Gangrey.com

A new dialogue on an old beast

So I'm speaking in a participation in government class in a high school in Newburgh, N.Y., and a kid at the back of the class raises his hand.
"Yep," I point.
"How do you know all this stuff you write?" he asked.
I didn't understand.
"You be writing it like you be there," he said.
His question has baffled me since. The stories his teacher had given him to read before my visit were mostly narratives, mostly about crime in an ugly, dangerous section of the Hudson River city of Newburgh. The narrative elements I used were based on my in-person observations as events there unfolded.
"I was there," was my response to the high schooler.
He expected less. I don't wonder why. I expect less. Why shouldn't he?
Thus, this blog, gangrey.com. If we intend to have jobs 20 years from now, if we intend to own any validity in our fight for progress and reform, we have to reverse the trends that infect our business.
We have to tell stories like David Finkel and W.C. Heinz and Anne Hull and Ernie Pyle. We have to inspire like Michael Brick and C.J. Chivers and Kelley Benham. We have to captivate like Rick Bragg and Barry Siegel and Kate Boo and Earl Swift.
We have to make the people who pick us up in the morning say, "Damn, that was a good story."
We have to get better.

stories that should never go away

The Little Girl in Grave 1565
Life
November, 1991

For 47 years after she died in a tragic circus fire, no one knew her name. This is the story of two people: one obsessed with finding out who she was, the other wanting only to forget what happened.

By Gary Smith

In a housing complex for the elderly in Easthampton, Mass., lived a lady in her eighties with sharp and clear blue eyes.

The capital of Alabama is Montgomery.

Her life was busy for a woman her age. She still worked two half days a week as a clerk at a dress shop. She edited the church newsletter and pitched in at Sunday school now and then. She helped a neighbor who had no use of his right arm to write his checks.

The capital of Alaska is Juneau.

She drove herself to the store for groceries, to the doctor and dentist and laundromat. She did the crossword in the Daily Hampshire Gazette in the evening while she watched TV and kept a magazine open to read while she ate. She said, “It takes up your mind.”

The capital of Arkansas is Little Rock.

But sometimes at night when Mildred Cook lay down and there was nothing, finally, to do, thoughts tried to enter her mind, and so she began reciting. The capital of Arizona is Phoenix. Half-formed thoughts, too terrible to contemplate: Why did I take them to …? The capital of California is Sacramento. If I had pushed and shoved, like others did … The capital of Colorado is Denver. I should’ve held onto her hand … The Capital of Connecticut is … But it was only a circus … The capital of Connecticut is … a circus …


***


The capital of Connecticut is Hartford. On the third floor of the fire department offices there, on a winter afternoon in 1990, a man with a white shirt and black tie sat in a plume of cigarette smoke. A pair of reflector sunglasses hung from his shirt pocket, to kill the light when the migraines came. A black flag with white skull and crossbones hung on his cubicle wall. It was a constant reminder that for him the rules don’t apply.

Lt. Rick Davey worked 10 or 12 hours a day, often more, investigating fires. But he slept no more than four or five, so that still left hours to fill. His right top desk drawer was open. A photograph of a beautiful little girl, her blond hair tied in ribbons, lay inside it. He stared at her. She was the one who filled his hours. “I’m coming for you, honey,” he said to her, or to himself—he wasn’t even sure anymore. But she was dead. He heard a colleague’s footsteps approaching his cubicle. Over 40 years ago dead. He stood up quickly. Dead four years before he was born. He nudged shut the desk drawer with his thigh.

What would he say if they asked him what he was doing? That an unclaimed little girl buried beneath a gravestone marked only by her morgue number, Little Miss 1565, had obsessed him? That he was on the verge of cracking open the investigation of a circus fire that killed 168 people … in 1944?



***



Here come the M’s, a real nightmare. Try keeping all eight of them in alphabetical order. The capital of Maine is Augusta. The capital of … of …

On a night that same winter, Mildred Cook took a deep breath. If she weren’t careful here, it could all come rushing back. She could be 38 again, thrilled to finally have two weeks of vacation to spend with her children, to be clutching the hands of six-year-old Edward and eight-year-old Eleanor and keeping her eye on nine-year-old Donald. They could be climbing to their seats near the top of the stands at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus that had just come to Hartford. It could be July 6, 1944, again.

It was so hot inside the big top that day, so sticky, but it really didn’t matter. It was wartime, and here was this magical tent, nearly two football fields long, that let everyone with a buck or two in his pocket walk inside and forget. The clowns came first, making everyone giggle. The parade of all the animals around the ring was next. Then came the lions and leopards, snarling and leaping through hoops. That’s when it happened. The big cats were being led through the two long caged chutes back to their wagons outside the tent, and everyone’s eyes had just lifted to the five sequined Wallendas poised on the platforms high above with their bicycles and balancing poles, when someone first noticed it, eight or nine feet off the ground, on the side of the tent behind where Mildred and her three children sat. It was a flame shaped like a horseshoe, no bigger than a basketball—a well-thrown bucket of water might have put it out.

But then a wind, blowing from the southwest, pushed it up the side wall to the big top—a twill canvas waterproofed, incredibly, by 1,800 pounds of paraffin thinned by 6,000 gallons of gasoline—and whoosh, The Greatest Show on Earth became three rings of hell. The tent top burned and fell like napalm, a hissing rain of flaming wax that ignited every blouse and sundress that it touched. People writhed on the floor to extinguish themselves, people toppled over them. The chairs, unattached to the floor, crashed and slid, tripping the mob in its rush to escape. Humans and animals screamed. The fire roared. At the far end of the tent, the circus band went on playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” trying to calm the frenzy, but it was hopeless. The tent was burning, one survivor recalled, like a crumpled piece of paper tossed into a fireplace. The crowd of 6,789, mostly women and children, fled toward the northeast, away from the blaze, but there many found themselves trapped by the animal chutes. Some were terrified that their hands or feet would slip between the meshing as they tried to scramble over, perhaps into the jaws or claws of some retreating beast. Some were simply not tall or nimble enough to make the climb. They paused, were pinned and trampled, found later beneath piles of bodies eight deep.

Flaming tent tops dropped from the sky, tremendous tent poles crashed. A crippled boy of 13 slashed through the canvas and hundreds escaped. A 29-year-old man hurled his child over the chute, remained and saved a score of others the same way before he was crushed to death by a falling pole. Coins fused in the terrific heat. Knuckles fused. A mother and child fused. Men passed out from the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh. The exits jammed, as people who had escaped turned back to look for loved ones. A woman ran outside screaming, “Where is my baby? Where is my baby?” was told the child had returned inside to look for her, and rushed back into the tent, where both of them perished.

Mildred and Edward and Eleanor found themselves in the middle of it all. Donald had always been the independent one; he ran to the right, hopped down from the stands and quickly escaped. But Mildred, the polite Liberty Mutual clerk, was following the crowd down the tiers, waiting for her turn, trying, somehow, to keep track of Edward and Eleanor in the stampede. She lost Eleanor, clutched Edward’s hand tighter, and then the billowing black smoke began to overcome them. Edward said he felt tired and wanted to lie down. Mildred lay down next to him. She would stay like that, clutching his hand, until someone at the hospital pulled them apart.

The whole incident took 10 minutes. And then there was nothing but an open field strewn with twisted metal and charred bodies, circled by children calling out for their mothers, by mothers staggering about and crying out for their little ones. In circus lore, it would become known as The Day The Clowns Cried. Emmett Kelly, who joined the fire fighting in full clown makeup, would paint a tear on his cheek from that day on.

The circus animals would all be retrained. But who would show the humans how to go on? Donald was picked up at the scene by a family and taken to their home, where he waited until his Uncle Ted and Aunt Marion retrieved him. Edward died the next day. Mildred lay in a coma for more than four weeks, 90 percent of her body burned. When she awoke, she was bandaged from head to foot, peering through a slit left open for her eyes.

She watched the doctor tell the woman across from her that her child had died. She watched the woman break down. The doctor walked toward Mildred. She clenched her teeth. She had been through this before. She knew how she had to act. Her brother and sister had died in infancy. Her two stepbrothers had died, one of polio at age 26. Her mother had died of cancer when Mildred was four. When she was 19, sitting in the church choir balcony, she had seen her father drop dead of a heart attack in a pew below her and not uttered a sound, not moved a muscle, not brought any shame upon herself or her family. It was weakness to cry; it was weakness.

Edward did not make it, the doctor told her. Nobody could find Eleanor; she too was likely dead. Mildred closed her eyes. “The other woman cried,” she said, “but I didn’t.”

If she didn’t think about it, she wouldn’t cry. If she was busy reciting the state capitals or doing puzzles, she couldn’t think about it. Certainly no one in her circle would be so indiscreet as to bring it up. Her husband was gone, separated from her three years before the fire—that was why she had had the children living in her hometown, Southampton, Mass., with her brother, Ted, and his wife, Marion, so the kids would have a normal life with two “parents” while Mildred worked two jobs in Hartford to help support them. Her family certainly wouldn’t mention what had occurred; they were one of those old New England families that responded to grief as they did to winter. They zipped up and stuck out their chins.

But the Dakotas could befuddle Mildred. Was Bismarck the capital of North Dakota and Pierre the capital of South Dakota … or was it the other way around? One hesitation like that and a drawer in her mind could open … Eleanor … Sometimes Mildred had to shift to a more rapid game, the counting game. One … one-two … one-two-three … How could no one have ever found Eleanor? … one-two-three-four … one-two-three-four-five …



***



The drawer opened. Lieutenant Davey stared at the photograph once more. Somehow, the picture of the little girl had done it to him—first, the one of her when she was dead, and now the one of her when she was alive. The morgue photograph was the same picture that had awed him when he saw it in the newspaper when he was seven or eight. This was his first look at death, and here it was in a child about his own age who simply looked to be asleep. Her face was barely marred by the flames or the trampling; she had died of a stress fracture to her skull. How could no one have stepped forward to claim so beautiful, so clearly identifiable a child?

The question haunted his city. Every July 6, The Hartford Courant published a story about her, and often her picture as well. Every Christmas, Memorial Day and July 6, Thomas Barber and Edward Lowe, two Hartford policemen who witnessed the horror and were assigned to a makeshift morgue at the Hartford Armory, visited her grave and left flowers. Barber, who outlived Lowe, paid the tribute three times a year for 32 years before he died in 1977.

The two men kept her picture in their wallets, investigated each new rumor about her identity. Some said she was a waif the circus had picked up along the way. Others believed her whole family had been destroyed by the fire and were among the five other unidentified bodies beside her at Northwood Cemetery, a graveyard used mostly for the poor and the war dead. Some insisted she was mistakenly buried by a family who had lost a child fitting Eleanor’s description.

A cult formed around the little girl. She became the little lost angel, she became a myth. Poems and songs were written about her, notes and balloons and toy animals were left on her stone. When public contributions that paid for new flowers three times a year ran out, a convicted burglar at Massachusetts State Prison sent a $10 check and a promise to buy them every year for the rest of his life, but the local florists’ association insisted on the honor. The little girl was nobody else’s—so she could be everybody’s. It was O.K. to cry for Little Miss 1565.



***



But years had passed since Lt. Davey had given that photograph or the ’44 fire much thought—until one day in 1981, when the fire marshal assigned him to give a speech to a local high school group on the subject. He thought he would bluff his way through it with the few crumbs of information he had, but when he opened the floor for questions, the hotshots were waiting. What day of the week did it occur? they asked. What time? What was the temperature? How they loved holding his badge to the flame.

He had lost, and he didn’t like losing. “I don’t care if it’s checkers,” he said. “I want to win, and if I don’t win, I’m pissed. Screw second place. Second place is for people who don’t mind second place.”

He and his partner, Tommy Goodrow, once spent four days on their knees in the soaked ashes and rubble of a YWCA fire, searching for a wire six inches long that would substantiate their theory on the origin of the blaze—they found it. His department’s conviction rate was 100 percent. If his checkbook was a penny off, it made him nuts until he did it all over again. He would learn a thing or two about that circus fire. He’d schedule a rematch with the hotshots.

That’s all it was at first, a poor loser’s pout, a perfectionist’s pang. But in every story about the fire he came upon in the library, there was this little girl. She drew him. She disturbed him. He had no idea why.

He didn’t need another child. He had three sons of his own by a marriage that had ended. And no, he wasn’t the soft sort. He had grown up in the projects in Hartford, been belted by his dad at eight for getting hit and not fighting back, and ended up in gang wars with bricks and bats. He had watched from the window as the sheriff took possession of every stick of furniture in his house. His mother had cried, but he hadn’t.

At the scene of a death, he would go up the ladder, take a good long stare, and come back down looking as if he had just perused his backyard for crabgrass. He’d light up a Marlboro, go back inside and start prowling, reading flame patterns and soot, reading depth of char and progression of fire, snapping pictures, drawing sketches, his mind churning like an engine, cause and origin, cause and origin. He would interview witnesses, then light up another cigarette and start pacing, looking right through anyone in the department new or foolish enough to ask a question.

It had gotten to him in the beginning—the smells that could drop a man to his knees, the humans burned like chicken forgotten on a spit. As a rookie fire fighter in 1973, he had raced into a house and had frozen at the sight of an old lady lying sideways, toppled from her wheelchair, her hairless head so blackened and distorted so badly that at first he thought she must be a mannequin. But then one of the veterans, clenching back his grin, told him that he had to give her mouth-to-mouth, just in case. He walked to the porch and threw up.

He watched the other men. He learned. A big fire was a “10-3.” A hired arsonist was “a torch.” A death was a “10-6.” A dead person was “the victim” or even “the roast.” You had to be cold to live around fire. With a little practice, you could carry off the body of a child so burned his skin stuck to you … and nothing stuck to you at all.

There was only one he had trouble getting rid of. It was a little girl who had cowered in a closet, screaming, as he charged into her bedroom one night back in the ‘70s. Blinded by smoke, he took a step toward her. Then the ceiling over the closet collapsed, and the screaming stopped.

“I dreamed about her every night,” he said, “for two or three years.” In the dream he could see her face clearly, surrounded by flames, and all of his movements were in slow motion. He would wake up in a sweat and torture himself. If only he hadn’t paused for a half second to hitch up his boots when the fire engine pulled up, if only he had hit the ground running …

He didn’t go to the little girl’s funeral. He never told anyone about it. “I go with the old school,” he said. “You just eat it.”



***



He found himself staying up at night over a little girl who died in 1944 instead.

He began arriving at his office two hours early, 6:30 a.m., to devour the files he had photocopied at the city library the night before. He didn’t tell a soul what he was doing—imagine their chortles. Evenings and weekends, he would go to local television studios for old film footage, to the newspaper library for old photos and clippings. He jotted notes to himself, photographed file pictures to take home and make studies of his own. But there were so many holes, so many original police files missing. Sometimes he found himself sitting on the sofa with all the lights out at midnight, waiting for the six aspirins he had just gulped to kick in and kill the migraines brought on by his inability to give Little Miss 1565 a name, by his frustration with the investigation of the fire that killed her.

From the beginning, the case rang wrong in his head. Edward Hickey, a political appointee with no investigative training for his job as Connecticut police commissioner, had ruled six months after the fire that it was caused by a cigarette carelessly tossed onto the grass. Cigarette fires smoked for a half hour or more before they combust—wouldn’t someone have noticed? Lieutenant Davey dug up the humidity reading at two p.m. on July 6, 1944—42 percent. Modern studies had shown that it is virtually impossible for a cigarette to start a grass fire if the humidity is above 23. He began conducting backyard experiments with lighted cigarettes and canvas that increased his doubts. He came upon the picture that showed the charred spot on a two-by-four beam, still standing, where Hickey claimed the fire had begun, and had the photograph enlarged. Not only was the char mark four or five inches above the ground, but the grass at its base was still there, unburned. Stranger still, the circus had experienced two smaller fires in the week before it came to Hartford, and in 1950 a young man named Robert Segee had confessed to Ohio authorities that as a 14-year-old circus hand, he had set them and the big one in Hartford that killed 168 people, as well as dozens more. A red man with fangs and claws, riding a fiery horse, materialized before him and ordered him to set fires, Segee said, giving his account of the Hartford fire and fitting a mold for a pyromaniac right out of the psychiatrist’s textbook—but Connecticut investigators had never even interviewed him.

By 1983, at the end of his first 18 months of study, Rick Davey had a list of 26 reasons why he questioned the official cause of the fire. He had a list of 30 theories concerning the identity of Little Miss 1565. He had 10 cardboard boxes full of information. He had eight more years to go.

“It’s her face,” he said. “If you stare at her picture long enough, she becomes any child. If you stare at it long enough, she becomes alive.”



***



Alive? That was the same sick trick Mildred Cook’s mind would play on her in the early years after the fire when she was alone in her apartment, crying. The same sick, beautiful, tortuous, sanity-saving trick. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to know for certain whose unidentified bodies were in the ground at Northwood Cemetery. If she knew Eleanor was one of them, her despair would be total, she could no longer flirt with that one small possibility, that all-but-hopeless hope. She did it only in her darkest moments, when all the reciting had failed and all the walls had burst, because it scared her as much as it soothed her to believe that any day there could be a knock on the door and when she opened it, who would be standing there, her amnesia gone, her hair in ribbons, her eyes smiling, but …

For six months after the fire Mildred had lain in the hospital, swimming in and out of a morphine haze, recovering from skin grafts so painful that the nurse had to turn away. Her sister, Emily Gill, had gone to the makeshift morgue after the fire for the grisly job of identification, had walked between row after row of little dead bodies. The authorities had shown her a body that, yes, looked a little like Eleanor … well, maybe … no, not quite. Eleanor had always been so ladylike, every hair in place, that it was hard now to tell. And besides, Eleanor’s dentist, working from memory, had said she had eight permanent teeth. This little girl only had four. Emily may well have been shown the wrong body. No, she decided. That wasn’t her niece, Eleanor Cook.

