Pot-luck readings

We held a pot-luck at our Hillsdale Book Club meeting Thursday night. The dishes were readings, not plates of food.

Joan had bitter poems from Guantanamo (What happened to habeas corpus?)

Dick brought a book about peak oil (We have reached the peak)

Rick (We have two Ricks) brought a biography of Jane Addams of Hull House. (As a child she had a vision of a large settlement house set among the hovels of the poor. She lived out her vision.)

Dianna had a hearty issue of “Yes!” magazine (stories about peace and the environment)

I brought a copy of “The Sun.” (I shared mystical quotations from the aphoristic “Sunbeams” section. Example: “Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)

So we shared these morsels and talked about their flavor and content. The brief readings led us to talk about where we should place our energies. Then it was on to what it means to be informed, then, oddly, to a trio of “St Peter jokes,” and finally to what our group should do with itself in the coming year.

Our origins go back to the peace walks we began in the early days of the Hillsdale Farmers Market, Next we evolved into Hillsdale Votes!, a local voter registration drive, and finally, following the disheartening 2004 election, into the book club, where we began licking our wounds by reading “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

Now, on the brink of a new election year, it is time to transform ourselves again, but we agreed it was too soon to decide how.

We are reading Thom Hartmann’s “Cracking the Code” for next month. Subtitled “How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision,” it may provide direction.

Browsing Bound Ink Blots

Going through books donated to the Hillsdale Book Sale (this Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Watershed Senior housing building), I was drawn to an odd assortment of titles.

My attraction served as a kind of literary Rorschach test, circa Dec. 2007.

Here are the blots of ink I chose to browse.

A 1977 edition of “Playboy’s Book of Backgammon,” with a forward by none other than Hugh Hefner. To quote Hefner: “Backgammon is an oddly moral game. It punishes self-deception.”

A 1953 Landmark Books edition of “Thomas Jefferson, Father of Democracy” by Vincent Sheean. I vaguely recall reading this “young readers’” book when I was 11 or 12. Could this tidy little, illustrated volume with its big, scholastic type have been formative? Chapter 1: "He was over six feet tall when he was seventeen years old—a rather awkward boy, with carroty red hair and freckles, a pointed nose and chin. You would never have called him handsome, and yet...."

Two Lewis Thomas books, “The Medusa and the Snail” and “The Fragile Species.” You can never get enough of Lewis Thomas, the self-described “biology watcher.”

“Flu,” subtitle, “The story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it.” By Gina Kolata, who's name sounds suspiciously like one of those exotic Hawiian drinks. Never mind. Thoughts of the 1918 flu pandemic take me back 20 years to one of those random English rambles that delivered me to a country parish graveyard, There I found myself staring at four rows of 16 military graves. The markers read that the graves belonged to Aussie soldiers who died in 1918 not in the horror of battle but in the agony of the Great Flu Pandemic.

“Oregon Geographic Names” by Lewis L. McArthur. 1984 edition. I’m surprise at how many times I have trundled down to the Hillsdale Branch Library to look up some nominal oddity in this book by my neighbor up the hill. What a treasure. From the “Hillsdale” entry: “The name Hillsdale has been in use since pioneer days, and is quite suitable for the place. Hill is from the old Anglo-Saxon hyl, and the Norse holl. Dale means a small valley. It comes form the same source as dell, and the German thal and Slavonic dol.” Now you know.

“An Army at Dawn” by Rick Atkinson, about the 1942-1943 North African campaign. I had read somewhere that this Pulitzer Prize winner was powerfully written. A dip into it did not disappoint. “September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hours, or 19 a minute or one death every 3 seconds….”

“Poor Richard’s Almanacks” by Benjamin Franklin illustrated by, get this, Norman Rockwell. Coffee-table format. What price can you place on this: “If you’d know the Value of Money, go and borrow some”? Or “In the Affairs of this World Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it.”? The price of "Poor Richard" at the book sale, a Franklin-esque $2.

There’s more, but somehow that’s enough.

Hillsdale's smoking slogan

Four of us sat around the corner table at Baker & Spice today coming up with a catchy name for a community fund-raising drive.

Some of money will go to light up a three-story-tall “Hillsdale” sign and tower light on the new Watershed Senior Housing building here. (I’ll get back to the lights in a moment)

The rest will go to establishing a Hillsdale Community Foundation.

