New bandcamp page!

I've started a bandcamp page as a place to keep my band's rough cuts (and maybe eventually some polished studio tracks). One track from our first gig this past Saturday is already posted. Check it out here!

More audio and maybe some videos to come.

Christopher Hitchens died this week

The world lost an irreplaceable writer when Christopher Hitchens finally lost his battle with cancer this week. Only 62 when he died, Hitch wrote books, essays, articles, and was still churning out content in the weeks leading up to his death. The love has been pouring out of the media, particularly the publications he wrote for like Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and Slate.

 His Slate editor did a lovely round-up of some of his best stuff through the years, including his scathing obituary of Jerry Falwell. (It's incredible; here's the first line: "The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled 'credulous idiot.'") And don't miss Hitch's instructions on how to make tea. (John Lennon and Yoko Ono did it wrong, apparently.)

But my favorite is this list of the 15 most memorable things to come out of his pen. He was an incredibly smart, concise writer. Some of the shorter favorites:

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

"If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox."

And, of course,

"The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics."

We'll miss you, Hitch.

The problem with standardized testing

First of all, there are many problems, too many to list in this blog post. But if you feel like getting up in arms today about standardized testing (why not?), read this article in today's Washington Post. A school board member -- a successful, wealthy adult -- took his state's 10th grade standardized test. He failed miserably, casting light on the specific problem of practical usage in these tests. What possible value could these questions (and therefore these test results) have for predicting aptitude, intelligence, or future success? Here's an excerpt from an email he wrote to the author of the article:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had. 

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail 'cut score'? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

In a nutshell:

I don't know the answer. But while "standardized testing" has become an evil word in American education, we continue to use it, flaws and all. And the problem intensifies lower down in the socioeconomic food chain. At this point, you'd better hope you're a monkey.

"N" for Knowledge

Nine hours there. Nine hours back.

My last road trip of the 2011 Wildcat football season begins tomorrow. My friends and I are caravaning from Chicago, Illinois to Lincoln, Nebraska, to watch Northwestern's first bout against Nebraska, the newest member of the B1G. Bring it on, Cornhuskers.

The Meaning of Life, according to A.C. Grayling

A.C. Grayling has rewritten the Bible. He's pretty confident in his opinions.

Photo via The Guardian.

In five minutes, philosopher A.C. Grayling offers an insightful and compact meditation on the meaning of life. Watch the video here. (I really wish I could embed the video, but alas, it's hosted on the New York Times website.)

If you're not convinced, here's an excerpt that gets to the heart of imbuing life with meaning and perspective: "It's up to you...Find something. Create something. Recognize the profoundly palliative character of love, of the human affections and friendship. And live with dignity. And when you do this, you find something -- and it sounds very simple and very glib but it's true -- that the meaning of life is to make life meaningful. That's a responsibility you have."

(You really should click through and watch the video, to get the full effect. Link again.)

His words remind me of a favorite quote from Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." It seems so simple, but it can be hard, at the end of a long day, to cherish every moment, to steep the passing hours in significance, to do something other than collapse on the couch after work or class or rehearsal and watch bad reality TV while eating Nutella with a spoon, directly from the container. It's hard to feel as though one's accomplished work is enough. To reach beyond what's expected. It's easier to settle. To become anesthetized. To lose fire and passion. Are these not the individual's private philosophical concerns, the gateway drugs to depression and isolation? Humans weren't meant to be alone or depressed; we were meant to thrive and explore, to make connections.

Or maybe our purpose was to create the Internet, so that we could all post pictures of our cats, and then in 2012 the Internet will open up, screaming like a banshee, and swallow us whole, starting with the U.S. (including Alaska and Hawaii) and quickly followed by the rest of the northern American continent. South America will go next, hinged on the Panama Canal and unable to resist the pull of North America toward the depths of the earth. Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia will eventually crumble and be engulfed. Greenland will meander, trying to dissociate itself from the real continents, but the sinkhole will get it eventually, submerging it, forcing it beneath the surface. Various island chains will be the last to go before the earth is left desolate, destroyed by our obsession with anthropomorphizing cats for not only Halloween, but every other day of the year too. Only Antarctica, a place that has never seen cats, will survive. A refugee camp will be established, and the human race will rebuild--

What? Cats have been visiting Anarctica since right after WWII? Well fuck. We're doomed.

Stephen Fry: "Context, convention and circumstance are all."

I am officially obsessed with this media form -- that is, typographic animation set to spoken word. And I love that it's so self-referential, that the language-benders are bending language to demonstrate how great language can be when bent.

A lot of my writing time lately has been spent on offline projects. I'll poke my head out on this and the other active blog I've working on right now, but fall always seems to snag me with a huge amount of work. But it's my last quarter as a full-time grad student, so I'm dedicating myself to a new form of caffeine (hello, coffee) and buckling down. But this video and others like it will be my study breaks, to remind me of why I'm doing it all.

A note on the video itself: I love that Stephen Fry distinguishes between lovers of language and the people who are annoying about it and ruin it for everyone. I often find myself frustrated with often-misused words (like the difference between "over" and "more than"), but I am reminded that language evolves, it belongs to no one, and it's no use to squabble over the small distinctions, especially in contexts where other aspects (like substance) are more worthy of focus. The crux of it is here: "Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind." Grammar is a tool we use to communicate effectively, but it is not a mastery of grammar that signals achievement: You still need something substantive to say.

