Tag Archives: Writing

Beware of the Blogger

01 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Work

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Me the Evil Blogger

I have a haiku for Tony Kornheiser, host of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption and ESPN DC 980’s The Tony Kornheiser Show:

Beware the Blogger, for he’s only right sometimes, but wrong all the time.

This not only sums up Kornheiser’s sentiment regarding bloggers, but those of many veterans of professional journalism. But since Kornheiser’s the most recent dissenter who’s used his microphone as a weapon to whack all bloggers over their heads about blogging, I’ll work with him. Apparently a person who wants to become a print journalist today must, absolutely must, “pay their dues” in order to be great at the profession. By Kornheiser’s definition as a long-time beat sports reporter, that means years of lousy pay, traveling to godforsaken towns and villages, staying in crappy motels and eating artery-clogging food in order to hone the craft of gathering sources and doing interviews.

I have no argument against honing one’s craft. We all should do it, regardless of profession, in order to make the most of our talents and eventually become successful. What I do have a problem with, though, is the idea that bloggers somehow are taking a shortcut. It’s as if we’ve all decided to warp space-time itself instead of seeking to break the speed-of-light-barrier in order to become successful journalists and writers.

All we do, according to Kornheiser and numerous others, is “spew” and “spout opinions,” not based on anything except our guts. Apparently we’re all supposed to become old, gray and grizzled in order to have the privilege of making a decent living and being able to have a radio show and a half-hour TV gig. Still, I get it. Andrew Breitbart’s blogging crusade against anything that he considers politically left managed to drag Shirley Sherrod, Ben Jealous and NAACP and the White House along for his pitiful ride into the mud.

Yet I don’t remember too many people complaining about the blogosphere when the story about former presidential candidate John Edwards broke into the mainstream two years ago. A story that bloggers and the National Inquirer had been banging around for eight months before the real professional journalists got a hold of it. I don’t recall Kornheiser and his buddies giving folks like Mitch Albom (Detroit Free Press, bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie) or Bob Ryan (long-time sports reporter and columnist for the Boston Globe) too hard a time over stories that they should’ve never filed or were completely inaccurate. I don’t remember Kornheiser complaining about the plight of print journalism when the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal (New York Times, 2003) or the Mike Barnicle fabrication scandal (Boston Globe, 1998) broke.

I take offense to any journalist or writer insisting that every blogger is an unadulterated hack with zero skills necessary to be — or become — good writers or journalists. I take offense because I’ve paid my dues, thank you very much. I’ve been writing on the topic of race, culture and diversity for more than twenty years, and have been a published writer for the past seventeen years. Five and a half years of graduate school to become an American and African American historian, and the past ten years to make myself more than an academic writer. Maybe I just imagined my days without food and with holes in my sneakers back then.

Within that, years of archival research hunting for sources much more obscure than “Deep Throat.” Interviews with people in authority, with people long forgotten by the press. A year of my life just learning how to do statistical analysis. Two and a half years of post-graduate unemployment and underemployment, taking crap work and teaching part-time in order to become a better writer and a better historian. But, alas, I haven’t “paid my dues.”

I blog for three reasons. One, because it serves as a form of a journal for me, to be able to track my mood, my progress as I pursue the publication of my memoir Boy @ The Window. Two, because as long as I have something to say about a subject I know quite a bit about — and through my years of experience, I know quite a bit about a lot of things — I can write about that subject. Three, I blog because I want to build an audience, to have an honest presence in the blogosphere, where I spew more than vitriol, where what I have to say is based on research, interviews, sources, and, of course, my biases and my opinions.

To Kornheiser, I say, based on a quote from Vernon Jordan’s memoir, Vernon Can Read! (2001): “Read, Tony, Read!” Read an occasional blog like mine. Don’t just spew your opinion, you dope!

Donald’s Sense of Something

15 Saturday May 2010

Posted by in 1, Eclectic

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St. Patrick's Cathedral, Washington, DC

It felt like my heart had finally made its way home. I found myself in a place where the world seemed far away. For a moment, I thought I was in heaven, far above the concerns of my past. I was in a place filed with the imaginations of my mind. But I was hearing voices, many other voices, contributing their wisdom to my words and images. I was in a big room, in a concert hall or cathedral. I wasn’t entirely sure.

The walls of this huge hall were buttercream-colored, with the brightest, whitest vaulted ceiling and pillars I’d ever seen. The seats in the hall were burgundy in color, on a dark cherry-wood floor so shiny with lacquer that I could see my face reflecting from it.  It was a room that smelled of tulips and roses, of honeysuckle and other sweet scents I’ve only smelled in my mind. Flower shops never smelled this exquisite, women never so intoxicating.