My goal was to coax a campaign name out of my three colleagues. With these three, it didn’t take much coaxing. Ted Coonfield, Don Baack and Mike Roach are hands-on, outspoken leaders in the Hillsdale community.

With the lighting bit in mind, we played with “Brighten Hillsdale,” “Hillsdale in Lights,” “Hillsdale, Light it up!” but finally, with vague reservations, decided on “Light up Hillsdale.”

The reservations had to do with a perceived cigarette connection, but then we figured, what the hell, how many people smoke here anyway?

Afterwards I got to thinking that we shouldn’t hide the smoking reference; we should “culture jam” (i.e. steal) it by using the insidiously clever slogans that the advertising industry concocted to promote sucking on cancer sticks.

So here is where the “Light up Hillsdale” campaign goes with slightly modified smoking slogans attached:

Light up Hillsdale — Come to where the flavor is. (We have a half dozen excellent restaurants here)

Light up Hillsdale — One cool (and wet) place

Light up Hillsdale — Just what the doctor ordered (OHSU is right up the hill)

Light up Hillsdale — Tastes good just like a community farmers market should. (We are known for our market)

Light up Hillsdale — I’d walk a mile to get to Hillsdale (especially if we had sidewalks — which we don’t. Trails, we have.)

Light up Hillsdale —You’ve come a long way, baby. (especially if you’ve confused us with Hillsboro and had to backtrack to get here)

Media inequity threatens the "global village"

Of the many ideas sprouted by the germinal mind of Marshall McLuhan, the notion that media are extensions of human beings is one of the most intriguing. If you have a telephone, you has super-ears; if you have a TV, you have super-eyes.

Perhaps. (A haunting question: Do you "hear" better or "see" better as a result?)

In recent years there can no question that those who acquire the ability to use new media have the farthest reach, the greatest extension. Those without access to new media or the skill or desire to use them are placed at a greater and greater disadvantage.

Within our own society we see chasms opening between the technologically proficient and the technologically ignorant, deprived or challenged.

Moreover, the faster the pace of technological change, the more apparent — and troubling — are the consequences of the divide.

Many of us have friends who simply can’t be troubled to keep up with the changes. To us, it is as if they have gone deaf or been struck blind.

The examples are everywhere. Suppose I have a message I want to get out to a group. I simply call up the group list on my computer and fire off the message. But suppose that someone in the group doesn’t read e-mail, or, horror of horrors, doesn’t have a computer. Will I go out of my way to phone my message? I confess it’s not likely. They are literally out of my communications loop

In my own way, I’m equally out of the loop to a young generation that text-messages. No one text messages me because they know I don’t text message. I might as well be living on Mars.

The changes are coming faster and faster and threaten to drive us farther and farther apart even as those of us who master them grow closer and closer.

Because of the uneven and inequitable media “extensions” of our human powers, the verdict is out on the “Global Village” that McLuhan predicted would result from Earth-girdling media.

Books in the Storm

What brings people out on a roaring, wet and windy day like this?

Books, that’s what. Books for our community book sale next Sunday.

There the three of us were in the old unheated, drafty Estby gas station. Tracy Stepp, Les Jevning and I were sorting the bodice-rippers from the Judaica from the Robert Ludlums, the James Micheners and the Danielle Steels.

Out of the gray gloom, the station wagons and hatchbacks pulled up to our storm-battered door to off-load more volumes.

Launched from the Pacific, the storm swept in sheets and gusts across our hills. Its wind and rain raced down Capitol Highway, buffeting and pelting the spartan garage turned book storehouse.

“There’s thunder!” Tracy announced, looking up from a stack of miscellanea teetering in front of her.

“There’s hardly ever thunder here.”

For years there were never books — now thousand of books— in the garage's lube-job, service bays.

Thunder and books happen, sometimes simultaneously, in strange places.

I came across Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” and then, a few swirling gusts later, her “Ariel.” The slender volume of poetry bore an inscription, a fragment in the storm: “Take this book as a memory of me and your other friends here. Sylvia’s poems are like my step-mother. Treat her gently for she is frail.”

“Yvonne” had drawn a peace symbol before signing her name.

Our building trembled in the moaning wind as another book-laden car pulled in.

Preparing for a departure

I’ve been preparing for my “Introduction to Writing for the Media” class, which runs for 10 weeks beginning the second week of January. (It’s listed as J-200 in the Portland Community College catalogue.)