At the same time, grammar is important because, as Stephen Fry says, ignoring it gives the impression that you don't care. "You slip into a suit for an interview, and you dress your language up too." And so while mastering grammar is not the end-all means to achieve good writing, it's still necessary to understand it. It's the framework we've created as a culture, the test to pass to prove you understand not only what to say, but how to say it. "You can wear what you want linguistically and sartorially when you're at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances. It's only considerate. But that's an issue of fitness, of suitability. It has nothing to do with correctness. There's no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all."

Hear hear!

The Only Argument You Need for the Oxford Comma

via Facebook

How to Ride a Bike

Dear Marianne Chrisos,

I was recently informed that you've forgotten how to ride a bike. You learned, but then you forgot, and you'd like to remember, to recall what it feels like to ride, the sensation. Here's what I offer:

Riding a bicycle is like playing a video game in real life. Chicago, specifically the North Shore, is fantastic for this. You choose the terrain: urban city streets, lakefront beach, the grassy knolls of Lake Shore and Lincoln Park. You choose day or night, heavy traffic or light. You can compete with those around you or just yourself. You can time it, or ride a certain number of miles, or just get on the bike and go. I like having a destination, something farther away, a few miles maybe, so I can feel my heart pumping and my skin heating up. I like riding in the cool fall, crunching through leaves, manually warming up my body, watching my own breath hit me in the face.

You start slow, rolling the bike for a few steps in the driveway, until you stop and swing your leg over. You put your right foot on its corresponding pedal and push down, lifting the other leg off the ground and finding balance as the wheels roll forward, taking you with them. Before you lose momentum, you put your left foot on the other pedal and push again, and then again with your right, and then again with your left. You may wobble for a minute, which is what the training wheels were for on your first bike, but you have a lower center of gravity now. Being short and female is helpful in that regard.

It's true, your butt hurts more on a real bike than on the video game bike. But that's okay because you're earning it. Once you get moving, you feel the wind in your hair and smell whatever season has crept over Lake Michigan. I like riding on rainy days because the air is cleanest and smells like laundry detergent designed to smell like fresh air. I also like riding on rainy days because it makes me feel like a badass. I ride harder and faster, feeling my heart quicken and my thighs ache as I push right, left, right, left, over and over, dodging raindrops. I stand up and push down with my body weight on the pedals to go faster, to keep up with the cars on Halsted Street. They usually pass me, but during rush hour I can easily outstrip an entire line from Wellington to Fullerton.

I pedal so hard that I arrive at my destination exhausted, in need of refreshment. Local tea and soup sales go up exponentially as cold weather grips the city and cyclists suffer runny noses and inclement weather. It's only September, but I've already bought enough hot beverages to pay for a new branch of a needlessly expensive coffee chain. (To whom it may concern: Corner of Sheridan and Irving Park, please. And make it snappy. Winter's coming.)

Once you work up some speed on the bike, or if you're on your way home at the end of a long day, you may choose to stop pedaling and drift. I wear a hat and gloves, and I sit up and take one hand off the handlebars, stretching my back up straight, watching my fellow urbanites or the city skyline to the south. Sometimes I stick my legs out to the side, brushing the grass or the puddles beneath me. If I ride through a big puddle, I bend my knees to lift my shoes up out of the water's spray, squealing involuntarily. I try not to splash runners or fellow bicyclists. They're already soaking wet, though, so it really doesn't make a difference except that it makes me look like a jerk for splashing them with more frigid water.

I would be remiss if I described the joys but did not outline the rules of the road. We're in America, so ride on the right side. We're in a major metropolis, so ride in the street, not on the sidewalks. Beware of turning vehicles, parked vehicles, and all vehicles. Put a white flashing light on the front of your bike and a red flashing light on the back, and tuck in your right pant leg so it doesn't get caught in the gears. (Getting tangled up is an unpleasant experience, especially in the middle of the Clark/Halsted/Barry six-way intersection.) And since there may be kids reading, wear a helmet.

So, want to go for a ride sometime?

Sincerely,

Brittany Petersen

The Scariest Thing Ever

Medill Dean John Lavine Steps Down

Medill Dean John Lavine is leaving behind some unfinished business.

Medill Dean John Lavine sent an email today to the Medill alumni listserv announcing he's stepping down from his post next August.

He doesn't really offer a reason other than focusing on other initiatives and spending more time with his wife. That's certainly possible, though of course it's curious that he's leaving the program at this point in the transition from pre-Lavine to a realization of his magnum opus, the "Medill 2020" plan (of which I'm admittedly not always a fan).

In fact, Dean Lavine mentions in the letter that "we've accomplished far more than was envisioned in our Medill 2020 plan." I'm not really sure what that means, but I would point out that it's only 2011, so maybe an itemized list of what we've actually accomplished (besides RenameGate) might shed some light on the depth of water we've been treading the last few years. And of course, this amplifies the question of where we'll go from here. A lot depends, I suppose, on who is chosen to succeed him.

We wait with bated breath. The letter is pasted below.

-----

from John Lavine
to MEDILLALUMS@listserv.it.northwestern.edu
date Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 9:05 AM
subject Future Plans -- A Note to the Medill Community


Dear Colleagues and Members of the Medill Community,

Six years ago, President Bienen and Provost Dumas asked if I would lead the implementation of a new strategy for Medill. In the years that followed, we have joined together to deepen the quality of our curricula, provide our students with the best educational opportunities in the country and strengthen and diversify our offerings and resources.

Now, I’m writing to tell you that I have shared with President Schapiro and Provost Linzer my decision to step down as Medill's Dean on August 31, 2012. I do so knowing we have a faculty, staff and curricula no other school can match.