What was Mildred to do when the hospital finally released her a half year later—challenge her sister Emily, demand that the unidentified bodies be dug up, wrench her family all over again? It took all of her strength just to hold her grief behind her teeth, to look at her scarred face in the mirror, to worry about the thoughts running through Donald’s mind.

Next to Edward’s grave, in Southampton’s Center Cemetery, a tombstone was placed in memory of Eleanor. For the first few years, Mildred had to go inside whenever she saw children playing, to turn the other way when she came upon them on her way home from work. She scanned the TV listings each week, to make sure she wouldn’t stumble upon any movie about children, or circuses or death.

Ted and Marion, Mildred’s brother and his wife, invited her up to the house each July 6, tucked away the pages in the newspaper that referred to the fired before Mildred could see them. Perhaps she saw the photograph of Little Miss 1565 at one time or another over the years—she doesn’t think so but isn’t sure. Even if she did see it, she didn’t see it. She couldn’t see it. Four decades passed. She advanced from file clerk to training supervisor at Liberty Mutual, was known by all for her kind heart and cheerfulness, and then retired. She became a grandmother of two, and then a great-grandmother. She was safe now. Surely she was safe.



***



Lieutenant Davey gave up. He had packed the little girl away in one of the cardboard boxes in his basement in 1984, hadn’t glanced at a word about the circus fire for six weeks and driven south to Virginia Beach to get away from it all. There were just too many contradictions in the records, too many dead ends. He was stretched out on the hotel room bed one evening, resenting himself for having failed to save another burned little girl. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said to himself, “I just don’t know where else to go.”

He didn’t believe in an afterlife. “You hit the box and it’s over,” he said. So it couldn’t have been Eleanor’s voice that day; he’s sure he must have imagined it. “I’ll help you,” he thought he heard a little girl say. He got out of bed, checked the television, checked outside the window. He scoffed at himself, then heard himself promising, for the hundredth time, he would start all over. He returned to the archives at Hartford Hospital, the last place her body was before it was buried. He found nothing new, but the archivist there suggested he try the Connecticut State Library—bingo! What he had been searching for and hadn’t found, the files purged by the state police years ago in a housecleaning—20 more boxes of material.

In the middle of one he came upon a photograph of a blond-haired girl in ribbons. He had never seen a picture of Little Miss 1565 when she was alive, and the child in this picture was far from a dead ringer for the girl in the morgue shot. He had no way to explain this, but he knew it was her, he knew it. He got out his magnifying glass and calipers, began measuring the space between the child’s nose and upper lip, the size of her earlobes, telltale I.D. markers that police weren’t aware of in 1944. Yes. He discovered a lab report comparing samples of hair taken from Little Miss 1565’s head and Eleanor Cook’s hairbrush. Yes, they appeared to match, another lead apparently lost in the paper shuffle. He refused to settle for any of the original investigator’s summary reports; he dug until he found their initial reports, their raw data. His case must be airtight, it could have no punctures, to survive the hurricane it would raise in Hartford.

He made the library photocopier pant, the librarian’s eyebrows arch; Davey Xeroxed 20,000 pages at a quarter a pop, five grand invested in paper, easy. He discovered memos written by Police Commissioner Hickey, transcripts of phone calls that Hickey had taped, indications that Hickey was determined to torpedo the arsonist’s confession in Ohio. Slowly, it all began to make sense. Segee’s admission had occurred in 1950. The circus had already paid out $3.9 million in settlements, six circus officials had already served time in prison for involuntary manslaughter. Heads might roll in high political circles were it to come out that Hickey and the police had botched the investigation of the worst disaster in the history of the state. That might explain, he thought, why no Connecticut official had ever spoken to Segee.

One day in 1987 the mass of evidence became so overwhelming that Lieutenant Davey became certain. He looked at Miss 1565’s picture. He called her Eleanor Cook. “For two days, I floated,” he said. “I’ve never been that happy in my life.” But then he hesitated. Perhaps he had gone to far. Perhaps his discovery would tear open a family’s old wounds.

No. He owed it to her to press on. Never considering that Eleanor’s mother might still be alive, he began tracking down her brother. That would take several more years of investigation, of fruitless letters to other Donald Cooks, of climbing through the family tree limb by limb.

Late in 1990 he received a reply to a letter he had written that had been forwarded to Granger, Iowa. It was the Donald Cook. Lieutenant Davey sent him two pictures, one of a little girl very much alive and the other, the morgue photo. Yes, said Donald. That’s Eleanor.

When the news about Little Miss 1565’s identity broke last March, the TV crews and photographers converged on Mildred Cook’s tiny house as her son had warned her that they might. She looked into the cameras with dry eyes and spoke in even, measured words. “I think I’m relieved,” she said. “I’m not really sure how I feel.”

Calls and letters flooded The Hartford Courant, some praising Lieutenant Davey’s work, others expressing anger. Some had expected to see a sobbing old woman, overcome by the new disclosures and the old pain. They didn’t know about the laminated map of America in Mildred Cook’s living room with the capitals inked in on each state. They didn’t know how many ways a human being learns to live with grief.

At midnight on the eve of Eleanor’s birthday, March 17, 1991, Davey went to Little Miss 1565’s grave for the first time. He laid a black stuffed kitten on it, just like the real one he had learned she once had. He laid some flowers, and a card with a note.

“Our only gift is the thing you once had—your name! How we all wish it could have been possible to correct a more terrible wrong and bring you back … You may join other loved ones and members of your family. But you’ll never be forgotten. I’ll always love you.”

He didn’t sign his name. Just his badge number, 33.



***



In fire fighting, there is a phenomenon known as backdraft. It occurs when a fire has consumed all the oxygen in a room, when it becomes a confined, superheated gas smoldering in silence, invisible, waiting only for a door to open, a trace of oxygen. And then it explodes with enough force to hurl a human being 30 feet.

Fire fighters learn to stay behind doors when they open them—or not to open them at all. In a not so different way, people who have experienced unspeakable horrors do too. On June 22, 1991, at Center Cemetery in Southampton, Davey stood a few steps from a freshly dug hole. Mildred Cook was sitting. Two people who knew all about backdraft.

At their feet, there lay an angel’s coffin, tiny and white and smothered by flowers. Cameras poked from nearby bushes, microphones strained to catch the minister’s eulogy. Davey eyed them, making sure they kept their distance. A vague depression had settled over him. Robert Segee was still alive, a 61-year-old living in Columbus, Ohio, who now insists he didn’t set the fire, and the reinvestigation of the fire that FBI and state police had promised seemed to have gone nowhere.

His nine-year quest had succeeded, but it wasn’t enough. He hadn’t saved the little girl. She was still dead. He had wondered how he would feel today, watching her casket go into the ground. But he didn’t feel much of anything. He was in uniform, helping to keep the reburial private, a fire lieutenant with a job to do.

Mildred Cook stared straight ahead. Her throat trembled once, and she reached for a handkerchief when a friend of hers strummed an Autoharp and sang “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” But then it was over, and she was back in the church reception hall sharing punch and cookies with the others who had come. “You’ve just got to prepare yourself,” Mildred was saying. “I began preparing myself last night. I told myself, ‘I’m not going to cry … I’m not going to cry … I’m not going to cry ….’”


REFLECTION

Gary Smith:

Jay Lovinger (now at ESPN.com) gets the assist here. He came up with the story idea, and he lateraled it to me. I wanted to quickly establish the old woman as burying bad memories and contrast that with the fire detective exhuming them. So that's why I started with the quick sketch of the old woman interlaced with her internal technique for walling off the past, and dove from there directly into the detective's obsession with smashing those walls.

Overall, I think since (Mildred) finally came to terms with the fact that mystery had been revealed by the detective, and her daughter was going to be reburied, and her own life was nearing its end, that it was time to come to some resolution. Perhaps, subconsciously, it was a way to finally give her girl a new life. It seemed that some force greater than her had exhumed all this, and she finally surrendered to it.

I spent about two months on the story. Looking back on it now, I like it. The structure seems to work both dramatically and as a conveyor belt for a large load of background material. I'd begun experimenting in the '80s, finding new ways to bring fictional techniques to non-fiction narrative, and I was probably starting to hit my stride with that in the early '90s.

Remembering Ernie Pyle

From Brave Men:
"I've written many times that war isn't romantic to the people in it. But there in that plane, all of a sudden, things did seem romantic.
A heavy darkness had come inside the cabin. Passengers were indistinct shapes, kneeling at the windows -- to absorb the spell of the hour. The remnants of the sun streaked the cloud-banked horizon ahead, making it vividly red and savagely beautiful. We were high, and the motors throbbed in a timeless rhythm. Below us were the green peaks of the Atlas Mountains, lovely in the softening shroud of the dusk. Villages with red roofs nestled on the peaktops. Down below lived sheep men -- obscure mountain men who had never heard of a 'Nevelwerfer' or a bazooka, men at home at the end of the day in the poor, narrow, beautiful security of their own walls.
And there high in the sky above and yet a part of it all were plain Americans incongruously away from home. For a moment it seemed terribly dramatic that we should be there at all amid that darkening beauty so far away, so foreign, so old.
It was one of those moments impossible to transmit to another mind. A moment of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our own fate. It made me want to cry."

Good ending

Check this
out, from Ramsey Al-Rikabi of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record.

Items worth noting

"We aren't trying only to tell a good story. We're trying to chronicle and illuminate the world, take readers into the lives of people they would never meet, write stories that are mirrors in which readers can glimpse a piece of unexpected humanity in others and, perhaps, even in themselves. If you do not have this deep commitment, it will be far easier for you to fall prey to making it up." -- Walt Harrington

"This world ... which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale ... All is telling. Do not doubt it." -- Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

"Every line should be a reported fact. If it's not, it's just pretty writing. It's like a comb-over." -- Anne Hull

"Everyone talks about active verbs. We don't need more active verbs. We need more truthful verbs." -- David Finkel

At St. Pete Beach

They are a story.

From WriterL

The folks on WriterL are recalling tips passed on by Jon Franklin. A few are worth noting.

From Adina Gewirtz:
Jon called it the "black box" school of deduction. That's to look at the outcome a person achieves - look at what he actually has done, rather than what he says he meant to do. Then try to figure out why he wanted that outcome, what that outcome did for him. Eliminate, to start, the idea that things happen by coincidence. Eliminate the person's protestations that he or she didn't mean for this or that thing to happen. You can always account for coincidence and accident later.

Brett Campbell:
When we see something that makes us uncomfortable, we naturally look away. But a writer (an artist of any kind) learns to use his own emotions as an antenna and, as soon as he detects discomfort on his own part, forces himself to examine the situation to find the source of the discomfort. That's where the story is.

From Laurie Hertzel

Saw these at The Neiman Narrative Digest, from a Laurie Hertzel speech early this year. She's the enterprise editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and she's good.

Tip one: Write with a Camera Angle
To make a scene vivid, think like a movie maker. Don't try to describe everything; aim your camera. What do you want to zoom in on? Do you want to show the subject closely, intimately, slow down and build tension?
Or do you want to pull back, show more sweep, use a wider camera angle, so to speak -- pan around the room or the park or the murder scene or wherever the scene is taking place -- and show a fuller view?

Tip two: Use Both Scene and Summary
Keep in mind that print journalists have a tool that movie makers and TV producers don't have. Except for the rare instances when they use voice-over narration, movies and TV shows are exclusively scene. Scene is their only tool because they rely completely on what can be shown through sight and sound.
But print writers have another tool. They can use summary. It's useful to know the structural difference, so you can decide if something is worthy of a scene or if it can be dispatched in summary. A shorthand way to look at the difference between scene and summary is to think of the difference between "showing" and "telling." You tell in summary. You show in scene.
Scene is used when you want to put the reader in the moment, walking right beside you, seeing everything you see, immersed in a specific moment with specific action. Scenes are told in real time. You see the events as they are unfolding. They have specific locations. You can picture them taking place. They have action and characters and dialogue and detail. To report well for scene, you have to really burrow in with great detail.
Summaries cover spans of time. They stitch scenes together, getting you from one to the next. The summary is usually shorter. It's less specific, more general and global. It helps skip you ahead in time, and fills the reader in on stuff he needs to know but doesn't necessarily need to see in detail. If you have a minor event that leads up to an important scene, use summary for the first event and then let the important event unwind as a scene.

Tip Three: Use Telling Details and Metaphor
Even when you're going moment-by-moment, you're still choosing which details you want to include in the story. Make sure they have meaning. You want telling details, not random details.

Tip Four: Vary Your Pace.
You don't want all of your scenes to move at the same steady pace. You don't want to give every fact and action the same emphasis as all the other facts and actions. Slow down for crucial and dramatic moments. Let the moment unfold with some tension.

Tip five: Move forward and backward in time.
A single scene, by and large, progresses chronologically. That is, a scene begins at a specific point in time and moves forward, moment by moment, to another specific point. Sometimes a writer includes a flashback to give history and/or context. A really skilled writer might move forward in time. As long as you are absolutely clear as to what you're doing, as long as you are skillful enough not to lose the reader, you can do this. It's hard.

Tip Six: Know Where to End Your Scene.
There has to be a sense of completion, but you don't want it to feel too complete; you want the reader to keep reading.

Tip by Jack Hart of the Oregonian

Some writers are simply better at finding meaning. Their habits of mind find connections that other writers miss. They discover patterns in what others see as chaotic thickets of information. And they have a knack for explaining their findings in ways that relate to the lives of their readers.
No doubt some of that ability flows from God-given talent.
A good education counts for something, too. But the ability to find meaning is also a skill. Any writer can get better at it.
One route to improvement is to copy somebody who's already mastered the skill. And the most analytical writers I know, the ones who make stories significant by finding connections that make them more meaningful, follow specific strategies.
One of the most successful exploits the ladder of abstraction, a concept popularized by S.I. Hayakawa a half- century ago. The semanticist's book, "Language in Thought and Action," still makes good reading for reporters and editors.
The idea is that everything falls into a hierarchy that ranges from the most concrete - individual objects in the visible world - to the most abstract - the sweeping ideas that have broad application to the whole universe of experience.
The first rung of a typical abstraction ladder might represent Hugo, my neighbor's cocker spaniel. The next rung might represent "spaniels." The next: "dogs." Then "mammals," "animals"
and so on.
As a reader, I may have no particular interest in Hugo. But if a news feature begins with Hugo, and ascends the ladder of abstraction to a generalization about all dogs, then maybe I can see how it connects with Speedy, my ill-behaved Dalmatian. If it can help me keep Speedy off the couch, I'm interested.
The same technique can work for a variety of stories. Say, for example, that a reporter stops into a greasy spoon for a quick burger. She strikes up a conversation with Madge, the waitress, who promptly plops herself down at the table and gabs away. The reporter notices the strange notations that fill the woman's order pad, and she asks about them. She finds out that the code has been passed down through a long line of cooks and waitresses.
The reporter is fascinated by the order code. It's a form a brief hand, she thinks, similar to what she herself uses for taking notes. And brief hand is an informal version of shorthand, a code that represents a more complete language. Maybe there are principles that apply to all such codes?
She calls a linguist at the local university. That leads to several experts on shorthand systems and how they operate. The reporter has herself a Sunday lifestyle story.
She opens her story with a vignette describing Madge as she jots down a big order and barks it out to the short-order cook.
She describes a few of the arcane scribbles that Madge enters on her order pad.
Then comes her nut graf:
"The language on the order pad is brief hand, a code that summarizes language for hurried note-takers. Waitresses, secretaries, delivery-truck drivers and reporters all have their own versions. But, as it turns out, certain principles apply to all brief-hand systems. Knowing those can help anybody take faster, more thorough and more accurate notes."
Ah ha. Now a story is broad enough to interest a huge swath of possible readers -- even journalists. And it also promises to use specific examples that will add color, emotion and tangible application.
The technique can work with just about any subject. A tactic used by labor negotiators can reveal something about resolving all kinds of disputes, including those between husbands and wives. John Glenn's return to space might lead to a feature on the principles of staying active through old age. Roman architecture might connect to modern garden design.
The only constant is the habit of mind that leads a writer to move up the ladder of abstraction, out into a broader concept and down into the real world again. The only requirement is that the landing point is somewhere close to the daily concerns of
readers.

Michael Kruse, showing off in Floridian

Not even a half-hour before show time, Hernando County's Elvis Presley is upstairs, in Room 615 of the Sheraton, wearing a tight white suit circa 1972, changing his daughter's diaper.

"We got 20 minutes to get down there," he says to his family.

And then?

Three songs to go huge.

Kenny Grube is a part-time drum teacher, a full-time stay-at- home dad, and a guy who wanted to be a rock star for pretty much forever.

For years he hung Sheetrock during the day, and at night played the drums in dingy bars from Ocala to Sarasota, hoping what almost everyone hopes. That someone sees. That someone hears.

No one did.

So, pork chop 'burns. White suit with big collar.

