The headline I’ve been waiting to write: Cause of death is electrocution, but not by urine.
Thanks! Noted.
I defy you to read the first three paragraphs of this Laura Berman column from the Detroit News and not read the rest:
The president of the Detroit school board, Otis Mathis, is waging a legal battle to steer the academic future of 90,000 children, in the nation’s lowest-achieving big city district.
He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence. Here’s a sample from an e-mail he sent to friends and supporters on Sunday night, uncorrected for errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage. It begins:
If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.
The column goes on to describe Mathis’ epic battles with the written word, asking whether his ability to succeed in spite of it (he has a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State, but it took more than a decade to get, because he couldn’t pass the English proficiency exam) is good news or bad. There’s no clear answer, but it made me think about writing and what it takes to do it a) well and/or b) competently. You can imagine my feelings about it; looking back on my romantic history, I don’t think I ever had a serious relationship with a man who couldn’t turn a phrase. They varied widely in formal education, but they could all write a decent letter or inscribe a book with style. It’s not like I went looking for them; it just worked out that way. I doubt a math PhD would marry someone who couldn’t balance the family checkbook.
Over many years, I’ve managed to overcome my belief that bad spelling is a character flaw, and friends, that has taken some doing. I’ve known enough very smart people who could barely spell cat and dog that I’ve grown into the belief it’s a form of learning disorder. (First, I have to believe you actually tried to learn, however.) One of my college boyfriends handed me a grocery list once: chese, pasto (penny), letus. I still get an occasional e-mail from him — funny but atrociously spelled. I don’t think he even sees the mistakes, and has the sense to rely on proofreaders for his business correspondence.
Others would feel the same way about me, and my mathematic illiteracy. I can do the big four — add, subtract, multiply and divide — but Kate, in seventh grade, knows better than to ask me for help on her math homework; she outran me with numbers a year or two ago.
But at least I’m not in charge of anyone else’s money, or doing calculations of load-bearing pillars. Mathis is on a school board, its president. And he’s a living embodiment of that contemporary nightmare — the diploma-holding (degree-holding!) graduate who’s functionally illiterate.
Of course, Detroit is a special case:
“We picked him (to be president) because we thought he has the intelligence for it and the tolerance for disruptive behavior,” says Reverend David Murray. “He has that type of calm.”
This is a district where board meetings often feature “disruptive behavior” — a citizen’s group organized a grape-throwing incident on one memorable occasion — so maybe this is a special case. But I doubt it. Grosse Pointe’s most recent board president has a blog that he not only writes himself, it contains his own complex but understandable analyses of financial documents. You could hardly pick a better example of how far apart two adjacent districts can be in this strange land of southeast Michigan.
OK, folks. Back to the grind. I’m a word-churning machine for the next fortnight, and the warmup has lasted long enough.
I saw this story yesterday on the Free Press’ most-popular list and — teachable moment! — asked Kate if she could tell my why it happened, how a man who had just hit a utility pole with no injury to himself could be found dead just moments later, with evidence suggesting he’d decided to pass the time by urinating into the ditch near where his car had crashed. She needed more information than that, so I told her there was a live electrical wire in the ditch. That closed the circuit, to to speak:
“Because of the water?” Ding ding ding ding ding. It’s not exactly an SAT essay-question answer, but she’s only in seventh grade. We’ll leave the appreciation of life’s cruel ironies and the question of the universe’s perverse sense of humor for senior year.
I needed that story yesterday, which was not a very good one. Nothing catastrophic happened, just one of those comedy-of-errors 24-hour periods you’re issued every so often. I’m working on a book project, a custom-publishing job, i.e., writer-for-hire work. It requires historical research downtown, at the Detroit Public Library. I found a parking place on Woodward Avenue, right in front of the place, which I chalked up to my prompt arrival in the first hour after opening. Win! Got out, paid in advance for two hours, went to the door — locked. Wouldn’t open for 90 more minutes. No catastrophe; I’d find a quiet place nearby to spread out my materials and get organized. That turned out to be an Einstein’s bagels on the Wayne State campus, which was not quiet, but did have a big overstuffed armchair free. Win! The armchair was free because it was right next to a malfunctioning door, which stayed wide open to the 35-degree elements if not pulled shut, something only every 10th customer realized.
After a few minutes of this, I moved to another overstuffed armchair, far enough from the draft that it wouldn’t bother me. Win! The one next to me was soon taken by a guy who was enjoying a hot sandwich and a conversation with his friend on the other side of me, which I normally don’t mind; I love to eavesdrop. Unfortunately, all they could talk about was how good their sandwiches were.
But I got a little done, and headed back to the library at 10 ’til noon. My paid-for parking place was full; at least someone was having a lucky day. I got another, paid for two hours. I had an OMG moment when I found a letter from 1938, the writer announcing he was coming to Detroit with “a moving-picture newsreel from the German Foreign Office…showing the ceremonies, indoors and outside, in connection with the National Socialist rally at Nuremberg last September. I do not believe anything of this kind has ever been shown in America.”
