: It's/Its Rhyme
Friday, April 15, 2011
Red Ink and Correction Marks
Hi All,
I've decided to try a podcast for this entry. In this podcast, I talk about how an unpleasant experience in a high school English class helped to inform the teaching pedagogy I would adopt later in life. To listen to the podcast click Red Ink and Correction Marks.
Enjoy!
Kurtis
I've decided to try a podcast for this entry. In this podcast, I talk about how an unpleasant experience in a high school English class helped to inform the teaching pedagogy I would adopt later in life. To listen to the podcast click Red Ink and Correction Marks.
Enjoy!
Kurtis
Friday, March 11, 2011
First Assignment
When I was twenty, I decided I wanted to be a writer. To get some practical, professional experience, I began writing for my college’s student newspaper. This was before word processing, when the latest technology was an electric typewriter with auto-correct. For me, the writing was done on a manual typewriter, a Smith Corona with a worn out S key that my father had used when he attended Pennsylvania Military College three decades earlier. The typewriter clipped into a hard tan case that locked and had a rugged handle for easy portability. With case, the typewriter weighed over ten pounds.
My first weeks at the newspaper were unremarkable. I did some copy editing, made a few fact-check calls, and wrote an opinion piece on a subject I don’t recall but which ended with a cliché, something that brought the ire of the assistant editor, a senior English major who snapped her lips and told me never to use clichés and never ever to end an essay with one. The highlight up to that point had been a late Friday afternoon meeting during which several staff writers produced six packs of beer from paper bags.
Then I got my first assignment. I was to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally and the subsequent protest of that rally in the small mill town of Rumford, an hour away. The Klan, I learned, was on a recruiting mission in this unlikely of places in Maine and found a farmer willing to hold the event on his property. As part of the press, I had credentials that allowed me entry onto the private property so that I could attend a press conference by a Klan representative.
At the time, I was politically active and had I not been covering the story would surely have been one of the protesters. I had been an adamant opponent of Citibank’s investment in South Africa under its apartheid system and had even been arrested outside a local branch with a host of others for refusing to stop reading the names of blacks killed under the apartheid government. One summer I canvassed for Greenpeace and grew accustomed to the malcontent and misunderstanding of so many. I had been questioned by police, ridiculed by homeowners, and in one instance chased off by an angry husband upset at his wife’s twenty-five dollar tax-deductible contribution.
The Klan rally occurred on a Saturday in early November on the outskirts of the town, where yellowing fields dipped and rolled west toward the White Mountains thirty miles in the distance. The road in followed the Androscoggin River, then snaked along winding country roads. I ended up making the trip alone and when I arrived the flashing blue lights of the Maine State Police greeted me. Protesters, I was told, were relegated to a field across the street from the rally, which was being held on private property . Trespassers, I was warned, would be prosecuted. “That’s ok,” I said, flashing my press card. “I’m here to cover the story. “
The mood in the field was restless. By 11 AM the crowd had swelled to about two hundred. Shortly before noon, the organizers of the protest arrived with signs, a bullhorn, and an agenda. Within thirty minutes, the quiet pockets of mostly college-aged students had banded together and were shouting “Not here Klan! Not here Klan!” One of the organizers, a slight gray-bearded man wearing a faded jean jacket and a Jesse Jackson for president pin, was talking in earnest to one of the troopers. The man was adamant that the police had no right to restrict where the protesters gathered so long as they weren’t creating a safety hazard and stayed off the private property. Before too long, much of the crowd in the field was across the street in front of the farmhouse and the shouts of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” continued.
I am not sure what law enforcement had expected from the gathering, but in no time, another State Trooper was on the scene along with two cars from the sheriff’s office. I was standing near the driveway on the road side of the yellow police tape that spanned the length of the property. About thirty yards in stood a barn, where inside I could see men milling about. As the crowd got louder, several men emerged from the barn and came to the end of the gravel driveway. If they were Klansmen, I do not know, but they were clearly on edge. One man shouted at the crowd to shut up and go back home; he spat on the ground and laughed. “Keep it up,” he said.