When I became dean, journalism and marketing communications were being roiled by a digital tsunami, and soon thereafter, by one of the worst economic downturns in a century. In the midst of these difficult circumstances, we adopted unprecedented curricular change. Northwestern supported our plan with the addition of more faculty and staff with new skills, knowledge, and experience than at any time in Medill’s history.

It has been quite an odyssey. Together we’ve accomplished far more than was envisioned in our Medill 2020 plan. Along the way, we’ve faced and overcome major challenges, as well as some controversies; when you undertake seismic change, both are inevitable.

What counts is the progress we’ve made, the foundation for the future that we’ve built, and the validation of what we’ve done from external sources -- including leaders of the industries we serve and the unprecedented evaluation last spring from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Our faculty and curricula lead the country. Despite the tough economy, employers here and abroad seek out our graduates, and Northwestern University Qatar, our undergraduate school in Doha, is about to graduate its first class.

You are terrific colleagues. I treasure the opportunity to have worked with you, and I’m excited about completing the big projects we have before us this coming year.

When I step down, I will focus on an initiative that is also close to my heart -- examining how the media can determine if people are truly informed by the content they provide, and seeking out new ways for the news media to remain viable. I’ll have more to share about this work in the future.

I will also spend more time with my wonderful wife, Meryl. As busy as we’ve both been in our careers – and as much as she has been central to all that I’ve done in my professional life – now, more than ever, we cherish having more personal time together.

Warm regards,

John

Human categorization via social media

(click to enlarge)

I'd like to thank Facebook for making it so easy to fit my life into various pre-defined categories: education, music preferences, favorite athletes, things I "like." It's nice to see political views taken so seriously as an option as well. Facebook is, after all, an extension of ourselves, and that freedom of expression is not to be trifled with, no sir. Especially if you're tired of being nice to people who don't give a shit. Sign me up for that one.

And apparently drunken twats don't know the proper usage of the various forms of "your." Go figure.

No room for hat

I hate that my day doesn't feel accomplished unless I've written something. Not just something, but something I like when I read it back.

I hate that I cannot end a sentence without first fixing the beginning. Same with paragraphs. And thoughts.

I wish that I could read through others' eyes. I guess that would require thinking through others' minds, which is why it's impossible. Same reason you can't look at yourself in the mirror and not see, just, yourself.

I hate that I have to be in the mood to write. I need to be in that zone to do anything worthwhile. And I hate to admit it, but I can manufacture that zone. I'm capable of it, at least, when I really need to make it happen. Procrastination is my willful refusal to be productive.

I love writing and reading and thinking and writing about reading and thinking and reading about writing and thinking and thinking about reading and writing. You know?

I hate the font Papyrus. Don't use it. Also Comic Sans, though I admit to heavy usage between the years of 1996 and 2001. We were all young once.

I hate that I can't write something poetic without scrunching my nose at it. Judging it. Rewriting it until it's a little more logical, a little less touchy-feely. Fewer dreamy clouds and smoky waters, more hard lines cloaked in secrecy. But the reader can tell when something isn't genuine. You can count on the reader to see through you.

I love that I can write things in a room by myself and then have the audacity to put it on the Internet, where everyone in the world can see it.

Twilight

Source: redmudnessa.tumblr.com via Brittany on Pinterest

I would like, if you'll allow, to reclaim the word "twilight." While it was once a beautiful vision of dusk in summer, fireflies and green leaves, the sky tinged pink over the lake -- this once lovely word has been stolen by glittery vampires that enjoy teasing preteen girls. You can see why I'm upset.

I went for a run with my roommate tonight. We left at 7:30pm and ran to Lake Shore Drive, and the skyline came around a corner, and we ran in awe of Chicago, watching the lights glitter on Navy Pier, competing with the Hancock and Sears* Towers for attention. On the way back north we were treated to a sunset over the classy Lakeview architecture. The air felt clear, clean, accommodating. This is twilight.

When I was a kid I would visit my grandparents in the Iowa countryside on a weekly basis. They lived, still live, next to a man-made pond where a family of swans lived in the summertime. We'd play croquet, or go swimming in the pool, or wander around the weeds in between the pond and the corn fields. (Like I said: Iowa.) At night we'd eat dinner on the porch. Dinner included a meat, a potato, a corn on the cob with butter, some fruit, and a glass of milk. We'd eat delicious Midwest dinner and watch the sun set over the little pond with the swans. There were fireflies, and they flitted in the half-lit air. That was twilight.

I say we take it back from these teenage vampire books that have something to do with Mormonism or werewolves or not showing the juicy parts of sex scenes or what have you. We take it back from them and give it to dusk in the summer, to air heavy with sweet scents, to surviving on barbequed meat and watermelon, to playing hard and being lazy. Because that sounds much more likely to get you laid.

* I will never call it the Willis Tower. That's bullshit. It's the Sears Tower. Why do I feel so strongly about this?

Blogging NUMB again

Happy Saturday! A quick note to let you know that since football season is almost upon us, I've begun blogging again for the esteemed Northwestern football blog, Lake the Posts. My first post, a Q&A with the band's SpiriTeam about the upcoming season, went up this morning. Check it out! And have a great weekend!

For an aggressively inarticulate generation

Check out this short slam poetry piece by Taylor Mali, given the typographical treatment by graphic artist Ronnie Bruce. This is the best 2:45 you'll spend today.