More

Learning from public radio's Pied Piper

From Transom.org
Ira is a radio hero because of the way he listens, and the way his listening summons stories you remember. He is a champion for the Many Voices that public radio's mission says it values. This American Life is not the voice of record, but a record of the voices around us. The stories are as fully strange and hopeful and funny and harsh and romantic as America itself...and occasionally all at the same time. They sprawl outside the usual standard-issue broadcast confines, telling about the way it actually was, what it felt like, what really happened. Ira is their shepherd, their piper.
But it was not always that way. Ira's Transom Manifesto, which will appear in serialized form over the course of his time with us, begins with his utter lack of talent at this work. We think Ira's failures will give you hope.
Ira's Transom Manifesto

We are what we read

Ira Glass suggests we imitate others.
"Painters do it," he says. "Why don't we?"
Michael Kruse, sounding a lot like Mikey from The Goonies when he's standing in the waterfall and trying to convince the others not to ride up in Troy's bucket, responds.
"We DON'T?
WHO doesn't?
Every time I drop overheard dialogue or lyrics, it's Anne Hull.
Every time I read over what I've got just to hear how it SOUNDS, it's Dan Barry.
Every time I go short-sentence staccato (and, please, please, please, hope to heck I use it in the right way at the right time), it's David Finkel.
Every time I start breaking rules about commas, dashes, whatever, it's Dave Eggers.
Every time I stop trying to write and just say what I saw, it's Gay Talese, or Joseph Mitchell, or Vanessa Gezari, or C.J. Chivers.
Same thing with reporting.
Every time I close my notebook and keep on listening, it's Rick Reilly.
Every time I pick off a business card from a bulletin board in a greasy spoon, it's Lane Degregory.
Every time I seek what's sad, it's Ben Montgomery.
Every time I think, "THINK like you're making a movie," it's Tom French.
Every time I stay still, even when stuff's moving fast, so I can see what I need to see, it's Kelley Benham.
Every time I back up, stand up and think STORY STORY STORY, it's Mike Levine and Terry Egan.
I am NOTHING but the people that I know and the people that I read.
Isn't everybody?"

With A Catch

Ann Gerhart proves there's a story in 873 pounds of bluefin tuna.

I'm about to jump

"There's a sky-is-falling quality to the media's conversation about their own troubles." But is it really all that bad?

serial from the LA Times

Thanks to Keith Goldberg for noticing this serial narrative from Kurt Streeter.

Found these by accident

Ever wonder where you can find vintage Jon Franklin?

How John Iriving Does It

From a Wall Street Journal interview with John Irving on his latest book:
"Novels are exaggerations of life -- we exaggerate the worst and the best of our experiences. . . . It [this story] is a tale of extreme dysfunction. I work that way because I begin with endings first. I build a novel as a piece of architecture from the back to the front. I need to do that because if you are going to take a long journey, which writing a novel is for me, I want to know that there is an emotional payoff at the end for the reader who will make the demands on himself to take that long journey. You might lose a little confidence in the story telling if you didn't have that ending waiting for you.
"I do this so obsessively that it can be as much as 18 months before I begin a novel. What I do is write the plotline backwards. It's often the case that the first lines I put down on paper are going to be found in the last chapter, or at least at the end of other chapters."

Walt Harrington's interpretation

"The novelist's eye for detail and attention to moral complexity is not just a bag of techniques. It is a way of seeing, a kind of theory of human behavior. When we inquire with what we think of as the needs of storytelling imbedded in our search, we are actually attuning ourselves beforehand to that human richness so often missing in our journalism. When used properly, the novelist's eye opens our eyes and heads and hearts to the breadth of what we can and should be looking for in our reporting. It doesn't take us away from the truth, as some traditional journalists fear. It helps us better see and hear and touch and feel the truth before us."

The Times Sees The Light

The New York Times has seen tomorrow, and it is Medicaid fraud and man dates! On July 6, Times managing editor Jill Abramson and associate managing editor Rick Berke convened a lunchtime gathering of the paper’s youngest writers—including health-system-exposé scribe Michael Luo and social-trend-piece innovator Jennifer 8. Lee—to urge them to put their stamp on the paper.
The morning that Judith Miller was heading to jail in the name of civil disobedience, Ms. Abramson was telling The Times’ youth corps to practice a little disobedience of its own. Her message, said a staffer who attended, was: “Don’t roll over to your editors. We’re the future of the paper.”
“Not to start World War III with editors,” Ms. Abramson said on the phone this week, “but I wanted to consciously send them a message that we want the paper to be full of engaging writing and engaging voices.”
So, at a buffet luncheon of sushi, tandoori chicken and curried cauliflower in the paper’s 11th-floor dining room, Ms. Abramson admonished the junior set to resist the paper’s "stentorian voice".

What does the man in black look for?

"I love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God."

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Where Scoops Go To Die

Newspaper writing was better then than now, Jimmy Breslin tells Corey Kilgannon, because "the language has been hurt by the computer."

"It was a product of nervous energy back then," he said. "It came out of a city room with noise and typewriters and thick smoke all through the joint. It was horrible, terrible and unhealthy, and now they have computers that can do wondrous things and everybody sits at them and bores the world. There used to be newspaper bars where everyone hung out and talked. Now they go to health clubs."

Using them with grace

How does Hank Stuever pull it off in every graph without looking stupid?

And don't miss his ending:

Doohan was Scotty; Scotty was Doohan, and an archetypal employee/colleague/friend was given a name: Scotty is the person in your office who swears that a project cannot possibly get done by deadline, then somehow pulls it out at the last minute. His favorite words: can't, won't, need more, impossible, losing power, can't, won't, overloaded, no way.

You have to let the Scottys blow off steam, and you have to remember what they always say in the end: Aye, aye, sir.

Ms. Brown can tell a story

Up Highway 96, sometimes called the State Fair Freeway, past the cliche of wheat fields, the thicket of signs proclaiming a right to life, take a left on 23rd Avenue and you will find a very plain nursing home, where something happened that wasn't supposed to happen.

Defied man-made logic.

Resisted complicated scientific analysis.

Couldn't be explained by some of the smartest brains in the world.

Still can't.

(When you're done, check out Kruse's version.)

Who is Michael Brick, and when did he get so good?

He keeps cranking out stuff like this:

This time there were no all-night happy hours in front of the bodegas, no battery-powered boom boxes blasting news updates between "In Da Club" and "Hey Ya!" No neighborhood tough guys made it their jobs to direct traffic, winking at the girls and waving flashlights, and you can bet nobody will sell T-shirts when it is done.

If mamas tell their babies about the blackout of ought-five, they will not speak of a whole region plunged into darkness, as in 2003, nor of a city united, in contrast to the riots of decades before. Instead, they will tell of a weird, hot, sometimes inspiring, mostly frustrating sunny day on Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

A story you can smell, taste and feel

Ran across a good question: How do we use our senses to report without slipping into cliche? Lynn Franklin points out that taste and smell are aspects of reality best shown in print, not broadcast. But how do we report those with originality?

Dan Barry's one of the best. Here he makes the Fulton Fish Market smell poetic:

"It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada, Florida, and the squid-ink East River. Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented ice."

Any tips out there? Examples?

A little advice on journalism from Mrs. Dowd

And when reporters just starting out asked her for advice about journalism, she replied sagely: "Get on the front page a lot and use the word 'allegedly' a lot."

Just how many stories ARE there?

Got in the mail in a package from Amazon.com a big fat book called The Seven Basic Plots.

In it a dorky British guy named Christopher Booker says that's how many stories there are.

1. Rebirth.

2. Tragedy.

3. Comedy.

4. The Quest.

5. Voyage and Return.

6. Rags to Riches.

7. Overcoming the Monster.

That's it.

Discuss.

Listen to this, buddy

I love retyping this piece byBob Considine, via The International News Service, 1938.

Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling.
It was a shocking thing, that knockout - short, sharp, merciless, complete. Louis was like this:
He was a big lean copper spring, tightened and retightened through weeks of training until he was one pregnant package of coiled venom.
Schmeling hit that spring. He hit it with a whistling right-hand punch in the first minute of the fight - and the spring, tormented with tension, suddenly burst with one brazen spang of activity. Hard brown arms, propelling two unerring fists, blurred beneath the hot white candelabra of ring lights. And Schmeling was in the path of them, a man caught and mangled in the whirring claws of a mad and feverish machine.
The mob, biggest and most prosperous ever to see a fight in a ball yard, knew that there was the end before the thing had really started. It knew, so it stood up and howled one long shriek. People who had paid as much as $100 for their chairs didn't use them - except perhaps to stand on, the better to let the sight burn forever in their memories...

Is Style important? Ben Yagoda thinks so.

Ben Yagoda tells Poynter's Chip Scanlan why style is important:

"Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a twenty-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster each playing a chorus of "All the Things You Are," of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme each fixing a duck a l'orange, of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson each designing a 20-story office tower on the same corner of the same city, or of Pieter Breughel and Vincent van Gogh each painting the same farmhouse. Everybody understands that the content is constant, frequently ordinary, and sometimes banal; that the (wide) variation, the arena for expression and excellence, the fun, the art -- it's all in the individual style.
"The same is, or should be, true about writing."

CHIP: Writers often complain their editors edit out their attempts at style. How can they dodge the delete key? Should they?

BEN: The best tack, I think, would be to work on the quiet style I was just referring to: style not as rampaging alliteration (for example) but as expression in subtle deviations from the norm that somehow suit the way you see the world and feel comfortable expressing yourself. What editor would object if you have slightly more parentheses than normal, or your paragraphs are slightly longer than average, or you indulged in a little irony now and then? All those things can be elements of a style.

CHIP: I'm a firm believer in the power of copying out great writing and was heartened to see that you subscribe to that method as well. What would you say to those who consider it a misguided practice?

BEN: Try it, you'll like it! Seriously, the single best means of becoming a strong, original writer and mindful writer is to read, as widely as possible. When you involve your fingers in the reading, you somehow absorb the words on a deeper level.

What does 'suspicious' look like?

Today's Dan Barry:

POLICE officers stopped a sightseeing bus in Times Square on Sunday morning, and not because they suddenly desired to see the South Street Seaport. Urgent word had come to them of suspicious men on board, acting suspiciously in these suspicious times.

Within seconds, the tourists on the double-decker bus had their hands raised high, in pantomime of thrill-seekers riding the Cyclone. And within minutes, five of those tourists, all dark-skinned men, had their hands in cuffs and their knees on city pavement, in pantomime of new immigrants worshiping the ground of this freedom-loving country.

It quickly became clear that those five suspicious-looking, dark-skinned men, who suspiciously had bought their tickets in advance, were just British citizens on holiday, with vacation snapshots that now will include newspaper photos of their public humiliation. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg issued a public apology - on behalf of the city, not the police - and the city lurched toward its next uneasy moment.

NNJ Dispatch from 12:51

I'm 17 pages in, and I already need to post from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism, in an interview with Ted Conover: Do you have any reporting routines you follow when you arrive in a new town?
Conover: I pay a lot of attention to place in my writing, so when I arrive in a new town I try to do what Lawrence Durrell recommended in his essay "Spirit of Place," which is to get still as a needle, as he puts it.
["It is a pit indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you--are you watching yourself through me?' Most travelers hurry too much ... the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly--but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling ... you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there."]
Think about what you hear, what you see, what you smell, what you feel. I try to remember that.

Making the reader wait

This is a story I wrote, yes, and it was done on deadline, and I'm not even sure I dig it, but I'll throw it out there as a way to start a discussion I think is worth having here.

Here are some pieces of messages I got from colleagues after it ran:

hey, liked the Schafer story. holding the nut graf til near the end didn't bother me one bit. headline, subhed and cutline all give the reader that up front anyway. you gave that guy a damn good sendoff.

i don't know... i think it works. the headline takes care of the news, and you just gathered such great detail the reader couldn't help but hang on to the end.

interesting approach to the dead soldier story, which i'm still reading. great detail. figured you took a page from kelley's shiavo obit.

I do work where I work, of course -- the "Kelley" referenced is Kelley Benham, by the way -- and there's probably a better shot at seeing a story like this in the St. Petersburg Times than in any other paper in the country. Even the copy desk didn't have any complaints, for Goodness sake.

But ...

Does it work?

Do you think the reader's sitting over coffee, checking his watch, wondering what the hell is going on?

Should we write more stories this way?

I don't know. Just throwin' it out there.

Pages 38 and 39

This stuff from Richard Ben Cramer is so good I don't even want to share it:
How do you know when a story is right for you?
I'll mention an idea to my wife, and she'll say, "Ah, that's horseshit." And I'll get all defensive and argue with her, "No it's not, and the reason it's not horseshit is ...!" That's when I know I'm hooked. It grown on me to the point where I start telling the story to people over and over again.

On interviewing techniques:
(Talking here about seeking advice from a friend on writing about presidential campaigning) ... And he said ... here is how you have to do it: you get in the plane, and when they come to you for your interview slot you say, 'You know what? I don't really need to interview the candidate. But, hey, would you mind if I just sat there while he does all the other interviews?'

You don't ask any questions?
Not one. I'd sit there for the first day, and the second day, and the third day, and on and on. And sooner or later, the candidate is going to get so comfortable with my being there that he will lean over to me after one of the interviews and say, "Damn, I fucked up that agriculture question again!"
And at that moment I've moved from my side of the desk to his side of the desk. That's the judo move I try to pull off: using his power to throw him where I want him to go. I'm always trying to be on his side of the desk. If I come in with my notebook and my list of questions, then I'm just another schmuck with a notebook and questions to be brushed off with the "message of the day," ... But if I don't have any questions -- except for the basic one of 'What the hell is going on here?' -- and I'm willing to hang around forever trying to see the world from his side of the desk, then I become something else entirely.

Horns Coming Out Of Heads

Ben's last post inspired me to go back and do some re-reading.

Lawrence Weschler:

"I'm obsessed with a narrow range of huge issues: Passion. Grace. Exile. Blockage.

"In the case of passion, the overarching theme is something I describe as 'Inhaling the Spore.' In Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, the first image is of ants foraging for food on the rainforest floor, who every once in a while accidentally inhale the spore of a fungus. The spore lodges in their brain and they start to behave oddly. They leave the forest floor for the first time in their lives, climb up the tendrils of surrounding vines, and eventually impale their mandibles on the stalk of the vine and wait to die. They die because the fungus has actually been eating away their entire nervous system, and two weeks after their death, a horn, laden with spores, erupts from out of their heads. The spores then rain down onto the forest floor and the whole process starts again.

"All of which is an allegory for what interests me. I'm fascinated by moments when people 'inhale spores.' ... In all my writing, I have been concerned with people and places that were just moseying down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously they caught fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive -- ending up, by day's end, somewhere altogether different from where they'd imagined they were setting out that morning ... "

Yikes.

Now, if that doesn't make you want to go out and watch the hell out of some ants, I don't know what will.

Should've cost $2 today

Read Barry: Irish shipwrights built St. Brigid's in 1848 as spiritual shelter for those brothers and sisters who survived steerage on famine ships. Its twin steeples rose over Tompkins Square in proud declaration to nativist New York: we Irish - we Catholics - are here to stay.

And Brick: It was no place to leave a baby in the middle of the night. The fence runs under the dirt and clang of the elevated train, around a lot of weeds in a neighborhood where the bodegas have bulletproof glass for a reason.
Popeye's fried chicken boxes, plastic foam cups and potato chip cans are all over the sidewalk. One sign says the yard is baited with rat poison, and another has a number to call for plastic slipcovers.

What are you reading today?

Almost missed Brick's Longing For A Cuss-Free Zone:
And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the pencils, the books and the teachers' dirty looks. Outside office buildings smokers bomb their bosses, and nonsmokers bomb the smokers. On the streets T-shirts bomb milk in favor of marijuana, bomb the space between the words New York and City and even bomb you just because "we're from Texas."
Even the culture's hallowed spaces are no longer bomb-free zones. Baseball players can be seen on television mouthing inaudible bombs in the dugout. The vice president of the United States bombed a colleague on the Senate floor.
For cultural Chicken Littles, these are heady days. It is easy to make a case that the particular word-bomb on all these lips - that undefeated heavyweight champ of profanity, that King of the Cuss Words - is so commonly heard now that it's moving toward ho-hum status. Once the word gets in, the argument goes, there could be no line of defense against all the other words known by their first letters. "You know what I blame this on the breakdown of?" as Moe Syzlak of "The Simpsons" once asked. "Society."

Don't miss this strong profile by John Doherty and Oliver Mackson:
JERICA WAS FOUND in the first-floor boy's room of Sacred Heart of Jesus School in Highland Falls on Jan. 27. She had been stabbed to death there some time after arriving at school with her father. She died while her classmates gathered for morning assembly just down the hall.
Linwood Rhodes had made cleaning up after his troubled sons something of a life's work. From a distance the play of his life can look simple, tragic: a quiet, squared-away man following his sons from one drama to the next, blind to any pattern.
He readied Jerica for burial and hired Chris a lawyer. As if this, too, might somehow be repaired.
"Who's Chris to her? Somebody that takes her to school?" Linwood, 55, said months later. "I raised her. She lived with me. I was the one she called her 'papoo.'"
This night, though, there's little time for reflection.

Keith Goldberg is reading Bill Plaschke:
Sixteen million dollars.
Jiggle that number around in your deepest pocket, see how it feels.
It's lottery money, lifetime money, 1,056 games worth of Monopoly money, a stack-of-one-dollar-bills-reaching-more-than-6,000-feet-high money.
Now, carry that thought to the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Covina, to a patch of grass in front of the Mausoleum of Christian Heritage.
The young football player whose death produced $16 million is buried here. But to find him, you need a weed whacker and a magnifying glass.
Amid rows of ornately decorated and elegantly worded bronze plaques, Rashidi Wheeler lies somewhere underneath a tiny cement disk.
Push back the grass that has grown over the disk, there is a faint number carved into the concrete. It's not his football number. It's his gravesite number. It's 625. That's him.
There is no headstone, no marker, no name, no dates, he's here, somewhere, you think.

Susan Orlean's (Not-so)Secret Cache

I don't know how I haven't run across this yet, but here's your girl, doing her thing, for free.
From Nice Doggy:
The other day, my Welsh springer spaniel, Cooper, gave me a manicure. He doesn't give the world's best manicure -- for that you'd have to go to that Korean joint, Nuclear Nails, or whatever it's called, on Broadway -- but he really tries. He can tell whether I'm in the mood to have my cuticles cut or just pushed back, and it was actually his idea to wear a little white uniform--he can just sense that it makes me more comfortable to have a "professional" atmosphere whenever I'm getting personal services. And you know how every time you get a manicure you immediately remember something you need in your handbag? And how if you put your hand in your bag to get it you wreck your nails? Cooper knows how frustrating that is to me, so as soon as he's done with my top coat he goes over to my handbag, empties the contents, and separates everything into little piles so that I can get whatever I need without making a dent in my polish.
Look, I know he's not perfect. He ate an entire pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving while I was at a performance of "Phantom."