The press conference took place in the barn at 2 PM. I don’t know what I expected (Klansmen in robes?), but what transpired was ordinary. The press asked questions and a lone man who would not say if he was in the Klan or not responded. He did say that members of the Klan would appear in the evening for a ceremony and we were all welcome to attend. The whole press conference lasted maybe twenty minutes and before I knew it, I was back out with the crowd.
Three images stand out from this experience. First, the crowd. As much as I oppose everything the Ku Klux Klan stands for, the crowd, if not antagonistic, was provoking. They jeered at anyone who appeared on the property. A man yelled through a bullhorn, “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” which the crowed repeated, over and over again. Some yelled incendiary remarks. They gestured. The police did little to control the crowd and what I remember most now is how tense the situation became. Perhaps the tenseness was due to the number of protestors, the lack of sufficient crowd control, or both. Perhaps the protesters should have been made to stay across the road. I am not sure. What I am sure about, though, is that I can understand how situations can quickly turn to something ugly.
In fact, things did get ugly, which is the second image that stands out. At some point a car tried to turn onto the property, but the crowd refused to move. A trooper intervened and the crowd slowly dispersed but not without one or two banging the roof of the car and intense yelling. I had no idea who was in the car, but once it made its way down the driveway to the barn, two young men and a young woman emerged. The woman, who could have been just another brown-haired college student, was visibly upset and, turning to the crowd, raised her middle finger, which brought boos and catcalls and even louder yelling of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” Suddenly, from inside the barn, a man emerged running toward the crowd with a rifle raised in his hand. The man’s jaw was tight and his eyes narrow and as he got closer, I realized it was the same man from earlier who told the crowd to “Keep it up.” The rifle was never lowered or aimed at the crowd and two troopers quickly came between the man and the crowd. “That was my daughter!” he yelled. “You’ve got no right!”
The last image, the one most frightening, took place after dark when I witnessed six hooded figures emerge from the barn and proceed onto a grassy knoll in a side field and burn a cross. Not many of the protesters remained and those that did said little. We all stood silently at the edge of the gravel driveway watching those six ghostly figures and the burning cross.
My first weeks at the newspaper were unremarkable. I did some copy editing, made a few fact-check calls, and wrote an opinion piece on a subject I don’t recall but which ended with a cliché, something that brought the ire of the assistant editor, a senior English major who snapped her lips and told me never to use clichés and never ever to end an essay with one. The highlight up to that point had been a late Friday afternoon meeting during which several staff writers produced six packs of beer from paper bags.
Then I got my first assignment. I was to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally and the subsequent protest of that rally in the small mill town of Rumford, an hour away. The Klan, I learned, was on a recruiting mission in this unlikely of places in Maine and found a farmer willing to hold the event on his property. As part of the press, I had credentials that allowed me entry onto the private property so that I could attend a press conference by a Klan representative.
At the time, I was politically active and had I not been covering the story would surely have been one of the protesters. I had been an adamant opponent of Citibank’s investment in South Africa under its apartheid system and had even been arrested outside a local branch with a host of others for refusing to stop reading the names of blacks killed under the apartheid government. One summer I canvassed for Greenpeace and grew accustomed to the malcontent and misunderstanding of so many. I had been questioned by police, ridiculed by homeowners, and in one instance chased off by an angry husband upset at his wife’s twenty-five dollar tax-deductible contribution.
The Klan rally occurred on a Saturday in early November on the outskirts of the town, where yellowing fields dipped and rolled west toward the White Mountains thirty miles in the distance. The road in followed the Androscoggin River, then snaked along winding country roads. I ended up making the trip alone and when I arrived the flashing blue lights of the Maine State Police greeted me. Protesters, I was told, were relegated to a field across the street from the rally, which was being held on private property . Trespassers, I was warned, would be prosecuted. “That’s ok,” I said, flashing my press card. “I’m here to cover the story. “
The mood in the field was restless. By 11 AM the crowd had swelled to about two hundred. Shortly before noon, the organizers of the protest arrived with signs, a bullhorn, and an agenda. Within thirty minutes, the quiet pockets of mostly college-aged students had banded together and were shouting “Not here Klan! Not here Klan!” One of the organizers, a slight gray-bearded man wearing a faded jean jacket and a Jesse Jackson for president pin, was talking in earnest to one of the troopers. The man was adamant that the police had no right to restrict where the protesters gathered so long as they weren’t creating a safety hazard and stayed off the private property. Before too long, much of the crowd in the field was across the street in front of the farmhouse and the shouts of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” continued.