Mali's poem is about speaking with conviction, about not ending every sentence with an uptick, as a question, thereby making you sound unsure of everything you say. (Ya know?) Bruce takes that performance and gives us the actual words, the hidden question marks, the metadiscourse of "like" and "you know." He portrays words as both shy and bold. He makes them into trees and axes. He fits everything together. The poem was poignant and funny and clever to begin with, but Bruce's execution has made it into art.

I love words so much. I think this demonstrates the power they can have if you're competent and you speak with conviction. And with an increasingly "aggressively inarticulate generation" learning literacy via text message and Facebook chat, it's a nice reminder that though language may change, the power it has when used effectively is enduring.

Whatchu talkin' about, Mark Twain?

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."
- Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger

Gangsta.

It's surprising how timeless certain ideas can be. As a writer, this immortality is both dis- and encouraging: On the one hand, it seems that all the wisdom has been found, wrought, digested, and regurgitated in "Inspirational Quote-a-Day" calendars. But on the other hand, we have these wonderfully knowledgeable guides to teach us things they learned the hard way. And who are we to balk at that? Especially since we can then take those lessons and build on them, make them relevant to ourselves and modern society. After all, Twain couldn't have anticipated what social media would do to happiness quotients, or how the Internet would render sanity an unnecessary prerequisite to amassing thousands of readers (or Twitter followers, but I contend that no one on Twitter is truly sane). (P.S. Follow me on Twitter!)

But Twain was obviously getting at something with this sanity/happiness thing, and the fact that we pluck this one sentence out of a book and put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs speaks to one of two things: either we're rocking the bookworm fashion, or we are able to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our own lives.

Do me a favor and think some more about the Twain quote.

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."

What was your initial reaction? More than likely you considered it, recalling the adage "ignorance is bliss," and then what? Did you dismiss it? After all, it makes madness sound like not such a bad way to spend a life, but you probably don't consider yourself truly insane. Or do you? How do we define insanity in various contexts? How much does this idea apply to something in your own life? Should we all just give up now?

I read an article today titled "30 Lessons Learned by 30." Despite being six years from the dreaded 30 (I hear it's not that bad!), I found myself immediately applying these one-liner lessons to my own life, evaluating how well I perform them on a daily basis, making mental notes to try harder to prioritize relationships, to be grateful and giving and loving, not to judge others. It's easy to roll your eyes at such well-meaning advice, to resist acknowledging that an entire life's lesson fits so easily into ten words. But understanding that lesson requires some background knowledge, some empathy with the situation. It's hard to argue with maxims like "Honesty is the best policy in relationships. The truth will come out eventually" -- but if you don't have any experience with dishonesty in relationships, then this means nothing to you. It is through life experience that we're able to boil down lessons into easy-to-digest tidbits. It's the reason cliches work and refuse to die: at some point, we realize they're all true.

This is also why grandmothers have so many things embroidered on pillows and hand-painted on adorable signs hanging around their house. Aging brings an understanding of and trust in digestible wisdom. And it's why young people, no matter how smart they are, will always be stupid: we simply don't have the years to back up what we claim to know. Experience trumps every other form of knowledge, always. Take it from a (still relatively stupid) young person who would love nothing more than to write a book that establishes a cliche that winds up on a coffee mug. It's the American dream, I tell ya.

I should mention that the opening quote was said by the main character of the unfinished and posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger. That character happens to be the nephew of Satan, and he spends the book ruminating on "the damned human race." It's heady stuff. The character goes on to say:

"No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result - and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race - and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."

No kidding, dude.

The Blackberry Suicides

Let me tell you a story. It is one of loss, betrayal, and first-world hardship. This is a story that proves it may, in fact, be better never to have loved than to have loved and lost. This is the chronicle of my pathetic history with the Blackberry.

I bought my first Blackberry in the summer of 2009 as a personal reward for completing college and obtaining a real-person job. It felt appropriate: I was an adult, and people would thus require constant access to me. In turn, I would need constant access to Google maps, Facebook, and the TFLN mobile website. I even bought a gel skin to protect my investment. Life was grand.

The following Thanksgiving, I was helping my grandfather haul a Christmas tree over a porch railing, forgetting about my prize Blackberry encased in its feeble gel skin in my front pocket. I leaned hard, resulting in a broken screen. Goodbye, Blackberry #1.

Blackberry #2 fell victim to a friend's birthday bar night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a few months later. It was left on a table, whereupon some douchebag picked it up, turned it off, and probably sold it on eBay, instead of replying to my frantic texts and phone calls. People are a-holes.

Blackberry #3 also fell victim to a broken screen, but I was particularly irked because I hadn't done anything to deserve it this time. It was just sitting in my bag, minding its own business, when it got the living shit kicked out of it by another member of my purse community. No one has stepped forward to claim responsibility. It was probably domestic terrorism.

Blackberry #4 was lost in epic fashion while vacationing in Las Vegas this past February. To protect the integrity of those involved, I'll just say that the last time I saw it, my fourth Blackberry was somewhere in Treasure Island. (Trust me, it's not the weirdest thing found there.) Needless to say, Vegas marketers don't fuck around.


At this point, my cell phone insurance provider dropped my coverage. I was officially on my own. But that didn't slow my irreverent momentum, as Blackberries were dropping like acid at a Flaming Lips concert. Blackberry #5 was in my hand during a softball team bar outing this spring. Fifteen minutes later, it was nowhere to be seen. Again, I suspect some douchebag picked it up and made an eBay profit. Seriously, people suck.