It's a city in ohio

The Plain Dealer's film critic Joanna Connors does Andy's Last Secret in seven parts.

Why don't we do more of these in newspapers?

Like this, by Jay Allison:
A young boy molts. Tender skin falls off, or gets scraped off, and is replaced by a tougher, more permanent crust. The transition happens in moments, in events. All of a sudden, something is gone and something else is in its place. I made a change like that standing in the back of a pickup truck when I was 15.

Back In The Day

He left the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina in 1929 and headed to New York City. He was 21 years old. He got gigs at The World, then The Herald Tribune, then The World-Telegram, papers when papers were PAPERS, then the New Yorker, where he worked until his death in 1996.

These, from 1938, are his words:

"I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels. The talk when you interview someone for a newspaper is usually premeditated and usually artificial."

Yes sir.

Dry Your Eyes, little guy

Zack McMillin passed this along:
If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says University of North Carolina professor Philip Meyer, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. But Paul Farhi tells us not to fret, newspapers are in good shape.

And he's from oklahoma

I will soon be creating a Hank Stuever fan club. Read his critique of the Washington Post's critiques.

Highlights:

I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn't include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Why are we obsessed with the paper being too much, too large? Our counterparts at McDonalds, Google, iTunes, Comcast Digital, The Cheesecake Factory and Barnes & Noble have already learned: People do not complain because something is too big and they can't possibly read, listen to, watch or eat it all in one sitting.

I have worked at newspapers that fretted, angsted and test-marketed all sorts of "news you can use" and entry points and time-savers. We added geegaws, rails, skyboxes, refers, breakouts, sidebars; we set the articles in ragged-right and whacked the living shit out of them. It helped not one bit, but this identity crisis ultimately created a paper you really could read in 10 minutes. And soon enough, it started to feel like something that wasn't worth the 50 cents they charge for it.

So I really do reach for my air-sickness bag when we start passing around prototypes of a redesigned A1 with rails and time-savers, and an AME wonders (in yesterday's critique) if it might be good idea execute a blanket reduction in story lengths. If we want to redesign the paper to make it look like the coolest thing on the planet, fine, that's an image crisis I can live with. I prefer that if we do, the aesthetic end result reminds me of walking into the Apple Store, and not of a bulletin board in a middle school social-studies classroom.

Homeless lose a place to drink

John Doherty nearly made me cry with his sad goodbye to a scruffy chunk of a scrippy-scrap city:
It's always been a park by default.
It's an empty lot next to the Newburgh Ministry soup kitchen, where for decades those clinging to the bottom rung of Newburgh's ladder have gathered.
It's a stretch of weeds right off Broadway where wanderers passing through the city rest a bit, cadge a swig of Thunderbird wine, maybe spot a familiar face.
"We sit down, we drink our beer," explained Edward Morales, 43, yesterday, shrugging. "We've always been here. We don't bother nobody."

The truth is that people like superfluity

Zack McMillin writes: The Hank Stuever riff sent me to the bookshelf for Nick Hornby's "The PolySyllabic Spree." I love it so much I'm going to retype it for Gangrey readers everywhere.

He's talking about novels and J.M. Coetzee in particular and how he got 907 hits when he googled "J.M. Coetzee and spare." His point is about fiction, but I think there's a parallel to what we do at newspapers, too. We're all trying to corral readers, right?

"Coetzee, of course, is a great novelist, so I don't think it's snarky to point out that he's not the funniest writer in the world. Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first things to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words -- entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty hour days) Go on, young writers -- treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! Have you ever looked at the size of books in an airport bookstall? The truth is that people like superfluity. (And, conversely, the writers' writers, the pruners and the winnowers, tend to have to live off critical approval rather than royalty checks.)"

He adds, later on, about Dickens:

"Could he have been cut? Absolutely he could have been cut. But there comes a point in the writing process when a novelist -- any novelist, even a great one -- has to accept that what he is doing is keeping one end of a book away from the other, filling up pages, in the hope that these pages will move, provoke and entertain a reader.

Brooklyn girls, a hurricane, a bullrider named Ross Coleman and some old E.G.

Don't miss Kevin Cullen's The Redemption of Shane Paul O'Doherty: "He was given his middle name because he was born on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, who was a zealous killer of Christians before his own conversion on the road to Damascus. But O'Doherty's story is not about a miraculous religious conversion as much as a gradual spiritual evolution. He had a tug of war with God, and God won."

Michael Brick's Finding Shade In A Legend's Shadow:
"Frankie drinks his beer and the jukebox is quiet. Willy the lady bartender opens the metal register and pushes some bills down and says she always has to keep track of everything."

Brady Dennis' Hard Times On Easy Street:
"She sleeps in a sleeping bag atop a futon because the storm ruined her mattresses. She keeps a white candle lit 24 hours a day because her aunt told her it would chase away the black cloud that follows her."

Larry Bingham from March, Eight Seconds To Fame: "Few people are more talked about in America's burgeoning world of professional bull riding than Ross Coleman, the only man from Oregon among the world's top 45 bull riders. It's his full-time job. Ross hovers over the twitchy Jack Hammer because he's trying to pay his mortgage in Redmond and fuel his Ford truck and float a respectable life with his girlfriend, Amy Lee."

And some vintage Elizabeth Gilbert: "The Ruddy Nut Hut had pinball and darts. The Tall Folks Tavern had a pool table. Some nights, one place had toilet paper or cigarettes when the other did not. And in the hot summers, the drunks crossed that stretch of First Avenue like it was someone's back yard, like the moving cars were harmless as swing sets or sandboxes, like the twin bars were just neighbors' picnics, welcome as any suburb."

More from Hank Stuever

I told you. Fanclub.

"California v. Michael Jackson is a criminal trial, but if you sit on a metal folding chair in an oversize trailer behind the county courthouse watching it on a 35-inch RCA closed-circuit television set (as most of the press does, partly so they can make smart-alecky comments during the proceedings) for a stretch of several days, you also begin to see it as an epic fable: How the values of a 20th-century celebriculture came home to roost in the 21st.

It's about a boy who was famous as a child, perhaps too famous, who has said he suffered some sort of psychological wound from it, forced by his domineering stage father to perform, even at the times he wished only to play. He parlayed his shyness and excessive talent into a global sensation. Rich beyond imagination, he set about making up for a lost childhood and redesigned his body as well."

The rest.

And, well, Good Lord, I just can't get enough:

"Next slide, please.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Grandma and Grandpa. They're both dead, now. And we had to decide whether to throw all their slides and carousels away, and so we opened the boxes and took the slides out one by one and held them up to the window to see what was on them, and here came the awful truth about slides . . .

Um, next slide, please.

Just hit the -- yes. There you go.

(Chuh-click-click.)

Here came the awful truth about slides: Too many mountains, too many trees, too many prairie dogs and never enough of your grandmother wearing cat-eye sunglasses, giving your grandfather that look she gave him when she thought he was being a precious fool. Too many hot-air balloons or Alaskan glaciers; not enough glum, pimply teenagers trying to look away from the camera. The lack of intimacy is what strikes you. The camera was always pointed at the most colorful thing, the most Kodachrome thing, the thing possessing what we all agree is natural beauty, but it was usually the wrong thing. Here is the turkey we ate in 1978, but why didn't anybody think to take a shot of whoever took out the trash that night?

You'd give back all those sunset slides for just one slide of your father at age 31.

But there isn't one, because he was the one looking through the lens, so it's sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset."

(Chuh-click, chuh-click, chuh-click.)

Mike Dawson Style

Man. Read Mike Dawson: "Pat Campbell is giddy Wednesday as she emerges from her dank trailer, which has no electricity, and stands in her yard of squalor – a sagging heap of busted furniture, rain-soaked blankets and mattresses with nesting holes, where birds and rats pick over moldy bread and empty condensed milk cans.
It's an hour before the Village Board will begin eminent domain proceedings to grab this land, the last of her lakefront property.
"Tonight. Tonight is going to be my debut. My theatrical debut. You know, I should have been an actress, like Ava Gardner, then she married that creep Frank Sinatra, but my mother was a rigid Catholic and, and … You know I have this condition."
She starts to cry and hunches over and lowers her eyes."

As if we have time to read books

Mediabistro's list.

A quick shot of pure, hot inspiration

Passed on from Goldberg, from Richard Ben Cramer's writings about Ted Williams (second graph in a 1986 excerpt for Esquire):

"It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation's notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust."

Keith is right. "Bitchin'" graph.

Wrapping up right quick

Kruse passed along this piece from Connie Schultz.
And check out Christian Wade's Trib debut:
The Deep Lagoon clubhouse, a faded yellow building with clumps of long grass sprouting from its foundation, has a sign that was meant to be a listing for social events.
But the blackboard is blank. No barbecues. No meetings.
Nothing but a sarcastic missive someone scribbled in white chalk.
"Happiness is a northern bound Yankee," it says.
Inside the building, cardboard boxes and garbage are piled in corners. Rows of metal chairs gather dust in the middle of the room.
"Nobody goes in that place anymore," says Shawn Feddersen, a hulky 28-year-old who lives in the park with his wife and two children. "It's filthy and there's mold."
The public bathroom, across the way, is even worse.
"I wouldn't wash a dog in there," he says. "It's disgusting."
Welcome to Deep Lagoon Mobile Home Park, New Port Richey's newest neighborhood.

Kentucky station pulls Writer's Almanac

Writer's Almanac, in my view, is par to my Slick granny's buscuits and gravy. On behalf of the education of future generations of Kentuckians(ites?), shame on the gutless tricks that pulled it.

Here's one that inspired me, work-bound one dateless morning in the mid-sized family sedan: Topograph, by Sharon Olds (Let Keillor read it in your head).

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas, your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Time beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right, my
sun rising swiftly from the left, your
moon rising slowly from the left, my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities, twin cities,
all our states united, one nation,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The stories of the sabbath

Sunday hymnal: Please check out my boy's boy Marc Broussard, with his new video, for his song "Home." This kid is bad. Sounds like a 67-year-old black man. (Click on VIDEO beside Home.)

This historical serial, from the Hartford Courant's Jim Shea, starts pretty cool: That finally changes at about 1 a.m., when Torrington Mayor William T. Carroll gets on the phone and wakes up Gov. Abraham Ribicoff.
"We've got trouble!" Carroll shouts into the receiver. "Rivers are running through the main streets, stores and homes are flooded, and it's getting worse."
(Thanks Keith.)

The Wrong Way Out Of A Housing Project: "When the end came, it barely made the newspapers. Hours before dawn, on a clear 73-degree morning, someone started an argument with a girl, and between the elevator doors of 1212 Loring Avenue and the concrete dolphins out in the courtyard, Keshawn Jamel Seeley bled to death in a spray of gunfire. He was 24 years old."

Kelley Benham's Birth Of A Mother: The system taught Carrie everything she needed to know about life. But it couldn't teach her what a mother does.
Carrie doesn't know what it's like to ride in a minivan like this to band camp with a pack of friends. To have one real solid parent, much less two.
"You're content with the life you knew," Laurallyn tells her. "We're just the system, Carrie. We're the system."
"That doesn't matter," Carrie says. "That's my family."

Please post what you're reading today ...

Hey, Whatever works

New New Journalism excerpt, from an interview with Lawrence Weschler:

Are there any activities that help at this point?
Two things. One is that I read a lot of novels. Writers like Larry McMurtry and Walter Mosley are especially good. I'm sort of like a bicyclist riding behind a truck: I want to get into the slipstream of that other narrator's narrative. To get the feel of narrative, to be on the road, to remember what it feels like to tell a story.
The second thing I do is play with blocks. I have a very large collection of wooden blocks. Some of them are my own invention, and some of them are just rectangular.

Theses blocks belong to your daughter?
No, my daughter is not allowed to play with these blocks. They are mine.

And what do you do with these blocks?
Well, my wife, who is an important human rights monitor, and my daughter, who has been off at school, will come home and see the elaborate cathedral I've built on the kitchen table. And they'll say, "We see you've been busy today." And I have! Because although I'm not thinking about the material at all, I am thinking about structure and rythm....

And how do these block structures get translated into writing?
I'll be playing with my blocks and find myself thinking, "Hmm, I suppose if I put this part of the story in front of that rather than after it ... That might be interesting." And gradually I start to find formal issues of sequencing. Then I start to notice rhymes that I hadn't noticed before.
For instance, when I was writing about Breytenbach there was a key moment in his story when he is being arrested at the airport and passes by a window in which he sees himself. I thought about what it might have been like to see himself at that moment. And then I remembered that in one of his poems he had a line about "South Africa is like the mirror at midnight when you looked in it and a train whistle blew in the distance, and your face was frozen there for all eternity, a horrible face but one's own." And I thought, hmm, if I put that quote next to that scene ...
Now this gets really interesting. This is fun. And at a certain point everything flips around: I'm suddenly magnetized north rather than south, and everything else in the universe except the blank paper before me is north. I'm at my desk, and wouldn't even notice if the house was burning down around me. And yet, I'm not interested in the material, I'm interested in the form. And the thing that is totally mind-blowing is that elements I put side by side for purely formal reasons turn out to be true about the real world. And this is because beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. It is the same kind of satisfaction that a mathematician gets out of an elegant proof.

Wise words

David Finkel on overstatement:

"Do not overstate, no matter how big of a rush you're in. Be a fearless editor of yourself. See if things stand up, or if you're overstepping your bounds.

"Ten years ago in narrative, we got the benefit of the doubt. Now it's 180 degrees. We can't be excessive. We must be trustworthy and transparent."

a short serial

NEW: Here's the end.

Figured I'd throw this on for your thoughts and advice. On Tuesday, I pitched a short serial out of the 2005 National Truck Driving Championships this week in Tampa. The bosses gave me Wednesday to report and said they'd decide if we wanted to do it again when I had written the first piece.
So I went in early and reported broad and at the end of the day I could have gone three ways with this story: father and son truckers reconnecting at the championship; the oddity of a husband supporting his trucker wife; and, finally, a love story.
I went with this.
My question: Does it work? Lenth? Cliffhanger?
Help a brother get better.

out of the ashes, and eclectic

Kruse asks if Corey Kilgannon's The Endless Night works: "One night, hanging out with teenagers, apropos of nothing much. Does it work?"

Elizabeth Gilbert on the worst wedding toast ever.

Bruce Feldman on what happens when a freckled 15-year-old named Brittany collides with an upward-reaching football program.

David Finkel on a Bush-loving family.

Michael Brick on dinosaur bones in Brooklyn.

Julie Cart and Maria L. La Ganga on a conservationist's suicide.

Tomas Alex Tizon on Hawaii's hole in the wall.

Hank Stuever on missing CDs.

Passion flows from memphis

Zack McMillin let's Roy Peter Clark have it (from a WriterL discussion on narrative length):

During one of those unavoidable by-committee meetings that accompany a large narrative, one of our designers, upon hearing that each installment would run 35-50 inches (I think that's 750- 1,500 words), made quite a show. "35 inches? 35 inches! That's a lot to ask of any reader." That the narrative focused on chess did not exactly temper his fears. "Read it," I told him. "It will seem like 15 inches."
With apologies to those who actually took real physics at university (I took Physics for Poets at Vanderbilt), time is a relative thing when we are engrossed in worthwhile narrative.
There are 12inch stories in our newspaper that read like 50, and when Erin Sullivan writes a 50inch story for us, it reads like a 15incher. While I admire Roy Peter Clark's effort to quantify reader investment, it strikes me as folly, as futile. It reminds me of the grammar check on MS Word -- OK in some contexts, but there's no way to create a program sophisticated enough to judge all the intabgibles.
Louis Menand, in a review of Lynn Truss's work last year (here)
, put together one of those amazing pieces -- much like a recent contribution from Hank Stuever (here) -- that is best summed up by this: "Yeah, what HE said." So, what Louis said.
By the way, when the narrative finally ran, to much praise from all over our community (and outside of it), that designer was among its biggest fans. Fifty inches, it turns out, isn't always 50 inches.

part of something big and dirty

So, Dwight Gooden ran from the cops Monday, and folks here and in New York (and lot of other places, I guess) are nuts about it. It's a nice chance to compare how different folks handle the same story. Here goes:
AP.
Newsday.
Daily News.
Hartford Courant.
Times.
Reuters.
Newark Star Ledger.
St. Pete Times
Mine.

And today:
Ny Post
Newsday
NY Daily News
AP
St. Pete Times
Mine

And, for the sake of a break, a story about a thirsty cowboy: from The Well Of Bermo, Niger — Every sunset, when his favorite cow ambles to his bush camp, Bermo Bello leaps up like an overeager suitor, scurrying to meet her with a twitter in his voice.
On this evening, Houley, once a great beauty, stands, her great curved horns held high, listening but not approaching. Bello calls to her in his own special way, a honeyed stream of croons, smooches and clicks that tumbles out like a gift.

765 words and desperately wanting more

The Father Who Never Came Home. Read and learn.

Newsroom watches burgler rifle through copy desk chief's stuff

And Dave Richardson lets him have it:
"This week's contender for the title of World's Dumbest Criminal: the genius who allegedly broke into the same house for possibly the third time in a week – and looked right into a Web camera left there by the owner to catch him.
"The smart person in this case: the Times Herald-Record's own night copy desk chief, Don Bruce, owner of both home and webcam, who watched the crime unfold live at his desk Wednesday night."