I am not sure what law enforcement had expected from the gathering, but in no time, another State Trooper was on the scene along with two cars from the sheriff’s office. I was standing near the driveway on the road side of the yellow police tape that spanned the length of the property. About thirty yards in stood a barn, where inside I could see men milling about. As the crowd got louder, several men emerged from the barn and came to the end of the gravel driveway. If they were Klansmen, I do not know, but they were clearly on edge. One man shouted at the crowd to shut up and go back home; he spat on the ground and laughed. “Keep it up,” he said.
The press conference took place in the barn at 2 PM. I don’t know what I expected (Klansmen in robes?), but what transpired was ordinary. The press asked questions and a lone man who would not say if he was in the Klan or not responded. He did say that members of the Klan would appear in the evening for a ceremony and we were all welcome to attend. The whole press conference lasted maybe twenty minutes and before I knew it, I was back out with the crowd.
Three images stand out from this experience. First, the crowd. As much as I oppose everything the Ku Klux Klan stands for, the crowd, if not antagonistic, was provoking. They jeered at anyone who appeared on the property. A man yelled through a bullhorn, “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” which the crowed repeated, over and over again. Some yelled incendiary remarks. They gestured. The police did little to control the crowd and what I remember most now is how tense the situation became. Perhaps the tenseness was due to the number of protestors, the lack of sufficient crowd control, or both. Perhaps the protesters should have been made to stay across the road. I am not sure. What I am sure about, though, is that I can understand how situations can quickly turn to something ugly.
In fact, things did get ugly, which is the second image that stands out. At some point a car tried to turn onto the property, but the crowd refused to move. A trooper intervened and the crowd slowly dispersed but not without one or two banging the roof of the car and intense yelling. I had no idea who was in the car, but once it made its way down the driveway to the barn, two young men and a young woman emerged. The woman, who could have been just another brown-haired college student, was visibly upset and, turning to the crowd, raised her middle finger, which brought boos and catcalls and even louder yelling of “Go home Klan! Go home Klan!” Suddenly, from inside the barn, a man emerged running toward the crowd with a rifle raised in his hand. The man’s jaw was tight and his eyes narrow and as he got closer, I realized it was the same man from earlier who told the crowd to “Keep it up.” The rifle was never lowered or aimed at the crowd and two troopers quickly came between the man and the crowd. “That was my daughter!” he yelled. “You’ve got no right!”
The last image, the one most frightening, took place after dark when I witnessed six hooded figures emerge from the barn and proceed onto a grassy knoll in a side field and burn a cross. Not many of the protesters remained and those that did said little. We all stood silently at the edge of the gravel driveway watching those six ghostly figures and the burning cross.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Reading on the Road
In the spring of 1988, I got married and, instead of a traditional honeymoon, spent the next four months vagabonding through Europe with my wife, Ann. We were both twenty-three, young by today’s standards to marry, but we were in love and ready for adventure. One of the great things about travelling and flitting about from one place to the next was the time available to read. These were the days before cell phones and texting, before iPods and ear buds, before everyone toted laptops like extra necessary appendages. I am not sure the times were simpler, but you certainly had a kind of freedom and anonymity, a sense of being out there all by yourself, unheard of in the Facebook era.
We flew into Heathrow where an English friend picked us up and whisked us to her flat on the outskirts of London. During our stay, I finished reading On the Road, not the first time I had read the book, but what could be better than reading On the Road while on the road? I fancied myself a European Sal Paradise.
Jayne-Anne, our friend, gave us each a book at the end of our stay—The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Graham Greene’s Brighten Rock. The books came right off her bookcase. Since Ann had already read On the Road and Jayne-Anne hadn’t, we passed on the book to her—and thus began months of reading and trading books with others we met on our travels, all of which I recorded in my daily journal.
While hitchhiking through Ireland, we got stranded in the rain with Christoph, a not yet twenty-year-old German who was tooling about before beginning his mandatory civil service to his country. One night in a Galway pub, we got to talking about literature and Christoph sang the praises of a German author I’d never heard of—Heinrich Boll. We travelled about a week with Christoph, including a few days in Dublin, where we slept on the floor in the flat of Frank O’Rielly, a friend of an American friend of mine. When Ann and I departed for France via ferry, Christoph saw us off and presented us with a pristine copy of Heinrich Boll’s 18 Stories, which I still have.