Blackberry #6 was obtained from the T-Mobile store in June, but within a couple days it was clear there was a defect that prevented certain necessary actions. I could not, for instance, upload photos to Facebook from my mobile device. Finding this injustice unacceptable, I took it back to the store and traded it for one that worked. This, I submit, was the most innocent and painless of the Blackberry deaths. At the very least, it was definitely not my fault.

But Blackberry #7 only lasted two weeks. It was lost this past Thursday, somewhere between a River North club and the cab ride home. I honest to God have no idea what happened.

The cosmic message is clear: I was not meant to be a smartphone owner. In an act of contrition, I've downgraded to the "Samsung :)" -- a slide phone designed for a 13-year-old girl with an emoticon fetish. If I can keep this flimsy not-smartphone alive for a year, I'm allowed to get another Blackberry. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I urge you, dear Reader, to observe a moment of silence for the seven Blackberries that had to die to teach me this unpleasant lesson. What was meant to be a symbol of my triumphant entry into adulthood has turned into the insolent shitshow of my early twenties. Let their demise not be in vain. Learn from my tale. And don't bother with the gel skin.

Alas, if only I'd gone for real protection. At the very least,
thieves would have been deterred out of pure disgust.

The stuff dreams are made of

My motivation for the next nine months.

Words of Wisdom from Ira Glass

(click the image to see it clearer)

Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on NPR, is one of the best journalists and storytellers working today. A graphic designer took a quote of his and turned it into a visual lesson on sticking to your guns in a creative profession. Keep your head down, keep writing, just keep swimming -- that's the theme as I face two more weeks of summer school, followed by four weeks of relative freedom, before diving right back into class and student teaching. Grad school is incredibly rewarding, but man, do I miss that dozen hours of my week. Anything worth having...

Stephen Colbert at Northwestern last weekend

Northwestern alum Stephen Colbert gave the commencement address to the class of 2011 in Evanston last weekend. There are many, many great pull-quotes...

"[Northwestern] represents humanity at its best. And on Dillo Day, it represents humanity at its worst...today evidently armadillos are honored by drinking Four Loko out of a supersoaker while dancing to the New Pornographers in a drunken mosh pit filled mostly with National Merit finalists."

And it gets better. Totally worth the 20 minutes, I promise.

And if you can't get enough, check out this feature on Colbert from the winter 2010 Northwestern Magazine.

Go 'Cats!

Another edition of me trying to justify my graduate study

This is my textbook for my Language & Style summer class. Doesn't it look super interesting‽ * I especially love the completely unrelated cover art depicting water. Or is that cigarette smoke? Either way, couldn't we find a more interesting way to depict grammar? How about this:


Much better.

Anyway, I'm studying for my test tonight on sentence structure, and I saw this as an opportunity to a) educate the world, b) defend my choice of master's study, and c) procrastinate while actually sort of studying in a way kinda.

Turns out everyone who's been freaking out about English grammar since, er, grammar school is sort of overreacting. This is mostly because we teach grammar really badly. In truth, there are only six possible sentence structures in English. Six. Total. If you want to feel like a grammar gorilla on cocaine -- all-powerful, all-knowing, and sort of depressingly manic -- then lend me just five minutes of your day.** Here's what you need to know:

You are aware, of course, that all sentences include a subject and a verb. "The grammar gorilla likes cocaine." "The grammar gorilla chortles." "The grammar gorilla does not give a crap what you think of his hairdo." All perfectly acceptable American English sentences.

I'm going to give you a chart now, but please don't freak out. You can skip it and come back for reference.

SIX BASIC ENGLISH SENTENCE PATTERNS

be patterns SUBJ-VERB-SUBJECT COMPLEMENT
linking patterns SUBJ-VERB-SUBJECT COMPLEMENT
intransitive patterns SUBJ-VERB
transitive patterns SUBJ-VERB-DIRECT OBJECT
di-transitive patterns SUBJ-VERB-INDIRECT OBJECT-DIRECT OBJECT
complex transitive patterns SUBJ-VERB-DIRECT OBJECT-OBJECT COMPLEMENT

Hi! Okay glad to still have you here. So listed above are the six possible sentence structures in English. I'm going to glaze over the actual definitions and just use a transitive sentence as an example so I can get to the cool part, which is the fact that you can take any of those sentences and make them negative, passive, perfect, progressive, interrogative, or change tense (past/present/future) -- and it REMAINS THE SAME SENTENCE STRUCTURE. So for example:

You like occlupanids.

This sentence contains a subject, a verb, and a direct object (takes the action of the verb; what I like are occlupanids) -- so it's a transitive sentence. Now let's have some fun with it:

You liked occlupanids. (past)
You will like occlupanids. (future)
You don't like occlupanids. (negative)
You are liking occlupanids. (progressive)
You have liked occlupanids. (perfect)
Occlupanids are liked by you. (passive)
Do you like occlupanids? (interrogative)

So we've made seven new sentences that say completely different things -- BUT IT'S STILL THE EXACT SAME SENTENCE STRUCTURE. It's still got a subject, a verb, and a direct object. It's still a transitive sentence.

Is anyone else as bowled over by this as I am? I mean, the sentence element mix-and-match possibilities are literally infinite, and if you know how to boil it down to the basic elements of the sentence -- that is, the form word slots (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) as opposed to the structure words (conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, determiners, etc.) -- then you can create anything. This, my friends, is what I went to graduate school to learn: how to finesse and manipulate sentences. Because, again, that's what writers do. Let's make this sentence as crazy as we possibly can:

Have occlupanids not been being liked by you?
(past passive perfect progressive interrogative)

It's still the same sentence: "you" is the subject, "liked" is the verb, and "occlupanids" is the direct object; we've just thrown a bunch of other elements in there to mess with tense, aspect, positive/negative, and form. Nevermind the fact that there are probably very few opportunities to use a sentence like this. It is grammatically correct, and that's what matters.