Tom Hallman Jr.'s three-part narrative on a man's choice

This started on Sunday:
Portland attorney Darian Stanford must choose: He can keep his paycheck at a prestigious law firm. Or he can pursue principles at the DA's office. Does he make money -- or a difference?

A subtle miracle in narrative journalism, by W.C. Heinz

They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for the purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of the cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped working on the kidding to watch, most of them interested in one horse.

"Air Lift," Jim Roach said. "Full brother of Assault."

Assault, who won the triple crown ... making this one too, by Bold Venture, himself a Derby winner, out of Igual, herself by the great Equipoise ... Great names in the breeding line ... and now the little guy making his first start, perhaps the start of another great career.

They were off well, although Air Lift was fifth. They were moving toward the first turn, and now Air Lift was fourth. They were going into the turn, and now Air Lift was starting to go, third perhaps, when suddenly he slowed, a horse stopping, and below in the stands you could hear a sudden cry, as the rest left him, still trying to run but limping, his jockey -- Dave Gorman -- half falling, half sliding off.

"He broke a leg!" somebody, holding binoculars to his eyes, shouted in the press box. "He broke a leg!"

Down below they were roaring for the rest, coming down the stretch now, but in the infield men were running toward the turn, running toward the colt and the boy standing beside him, alone. There was a station wagon moving around the track toward them, and then, in a moment, the big green van that they call the horse ambulance.

"Gorman was crying like a baby," one of them, coming out of the jockey room, said. "he said he must have stepped in a hole, but you should have seen him crying."

"It's his left front ankle," Dr. J.G. Catlett, the veterinarian, was saying. "it's a compound fracture; and I'm waiting for confirmation from Mr. Hirsch to destroy him."

He was standing outside one of the stables beyond the backstretch, and he had just put in a call to Kentucky where Max Hirsch, the trainer, and Robert Kleber, the owner, are attending the yearling sales.

"When will you do it?" one of them said.

"Right as soon as I can," the doctor said. "As soon as I get confirmation. If it was an ordinary horse I'd done it right there."

He walked across the road and around another barn to where they had the horse. The horse was still in the van, about twenty stable hands in dungarees and sweat-stained shirts, bare-headed or wearing old caps, standing around quietly and watching with Dr. M.A. Gilman, the assistant veterinarian.

"We might as well get him out of the van," Catlett said, "before we give him the novocaine. It'll be a little better out in the air."

The boy in the van with the colt led him out them, the colt limping, tossing his head a little, the blooding running down and covering his left foreleg. When they saw him, standing there outside the van now, the boy holding him, they started talking softly.

"Full brother of Assault." ... "It don't make no difference now. He's done." ... "But damn, what a grand little horse." ... "Aint he a horse?"

"It's a funny thing," Catlett said. "All the cripples that go out, they never break a leg. It always happens to a good-legged horse."

A man, gray-haired and rather stout, wearing brown slacks and a blue shirt, walked up.

"Then I better not send for the wagon yet?" the man said.

"No," Catlett said. "Of course, you might just as well. Max Hirsch may say no, but I doubt it."

"I don't know," the man said.

"There'd be time in the morning," Catlett said.

"But in this hot weather--" the man said.

They had sponged off the colt, after they had given him the shot to deaden the pain, and now he stood, feeding quietly from some hay they had placed at his feet. In the distance you could hear the roar of the crowd in the grandstand, but beyond it and above it you could hear thunder and see the occasional flash of lightning.

When Catlett came back the next time he was hurrying, nodding his head and waving his hands. Now the thunder was louder, the flashes of lightning brighter, and now rain was starting to fall.

"All right," he said, shouting to Gilman. "Max Hirsch talked to Mr. Kleberg. We've got the confirmation."

They moved the curious back, the rain falling faster now, and they moved the colt over close to a pile of loose bricks. Gilman had the halter and Catlett had the gun, shaped like a bell with the handle at the top. This bell he placed, the crowd silent, on the colt's forehead, just between his eyes. The colt stood still and then Catlett, with the hammer in his other hand, struck the handle of the bell. There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring straight out, the free legs quivering.

"Aw--" someone said.

That was all they said. They worked quickly, the two vets removing the broken bones as evidence for the insurance company, the crowd silently watching. Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rused for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of assault.

And some other goodies, new and old, for your Sunday reading pleasure:
Dan Barry, Rick Bragg, Kate Boo, and Jack Hopkins.

Alex Zesch passed along this smooth piece from the Jacksonville paper.

What are you reading?

You Can Do daily narrative

Corey Kilgannon shows us how.

THR alumn write-off

I'll be away for the next week, so forgive me for not updating Gangrey. But make sure you check on how Kruse and I are doing as the water recedes from Mississippi at www.tampatrib.com and www.sptimes.com.
As said via cell-phone as we prepared to leave town, him by plane, me by 24-foot RV, I WILL write circles around him.
Best,
Ben

Some of the very best

Given the extreme physical conditions, the obvious logistical difficulties and the challenges of just being a human being and seeing what there is to see all along the Gulf Coast, some of the work being done off Katrina and the aftermath is awe-inspiring.

Here is but a small sample of some of the very best:

Scott Gold of the LAT, first person, walking around New Orleans:

Water is the enemy. Even now, it drips steadily into the lobby of my hotel. It gurgles up from storm drains, splashes against shattered storefronts and front doors when rescue trucks go by. It hides snakes, dead, bloated rats and, in the areas with the worst flooding, untold numbers of bloated bodies.

There is no air conditioning. There are no fans. There is no ice.

As journalists, we keep a wall between our emotions and our stories. I had been holding up fine until Wednesday evening, when I made my way through the masses at the Superdome and found a young mother. Her name was Tonisha Jones. She was 24 years old. Her daughter Justice is the same age as my daughter — 17 months.

Justice was perched on Tonisha's lap. She had chubby cheeks and pigtails and eyes like black pearls. I noticed that Tonisha was feeding her trail mix that emergency crews had handed out.

"You're really not supposed to let babies eat raisins," I blurted out.

Tonisha stared at me until I realized the profound folly of what I had said.

For a few minutes, I sat with them, as Justice happily popped in peanuts and raisins. The sun erupted through the holes in the roof left by Katrina, sending dazzling rays of light onto the field.

Then I went back to the hotel and cried, wondering what will become of all of these people, wondering about little Justice, and whether she will ever again have a place she can call home.

Ellen Barry of the LAT on a little boy with a big job:

The water wasn't going down and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived to pick them up, they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. She and her neighbors had to make a quick decision.

It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead.

P.J. Huffstutter of the LAT with a family in Gulfport:

The Sparkmans had one working car, a blue Mercury Sable with six gallons of gas. They had been saving the gas for emergencies. Though services were starting to return along the gulf, the uncertainty was maddening. A bank open for several hours today might be dark all day tomorrow. The gas station that pumped steadily yesterday might attract a line two miles long today — only to run dry by mid-morning.

Willie was not willing to risk their small supply of fuel to drive around on what might well be a fool's errand.

But this Salvation Army site sounded solid.

Breakfast, they all decided, would be worth one-sixth of a gallon.

Dan Barry of the NYT at the first rest stop in Texas:

One after another, the westward-bound buses pull off Interstate 10 and all but collapse at the Texas Travel Information Center here. Their doors sigh open to release the fetid smell of a devastated New Orleans: of urine and waste and mud; of days spent on rooftops, on bridge overpasses, in dark and dangerous concrete behemoths.

If despair carried an odor, it would be this.

Jodi Wilgoren of the NYT on a (sad) homecoming:

So the couple crossed the street that had become a river, and soon stood waist-deep inside the living room that had become a lake, with Stephen King novels, tennis balls, and a pink souvenir candle from Cape Cod floating around the furniture.

Peter Applebome of the NYT at a makeshift morgue:

After the wind, after the flood, after countless bodies are fished from muddy bayous or lifted off street corners or carried down from roofs or attics, the road ends here.

Dana Hedgpeth of the WP keeps it short:

Nevertheless, the cars, trucks and vans began lining up as early as 5 a.m. Friday outside Renovations, a family-run home improvement store and gas station in this small town of shrimpers about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans. A gallon of regular gas was $3.10. A nearby station had been charging $2.46 for regular and $2.91 for supreme late Thursday, but it ran out of fuel.

Brady Dennis of the SPT goes even shorter:


After a while, soldiers in camouflage showed up with Humvees and machine guns to knock on doors and make sure nobody got too close. Firefighters arrived with a tanker truck of water to keep the fire from spreading. The buildings burned to ashes.

Please post what you’ve been reading.

Baby Got ...

Please pardon the delay. Moved into a new house over here in Seminole Heights, and I've been unpacking boxes since I rolled in from the coast. I'll be running stuff shortly. Meanwhile, has anyone ever had symptoms of PTSD after covering an especially brutal assignment?

PS: I think I fixed most of the links in the Katrina post below. If not, find them yourselves, you word hungry bastards.

Good, bad, and lazy

Just thinking, after a long hard trip and staring down the muzzle of another: If a good writer only puts out a story or two a year, is the writer really all that good? (I like that. Like, if a subscriber can only read a paper's best writer once a year, is he or she really the paper's best writer? And if a tree falls on that writer, but no one sees it, can you still try a narrative? And how long can one go without publishing a story and still be invited as a featured speaker at a NWW?)
Really, though, isn't speed at least a part of this business? Could I win a pulitzer if I had 6 months to report, 3 months to think and 3 months to write?

The BBC on the future

Makes perfect sense. What else is there to do while you're taking a dump?

Anne Hull does Seguin, Texas

Don't miss her stuff off Katrina: In Rural Texas, Blessings and Culture Shock and Hitchhiking From Squalor To Anywhere Else.

A plaque (and a poet) in newburgh

Check out John Doherty's tab-sized tribute to curiosity. Makes me miss the 'burgh.

Brick on Katrina

What do you think about this piece?

80 years of excellence

Zack McMillin ran across a helluva bargain: 80 years of the New Yorker for $63.

It's worth $7.95

If you haven't done it already, sign up for a free 14 days of Times Select at nytimes.com, and check out the multimedia video feature with Dan Barry. Classic stuff. He reads the papers, he reads Joseph Mitchell, he reads E.B. White, and he walks around New York being curious.
There are lessons throughout.

guerilla journalism

Early on, after I had written my fifth robbery roundup in five days, the metro editor at that time, a great guy named Bill Gerdes, came to me and said, "Stop! No more robbery roundups."

Then he explained the Post-Herald mission to me.

"Look," he said, "you don't have to write about every crime committed in the city. This is not the paper of record; those guys are," and he jerked his head toward the other side of the building where the reporters and editors of the Birmingham News worked.

"What we do," he said, "is pick the best stories and do them better." (More)

A close look at a decision

Taped under receptionist Gloria Williams's desk were "urgent" instructions to recite in case of a hurricane: "Our Father who art in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Lady of Prompt Succor spare us from the harm during the hurricane season."

No prayer could stop Katrina's rushing waters or ease the fatal heat that followed. When rescue workers finally arrived five days later, bodies were found wrapped in bedsheets in the chapel. Originally told 14 had died, officials eventually recovered 22 corpses.

Anne Hull and Doug Struck with At Nursing Home, Katrina Dealt Only The First Blow.

Been Wondering what he's up to

So I got Direct TV a few weeks ago and I finally got a chance to flip channels this morning. Somewhere in the 300s, I stumbled across Charlie LeDuff getting his ass kicked by a biker in a fight club-style boxing match. Turns out, I'm watching the Discovery/Times channel, and LeDuff has his own show called Only In America. Have you seen this?

Long Gone Daddy

"The good years were sweet - he sang on big radio shows in New York, was offered a movie contract by MGM, got to hear his songs covered by pop stars - and then he fell and fell hard. The end was brutal. He was in and out of sanitariums and got hooked on a sedative, chloral hydrate, and became pitiful in a public way: he got booed off a number of stages by his own fans. He was, Hemphill writes, "skinny as a spider, suffering from chest pains, nearing impotence, incontinent to the point he was wetting his bed every night." In the midst of his miseries, he had a last grand hurrah at the Skyline Club in Austin, Tex., and sang every song he knew, some of them more than once, for three hours, no intermission. He stood on stage and wailed. People said it was the greatest thing they'd ever seen."

with a little help from my friends

Following a few backchannel discussions, I'd like to extend an open invite for all of you to let me post your stuff here on Gangrey.com for feedback from other pros. If we can't get honest feedback, we'll all have a tough time getting better. Shoot me an email and I'll put it on, and hopefully we'll stir some thoughtful critiques.

Most Important: Telling People What They Want To Know

Please check out the Times Herald-Record's Tuesday coverage of a triple homicide Monday.
Comprehensive, readable, good stuff.
The main bar: Fired sex offender shoots 3, kills self.
From the scene: 'I want to go home and hug my kids.
On the workplace: Low-profile plant a big player.
The gunman's secrets: Gunman had dark side few knew about.
On the victims: Shooting victim profiles.
And: Photo gallery.

fighting back with writing

A few nuggets from Newspapers In Turmoil in The Rake: ( Thanks, Zack. )

...But almost everywhere else, newsrooms have been stripped of adequate resources, imagination, and editorial courage. Too much of the regular, daily content of too many news organizations is filled with predictable, redundant stories produced in the same bland newspeak, the same inevitable tone and perspective...

...The bard of Anoka, Garrison Keillor, a lover of good writing and journalism, gave an interview to the Hartford Courant last April. He was about to speak to the 2005 National Writers Workshop and he wanted say something in defense of newspapers. It wasn’t easy. “I think that American newspapers have taken a very serious wrong turn,” said Keillor, “and that aside from a few newspapers, the quality of the product is in decline, especially for the reader, and I think that newspapers have forgotten that their readers are readers and love writing. Writing is what people want. They don’t want a sort of concept of journalism; they want writers. And writers are always individuals. This is what people turn to newspapers for. They don’t turn to newspapers for advice and for personal service and for sort of glossy pieces about lifestyle and home décor and cooking and how to bring up your children.”

Talking to the journalism trade magazine Editor & Publisher a while later, Keillor added that today’s newspapers “are too positive and upbeat, on the mistaken assumption that that’s what readers are looking for.” Sadly, what Keillor is looking for is precisely the sort of stuff many newspapers are combing out of what remains of their pages. I can tell you from long, personal experience the sour reactions and looks I got from any TV review or trend piece that wasn’t a giddy celebration of the sheer, bouncy fun of The Bachelor, Joe Millionaire, or The Apprentice. “It’s what our readers want to read,” I was constantly told, by editors fresh back from another mandatory meeting with the research department...

...Newspapers are still the anchor of the mainstream media, despite the public’s overwhelming reliance on TV for breaking news. (Local TV news would implode if it didn’t have the morning paper to work from.) Papers still have the wherewithal to fight back against the appeal of the best bloggers. But in order to compete, they’re going to have to let at least some of their writers be actual writers, loosen their foundation garments, assert their opinions, employ more literary devices, and in general have some fun with the topics and people they cover....

...The appeal of good, sometimes irreverent writing, beyond what traditional mainstream newspapering currently allows, is borne out in a study by Northwestern University’s Readership Institute. Lately the Institute has partnered with the Star Tribune, testing models for the newspaper’s long-awaited redesign.

The makeover is supposed to incorporate significant advances in online service, among other things. Many Star Tribune employees will be curious to see if it addresses anything mentioned here. Northwestern spent a lot of time assessing the tastes of those elusive “younger readers,” the ones who don’t read newspapers much, don’t watch traditional network news programs, and only leaf through Time and Newsweek at the dentist’s office.

What they found was interesting: A remix of news choices with hipper, more irreverent headlines and stories written with blog-like attitude—not Jen-Brad-Angelina-style celebrity junk, but actual news—was in fact more appealing to young readers than the stuff the Star Tribune actually published (they focused the study on the Star Tribune’s Valentine’s Day 2005 edition). The Star Tribune test material was very similar to Chicago’s competing Red Eye and Red Streak free tabloids. (The “Reds” are two free weeklies published the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune since 2002. They are aggressive efforts to lure young readers.)

“What is interesting and revealing,” says Mike Smith, managing director of Northwestern’s Media Management Center, “is that the Sun-Times and Tribune have found that adults, loyal newspaper readers, are picking up the free weeklies in far greater numbers than first imagined.” In other words, a general loosening of the more staid conventions of professional journalism may very well offer more upside than risk to mainstream media.

Can someone explain this to me?

I dig this, but I don't get it.

"GOD couldn't decide where to meet for a cup of coffee.

Dunkin' Donuts? "No place to sit." Howard Johnson's? "Gone, my child, gone." Starbucks? "Too pretentious."

Here's Dan Barry.

The best of the best

As someone else said, there has been so much good writing out of New Orleans, but this is the first poetry. I can't stop reading it.

...In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods, the severely damaged streets bear the names of saints who could not protect them. Whatever nature spared, human nature stepped up to provide a kind of democracy in destruction.

At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from the crushed door, offering a view of the complementary coffee table. A large woman named Phoebe Au -- ''Pronounced 'Awe,''' she says -- materializes to report that men had smashed it in with a truck. She fades into the neighborhood's broken brick, and a thin woman named Toni Miller materializes to correct the record.

''They used sledgehammers,'' she said.

Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks rumble past a smoldering building, the roads are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The city parked them on the riverbank for the hurricane, after which some hoods took them for fare-free joy rides through lawless streets, and then discarded them.

On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since the police took away the gun he was carrying -- ''They beat me and threatened to kill me,'' he says -- but there are benefits to this new world.

''You're able to see the stars,'' he says. ''It's wonderful.''

Today, law enforcement troops began lending muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin's vow to evacuate by force any residents too attached to their pieces of the toxic metropolis. They searched the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and that woman whose name sounds like Awe.

Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled black water over someone's corpse.