My heart soared, thinking I had found a contemporaneous description of what were perhaps “Triumph of the Will” outtakes when I thought to check the dates. Um, no. Leni Riefenstahl shot the 1934 Nazi party conference, not 1937.
Trudged out to the car and found a $20 parking ticket. It was that kind of day.
I wonder if I can deduct it.
Came home, and heard about the guy who died with his weenie out, which was a useful reminder that one’s own bad day is almost never the worst bad day anyone ever had.
I wish I could have seen that newsreel. I wish more I could have heard what people said about it.
This project has been a useful reminder that there are two kinds of history — the kind you live through day-by-day, and the kind you didn’t. Go through old newspapers on microfilm for a while, and before long I guarantee you’ll find someone is being accused of leading the youth of America down the path to ruin and socialism. Yesterday I saw a column from the last week of October 1963, by Max Freedman. Dateline Houston:
One of the most surprising discoveries of this visit to Texas is the depth of feeling against the so-called Kennedy dynasty.
In Washington this complaint has dwindled to a pleasant little joke. Out here men swear angrily and women edge their speech with hardness as they denounce “the Kennedys.”
Don’t worry, Mr. President. I hear Dallas loves you.
OK, back to work. Lord knows what will turn up today. And I’ll remember to feed the meter.
An all-bloggage Tuesday for an overstressed blogmistress:
You want to know why the Great Lakes are fighting the Asian carp incursion so strongly? Because we already have enough invasive species in the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water. Exhibit A being this ugly bastard.
The phrase “wait, what?” has caught on in Kate’s circle. It has a certain Cheech-and-Chong air of amused bafflement. I haven’t felt even vaguely tempted to use it myself. Until now. Wait, what?
Blame Chile: Their stupid earthquake has shortened all our days, perhaps knocked the very planet off its axis (a little). No kidding.
Will Leitch is a brave man. He tells his Roger Ebert story, a great read about just how stupid and feckless youth can be (especially youth with a pen and a great idea for a headline — “I Am Sick Of Roger Ebert’s Fat F—-ing Face”), here. [Link fixed. Thanks, J.]
Off to the historical library. With a peanut-butter sandwich for lunch.
I spent most of Friday doing something at the last minute. (So sue me, I have a journalist’s heart. We do things at the last minute.) Considering I was judging college journalism, that seemed fitting.
Fifty entries in an SPJ contest. I read every one. I liked many of them. When it came time to pin the ribbons, I felt the usual remorse that so many good entries wouldn’t go away with a prize. I expected all of this. What I didn’t expect was this: How little has changed. I’m not talking about the flag of The Post, my collegiate alma mater, still recognizable after, what? Thirty years of subsequent editorial staffs? (Admirable restraint, if you ask me. The first thing a new editor does in the real world is order a sweeping redesign. Ninety percent of the time, a criminal waste of effort.)
No, I’m talking about the form itself — the student newspaper. By this time, the new media should have swept college campuses. There shouldn’t be a student newspaper, but rather, a completely interactive platform-neutral information stream, processing all the important news on campus — in my day, record reviews, classified ads on apartments and two-for-one pizza coupons — into a seamless garment of data accessible on everything from a laptop to a phone, plus Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of it. Maybe, somewhere, that is the case. All I know is that I saw traditional news stories written in traditional ways, presented in traditional layouts on traditional ink-on-paper. It was more than traditional. In fact, it was retro: At one point, I beheld a headline with a kicker. You know what a kicker is? It’s the little mini-headline that runs over the main head, usually with a rule underneath, usually just a few words:
Swine flu sweeps freshman dorms; vaccination clinic announced. Kicker: ‘Sick as a dog’
I haven’t seen a kicker in professional journalism since Jim Barbieri was writing them at the Bluffton News-Banner. That is to say: A while.
There are two ways of looking at this. One, that colleges are seriously failing journalism students by keeping student papers around at all, like a school offering buggy whip-braiding classes in 1925. Or maybe, just maybe, the newspaper isn’t a terrible way to deliver news in any environment, but particularly on campus, where kids frequently find themselves with 20 minutes to kill between this and that, and a paper is not only an efficient delivery vehicle for the information those students might want, but actually, I dunno, something pleasant to pass the time with.
I’m holding with hope. It’s all I’ve got. Although a word of advice to student journalists: You can almost always make your stories shorter. You’re competing with Twitter, you know.
And now the weekend is over, and I’m facing a two-week sprint unlike many of recent years. Good news: It’s work, it’s paying work, and that’s good. Bad news: Might be spotty around here for a while. But you guys are good conversationalists; you can carry this dump for a few days here and there.
Let’s start with an underreported story, in my opinion: What if health-insurance reform dies, as so many seem to want? What then? The cost of doing nothing. Not cheering.
Or try this: A white sorority wins a step contest, traditionally an all-black show. What then? Metafilter has a nosegay of links, and from watching their performance, I’d say they brought it.
Dear Mr. President, Stop smoking. Try Chantix — I hear it works.
And that’s it for me today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.