For the record, this works for really long sentences too:

Last year, you definitely liked bright green and orange occlupanids despite the fact that my mother's best friend's uncle's sister gave you a huge bag of twist ties for your birthday instead.

All of the information beyond the basic sentence is adverbial; that is, if we stripped it all away, we'd still be left with a grammatical sentence:

You liked occlupanids.

And that concludes our lesson for the day. I hope you learned something. At the very least, you should now know what an occlupanid is.


* Yes, that is an interrobang. No, interrobangs do not get the respect they deserve from English grammarians. Fight the power.
** Satisfaction not guaranteed. But I'm gonna try really hard.

What a writing major does

My god I love Google image search.

Sometimes I have a hard time describing my graduate program to people.

"I'm studying writing and publishing," I tell them.

"Like books?" they ask.

"Well...yeah, sort of. Like, I have writing workshops on things like memoir and revision, and I study grammar and education theory and stuff too."

It's surprisingly vague and hard to explain, and it actually took me a full year of classes to understand what I was really in grad school for. It's not unusual for me to not really grasp the full extent of the syllabus until eight weeks into the ten-week class, and that's fine because it presents me with a series of satisfying "Eureka!" moments on a regular basis.

Now I've only got four classes left to go before getting my MA. One of those classes -- "Language and Style for Writers" -- I began yesterday in an intense 5-week summer session. (Quarters are normally ten weeks.) My next class is tomorrow -- "week two," if you will -- and I again find myself staring at four chapters of reading from the most vaguely titled textbook I've ever seen in my life: Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects (6th edition, natch).

But I'm a few pages into the introduction -- which, I will add, was not actually assigned reading but I decided to read anyway because it might give me a clue as to what the class is really about -- and I'm intrigued enough to procrastinate a bit with a blog post.

What caught my eye was the definition the authors offer for the title phrase "rhetorical grammar," which is basically the choices a writer makes regarding audience, purpose, and topic. The authors use an example of the difference between writing a text message to a friend and writing a formal fundraising request to the university dean. Each format has its own conventions, from spelling to sentence structure to punctuation to emoticon usage, and each audience has certain expectations. Those grammatical choices, particularly those related to sentence structure, are rhetorical grammar -- and the subject of what I'm studying in class. How to manipulate sentences. Because that, my friends, is what writers do.

And yes, it's past 10pm the night before class and I've paused while reading the introduction to my reading, which is not actually part of the assigned 80 pages, to inform the Internet of just what it is I'm not studying. I'm taking masochistic procrastination to a whole new level here, folks.

So You Want to Write a Novel

These really don't get old. Click here for the journalist version.

"How many editors will Random House assign to my novel?"
"Minus 13."
"--Because it's going to need a lot of editing. I'm not the best speller."

Medill: The Last J-School Standing

This word cloud was created by running Medill's 2008 online course descriptions through Wordle.
See more here.

If you're at all familiar with this blog or the melodramatic happenings at my alma mater, Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism et al, then you've likely formed some opinion of whether a marketing program belongs under the same roof as a journalism program. (Hint: It doesn't.) This week, The Nation's Michael Tracey wrote a 2,000-word piece of despair that places Medill in the center of the downfall of the journalism school (referred to by the affected as "j-school"). He covers a lot of ground, but he makes a few key points: 1) marketing and journalism are "profoundly antithetical enterprises," and their blending in education is not good for the reputation or credibility of journalism; 2) as a leading j-school, Medill's seismic shift spells trouble for the future of all j-schools; and 3) j-schools aren't necessary and we should just do away with them altogether.

(I highly suggest that you read the original article in order to fully appreciate my rage. Look, I'll even give you the link again! Click here!)

Okay, so from the outset, I'll reiterate Tracey's first point, the discomfort with combining marketing and journalism education. Medill has been shoving the two together under the direction of Dean John Lavine, who hit the ground running in 2006 with proposal after proposal that seemed destined to turn Medill into an arm of the Kellogg School of Management. In a symbolic birthing ritual, this spring faculty voted 38-5 to approve a name change from "Medill School of Journalism" to "Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications." (Ugh, it hurts to type.) It's simply a bad idea; just because both journalism and PR/marketing deal with language doesn't mean that they should be lumped together. Tracey quotes director of the Yale Journalism Initiative, Mark Oppenheimer: “We should all be a little concerned that the same schools that teach people to see through bogus claims are also the same schools teaching students how to perpetuate bogus claims.” Right on, totally agreed, no argument here.

The thing that makes me so queasy is that journalism is supposed to be about truth. It's free, it's honorable, it's necessary to functioning society. It is a check on power, a protector of our right to free speech. I loved calling myself a journalist because it made me feel like part of something exciting and cutting-edge and noble. But marketing is about sales. It's about tricking people. It's about convincing consumers they need the newest iPhone, or that a company is socially conscious, or even that this charity is more worthy of your money than another charity. It's about manipulation and persuasion -- a version of the truth, maybe, but not truth. Given, not all journalism is going to clear that bar (hi Bill), but it's at least supposed to try. So that's why everyone (who isn't John Lavine or the 37 other faculty members who voted for the name change) thinks this unholy marriage is a terrible move.