Narrative Songwriting

From Zack: Went to see John Prine Friday night, and found myself inspired for two solid hours, listening to THE MAN. Was wondering if anyone had particular favorite singers/bands who get their narrative juices flowing. Obviously, Nebraska and the Boss. Gordo Lightfoot and the Edmond Fitzgerald. Not necessarily Dylan, though I understand the attraction. I've always thought he needed an editor, but I'm just a humble sports writer, so what do I know.

Anyhow, I'm always struck dumb when I recall that John Prine wrote "Hello, In There" as a 23-year-old. I'm going to put together a Narrative playlist. Shoot me an email if you'd like me to burn a disc.

Hello, In There
John Prine

We had an apartment
In the city,
Me and Loretta
Liked living there.
Well, it'd been years
Since the kids had grown,
A life of their own
Left us alone.

John and Linda
Live in Omaha,
And Joe is somewhere
On the road.
We lost Davy
In the Korean war,
And still don't know what for,
Don't matter anymore.

Chorus:
Ya' know that old trees
Just grow stronger,
And old rivers
Grow wilder ev'ry day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say,
"Hello in there, hello."

Me and Loretta,
We don't talk much more,
She sits and stares
Through the back door screen.
And all the news
Just repeats itself
Like some forgotten dream
That we've both seen.
Someday I'll go
And call up Rudy,
We worked together
At the factory.
But what could I say
If he asks "What's new?"
"Nothing, what's with you?
Nothing much to do."

Chorus:
Ya' know that old trees
Just grow stronger,
And old rivers
Grow wilder ev'ry day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say,
"Hello in there, hello."

So if you're walking
Down the street sometime
And spot some
Hollow ancient eyes,
Please don't just
Pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care,
Say, "Hello in there,
Hello."

A ride with a family

Here's John Henry Doucette, sweet and tight, on a family making copies of a dead kid's picture:

Billie A. Spruill sifted through photos to pick out the best one of her dead son. She and her husband, Robert, were following the advice of a police officer. They traveled in their motor home to a copy shop.

Her son, Michael L. DeMasse , was killed late Dec. 10 in a hit-and-run collision while riding his motorcycle.

The Chesapeake man had been trying to turn left from Portsmouth Boulevard onto California Avenue. He was 31 .

He died near a Christmas tree lot. One witness saw a dark-colored pickup truck with big tires and a loud exhaust system keep going.

A man with a past ends it all

Vanessa Gezari on the police beat:

At 7:31 a.m. Tuesday, on a quiet street in St. Petersburg, a man who had done terrible things to a woman and dodged justice for almost two years sat slumped over in the cab of a white Chevy pickup, his life ebbing away as the law closed in.

Edward Lee Green was 53 years old with a staggering rap sheet and a price on his head.

David Sullivan sets idealists straight

From Romanesko letters: There are any number of ideas for coping with this problem, some of which will be successful -- examples include a Web news presence that reflects the abilities of the Web instead of simply putting ink-on-paper stories on screens; targeted marketing and niche products -- and some that would be bottom-line unfriendly but enhance our current product -- mandating doorstep delivery, for example. The weakest point in our production and distribution chain is that we expect the reader to walk to the street at 5:30 a.m. to get our product. That is just arrogance.

Journalists can play an important part in the process of saving the news business, let alone newspapers, but we need to understand that there has rarely been a link between higher quality and circulation. The most
famous example where there was is probably that the New York Times turned away advertising for news in World War II and surpassed the Herald Tribune, which did not. But that was in a one-on-one competitive situation over the country's most elite market -- upmarket New York City. There were four or five New York dailies of lesser quality that were as large or larger than either the Times or the Herald Tribune, but did not circulate among the chattering classes. Yes, they ultimately died as well, but the Herald Tribune was still a quality newspaper when it succumbed.

The problem for journalists is that most people who care about quality journalism (at least, over 30) already take a paper, even though they may be extremely disappointed with it. They may take the Times or the Journal over the Dacron Republican Democrat, but they take something; and lots of them take the Dacron paper because they live in Dacron. They think it is junk, but they buy it anyway because they are newspaper readers and care about journalism.

Letter in full.

Dusting off some Mike Levine

When you get a minute:
Part I.
Part II.
Part III.

What annonymous sources aren't saying

NYTimes.com: A third man has been detained in a suspected plot to detonate explosives on the city's subway system, a government official said today, as police officers searched passengers' bags on subways, buses and ferries.

Authorities are holding three Al Qaeda operatives in connection with the suspected plot, although no details were available on who they are, where they were detained or what agency captured them, said the government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

Is the post on to something?

Kurtz: The Washington Post is a bloated newspaper that should cut its voluminous and often dull output by a third to attract more readers, some say.

The Washington Post's rich offerings have attracted an incredibly loyal core of readers who would be alienated by a drastic personality change, others say.

The people who hold these divergent views all work for the capital's biggest paper, and they are firing away in daily in-house electronic critiques that have sparked an impassioned debate about The Post's future.

Pete Hamill bounces back

Brooklyn, 1955, and raw ( Thanks Keith ):

There is no way to understand Oct. 4, 1955 and the great explosive release of giddy, tearful, fist-pumping emotion at 3:45 that Tuesday afternoon without understanding the place from which it all came. These were the Brooklyn Dodgers and they had traveled from Brooklyn, our country, into the heart of darkness, into the majestic confines of Yankee Stadium, into the House that Ruth Built, into the place of long October shadows where doom had so often awaited them. And us. This time, at last, it was different.
In a very important way the tale properly began on that day in August 1945 when the war ended. I was 10 years old. And everywhere in New York church bells were ringing and foghorns blowing. On tenement fire escapes people beat on pots with huge spoons and all work ended and there were kegs of beer in front of all the saloons in my neighborhood. My father, Billy Hamill of the lower Falls Road in Belfast, was among them, singing.

In the midst of the most immense New York block party ever held, some women wept because their sons were coming home from the war. Others because their sons would never come home. Their sons had died in the Hurtgen Forest, on the beach at Anzio, at Guadalcanal or Okinawa. Their names were listed on the sign erected by the Arrows at 13th St. and Eighth Ave. in our neighborhood. The Arrows had played ball for the joy of it before going off to kick the crap out of Hitler and Tojo, and on that day I saw an old man stand on the steps of Gallagher's saloon and salute the sign and the names of those who would never, ever play ball again.

Kelley Benham checks sin's temperature on Bourbon Street

NEW ORLEANS - Inside, it smells like mold. Outside, the entire French Quarter smells like a dead cat. But the lights came on this week and so, here and there along the street, men prowled again, booze swirled in plastic cups again, and the strippers, the few who found their way back, climbed up the poles.

In Big Daddy's strip club, where a mannequin swings from the ceiling, manager Saint Jones smokes a Marlboro and tries to hold back what is nearly impossible to hold back: the appetites at the door.

"Guys, come back at 5."

J.R. MOEHRINGER with a slow pitch

( Thanks, Baird. )

It was supposed to be a simple story about a mysterious senior-softball phenom whose legend was growing in America's heartland. Of course, nothing is simple.

No rhyme or reason

Kruse passed along the story behind Josh Paul, the now famous third-string catcher for the Angels.

Is there something to be learned?

Sheryl McCarthy thinks so: "Relationships between journalists and their subjects are complicated and often conflicted. Even when they evolve into a kind of friendship, they are fueled, as are most friendships, by needs on both sides. I think Capote genuinely felt affection for his subjects, but he knew there was a boundary between his relationship with them and his job as a writer. At one point in the film he tells Smith, who was still refusing to tell him what happened the night of the murders: I'm working, and I need you to tell me what I need to know, or there will be no more contact."

Very shallow

Alex sent this: "If Michelle Kosinski's canoe had sprung a leak on NBC's "Today" show Friday, she didn't have much to worry about.

"In one of television's inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera _ making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep."

Who Is Cormac McCarthy?

The last (and only?) interview Cormac McCarthy did was this one, for the New York Times Magazine, in 1992.

But someone has been thinking lately about how cool it would be to talk to the lonesome genius who wrote:

They rode. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasn't supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell's wrong with you? I dont know. Nothin. I believe I'll sing. He did.

There's a story there

Dan Barry:

Umbrella.

Say it fast, as one peddler did in Times Square - umbrella-umbrella-umbrella - and there's music playing. Say it soft, as another peddler did at Herald Square - ummm-brell-laa - and it's almost like praying.

A columnist takes on poverty

He's living on the street. And it looks real. (Thanks, Tim.)

Steve Lopez: The call comes in at 11:18 in the morning. Possible overdose on skid row, just half a block from one of the busiest firehouses in the United States.

A thug turned hero

Check out this piece by Josh Peter, who should have won the Pulitzer for feature writing a few years back. Here's to this year.

"Across the street from the Astrodome, in the alcove of a motel where the night manager sits behind bulletproof glass, a young man leaned against a faded stucco wall.

A grin crept beneath his wispy mustache when a stranger approached.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

His name is Jabar Gibson.

The first bus to arrive in Houston loaded with Hurricane Katrina evacuees from New Orleans was not operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or any other government authority. It was an Orleans Parish school bus, its driver too young to drink but already a convicted car thief. His cargo: 60 of New Orleans' poorest residents, the youngest a week-old infant and the oldest 59.

It was known as the "renegade bus." Gibson, 20, was its renegade driver."

A reporter sings the unoriginal blues

Am I not looking hard enough, or have all the waiting-on-the-big-one stories been done? Seems like every idea that feels fresh has been done by someone better and brighter than me. Could someone please get me excited about a pre-hurricane hurricane story in the vicinity of Miami? Please.

Talk amongst yourselves

Gangrey will be down for a few days. Miami lost power and phones so I'm stuck for now using the cell to file, which is as slow as Doherty on deadline. Please keep making each other better.

Some weekend reading

Wild week. The power of that hurricane made me feel insignificant, like when you roll out of your tent at 1 a.m. in Seminole Canyon and see the stars for the first time. That's a nice feeling once in a while.

A few items for your weekend reading pleasure.

Keith was looking for feedback on this piece on Port Jervis football: At Homer's Coffee Shop on East Main Street, where $2.65 gets you a couple of eggs, home fries and toast, a few sleepy residents wake themselves with cups of freshly brewed coffee. The city fire chief eats breakfast quietly before his walkie-talkie calls him away.
And in one corner, a retiree with a Giants cap and a thick mustache talks about the football game that's 12 hours away.
Port Jervis High School football.

Kruse brought us this one from Belmar, N.J., on a band trying to find where it fits: One evening at the beginning of the second month of life after Katrina, the guys who make up the New Orleans band called the Soul Project sat in a house that smelled like cigarette smoke.
Cristian Duque needed some black socks to wear with his thrift-store suit at that night's gig way up here on the Jersey Shore.
"I had like 10 pairs," he said. "I don't know where they are."
He hardly knows where he is anymore.


Kelley Benham, with a nice way to tell a soldier's story: When a mine exploded in Iraq, Roberto Baez disappeared from CiCi's Pizza on Hillsborough and the Lucky Buffet on Waters, from the passenger seat of his best friend's Sentra and from PlayStation cyberspace. He was 19 and grew up in Tampa.

Tom Hallman Jr. on an aging magician: He pulls a deck of cards out of his battered briefcase. He shuffles in silence, lost in thought.
"When I die," he finally says, "all this will be hauled off to the dump."
He wipes his eyes. A cold, he says as he briefly turns away. Just a cold. He clears his throat and holds out the deck.
"Take a card," he says. "Please, take a card."

Ramsey explores the death of a rabbit: Flopsy was dead by the time the ruckus woke up Miles Barnett.

Brady Dennis with a quiet look at a clown: Inside the locker room, the drifter drifts to sleep.
He pays no attention to the country music blaring outside, or the bulls pacing restlessly, or the bullriders swaggering in too-tight Wranglers.
They call him Stretch, a wild man, a bullfighter, the American kind, who paints his face clown-like and dresses in red and throws himself willingly into the path of angry beasts who have just bucked cowboys to the ground.

Timothy Egan on a freaky town: "It's just like the mob," said Gary Engels, a former police detective who has been retained by county officials to investigate child abuse accusations here. "The church is able to keep iron-fisted control even though the top leaders are fugitives."
Church leaders - and officials of the mayor's office, the Police Department and the school board, all of whom are followers - declined to be interviewed. The police, as well as church body guards in white pickup trucks, followed a visiting reporter and a photographer around town for several days.

And finally, a gangrey.com exclusive (space was tight, I'm told):

MIAMI BEACH -- Four homeless guys were sitting on South Beach, near a washed-up crab trap and the surf, which was wild and white for this time of year.
Accounted for among the homeless of South Beach post-Hurricane Wilma were these pals -- Jeff Berkins, Peter Joseph Servello II, Scabs, and Damin Schmidt -- plus Andre, Walking Mike and J.C.
One was missing.
Red-Eyed Bobby.
The men were worried.
“We look out for each other, know what I mean?” said Berkins, a University of New Hampshire graduate who says he ran the IT department at Children’s Hospital in Boston before he tried crack. (This couldn’t be confirmed through the hospital Wednesday night.)
The night of the storm, the group –- most of the guys who sleep behind the wall near 12th Street, between Ocean Drive and the sand -- was split up.
They all intended to ride it out on the streets.
Servello did. He’s 50, Sicilian, has lived in Tampa and has tattoos on his face: a lightning bolt to make his mother mad and two tear drops, for his daughters, April and Christina.
He snuck into a stairwell on Collins Avenue, crept up to the seventh floor and fell asleep, safe and sound and reading a western novel called “Independence.” He knew nothing of the chaos around him as he slept.
About 11 p.m., when the wind started picking up, Berkins and Schmidt, 20, who says he joined the carnival after his parents overdosed on heroin, were talked into riding a bus to a shelter.
They heard the last pick-up was at 5, but a bus barreled through the night, so they jumped on and rode 45 minutes to a high school in West Hialeah.
Red-eyed Bobby was with them.
The high school hallways were lined with sleeping bags, they said. People everywhere. Some families had brought mattresses and battery-powered televisions. The men ate chicken nuggets in the high school cafeteria and tried to sleep.
In the middle of the storm, Red-Eyed Bobby needed some something to drink.
“He’s a wicked alcoholic,” Berkins said.
“Vodka,” said Servello. “Loves Vodka.”
So Bobby, who they say is a Vietnam War veteran, chased his demons out of the shelter and into the wind.
And that was the last anyone has seen of him.
When the hurricane passed and the sideways rain stopped, the guys met up at the beach. Walking Mike was there. J.C. Andre. And the four buddies.
“As soon as we got back, we started looking around to make sure there were no casualties,” Berkins said. “Everybody seemed good, but Red-Eyed Bobby wasn’t here.”
They asked around.
No one had seen him.
As South Beach filled in around them Tuesday, the men ate Funyuns, smoked Broncos and split a six-pack of Natural Light tallboys. The beach was beautiful. Red-Eyed Bobby should have been here.
The good thing: he wasn’t listed among the hurricane dead.
The bad thing: who was looking?
“Hope he’s OK,” said Servello.
“Yeah,” said Schmidt.

Behind the press release

Kruse says this is the best thing Ramsey Al-Rikabi has ever done:

Jose "Tito" Torres fired only two shots. The first went through the belly of a 16-year-old girl. The second he shot through his own chest 13 hours later.
It started late Saturday night, when the 44-year-old Torres shot the girl, stole a car, took hostages, then barricaded himself in a Farrington Street apartment.
It ended early yesterday afternoon when negotiators, who had enlisted the help of Torres' sister and the girl he shot, couldn't convince him to surrender to police.

Dan Barry Style

Button up your overcoat...

Say Cheese as the years pass

Read Michael Brick's Halloweens Pass:

The old-timers watched Halloween from the stoops, and laughter rose above the other noises. Batman came with a Superman bag. A tiny cheerleader posed, then walked away without her candy. A teenage boy in a suit with an unlit cigar led a group of cross-dressing boys down the block, ordering them into the photo booth.

"No touching my women," the boy said, only he used a different word. Sylvester the Cat was freed from his stroller for a turn in the booth, where he dropped his chocolate. Few, if any, of the children chose coins.

Selling the news

For those without a staff, and without the time or the patience to muddle through more than one paper, there is Carlos, a young man of indeterminate origin and background (“I’m from everywhere and nowhere,” he says), who, for the past several months, has stood at the southwest corner of Forty-second and Eighth, by the entrance to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, greeting evening commuters with a simple one-line digest of the latest in world affairs: “Bush nominates a lady with zero experience to the highest court in the land!” or, “Archeologists find proof that Jews existed!” Carlos is one of about two dozen men stationed in the area each afternoon who offer morning newspapers at half price, but he seems to be alone among the venders in his old-fashioned conviction that the news must be sold rather than simply bought. (Thanks, Ramsey)

So what are we excited about?

Anybody making plans yet? What are we longing to hear?