At first, I thought that I was in the balcony, a dark place with another set of chairs, these painted black. I looked over there. No people inhabited this space. Just distance whispers, tiny sounds of fear and doubt that would come out of there. Only to be canceled out by my thoughts, my ideas, my images.

A bright light shone through from a glass dome that I somehow hadn’t noticed before, The light was directly on me as slowly began to move from the back of the hall toward the stage and the cream-colored curtains that dressed its sides and top. I realized that I wasn’t walking, that I was somehow flying, but not. It was more like I was walking on air, dressed like I was a scholar, or pastor, or Roman senator. But that wasn’t it, not quite. As I started toward the stage, slowly at first, I heard this soft yet pressing music mingle with my thoughts. It wasn’t religious music, though. It was a cross between classical music and new age, something like Bach combined with Enya. I had no idea what was going on at the other end of the hall. I just knew I had to get there.

Suddenly I could see my thoughts in the light combine with the musical notes that I’d been hearing throughout my air walking across the hall. The thoughts and music came down to me as words on pages. I found myself writing about everything I could imagine. I wrote papers for all of my classes. I scribbled down thoughts and notes for my thesis. I typed out tremendous volumes of materials, some for the world in which I thought I was a part of, many more for another world, another place. I wrote and thought so much that the paper rained down on the audience below, a light and paper shower that would’ve rivaled a torrential rainstorm.

I wrote as if time was running out, for I couldn’t be in this hall forever. And I was right. My pace had picked up, so much so that I was not longer walking on air, I was flying! I looked at myself and saw that I was wearing the slightly off-white robe of an angel, floating about and changing lives with my light and paper shower. The people below had picked my pages up, and were speaking the words that were on them. It was a swirling chant of many, many words and ideas, so many that I was dizzied by them.

Yet the music wouldn’t stop, and I didn’t stop. I kept writing. I kept going, even as friends would disappear below from my view, even as time seemed to march on at light-speed. I found myself above the stage of the hall, giving it one last look as I flew away, writing all the while. I rose above the ceiling, past the stage, out of the clear glass dome and into the light that had been my companion the whole time.

It was the greatest vision I ever had of myself and of my life. Best of all, it happened while I was sound asleep, with none of the distractions of my life in the way. For once, I hadn’t allowed my fear of heights or flying scare me awake. I was completely baffled at first, though. Most of my visions were simple affairs. If my classmates didn’t like me, I knew that they had issues of their own. If I had a fight with my ex-stepfather, I knew how to escape or found a way to beat him up. If my crush from seventh grade showed up, I’d stare at her or maybe give her a short smooch of a kiss.

This one was so complicated that I didn’t quite figure it out. Not on that October day in ‘91, and not in the two decades since. But in my first-year graduate student mind, I first interpreted it this way. I saw myself as someone who would have to write more than I’d ever written in my life to earn my master’s degree, and, if I chose to go on, my doctorate in history. That there would be many people watching my every move, with some of my friends falling by the wayside along the way. That there would be some hoping and praying that I didn’t finish. That my own feelings and fears were the things that I needed to overcome. And that no matter what, God was there with me, shining truth and wisdom on me so that I could write and finish school successfully.

Although that was a fine interpretation to pump me up for finishing my master’s in two semesters and my history doctorate in five years, it was far from an accurate one. I missed so much of the wisdom in that vision twenty years ago. A wisdom based not in the academic, but based on the practical and supernatural. A kind of wisdom that can only visit us from the past and future. Over the past twenty years, I’ve realized that there was a twelve-year-old with a grand vision talking to me while in deep sleep that morning in mid-October ‘91. A boy who knew, somehow, that my destiny was to write about my life, my dreams, my nightmares and my hard-learned wisdom, supernatural and experiential. That boy had a window into a life that I’m only beginning to understand. I must defer to the voice of that boy, for it is he who has a better understanding of visions and how they can change the world, and not I.

Comparative Slavery

20 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by in 1, Academia, race

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This time twenty years ago, I was finishing up what would turn out to be my first 4.0 semester at Pitt as an undergrad. I’m not bragging, even though my wife once thought I was (more on that in a few days). Key to the way that semester turned out — academically, at least — was a graduate course I talked myself into my junior year, Comparative Slavery. I found a loophole in the University of Pittsburgh handbook that allowed an undergrad to take a graduate school if that course would eventually be used as credit toward a master’s degree in that student’s fifth year. Somehow, I convinced my advisor and an administrator to let me take the course. Groveling and highlighting of obscure rules in the Pitt handbook were involved, though.