Tracey actually goes off a bit on Dean Lavine, and I felt myself turning into a member of the choir. "Amen," I thought when he recounted the bit of drama a few years ago when an undergrad caught Dean Lavine using unattributed (and very likely false) quotations from students in praise of a Lavine-esque course titled "Advertising: Building Brand Image." It was embarrassing for all involved, and it made Medill look stupid, and I still haven't really forgiven Dean Lavine for that. It was inexcusable.

But I get what he's trying to do. I appreciate that Dean Lavine wants to make sure our $200,000 education is worth it, so he's trying to teach the business aspects of journalism too. How to market your story and yourself to a particular audience. How to manipulate people into reading. It's misguided, but I can see why he thinks that marketing and journalism go hand in hand. But that sort of thing just feels so slimy to a crowd that's being taught to be fiercely objective. We should be talking about paragraph structure and contextual analysis, not branding and pull-quotes.

After fleshing out all the reasons why j-school shouldn't house a marketing program and inflicting some violence on Dean Lavine's reputation, Tracey goes on the offensive against the entire concept of j-school. It's true: you don't need a license to be a journalist. A lot of people who work in the field didn't study journalism, and a lot of people who did study journalism found jobs in other industries. So what's the point? Tracey asks. Anyone can be a journalist, so take that time you're spending "learning" journalism and use it to study other things -- arts, science, whatever you're passionate about. Your proficiency in those passions -- not your knowledge of the inverted pyramid and search-engine optimization -- will make you a good journalist.

I agree that journalists should not be hollow shells resembling people, but active and contributing members of society. Of course we should study other things and become experts in other areas; that's why most people go to j-school, to learn how to tell the stories that interested them in the first place. Some grew up in squalor and dedicate their career to social change journalism; others love numbers and have read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover every day since the age of 11. To each their own. And yes, anyone can be a journalist in the sense that anyone can write words and publish them, usually on the Internet. (Hi mom!)

But Tracey takes an ill-advised leap in suggesting we get rid of j-school altogether. His argument: "Think about the social function of the journalism major. Overtly or not, it creates an implicit regulatory structure, endowing journalism students with the right to manage the university’s newspaper by virtue of their participation in important seminars on media ethics and interview techniques. Conversely, non-journalism students are left with the impression that reporting is best reserved for those who've been formally trained to do it."

To me this is so clear-cut: People who are trained to do something are generally better at it than people who aren't trained to do that thing. You become a better musician by learning about music, you become a better racecar driver by learning about racing, and you become a better journalist by learning about journalism. You don't need a license to practice, but throwing out the entire discipline would be absurd. It suggests that the entire corpus of knowledge -- the history, the ethics of reporting, the art of interviewing and dealing with sensitive subjects, the methods of research, the resources available -- is useless and can be replicated easily without formal training. This would be devolution, a step backward for a discipline that is already so desperately fractured and bleeding. Not to mention it's a slap in the face to me and everyone who majored in journalism, at Medill or elsewhere. I understand that journalism need not be regulated with a gateway fee of a specialized degree, but let's not forget that the specialized degree still has value.

Okay, look. I went to journalism school to learn how to write like a journalist. As luck would have it, the Medill wind shifted as soon as I arrived. Dean Lavine took over at the end of my freshman year from Loren Ghiglione (whose name I had JUST learned how to pronounce, goddammit), and we launched into three years of identity confusion as Dean Lavine tried to basically merge Medill with the Kellogg School of Management. Or at least that's what it felt like. My History and Issues of Journalism course -- a cornerstone of the program -- was reimagined and tag-teamed by three professors in a huge auditorium. We had assigned seats and they actually took attendance -- in a classroom of 150+ students, the entire Medill freshman class. It was a ridiculous exercise and I remember nothing except watching a movie about Edward Murrow.

But Medill does do some things right. The liberal arts education I received at Northwestern was top-notch; most of my peers had a second major (mine was in political science) and we all took courses in art, philosophy, math, science, economics, literature, and so forth. My journalism classes that actually focused on journalism -- literary journalism, magazine writing, law and ethics, and so forth -- blew my mind and forced me to think about the world in a whole new way. I completed two journalism internships, one at an extra-small investigate reporting operation and another at a large consumer technology publication. I got both the breadth and the depth of education that Tracey pines for, and I got it at Medill. You can teach journalism. I know because I was taught journalism. What's much harder to teach is writing, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.

I'm hoping against hope that Medill is going through some sort of teenage phase, but I can't help but feel glum about the future of my alma mater. Like many of my peers, I am not on the journalism track -- but it did directly funnel me in the direction I'm going now as I pursue creative writing. I have friends who work for newspapers and TV stations and magazines, and we still carry on ridiculously nerdy conversations about headlines and AP Style and industry gossip. A piece of me is a journalist, will always be a journalist, and that piece will inform every encounter I have with culture and society and language. For that I thank Medill, and I can do nothing but lament Dean Lavine's agenda and hope it doesn't turn my school into a disgrace.

Reality Bites, a mini-review

Nice tights, Janeane.

Speaking of twenty-somethings, I recently watched the cult classic Reality Bites, starring a young Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke, with Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo, and Ben Stiller, who also directs. It's a healthy dose of early 90s culture, and though it fits the format of a standard romcom, its cult status is deserved. It's well-made and acted and it gets to the heart of the things that terrify 22- to 28-year-olds*.