2005 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism
Draft Schedule
Friday, December 2, 2005
11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Registration
1:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. Welcome (Bob Giles and Mark Kramer)
1:15 p.m. - 2:25 p.m. Keynote
Setting, Psychology and Mommy in Narrative Journalism (Tom Wolfe)
2:45 p.m. - 3:55 p.m. Breakout I
• The Gift of Personal Stories (Tom French, Amy Ellis Nutt, Eddy L. Harris)
• Writing for Multiple Cultures Without Reaching for the Least Common Denominator (Victor
Merina)
• On Character (Jamaica Kincaid, Mark Singer)
• Bridging the Gap: Narrative in newsrooms (Robin Gaby Fisher, Laurie Hertzel, John Carroll, Chip
Scanlan)
• Which Story to Tell: Choosing the characters, details, strands, ideas and scenes to move from field
notes to first draft (Jacqui Banaszynski, Mark Kramer, Adam Hochschild)
• Write From Your Tent: Why it pays to put words down in the field (Marc Lacey)
• Writing to Picture: Narrative in TV news stories (Beth Nissen)
• *****Name of session to come (Presenter to come*****)
4:15 p.m. - 5:25 p.m. Breakout II
• Engineering Mega-Narrative Projects (Gerald Boyd)
• Using Narrative Elements to Make Hard Reading Easy (Roy Peter Clark)
• Finding Stories in Everyday Life (Jacqui Banaszynski)
• Three of My Most Effective Narratives and Why (Laurie Hertzel, Tom French, Beth Nissen)
• Writing Workshop: When “hack” isn’t a four-letter word — five steps to make writing dreams
happen and other time-management tips for writers (Chip Scanlan)
• Why So Much News Narrative Comes Out Mawkish and What to Do About It (Mark Kramer)
• Sports and Power (Sally Jenkins, Amy Ellis Nutt)
• A Picture of What Happened: Maintaining credibility in the digital age (Michael Williamson)
5:45 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Readings
7:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Remarks
Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers
7:30 p.m. Reception
9:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Café Sessions
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2005 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism
Draft Schedule
Saturday, December 3, 2005
7:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. Registration
7:30 a.m. - 8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. Keynote Panel
How Must a Storyteller Be Fair? (Cheryl Carpenter, John Carroll, Philip Gourevitch, Mark Singer,
Gerald Boyd, Orville Schell and moderator Mark Kramer)
10:20 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Breakout III
• Putting Endings First: Nine ways to demolish default kickers and make your stories unforgettable
(Chip Scanlan)
• Immersion Reporting: Disappearing inside other worlds, other experiences (Tom French)
• Community Journalism and Narrative (Cheryl Carpenter, Derrick Jackson, Doug McGill)
• Whose Story Is It to Tell? Minorities on minorities (Gerald Boyd, Victor Merina, S. Mitra Kalita,
Mirta Ojito)
• Painting Scenes in Three Media (Marc Lacey, Claudio Sanchez, Michael Williamson)
• “Trust Me”: Why the people you write about should (not?) do so (Mark Singer)
• Managing Narrative Writers (Eugene Robinson)
• How “I” Makes the Story (Eddy L. Harris)
11:45 a.m. - 12:55 p.m. Breakout IV
• How to Improve the Climate for Narrative (Cheryl Carpenter)
• Reporting on Your Own: Narrative from within communities (S. Mitra Kalita)
• Telling the Hard Stories (Doug McGill, Orville Schell, Sheila Curran Bernard)
• A Toolbox of Literary Skills for Nonfiction Writers (Phillip Lopate, Eugene Robinson, Eddy L.
Harris)
• 50 Writing Tools in 50 Minutes (Roy Peter Clark)
• Narrative in Breaking News (Sarah Lyall, Tom French, Beth Nissen)
• Covering the Country (Not the City) (Dale Maharidge, Mark Singer, Laurie Hertzel)
• Getting Real: Beyond the heroic (sports) narrative (Sally Jenkins)
1:15 p.m. - 2:20 p.m. Lunch and Readings
2:40 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. Keynote
Ambitious Narrative Writing in Newspapers: An editor’s perspective (John Carroll)
(Saturday continued on next page)
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2005 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism
Draft Schedule
Saturday, December 3, 2005 (continued)
4:05 p.m. - 5:15 p.m. Breakout V
• In the Beginning Was the (Right) Word: Ledes and nuts (Jacqui Banaszynski)
• Global Narratives for Local Audiences (Doug McGill)
• New Tech and New News: Does changing broadcast technology change what’s covered? (Beth
Nissen, Claudio Sanchez, Sree Sreenivasan, Orville Schell)
• Regular Guests: How to entertain week after week with your column (Randy Cohen, Derrick
Jackson, Sally Jenkins)
• Recasting History (Adam Hochschild, Philip Gourevitch)
• From Journalist to Author: Making the transition successfully (Stuart Krichevsky)
• How to be Funny Without Being Mean: Using (but not abusing) people you interview (Sarah Lyall)
• The Reported Memoir: Going beyond memories to craft a personal story (Mirta Ojito)
5:30 p.m. - 6:45 p.m. Breakout VI
• Fact is Stranger than Journalism: Why ‘the news’ stays tame while reality goes wild (Philip
Gourevitch)
• How Journalists Fail: Clumsiness vs. nastiness (Randy Cohen)
• A Writer/Photographer Partnership that Works (Dale Maharidge, Michael Williamson)
• Medical Stories (Mark Kramer, Diana Sugg, Amy Ellis Nutt)
• What I Learned About Narrative From “Louie, Louie” (Roy Peter Clark)
• In Praise of the Knife: The virtues of cutting (Adam Hochschild)
• Narrative Writing 2.0: Using blogs (and whatever’s next) to tell better stories (Sree Sreenivasan)
• Straight A’s Don’t Mean a Thing if you Don’t Have Common Sense (Derrick Jackson)
8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Café Sessions

Measuring failure

So the new circulation numbers are out for six-month period ending Sept. 30, compared to the same period last year.

In the spirit of the New York Tab War, I'd like to shoot one across the Bay:

Nearly 10,000 readers said "No more!" to the St. Petersburg Times as the paper reported a tumble in Sunday circulation of almost 2.4 percent, from 395,117 to 385,794 copies, even though it sells the edition for a measly 50 cents. The struggling paper's daily circulation was down nearly 3.4 percent, from 311,675 to 301,183 newspapers. (In a positive note, the Times' Hernando county edition circulation jumped nearly 200 percent, from 11 copies to 20.)

Meanwhile, though papers nationwide tumbled by an average of 2.6 percent, the numbers at The Tampa Tribune were down just slightly for Sunday by an almost unnoticeable 0.5 percent, from 293,090 to 291,749 papers. Daily circulation also floated down like a feather 0.8 percent, from 214,270 to 212,608.

Tribune management attributed the drop to the deaths of about 2,000 homeless men to bird flu.

A lesson from "Meatballs"

Kruse found this: "Let's be all the things we love to read. Let's astonish our audience. Let's stop asking our readers what they want. Let's remember, as Frank Capra, the great director, once said, that "the audience doesn't know what it wants--until it sees it."

Best magazine of the 1960s.

Writing that spurred a revolution.

Talese: "I'd always read short stories," he said, "and the short story writers?and the playwrights and the novelists?were just writing about people, about the interiors of people. And that's what I always found challenging about nonfiction. My favorite short story writers were John Cheever and Irwin Shaw, and I figured I could do what they were doing without changing the names."

Warren St. John on Sports and newspapers

NYT's Warren St. John talks shop:

"But I don't think storytelling is ever going to go away. I don't think trying to understand what's really happening in the world is ever really going to go away. I think it's definitely the case that how we tell those stories is changing rapidly."

This must've slipped by

In case you were wondering, THIS appears to have been up since August, but I must've missed it. There's a nugget of inspiration in the second graph below. And make sure you read A Guitar's Life.

"Latest question: How come we haven't seen any new articles by you in the Post lately? (In March 2005, I took a temporary job as an assignment editor in the paper's daily Style section. I'm liking it quite a bit. This is the first time I've had in a decade to cool my jets and not write for a while, and re-learning a valuable lesson: good editing is damn hard work. I hope to return to my writing cubicle, and the world at large, in a few more months.)

"I have learned that those without beats need to sort of form one in their heads and develop an overriding sensibility that guides them away from what everyone else is writing about. In my work I try to set out for the overlooked margins of our daily, or pop-cultural, lives: I like empty shopping malls, unpretty streets, teenagers who don't help out the community, low-technology, Kmarts (or anything employing the middle-American "k" -- kamping, kountry, krazy). I like memories and nostalgia for things that don't often fit the definition of popular retro. I like science that doesn't make headlines. I like to see what's in people's houses. I like stores. This is a start. Lately, I've been pegged as a "funny" writer -- he's wacky, he's oddball, he's homo (and he is) -- but I have always felt my work ran a bit deeper than that, even with lighter subjects."

St. Pete's series on ...

...the Jennifer Porter case.

Deborah Sontag's series ...

chronicling the lives of three generations on Delery Street in New Orleans.

Salty Journalism

From Vanessa, who has been thinking THIS is some of the "weirdest, prettiest writing I've seen in a while": Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie Plame affair, the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s recently deposed chief of staff. “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life,” he wrote in a jailhouse note to Judith Miller. Meant as a waiver of confidentiality, the letter touched off the sort of fevered exegesis more often associated with readings of “The Waste Land” than of legal correspondence.

Someone who gets a chance to wade through THIS, let Gangrey readers know if it's as good as it looks: They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear.
It begins with a knock at the door.
For the past year, the Rocky Mountain News has followed Maj. Steve Beck as he takes on the most difficult duty of his career: casualty notification. As Beck and his comrades at Buckley Air Force Base keep constant watch over the caskets of the men they never knew, the Marines also comfort the families of the fallen, and choke back tears of their own.
It's all part of a tradition that started in 1775: Never leave a Marine behind.
After the knock on the door, the story has only begun.

Wright Thompson in Austin: You slide through the front door into the warm, stale air. At all the tables along the wall at Cisco’s, the Austin Tex-Mex palace disguised as an Old Havana barroom, the heads turn in unison. One man looks up, then down, finally deciding you’ve passed the test.
“Back room,” he says, pointing toward the steps. “It’s cooler in there.”

Anne Hull with a two-parter on The Price Of Change: On the second floor of a battered building on the corner of 14th and T streets NW, more than 300 worshipers are caught in the driving syncopation of drums and organ. Church of the Rapture has occupied this corner for three decades. Beyond the doors of the Pentecostal storefront, the sun is out and the iPod people walk by. A real estate agent hammers in a "For Sale" sign pointing to a T Street rowhouse that six years ago sold for $282,000 but now has granite counters and is going for $839,000.
Upstairs in the church, the music oscillates, and the worshipers are out of their seats, some so deep in the spirit that their shouts of "Yes, Jesus" and "Hallelujah" become bursts of unrecognizable syllables.
"I thank God for this church and we can express ourselves," a pastor says when the music quiets. "No one to pull your coattail and make you sit down. We are in a beautiful place, saints, free as a bird flying over this building. No one will hinder us. I see prosperity all over the church."

And a weird one, ( thanks, Kelley ). The AP's Pauline Arrilliga with a cartoonist searching for his lost son: The artist would perch himself on a bench in the town square, sketchbook and pencil in hand.
In between doodles of his beloved wife and "Miss Kitty" the pet cat, he'd fill page after page with the other subjects that consumed him, the panhandlers who sat under elm trees hungering for pocket change as lovers strolled to dinner and children played on the grass.
Happiness and despair competed for space in the picturesque plaza; also in the artist's sketchbook and heart.

Silence

Kate Boo on lying low:

“The darnedest thing about real people is that they don’t conform to our little preconceived narrative of life,” Boo said. “So they are going to surprise you, and if they don’t surprise you, then you probably aren’t doing your job right.”

(How come Boo never came to Arkansas Tech to speak?)

what we can learn from movies

WriterL member Lynda Ward has started a Yahoo group for studying and analyzing narrative themes in movies like Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Station Agent.

I tend to wonder: Who has the time? But I recall one winter afternoon when a certain duo left the office for 5 Mills Avenue to study Final Destination II (we couldn't find the original) and ended up with a pretty decent read.

Ward's description of the free group: "Writers who wish to practice narrative writing by analyzing the plots and subplots of popular movies with layered narratives, this is the group for you! We will analyze movies for their five main foci: the complicating factor, plot points, mid point shift, and resolution. Also topics of discussion will be imagery, symbolic substructure, negation of the negation, and so forth. Please join us especially if you have either read or attended Robert McKee's "Story" book or seminar, or if you have read Jon Franklin's "Writing for Story."
If you want to practice analyzing narratives in order to strengthen your own writing, please join us!"

Jimmy Moy, Chinese Laundryman

Michael Brick's Tracing Steps Of The Man Who Walked Away: He walked these avenues and then he was gone, as the inhabitants of one city give way to the next, as some are hurried along. Everyone leaves behind a name, a time, a place and a role, and his were Jimmy Moy, 1960, Park Slope, Brooklyn: the man who never returned.

A wreck, and a lost man found

Michael Kruse's story: Bam Bam Bigelow skidded off the motorcycle and onto the hard wet asphalt on State Road 50 one Sunday in early October on the west side of Hernando County.
The woman who had been on the back of his bike hit the pavement with a sound one witness said was like an open palm slapping the surface of water. Then she flopped around like a rolled-up rug.
Bam Bam landed about 50 feet up the road. The former professional wrestler with the tattooed scalp and the name no one can forget was covered in blood, but he managed to get up. He held his scraped-up arms straight out from his sides. He lurched back toward the woman, who was moaning.

A killer changes his story

The OC Weekly's R. Scott Moxley on one of California's most awful hate crimes: We joke, in Orange County, about beige and white, about beige carpets in beige homes behind beige walls in beige housing tracts, and white walls in the beige homes. We joke because beige and white aren't really colors, and color suggests excitement, and Orange County, particularly South County, is, well, anything but exciting. We joke until we see something like a crime-scene photograph of a Tustin apartment, from the summer of 2002. The apartment had been ransacked, its once-white walls now grotesquely spattered burgundy, and on carpet that had been beige but is now turning almost black, there's a bedspread. The bedspread, we'll learn, covered the mutilated corpse of a nude man. He was hog-tied from behind with white athletic socks. Though he suffered a myriad of injuries, the most serious wounds were deep gashes in the top and back of the head, wounds that, by the time the photograph was taken, had attracted an army of ants. The lethal weapon, an unopened bottle of Moet & Chandon, lay nearby, covered in blood. (Thanks Alex.)

The Inventor Who Took The Stuffiness Out of Stuffing

Hank Stuever: Quick! Stir this while we take a sec to give thanks for dear Ruth Siems, who is credited with inventing Stove Top Stuffing in 1972, of which tens of millions of boxes are eaten every year. (Instead of potatoes.) She died last week, but somebody neglected to run her obituary until today, which is such a holiday-rush kind of thing to do...

Makes you go hmmmmm

Remember this? Well, now there's this. And that's the way miracles unfold sometimes.

In black and white

Is it that time of year again? Time to string the cliches from the rafters and hang the unoriginality from the mantle and tuck the ridiculous quotes snug into bed for a long winter's nap?

Here's the participatory Holiday Weekend version of Gangrey.com.

You be the judge of who did the obligatory Friday-After-Thanksgiving story justice, and let's try to learn something.

Brace yourself, though, for much swarming and luring and quite a few references to standing in line for this or that. Be warned: A Google News search shows at least eight reporters wrote "line snaked" on Friday, so, um, OK, here's a cross section.

Looks like it got pretty wild at the Walmart in Middletown, N.Y. (Someone's going to die in one of these stampedes.) There were more wacko's in Washington, but the retail giant's PR machine was fully functional. ("Christi Gallagher, a national Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the most excitement was caused by two people shouting at each other. She said, "From time to time, our customers get very excited about the prices we're offering.")
The Mercury News sent a team out for the "near-riot" in Mountain View. Those covering fist-fights and police action at least had something to write about. Not so in Detroit, where people reportedly woke up: "And get out of bed they did."
Of course, you can't neglect to mention the menacing weather. "Morning rains did little to dampen the ardor of shoppers who crammed into big-box retailers, department stores and malls Friday," in San Francisco. And shoppers in Baltimore's burbs were "Lured by early-bird specials and undeterred by frigid weather and jostling crowds." "Frigid temperatures" didn't stop crap in Oklahoma, thank goodness. It's actually refreshing to get a kinda-funny anecdote by Doris Hajewski at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Jim Bainbridge at the Colorado Springs Gazette gets props for working his tail off.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette went overboard: "This story was written by Teresa F. Lindeman based on her reporting and that of staff writers Caitlin Cleary, Monica Haynes, Madeline Izzo, Rebekah Scott, Anya Sostek and Monessa Tinsley." (No men?)

Thank God for Steve Israel in sleepy Sullivan County.

Until next year...

Benham on a boat

Read Kelley's story: They eat cold fried snapper for breakfast. Taso shaves with saltwater and enjoys the sting. He says "buenos dias" to Louie the sun and plays with his dog, but his mood is falling. He found healthy sponges 40 miles from home, but not many, not enough. Jason has work tomorrow, and it's time to head back.

Taso will make about $250, enough to pay for his groceries but not his gas. This trip wasn't so much about finding sponges as finding answers, and now he has some. He knows not to bother with the spots he loves close to home. Travel farther. What he will do next year, he isn't sure.

Brick, again

His Doctors Wage A Frantic Fight To Save A Wounded Officer: The guarded entrance to Building C of the Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn is designed for ambulance traffic, but the green Impala that stopped at its painted curb around 3 a.m. yesterday counted as an emergency vehicle.
There were bullet holes in the doors, and the front-seat passenger, Officer Dillon Stewart, was bleeding from a massive heart injury.

A weekend of words

Please stay posted this weekend. I'll be doing what I can to update gangrey from the Nieman Conference for those of you who couldn't make it. Look for some guest bloggers as well.
Peace.

Is the novel dead?

"Novelists come out of these great standing pools of water called Masters of Fine Arts programs," Tom Wolfe declared on Friday, his left arm in a sling but the rest of his white beclothed self rattling sabres at the highfalutin fictitioners.

"It's wiped out an entire generation. It's a catastrophe. It's so sad it's almost worth writing about."

Wolfe came close to channeling his inner Rush Limbaugh a number of times Friday, but did anyone else find themselves nodding at this particular diatribe?

And, no, it has nothing whatsoever to do with my college flame publishing her second novel.

Actually, Leah's noveling benefits from her formative writing years, when she trained to be a journalist. She likes discernible plots. Sympathetic characters. Accessible themes.

Kind of like what we cast our lines for, out here in the real world. Even Wolfe admitted he could not imagine writing his own fiction without applying immense amounts of reporting to the process.

