Propheteering

This is a response to a recent essay by my friend Hank Fox, on the subject of the cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed and their aftermath. Read his essay over at www.hankfox.com, and then proceed below (or don't, it's your call):    

Hank,  

I'm well aware of your thoughts on fundamentalism and organized religion, and many of your readers probably are, too. However, I'm not sure I'm with you 100% in your essay on the Mohammed cartoons, etc. My basic beef is that you seem to be lumping all Muslims together as violent and dangerous based on the reactions of the crazy ones. I'll grant that there seems to be a higher percentage of violent psychos in Islam than in, say, Quakerism, but Islam also has its share of fairly well-adjusted followers (in the sense that they're not violent, not that they're right about other things). You've attacked the whole religion based on the antics of the fundamentalist jihadists -- and though the less-violent Muslims might have beliefs/values you abhor, such as the subjugation of women, etc., those issues differ in type and degree from the problems of the jihadists.

The essay doesn't make enough of a connection between your reasons for attacking violent fundamentalism and your reasons for attacking organized religion in general. They're related issues, but the relationship is complex enough to warrant a complex critique.  

To say "we can't live" with Muslims might be misconstrued as sounding like a call for genocide -- I understand you're simply following through with the crazy boyfriend analogy, but the analogy doesn't work because we non-Muslims can't opt to "kick the Muslims out and change the locks" as if they were a crazy boyfriend. We can't even "call the cops" -- because the "cops" in this case are busy shooting their friends in the face with birdshot. ;)  

Just a few thoughts from a devil's advocate point of view.  

Bill

Franklin and Fiction

Yikes, it's been more than a week since my last post. I've been busy, tutoring at the Writing Center 20 hours per week, and reading, reading, reading: Franklin, Anne Bradstreet, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, Faulkner, Melville and others, as well as some dense works of literary theory and criticism, just in the first three weeks of the semester.

The Benjamin Franklin autobiography was quite revealing, and it changed my impression of that founding father quite drastically. He was a vegetarian for a while but caved in at the smell of fried cod, he had several "intrigues with low women" and he did some fairly dirty journalism (making himself wealthy in the process) as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Yet his reputation remains that of a pillar of American virtue and values. Hmmm ... maybe that's not ironic after all. But I digress.  

The greatest challenge so far has been writing fiction for the workshop I'm taking. This week I finished my first short story -- the first bit of fiction I've completed since the seventh grade. I've decided not to post it on the blog, but anyone who wants to read it can e-mail me at smokinbill@aol.com, and I'll send you a copy of the text, with my compliments.

 

Passing a Poem Along

I just stumbled upon this fine music-inspired poem by Hayden Carruth. Check it out over at poets.org:

Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey

Learning to Write ... and Duck

My parents, teachers, editors and colleagues have all made contributions to my development as a writer. I’m grateful for the guidance I’ve received, and I hold no one but myself responsible for any bad writing habits that may have rubbed off in addition to skills and wisdom. In deed, there will be a long list of people to thank when I accept the awards for this dazzling essay, written in a moment of inspiration after twelve hours at school and an hourlong commute on slick roads – from Mrs. Wilson, who praised my second-grade poem about an avocado plant, to Professor Barlow, who found nice things to say last semester about a ten-page, dead-end meditation on the (almost entirely imagined) connections between the American Primitive guitar music of John Fahey and the dive bars of Oneonta.

One jerk who won’t make the list is Jim H. He was my first boss, the supervising editor at a small Upstate New York paper that hired me as a reporter fresh out of college. With Jim screaming for copy and literally breathing down my neck on deadline, I learned some critical lessons about writing in the world of daily newspaper journalism, many of which apply to writing in other contexts:

1. When you’re trying to convey information to your readers, substance is always more important than style, and simplicity will often serve the message better than complexity.

2. You have to know the rules of grammar and usage in order to break those rules in effective (i.e., forgivable) ways.

3. Nothing you write can be absolutely perfect or complete, whether your deadline is ten minutes or ten hours away. But that’s okay, because there’s always a chance to follow up in the next edition.

These tidbits have stayed with me over the years, but not because Jim was a positive role model or sagacious mentor. He hurled advice at reporters across a busy newsroom, sometimes accompanied by insults and the occasional paperweight.

Another thing that I learned from Jim was that a person should never attempt to simultaneously kick three serious addictions (booze, caffeine and cigarettes) while going through a nasty divorce, and a supervisor should never verbally abuse an employee at close range when that supervisor has recently fallen off one or more of his proverbial wagons, even with the precaution of a curiously strong breath mint.

He taught me a little about writing and a lot about how not to manage a newsroom. I brought the experience with me a few years later, when I took over the job that he had lost because of his foul temper and conduct.

So thanks for the advice, Jim, but you can kiss my ass. I’ve still got a paperweight with your name on it.

I just stumbled across this site, of interest to fans of pre-WWII acoustic blues ...

Honey, Where You Been So Long?

Getting Jiggy

Last Friday, I took part in a traditional jam session at "The Green House" on the campus of my alma mater, Union College. Here's an .mp3 of the group playing a set of two Irish jigs:

Swallowtail Jig/Tobin's Favorite

I was one of three or four guitar players strumming and picking away under the strains of fiddles, mandolins, piano and pipes. I played rhythm behind the first tune and tried to pick out the melody of "Tobin's," but I couldn't hear over the din to tell if I was even in the same key, let alone playing the right notes. But that's one of the joys of large sessions -- plenty of room for experimentation and clams.

Onward and Upward? Or Just Elsewhere?

Sunday was my last shift as an editor on the copy desk at The Daily Gazette. I'm officially unemployed -- for a week. On Monday, I'll start courses and my tutoring job at UAlbany. I've signed up for three courses (Faulkner, "The Literary Reputation," and a workshop in short fiction), which should provide enough intellectual labor to keep my brain smoking and popping for the length of the semester. 

I will have the summer off from school, though I will be teaching a section of Intro to Journalism. In the fall, I'll write my thesis, which I'm hoping will be a creative one -- in the form of a collection of short stories or a novella -- rather than a traditional academic research-and-analysis paper. People have been asking what it's going to be about, and I try to put it in a nutshell for them, but it simply won't fit. So sometime this semester, I'll write up a prospectus for the thesis, and I will of course paste a copy on this blog for my loyal readers to ponder.

Yesterday, Jen and I took the boys to the state museum in Albany. They had a great time on the carousel, though sitting in the spinning tea cup made me want to hurl. Here are a couple of shots: