And How -- An Introduction to the Craft and Art of Journalism
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Link to Hunter's First Full-Blown Gonzo Piece
Read "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" here.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Schedule for Tuesday, Nov. 29 Through Thursday, Dec. 8
Tuesday, Nov. 29: Begin discussion of the book and watch film, "Into the Wild"
Thursday, Dec. 1: Continue film, "Into the Wild." (Quiz will be moved to Tuesday)
Over the weekend, please review/finish reading Into the Wild.
Begin reading Hell's Angels.
Tuesday, Dec. 6: Quiz/Into the Wild (book and film); review checklist and guidelines for final portfolios. Final portfolios will be due in my office by 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 15.
Thursday, Dec. 8: Introduction to Gonzo Reportage. Final assignment: One gonzo piece (to be included as your final piece in your portfolio)
*******************
Checklist for Final Portfolios
Please arrange the following 10 pieces (include links or copies of pieces that ran in the Insider, when applicable) in your portfolio in this order:
1. Final Piece/Gonzo Reportage
2. One Revision of One News Brief or Localized National Story (Your choice. The revision should be an example of perfect Associated Press Style, your understanding of basic news concepts, good use of sources and quotes, and your understanding of the structure of a basic news story.)
3. Localized National Story
4. Halloween Piece for Insider
5. News Brief #3(from October 20)
6. News Brief #2 (from September 29)
7. Ross Gay Three-Paragraph Coverage (from September 20)
8. News Brief #1 (from September 11)
9. News Lede (from September 5)
10. Personal Introduction Lede (from August 30)
Please clearly label each piece and arrange in a folder or binder. There will be a drop box outside my office -- FOB 208. Please be sure not to miss the deadline: 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 15. If you'd like your portfolio returned, please plan to pick it up next semester or include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Thursday, Dec. 1: Continue film, "Into the Wild." (Quiz will be moved to Tuesday)
Over the weekend, please review/finish reading Into the Wild.
Begin reading Hell's Angels.
Tuesday, Dec. 6: Quiz/Into the Wild (book and film); review checklist and guidelines for final portfolios. Final portfolios will be due in my office by 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 15.
Thursday, Dec. 8: Introduction to Gonzo Reportage. Final assignment: One gonzo piece (to be included as your final piece in your portfolio)
*******************
Checklist for Final Portfolios
Please arrange the following 10 pieces (include links or copies of pieces that ran in the Insider, when applicable) in your portfolio in this order:
1. Final Piece/Gonzo Reportage
2. One Revision of One News Brief or Localized National Story (Your choice. The revision should be an example of perfect Associated Press Style, your understanding of basic news concepts, good use of sources and quotes, and your understanding of the structure of a basic news story.)
3. Localized National Story
4. Halloween Piece for Insider
5. News Brief #3(from October 20)
6. News Brief #2 (from September 29)
7. Ross Gay Three-Paragraph Coverage (from September 20)
8. News Brief #1 (from September 11)
9. News Lede (from September 5)
10. Personal Introduction Lede (from August 30)
Please clearly label each piece and arrange in a folder or binder. There will be a drop box outside my office -- FOB 208. Please be sure not to miss the deadline: 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 15. If you'd like your portfolio returned, please plan to pick it up next semester or include a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Reminders
We won't be in our regular class today, Thursday, Nov. 17. Instead, please plan to join Professor Vollmer's class or continue to work independently on your localized pieces. Your pieces are due in class on Tuesday. Please bring a hard copy and an e-copy of your work to class for editing.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Schedule for Tuesday, Nov. 8 and Thursday, Nov. 10
On Tuesday, we'll have the quiz on Joan Didion. Before the quiz, you should be ready to report on the national story you'd like to localize for a UPG audience. I've extended the deadline for localized stories to Thursday, Nov. 17. This should give you time to do research and gather the sources (at least two) you'll need for the piece. Your stories will be due in class for editing workshop and Insider submission on Thursday, Nov. 17.
This Thursday, we'll wrap up our work with Didion. We'll do some editing drills in class, then work on backgrounding your localized pieces.
Over the weekend, please work on your localized pieces.
This Thursday, we'll wrap up our work with Didion. We'll do some editing drills in class, then work on backgrounding your localized pieces.
Over the weekend, please work on your localized pieces.
Monday, November 7, 2011
From Didion's "Why I Write"
Excerpts from Why I Write by Joan Didion
From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.
******************
Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I
I
I
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.
I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am "interested," for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.
I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.
******************
Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I
I
I
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.
I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am "interested," for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.
I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Assignment Schedule: Tuesday, Nov. 1, Thursday, Nov. 3
This week, we'll review your news briefs and Halloween pieces from the Insider site. Then we'll move on to an introduction to Joan Didion. Please read Vintage Didion. There will be a quiz on the book and concepts on Tuesday, Nov. 8.
On Thursday, we'll have another round of News Jeopardy. The winning team will get a pass good for 10 points on the Didion quiz. Also, chocolate.
Homework: Please begin scanning the news for national or international stories you might be able to localize for a UPG audience. Come up with five ideas by Thursday and be ready to share your ideas in class. You'll choose one of your ideas and follow through with a story that will be due Thursday, Nov. 10.
On Thursday, we'll have another round of News Jeopardy. The winning team will get a pass good for 10 points on the Didion quiz. Also, chocolate.
Homework: Please begin scanning the news for national or international stories you might be able to localize for a UPG audience. Come up with five ideas by Thursday and be ready to share your ideas in class. You'll choose one of your ideas and follow through with a story that will be due Thursday, Nov. 10.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)