In Carcassonne, a medieval walled city in France, we befriended an old French street artist named Savigon, who ranted about Rimbaud and Camus and existentialism. He couldn’t say enough about Kafka and Dostoevsky. On the day Ann and I left, we purchased one of Savigon’s line drawings, and in addition to the art, he gave us a tattered copy of Camus’ The Fall (in English!). I’ve since read my way through all of Camus and Dostoevsky and Kafka, and I can’t say that I don’t think of the ranting Savigon whenever I think of those authors.
In Switzerland, I traded The Fall for Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. On a train to Italy, I traded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to an American couple from Seattle for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. All through Europe this kind of exchange went on and I read and read. Dracula. Ironweed. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Sometimes a Great Notion. Breakfast of Champions. It was wondrous. On my twenty-fourth birthday, my wife gave me Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller. In Zagreb, which at the time was in the country of Yugoslavia, I learned of Ivo Andric and purchased a copy of The Pasha’s Concubine and Other Tales in an English bookshop.
Despite the weight they added to my backpack, I kept some of the books from those travels, but the majority I passed along because it was the most economical way to get “new” books and a great way to meet people. I don’t know how many years it would have taken me to discover Boll or Andric, or to realize just how much I enjoy the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. To this day, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock remains one of the most gripping books I’ve ever read.
I am not sure when I’ll get a chance to travel and read the way I did twenty-odd years ago, but when the day comes, I will dust off On the Road and be on my way.
We flew into Heathrow where an English friend picked us up and whisked us to her flat on the outskirts of London. During our stay, I finished reading On the Road, not the first time I had read the book, but what could be better than reading On the Road while on the road? I fancied myself a European Sal Paradise.
Jayne-Anne, our friend, gave us each a book at the end of our stay—The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Graham Greene’s Brighten Rock. The books came right off her bookcase. Since Ann had already read On the Road and Jayne-Anne hadn’t, we passed on the book to her—and thus began months of reading and trading books with others we met on our travels, all of which I recorded in my daily journal.
While hitchhiking through Ireland, we got stranded in the rain with Christoph, a not yet twenty-year-old German who was tooling about before beginning his mandatory civil service to his country. One night in a Galway pub, we got to talking about literature and Christoph sang the praises of a German author I’d never heard of—Heinrich Boll. We travelled about a week with Christoph, including a few days in Dublin, where we slept on the floor in the flat of Frank O’Rielly, a friend of an American friend of mine. When Ann and I departed for France via ferry, Christoph saw us off and presented us with a pristine copy of Heinrich Boll’s 18 Stories, which I still have.
In Carcassonne, a medieval walled city in France, we befriended an old French street artist named Savigon, who ranted about Rimbaud and Camus and existentialism. He couldn’t say enough about Kafka and Dostoevsky. On the day Ann and I left, we purchased one of Savigon’s line drawings, and in addition to the art, he gave us a tattered copy of Camus’ The Fall (in English!). I’ve since read my way through all of Camus and Dostoevsky and Kafka, and I can’t say that I don’t think of the ranting Savigon whenever I think of those authors.
In Switzerland, I traded The Fall for Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. On a train to Italy, I traded Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to an American couple from Seattle for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. All through Europe this kind of exchange went on and I read and read. Dracula. Ironweed. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Sometimes a Great Notion. Breakfast of Champions. It was wondrous. On my twenty-fourth birthday, my wife gave me Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller. In Zagreb, which at the time was in the country of Yugoslavia, I learned of Ivo Andric and purchased a copy of The Pasha’s Concubine and Other Tales in an English bookshop.
Despite the weight they added to my backpack, I kept some of the books from those travels, but the majority I passed along because it was the most economical way to get “new” books and a great way to meet people. I don’t know how many years it would have taken me to discover Boll or Andric, or to realize just how much I enjoy the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. To this day, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock remains one of the most gripping books I’ve ever read.
I am not sure when I’ll get a chance to travel and read the way I did twenty-odd years ago, but when the day comes, I will dust off On the Road and be on my way.
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