I’ve taught the course under various titles for 12 or so years at a couple of campuses. Until now, I’ve stayed in lockstep with the regimented chapters of hefty, slog-it-out textbooks.

For next term, I’ve decided to break free of a text and sprint down a new path.

This time the required reading will be the Associated Press Stylebook (which I have required before), the classic “Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E.B. White (see earlier post), and a recent New York Times best seller “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. The subtitle of the latter is “Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.”

I have two motives for changing. The first has to do with money. My students', not mine. The cost of the standard textbook is pushing $90. The three new required books can be had on-line or at Powell’s, used, for no more than $20 — total.

For community college students, the difference can be huge. I have had students who have waited four weeks into the term before they could scrounge up money to buy the text. By then they were lost.

More important than the stratospheric price of textbooks are several experiments I want to try.

For example, one calls for dissecting news stories. I’ve done some of this before, but this time I want the students to approach the stories almost as mechanical devices to be taken apart and reassembled. Not that I said "almost."

Working alone or in pairs, the students will be assigned their own news story to disassemble into facts and sources, listing them on a fact/source inventory sheet.

Then the students will swap fact sheets from the different stories broken down by other students. From one student or team’s inventory sheet another student or duo will reassemble the story — or a story, their story.

The final step will be comparing the new student-written story to the original, exploring questions that arise from the comparison. Here are just five:

• How do the leads (and hence the news judgment) differ?
• Did you find you wanted information that wasn’t listed on the fact sheet?
• Was that missing information in the original story?
• Are the sources reliable?
• What other sources would improve the story?

I also want to press students to come up with their own exercises. In a way, I want them to work for that $70 they’ve saved and to help create a better "text" and a better course.

Right now I’m trying to figure out exactly where “Made to Stick,” “The AP Stylebook” and “The Elements of Style” will fit in. I have a month to play with that part of the puzzle.

One other thing: I have recommended purchasing the essays of George Orwell, which should add no more than $3.50 to the cost of the “texts,” if that. Our PCC library has Orwell’s essays, which remain the gold standard of journalistic purpose, passion and conscience.

I may come back to my musings about this class on the blog. I want to offer an idea or two for your examination and criticism. If my sharing of ideas only results in self-examination and self-criticism, so be it.

Just knowing you are reading will steel me to the task.

Revisiting Strunk and White

Re-reading “The Elements of Style” is like visiting with an old friend after a long, long absence.

All the endearing qualities, all the old bonds, come rushing back.

And, with the passage of the years, there’s so much to talk about with authors William Strunk and E.B. White. So much to be reminded of. That includes their assurance that it’s all right to end a sentence with a preposition — especially if it saves you from writing, “So much of which to be reminded.”

The book reminded me of how much I’ve wanted to share with kindred spirits my revulsion for the ubiquitous “robust.” Whom better than Strunk and White?

If there was ever a “Bush-ite” word, it is “robust.” It almost comes branded with the black mark of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The word is all posture and no substance. “Mission Accomplished” was, and is, “robust.”

What kind of bust has Iraq been? A RO-BUST!

So it was that Strunk and White singled out “thrust,” which displays its own phoney muscle-flexing. To quote from page 61 of the third edition: “This showy noun, suggestive of power, hinting of sex, is the darling of executives, politicos and speech writers. Use it sparingly. Save it for specific applications.”

Exactly, and likewise with “robust.”

“The Elements of Style” is one gem after another.

One of my favorite passages explains how Lincoln got away with “Four score and seven years ago.”

I mean, REALLY! Talk about over-written.

And yet he did it, and White in the book’s concluding section, titled “An Approach to Style,” nails down why.

Noting that Lincoln was “flirting with disaster” when he wrote the phrase, White continues:

The president could have got into his sentence with plain “eighty-seven” — a saving of two words and less of a strain on the listeners’ powers of multiplication. But Lincoln’s ear must have told him to go ahead with four score and seven. By doing so, he achieved cadence while skirting the edge of fanciness. Suppose he had blundered over the line and written, “In the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and seventy-six.” His speech would have sustained a heavy blow. Or suppose he had settled on “eighty-seven.” In that case he would have got into his introductory sentence too quickly; the timing would have been bad.”

Lincoln’s choice of a beginning ensured that, contrary to what he said that day, we will long remember his short speech at the hallowed Gettysburg battleground.

Strunk and White’s well-chosen words have the same effect. We will long remember “The Elements of Style.”