It was a good course, taught by Sy Drescher, whose scholarly research we in the history field would now consider part of Transatlantic Studies, as he looked at slavery from the standpoint of its impact on European notions of freedom, as much as he looked at the slave trade itself. As an aside, my nutty Carnegie Mellon University professor Dan Resnick once wrote a letter of recommendation for me to the Spencer Foundation discussing how huge an impact Drescher had on me as a student, which helped me become the great grad student I was. It was a bigoted, paternalistic letter, and I don’t think Drescher would’ve appreciated it if he had known about it. Drescher was one of my best professors at Pitt, undergrad and grad, but his student Paul Riggs was the one who had made a big impression on me in terms of my decision to pursue history as a degree, and to a large extent a profession.

But I digress, once again. This was my second course with Drescher as my professor. My freshman year, I had taken his Western Civilization II course (about how Europe came to dominate the world, 1492-present). It was a great course, and when I saw that he was teaching this one, I sought advice from Paul about the course and about his advisor, all of which convinced me to take it. I learned so much in that semester from that course, and not just the academic content. The fact that American slavery wasn’t the worst in the Western Hemisphere, the fact that the slave trade continued because the average life expectancy of slaves in places like Brazil and Haiti was about seven years, the fact that slavery and the slave trade made money for everyone involved, including West Africans. It was an eye-opening course.

I also learned a few important life and academic socialization lessons. I was in a class of seven people, including about three veteran grad students, a grad student who was the son of a famous civil rights leader, and a nineteen-year old first-year grad student who had gone off to college at the age of fifteen. Listening to these folks debate serious historical issues week after week was fun at first. Until I realized that some of them didn’t know what they were talking about. That at least two were classic yet sophisticated brown-nosers, attempting to sell arguments that would most likely impress Drescher (luckily, our professor didn’t like brown-nosers). And that there were many moments when all seven of us would sit in our grad seminar stumped by a question Drescher asked us about our readings for that week. I learned that students with master’s degrees or working on master’s degrees weren’t any more intelligent than I was as a college junior, or for that matter, when I was a high school junior. They simply read more on a given set of topics, much more in some cases than ninety-five percent of the educated public.

We had a primary source research paper on comparative slavery to do that semester, one that was supposed to be between twenty-five and thirty-five pages long. I decided to do mine on slavery in South Africa versus slavery in the US. It was a continuation of my undergraduate interest in South Africa that had developed my sophomore year. It turned out that with the other paper assignments and readings, Drescher realized that no one in the class would have their papers ready in time to submit by the end of April. So a week before the papers were due, he assigned us all “I” grades (incomplete) and told us to get our papers done as soon as possible.

It put me in a weird position, because I wasn’t a grad student. My semester Work-Study job was up, and I had made plans to be in Mount Vernon that summer working for Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health again. So it meant that I needed a job and some money in May and possibly June, I needed to extend my one-room efficiency lease, and I needed to turn a seventeen-page draft into a workable document of at least twenty-five pages. The last part was the easiest, since I had access to British parliamentary document and documents from the colonial government in South Africa about the conditions of slaves and the laws about slavery in that part of the world, all on microfiche. I just needed time to work on it.

Plus, I needed to get over the fact that I had earned A’s in my other four courses that semester: Latin American Revolutions, History of Africa to 1800, History of Blacks in Sports, and American Working-Class History. I had learned that semester how to be a cool nerd, to be diligent, to be social, to hang out when I made the time, and to study when I made the time as well. I had found balance in my life and broken free from six years of Humanities thinking. I no longer obsessed about A’s, which I believed was why I was doing nothing but earning them that semester.

So I did nothing on the comparative slavery paper in the first seventeen days of May. I worked my idiot job at Campos Market Research, where one of my friends and my eventual wife worked (again, more about that in a couple of days). I hung out with E (see “The Power of Another E” post from April 2009) and my other folks, took some driving lessons, went to see the Pirates play, cried about my Knicks again, and watched the Detroit Pistons clothesline players on their way to the hoop. I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time, and learned that life really is ironic as a result of reading his story.

Then I got a call from my eventual boss with Westchester County, telling me I had until June 19 to start my job if I still wanted it for the summer. That, and Drescher about to go on vacation after Memorial Day sent me into overdrive. It took a week, but I wrote, cut, wrote and revised my paper until it was thirty-four pages long and had enough endnotes to take up another six pages. It was by far the best academic writing I’d done up to that point in school. I think that Drescher was so happy that any of us turned in a paper that made any sense at all that he graded me on a curve and gave me an A. Honestly, I was just happy to have it out of the way.

I knew by the end of May that I was ready for grad school. It would take until I was done with my doctorate to prove to people like Dan Resnick, though, that I was truly grad school material. Either way, I think of that semester and this course and realize that while I would always care about my grades, I stopped worrying about them after that. And that really is a kind of freedom that can’t be underestimated, especially going into my senior year and in those six years of grad school that came after. I think that this experience helped me to become a better and more confident me.