India unbound

My friend Renee Chinquapin has spun her energetic prose into venturesome story-telling again. She’s just put out another self-published book that really, really, needs, nay, DEMANDS, a larger audience.

(Publishers and lovers of engulfing, bracing prose should contact her at reneechinquapin@gmail.com)

Her press run for this slim volume was 60, and she has two copies left after giving most to friends.

Her first book, “Bogotá to Buenos Aires: Riffs, Raps and Revelations on the Gringo Trail” was a similar stunner about her travels in South America. This one, called “Near Death India,” throws the reader unawares into the swirling sub-continent.

Here’s a sample from early in the book:

Winston Churchill quipped that India’s no more a country than the equator, so fractured is it by language, culture, sect, huge history and brokeback geography. What mind can grok a billion plus souls squatting by dung flies? Flooding third-class railroad cars? Sleeping on the street? Mending nets on the beach? Drying coconut meat? Training for war in Kashmir? Recapitulating colonial ontogeny in a million bureaucratic labyrinths heaped high with dusty unread reports and requests?

India’s an impossible jumble of overlapping galaxies of self-regulating chaos linked by cricket allegiance and sari-splendor.

All I can do is be here, now, as Ram Dass so wisely advised. Be here in this empty, tiled downstairs living room with lazily revolving ceiling fan barely blunting the blazing tropic sun outside. But immediately my mind leaps into action, wondering to where the toilet hole in the bathroom flushes? What lives in the tap water? How many gazillion ants swarm in the stripped-down kitchen? Is my mattress really horsehair? Why are there no sheets or pillow case? Are the bedroom shutters nailed shut to thwart thieves fishing for tourist goodies through open windows?

There’s no one to ask.

Outside, delicate poplars sway above a steady stream of tiny, three-wheeled trucks, unmufflered motorbike taxis and rented scooters. Dark-skinned Dalit (Untouchable) women beg. White-shirted, bespectacled mercantile Christian local men stride by, eyes set on profit.

I can no more know India than I can know quantum physics or God.

So be it.

Blogs for Budding Journalists

Today a student asked me THAT question again: Is there a future in a career in journalism?

I was a bit quicker to respond than the last time I was asked just a couple of weeks ago.

“As long as there is a need for clear, concise writing and fair and accurate reporting, there will be a need for journalists.” Then I added, "Whether journalists actually will be practicing journalism, is another question." (Two more newspapers tanked today.)

I was pleased to see that my answer didn’t deter her.

"I know I need 'clips' to get into graduate school. Where can I get published?”

The community college where I teach shut down its student newspaper several years ago. It was a poor excuse for a newspaper. Each sophomoric (literally and figuratively) issue displayed its lack of professional guidance and administration support.

It was, in short, an embarrassment.

Then an idea struck me. “Do you have a blog?” I asked.

She didn’t, so I encouraged her to start one. And I went farther. “If you’ll start one, I’ll read it. And if you like, I’ll comment on it. In exchange, you should read mine and comment on it.”

There it was, blogging buddies. Or blogging co-editors. Or co-mentors.

I have no idea what will become of the idea — or her resolve, but my suggestion seemed like excellent advice as a way to prepare for the future of journalism, whatever it might be.

I just googled “blogging" and "buddies” and, of course, got a host of responses. This one seemed particularly helpful.

Where public words go

As a journalist, I'm used to having my name in print. So when I become a named source in a story, as I was today, it's no big deal.

I'm pleased to be quoted accurately and in context.

Today's story was about TV Turnoff Week specifically and media's impact generally. It appeared in the Living Section of The Oregonian. Reporter Abby Haight used one thought of mine that the others she talked to apparently didn't make.

I noted how televisions (and all "screens" really) are powerful tools, and how we must use them constructively, not let them use us destructively.

I'm glad I mentioned that, especially if others didn't, and that she included it.

It was a good story.

I have a quibble. I don't describe myself as a "journalism professor," as she did. Generically I suppose that's what I am, at least some of the time. But in the hierarchical world of academia, the title "professor" implies tenure and academic distinction. I have neither.

I teach at Portland Community College from term to term. I have no hold on even my part-time employment. The administration can let me go at any time.

"Tenure" is a funny word. It works two ways. It means you are assured a job—that you have a "hold" on it. But often that security means the job has a hold on you. I have found my lack of tenure to be liberating, both for me and those who have hired me. We can both take it or leave it.

My students generally appreciate my efforts, but professorial "distinction" isn't a word that appears on my end-of-term evaluations. Several students have felt a certain "passion" in my teaching. If true, it is a guilty charge I gladly accept.

This all began as thoughts about a story in today's newspaper. It's hard to know what becomes of such stories. To write for mass audiences or allow yourself to be quoted is a leap of faith that you will touch some unseen reader or readers.

On rare occasions a reader will respond, commenting on the impact of something we have written or been quoted as saying. But for the most part, the writer's printed or speaker's quoted words all become part of the swirling mix of ideas that shape our existence.

And we hope for the best.

Probing the limits of brevity

I remember reading somewhere that, when in doubt, attribute aphorisms to Mark Twain.

One of my favorites about writing, "If I'd had more time, I'd have written less,"is credited to Twain.

I found myself invoking it on Saturday when I gave a short talk to neighborhood leaders who write for a neighborhood newspaper. They are busy people so they don't spend much time in writing their monthly news updates for the paper. Accordingly, their submissions often are tediously long.

The staff that puts out the paper answers to the neighborhood leaders and is therefore reluctant to cut words. As a result, the writing ends up unedited and printed in boring, gray expanses in the generally drab paper, which is called the SW News. (Visitors: SW stands for Southwest, as in Southwest Portland, which is not in Maine, but Oregon.)

I mention all this because, by sheer synaptic chance, I stumbled upon an un-Twain-like way of capturing his idea.

"It took me twice as long to write half as much."

It sounds pithy, until you realize it is two words longer than Twain's version.

I was hoping to get the whole thing down to four or five words. And no, I didn't run out of time.

Brevity has its limits.

Note: Rooting around on the Internet, I found this comment about the Twain quote: "I thought he meant he would've spent less time writing about life and more time living it [if he had had more time]. Am I the only one that saw it that way?"

I didn't read it that way, but now that you mention it....

A sobering critique

On Monday evening my monthly writers’ group got to me about my Red Electric writing before the New York Times did on Tuesday morning.

Each writer in our group of six invites comments from the others about our monthly submissions. My submissions in the past two months have been several Red Electric posts.

On Monday evening one of my fellow writers put her criticism directly, “Your writing in the blog seems harsher.”

Another asked, obliquely, but tellingly, whether I missed having an editor.

Someone else wondered whether I would write my newspaper column the way I do the blog.

I had to confess that I’m more guarded in the column.

My tone, they were saying, is strangely different on-line. I agree. It is blunter and, frankly, less sensitive to how those I’m writing about might react.

I’ve been particularly tough on those in government and bureaucracies in general. I believe in what I’ve written, often passionately, but the criticism has been coarse at times.

I was sobered by my colleagues’ critique and my own repentance.

The very next morning, I found some solace in an explanation in the New York Times Science section. The author, Daniel Goleman, wrote that when we compose for the internet, we lack the visual feedback (a raised eyebrow, a grimace, a frown) that we do when we communicate face to face. As a result, our writing is far less inhibited. At times it is downright rude. At worst, it becomes “flaming.”

Psychologist even have a name for the behavior: “On-line Disinhibition Effect.”

What to do?

First, for me, a few apologies are in order to anyone who has been offended.

Second, clearly I need to create a greater sensitivity in this solitary writing space devoid of social cues.

Goleman suggests the problem will be solved when we have video e-mail so that we can see how recipients are responding. Until then he believes some kind of visual reminder of caution and civility should be pasted to the computer monitor.

The best one I can think of comes from the Salem, Oregon-based Hands Project. It takes the form of a refrigerators magnet depicting an open hand holding a heart. The image is accompanied by the words “Hands & words are not for hurting.”

In the case of on-line writing, the pledge should apply to typing hands and the words those hands send into cyberspace.