It's about the romantic, despairing, and hopeless pursuit of a dream job; it's about the confusion of first loves and complicated friendships; and it's about trying to find a path to follow, whatever that may be. (I know, I know, cue the tiny violins, but stick with me.) The characters strive to reconcile their circumstances and their lifestyles while going through a time period that every self-aware adult recognizes. Coming out as gay, getting fired from a job (or twelve), experiencing amazing sex, getting that first taste of realistic success, suffering an AIDS scare -- even if these aren't our lives word for word, we can see the vibrations and understand where they're coming from. The breakdowns, the celebrations, the joy, the despair -- it's a 98-minute lyric poem.

I read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life this week for my revision workshop and pulled this quote from it: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." The simplicity of this statement just bowls me over. It's actually a beautifully freeing thing, because it implicitly awards the individual the choice of how to spend their time. It could have read "how we choose to spend our days is how we choose to spend our lives." Each day we're awarded 24 hours, and we spend them like currency -- this much on sleep, this much on work, this much on play, this much on dicking around and watching The Bachelorette on Hulu.

But those little choices each day build up, and as time passes they'll be what we remember because that's what actually happened -- not necessarily what we wanted or expected. So we seek this status quo, a state of being and set of habits, that will bring us the utmost happiness. For some that happiness is a secure job and a passionate love affair and a four-door sedan. For others it's a gypsy lifestyle, always on the move, always experiencing new things. There's no wrong answer, both the movie and Annie Dillard tell us, but you should probably at least be attempting to seek one out. You know, in your free time.

* I assume the quarter-life crisis will be over by 28. At least that's what I'm hoping, because I'm pretty sure the "I'm about to be 30" crisis will take over either way.

--

UPDATE, 12:13 p.m. - So after posting this, I continued daydreaming and waxing philosophic about being 24 and yadda yadda, and I had a thought. An extension of a thought, really, regarding how we spend our time like cash at a farmer's market, handing it out in return for various satisfactions. Why waste time, then, doing something you don't like -- spending on things you don't care for? I understand that people work jobs they hate because they need the money and that couples stay together for the kids sometimes. But a vast majority of the time, there's no one forcing us to conduct our lives any which way. So why wait around, being unhappy? It's like wasting money -- except that money is replaceable whereas time is not.

Oh...my...God...could it be? Could they have been RIGHT ALL ALONG?!!



Happy summer, everyone.

Twenty-somethings: Choosing a Lifestyle

So many lifestyle choices, so little time.

A quotation from New York Times columnist David Brooks as the commencement speaker for the Brandeis University 2011 graduating class:

"If you are like most college grads, you will spend the next decade of your lives moving from city to city, school to school and from job to job experimenting with different careers and lifestyles," he said. "While you do this, by the way, your parents will slowly go crazy. Everything will be contingent and uncertain."

As Brooks adeptly points out, our generation -- that is, the people born basically in the 80's and now spanning the powerful 21 to 31 demographic -- is behaving differently. Part of it is a necessary reaction to the economy and the job market; we must be willing to move for jobs. We become transient. I, who was raised by transients who wandered a full 3,000 miles from their birthplace, have resolutely made myself a home in Chicago. I extol its wonders -- lovely parks, Midwest attitude, North Ave Whole Foods -- while continually discovering new joys (Lake Shore Drive running path) and setbacks (pee smell that permeates the loop in the summer). It's a big city and I'm young/hyperactive and I like it here.

I know in my heart I probably won't stay in Chicago forever. There's too much of the world to see. I may leave for a few years and then return for good -- I'd like that, actually -- but I belong to the generational mindset that home is where I charge my cell phone. It's that attitude that has allowed my peers and classmates to fling themselves around the world -- Amsterdam, London, the Ukraine, not to mention Atlanta and LA and Portland and so forth. This, our twenties, is the time for adventure and experimentation.

With my location settled for now, and as I hazily hobble toward some sort of career path as a grad student, Brooks would probably agree that I can focus on experimenting with lifestyles. It's like trying on costumes. Do I want to be a jock or a bookworm? Should I spend my lunch hour socializing or exercising? What statement does my hairstyle make? In what clubs and boards and music ensembles will my time investment be worthwhile? Is there a job I'd want where a tribal neck tattoo would be inappropriate; and if so, how about an eagle and the U.S. flag emblazoned across my back? These, I submit, are the important lifestyle decisions of the typical (that is to say, self-absorbed American) twenty-something: It's about how you spend your time and what image you're projecting to the world and how true a snapshot that is of who you really are. It's why we're all so obsessed with Facebook and Twitter; social media is another foundation for building and maintaining a reputation. It's like being in high school again, but with slightly less naïveté and hopefully better hair.

Why not?

This year I have two cousins graduating from high school, five siblings graduating from various elementary-age grades (my twin brothers just finished kindergarten!), and a handful of friends finishing up Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Meanwhile even more of us are still trudging along, sorting through term papers and auditions and manuscripts, the terminal diploma months or years or decades away.

But the toil is the equivalent of the journey, especially if that journey (studying writing) has no set destination ("writing the great American novel" is so twentieth century). So all there is left to do is apologize to our parents, promise them we're happy and well-adjusted and thriving no matter what lifestyle we're attempting this week, and ask them to pretty please mail just one more check. Last one, I promise.

--
P.S. Completely unrelated, but you should check out my side-project with my buddy Kevin Rinz titled New Age Whitman. The summer blog/Twitter (@NewAgeWhitman) will culminate in a raucous drinking event in August. I'm really excited for the power trip that is ordering interns to reconstruct the eastern seaboard using empty Bud light cans. Follow along in the fun!