Back to Wolfe's point: Has contemporary fiction become too obtuse and self-referential for its own good? Is Wolfe right that we courageous narrative journos are "riding the wave" that will have a much greater influence on popular culture than our novelist cousins? Or was he just pumping our egos by putting other people down?

A sampling of the day one stuff at nieman ought five

Tom Wolfe: "It's great to see this many people involved in journalism. I just wish there were more readers."

"It's the emotional part of crimes that we do not report in our newspapers... We report what kind of guns the assailants are carrying. That's not the story. The story is the fear. The fear of the victims and the fear of the assailants."

"In the writing of narrative journalism, there is not enough writing about mommy... I don't think we should ever gloss over mother in non-fiction to explain the destiny of a subject."

"The city has to be a character."

"The future is yours. This country has hardly been explored. This is a bizarre country."

Mark Kramer: Read your mother your notes (because she's the only one who will listen to you). Remember when she perked up. Remember those good parts because you're going to cut and paste them into your document.

Be fussy, but paste too much. Make a junk sculpture. Then select a topic in all this material. Remember you're sculpting someone else's experience.

Adam Hochschild: Report broad. Collect as much detail as possible.

Upon returning, tell someone about what you learned. We're all instinctively very good editors of ourselves as talkers. Edit what you're going to say to fit inside the frame you have.

Jacqui Banaszynski: Who you chose to tell your story through is a make or break point.

When looking for a character, you have to find a character who can carry your entire story.

Accessible personality, authentic, credible. No fatal flaws.

Make sure your characters really reveal what you're trying to say.

Follow your fear to the most uncomfortable place. Most of the discomfort is yours.

Turn your subjects into storytellers through interviewing.
Ask the questions that will put a photo image in their minds so they can help you recreate your scene.

Focus around your story; what is it really about. One message.

The closer you get the the action, the better the scene, the better the characters.

Every question must be followed by five more.

Ramsey Speaks From The Throne

Why is it that some people, for some reason, are compelled to do this blogging thing? Ben insists. I wake up. I feel a little groggy. I'm not sure what I can possibly learn about words and such today when my mouth feels like glue. And for some reason, in this post-beerdom, I know I will want to smoke lots of cigarettes.

Not getting community journalism

The seminar was called Community Journalism and Narrative. At the table up at the front of the room were Charlotte Observer editor Cheryl Carpenter, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson and Southern Minnesota blogger guy Doug McGill. And what we learned from these people, long, maddening story short, is that “community journalism” means small weeklies, something you do before you do stuff that matters, “a little write-up,” “a slice of life,” Little Fucking Johnny kicking a fucking soccer ball in a zoned “neighborhood” section – or, at this point, more and more, “citizen journalism,” which, so far as I can tell, is what is done when Little Fucking Johnny’s fucking mother logs on to the Internet.

Makes me sad.

Makes me mad.

Makes me drop my notebook onto the floor in front of my chair.

People. No. Community journalism should mean – IS, IS, IS – the stories … the STORIES … about the way we live that are able to be told because we also live that way and see others doing it too and are therefore PART of that community and can therefore tell those stories from the ground up rather that the sky down, and they’re told by professionals, US, not Little Fucking Johnny’s fucking mother blogging her little head off and sending digital-camera snap shots to neighborhood editors sitting all cubicle-catatonic.

So.

Fuck the term “community journalism.” It’s not working. It makes people think stupid things which makes editors make stupid decisions which makes readers go away.

Right here, right now, on Gangrey.com. New word. What’s it gonna be?

Going off on those who go off

Pet peeve question No. 1 asked by some people at Nieman who don’t get it: Um, he there, yeah, I was wondering, how can you weave facts into narrative?

OK. NARRATIVE IS FACTS. IT’S NOTHING BUT FACTS. REPORTED FACTS. SEEN, HEARD, PAINSTAKINGLY RE-CREATED FACTS.

Pet peeve question No. 2 asked by some people at Nieman who don’t get it: Um, hey there, yeah, I was wondering, how can you incorporate narrative “elements” into hard news?

OK. WHAT IN THE HELL IS HARD NEWS ANYWAY AND WHY WOULD NARRATIVE “ELEMENTS” BE ANY HARDER TO INCORPORATE INTO WHATEVER THAT MIGHT BE?

I don't like 'em

Mark Singer, the longtime writer for The New Yorker, admitted he comes from a different world than the daily newsperson.

"I didn't work in newspapers. I don't think I would've lasted long. The nut graph, ya know, that third or fourth thing -- No. I don't like that."

Daily Narrative Dreaming

While waiting at Logan with Ben and a beer for a snow-delayed flight back to what will be the most welcome warmth of Greater Tampa Bay …

Nieman every year ends up being about amazing talents from amazing places saying amazing things – Mark Singer, Philip Gourevich, Tom French, book writers, Roy and Chip and the Poynter people – and then most of the rest of the folks there going, OK, well, great, but how the heck do I do that at the place where I work?

A suggestion then:

Let’s have more breakout sessions on doing narratives in “normal” stories. “Regular” stories. Daily stories. In other words: MOST of the stories that MOST of us do.

The inimitable, accessible Kelley Benham talked at Nieman ’04 about doing narrative off a beat. “You do narrative one line at a time,” she said. Narrative, she was saying, that isn’t a project, or really, really long, and doesn’t take 10 months of reporting and two months of writing and five weeks of editing. Realistic narrative.

No less important.

MORE important?

Maybe.

Narrative, after all, is the easiest way to tell a story – arguably, actually, it’s THE way to tell a story – and it’s the most sensible, the most natural, the most fun. The most fun way to report and the most fun way to write and the most fun way to READ. As Gourevitch said this year in his breakout session Saturday afternoon, almost off-handedly, and I’m paraphrasing here: Does anyone else find the name of this conference a little puzzling? NARRATIVE journalism? If a narrative is a story (it is), and if journalism is the stories of the time in which we live (it is), is there any other KIND of journalism?

Laurie Hertzel, the practical, loveable editor and writing coach from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, did do a breakout on Sunday morning about doing narrative in 40 to 60 inches. That’s a start. But 40 to 60 inches is NOT really a SHORT story that most of us do on a regular basis as a daily story.

So let’s knock it back even more for Nieman ‘06:

Doing narrative in a 10-inch cops daily.

Doing narrative when someone dies in a wreck at 4 p.m. on a Monday and you’re writing for Tuesday.

Just sayin’, Mark Kramer, et al. I can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com. Ben’s at bmontgomery@tampatrib.com. We work well as a team. Hope to talk to you soon.

Where was her cape?

Sitting there stunned, listening to the Diana K. Sugg preaching a virtuouso Sunday sermon about finding journalistic salvation, that's what I kept asking my good buddy Erin Sullivan.

She is going to levitate, right? That's what I expected, for Diana Sugg to rise like the old TV Superman, go flying just over our heads like Cathy Rigby, and whoosh out the double door, with Clark Kent somehow missing the whole darn thing.

In three years of Nieman, it was the single-most inspiring and affecting session I've attended. This was not a woman coming in with a list of talking points and a rush to the Q&A. This was a woman with a message to deliver, a woman who had seen the light and desired greatly to fill us with the spirit she'd found one night while staring at herself in the mirror at the Baltimore Sun.

"Go the distance," is what she said she heard that night, like her own little karmic chant, like a spirit whispering to her. "Go the distance."

I would have gone any distance for Diana K. Sugg after that soul stirring.

She lifted us up. Then she tugged us down to that place we all want readers to go, to the place in the soul where their humanity is most tender, by going through the pictures and words that made up her Baltimore Sun series, If I Die.

I'm sitting there crying. The woman on my left starts crying.

Then she started taking us back up, leading us to the promised land, back to soul's salvation.

Diana said she grew up Irish-Catholic, but, I swear, this lapsed Southern Baptist boy had never been so ready to walk the aisle and get dunked in blessed water.

Can’t wait to get the MP3s, if only to hear it all over again, like some Deadhead desperate to relive the third DC ’91 show all over again.

Lane is Back

Read Lane Degregory's series: Michelle Dowdy had auditioned on a lark. In January she had gone to New York with her mom, Karla Harris, to visit colleges. A friend had phoned to tell Michelle about an open casting call for Hairspray. They needed someone to be the understudy to the lead character.

Elegance of narrative

Michael Brick gives us something not even Court TV can do: a short daily on hours of court proceedings, with graceful narrative elements and important details that put readers there. Those of us who cover courts can learn something from his story:

This is the second trial for Mr. Norman, who was convicted in September of soliciting illegal campaign contributions, and his long volley with the prosecutor, Michael F. Vecchione, first deputy district attorney, was something of a rematch. Mr. Vecchione cross-examined a faltering Mr. Norman in the earlier case, eliciting statements including, "I have no independent recollection."

In contrast to that performance, Mr. Norman appeared calm and self-assured on the stand yesterday, measuring his replies in soft, explanatory tones even as Mr. Vecchione yelled at him, sighed loudly and spun on his heel.

A lesson in access

Vanessa Gezari shows us the story behind Sami Al-Arian as it spilled out of court.

The power of oberservation

Ramsey passed along this story from Jason Burke of The Observer, which Adam Hochschild mentioned at Nieman. He was making a point about observation. This is especially brilliant:

... Thus the graffiti on the walls of the Portakabins where, if you got to them later than 9am, you'd be greeted by a 5ft-high pile of soldiers' faeces:

Toilet 7: 'I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds'; 'I am become Bored, Destroyer of Motivation'

Toilet 3: 'Though I walk through the valley of death I shall fear no evil, because I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.'

Toilet 6: 'MARINE - Muscles Are Required, Intelegance [sic] Not Essential'

Toilet 2 (women only): 'I miss my cat.'

By someone else

Bill Kirtz tells us why narrative matters most now: ... "when outmoded notions of "he said/she said" fairness, avaricious owners and new media all threaten newspapers' primacy -- narrative journalism has the chance and the vital mission of bringing context and emotion to reporting. Here's his Nieman folo.

Is Rolling Stone Dancing again?

I admit it's been a while since I've bought a Rolling Stone, but I really want to read this guy. (Thanks, Kelley.) (I also like reading this guy.)

The best of the best of the best

I stumbled across this test a few days ago and finally had a chance to give it a whirl. Fun stuff, it is. A sample from the Trib's 1A, using first graphs only:

* Hillsborough County officials want voters countywide to send a strong message against nude dancers.

* The family of a 13-year-old boy found dead at a county park struggled Friday to make sense of the slaying.

* We hear the most egregions cases: restaurants making black customers pre-pay for their meals; stores accusing black customers of shoplifting the very clothes they're wearing; most recently, local businessman Reginald Pitts being interrogated and detained while trying to buy $13,000 in Wal-Mart gift cards on behalf of his employer.

* Armwood High School football coach Sean Callahan does not have time to think about his team's chance to make history.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the ledes above. But I love this test, and it has me thinking hard about how to better begin, how to make folks choke on their Lucky Charms.

Thus, this timely attempt at assembling some of the best of the best ledes from Gangrey readers.

What's your favorite? Please give it some thought and let the posting begin.

I'll start.

This, of course, is good:

* OKLAHOMA CITY -- After the explosion, people learned to write left-handed, to tie just one shoe. They learned to endure the pieces of metal and glass embedded in their flesh, to smile with faces that made them want to cry, to cry with glass eyes. They learned, in homes where children had played, to stand the quiet. They learned to sleep with pills, to sleep alone.

Today, with the conviction of Timothy J. McVeigh in a Denver Federal court, with cheers and sobs of relief at the lot where a building once stood in downtown Oklahoma City, the survivors and families of the victims of the most deadly attack of domestic terrorism in United States history learned what they had suspected all along: That justice in a far-away courtroom is not satisfaction. That healing might come only at Mr. McVeigh's grave. (Rick Bragg)

And this is too:

* TARPON SPRINGS -- When they heard the screams, no one suspected the rooster.

Dechardonae Gaines, 2, was toddling down the sidewalk Monday lugging her Easy Bake Oven when she became the victim in one of the weirder animal attack cases police can recall.

In the cluster of beige houses at Lime Street and Safford Avenue where Dechardonae lives, man and chicken have coexisted peacefully for years in quiet defiance of city ordinance.

That ended Monday afternoon, when authorities apprehended the offending rooster, named Rockadoodle Two, and its sister, named Hen. Hen was not involved in the attack, police said. (Kelley Benham)

Ramsey dug this one from a recent Brick story:

* Ever since the kung fu judge started showing signs of dementia, people have been trying to take his property. At a court hearing yesterday, a woman in a pink sweater and a ponytail was accused of succeeding.

I agree. But my drop-dead favorite comes from one of Kate Boo's Pulitzer winners:

* Elroy lives here. Tiny, half-blind, mentally retarded, 39-year-old Elroy. To find him, go past the counselor flirting on the phone. Past the broken chairs, the roach-dappled kitchen and the housemates whose neglect in this group home has been chronicled for a decade in the files of city agencies. Head upstairs to Elroy's single bed.

"You're in good hands," reads the Allstate Insurance poster tacked above his mattress -- the mattress where the sexual predator would catch him sleeping. Catch him easily: The door between their rooms had fallen from its hinges. Catch him relentlessly -- so relentlessly that Elroy tried to commit suicide by running blindly into a busy Southeast Washington street.

These days, reconciled to living, Elroy has fashioned ways to cope. He keeps private amulets against a misery he doesn't fully grasp. There's the leatherette Bible he can't read; the Norman Rockwell calendar of family scenes he hasn't known.

And there's his strategy of groping his way down to the bare-bulbed basement again and again to wash the sheets from his violated bed, as if Tide could cleanse defilement. "God is a friend of mine," he says. But absent divine intervention, "you just gotta do what they say." Just got to add soap powder, and more soap powder, turn the dial to hot. "Gotta not let the worries pluck your nerves."

The future of sports narrative

From Keith Goldberg:

Just read this story in Sunday's New York Post, from 1956 on the trade of Jackie Robinson.

You never see a news story written like this in a sports section any more. I'm halfway through the Best American Sports Writing of the Century, reading some great narrative newspaper pieces...all published at least 30 years ago. The annual BASW volumes are filled with great narrative pieces...nearly none of them from newspapers.

I'm loving all the enthusastic talk coming from the Nieman folks about working narrative journalism into newspapers. But as a guy who writes about the games people play, I sometimes wonder where my place is in all of this.

I'm fortunate enough to work at a paper that encourages narrative writing in its sports section. But how many other papers are like that? Not many. I read papers that have narrative pieces littered all over its pages...except in the sports section. Why?

Does narrative sports journalism have a future in newspapers?

Zack, any other sports people, I would love to get your take on this.

low platelets

Zack says: Take your blood pressure medicine and then read ... THIS:

Staff cuts are a disgrace to journalism
Profit-driven media companies trimming muscle, not fat, are bad news for democracy, readers and business
BY TODD GITLIN AND OLIVIER SYLVAIN

December 12, 2005

Everyone trying to lose weight should know that the trick is to cut fat and not muscle. This is not a lesson media companies have learned.

Last month, Private Capital Management, a $32-billion money management firm, issued a sell-or-be-gone ultimatum to the board of Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper proprietor in the land. And Knight Ridder has just received preliminary takeover bids.

The prospective sale presages bad news for readers and reporters, and likely in the long run, for business, too. PCM is Knight Ridder's largest stockholder, with 19 percent of the shares. Knight Ridder owns 32 daily newspapers totaling a circulation of 8.5 million on weekdays and 11 million on Sunday. Its five largest holdings are big names in journalism: The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury News, The Kansas City Star, The Miami Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Knight Ridder's news service alone has 42 correspondents, several of whom have been responsible for outstanding coverage of the much-hyped weapons of mass destruction issue in Iraq.

Newspaper companies are setting sliding goals and then defining themselves as business failures. When he became chairman and chief executive of Knight Ridder in 1995, Tony Ridder declared that the chain's profits of 8 percent weren't up to snuff - that the company should be able to make 15 percent. Ten years later, Knight Ridder makes upwards of 20 percent, but that's no longer enough for Wall Street, with the stock price sliding. The chain's biggest stockholder is restless. It has no soft spot for newspapers. It has a soft spot for more - not more news or stronger, more comprehensive news, but more profit next quarter and next year.

a riff from the past

It's cold in Oklahoma City today, so cold I've been stuck inside my in-laws' for hours. I'm holed up in this little computer room reading and cleaning out email. I came across the following (thanks to Michael for saving it from my files in Middletown). In light of what seems like an overload of recent chatter about layoffs and trimmings at papers near and far, maybe you'll find this useful. May your holidays be cherry-berry and bright, or whatever.

The dog is crashed on the couch. The wife, who is sick as a dog, is crashed on the bed. And I’m up with my thoughts, in pajama pants that fit and a paint-splattered sweat shirt that doesn’t come close.
I need something. Not sure what. Not sure why.
I lift the lid on the end table Jennifer’s grandfather gave us when we got married. It’s the place I put crap that has no place but needs to be kept.
I never open this thing and I’m not sure why I’m doing it tonight, but it’s right, and I’m digging.
On top, there’s a letter from our friends in San Angelo, Ross and Erin, good people. I think they’re in Lubbock now.
Under that, a playbill from Chicago. Saw that when Mike and Mandy came up from Abilene to visit. You should’ve seen Mike’s face when they told him the drink he ordered at intermission – a cosmopolitan, I think it was – cost $18. “Goddammit, Ben,” he said like I had something to do with it. “How’r y’all gonna make it up here?”
Below that playbill, the news-papers start.
To tell you the truth, I can’t really remember putting half of these in here.
There on top is the sports section of The Russellville Ar-kansas Courier, circ. 7 grand, from Sunday, Nov. 14, 1999.

By Sean Ingram
Courier Sports Editor
All a football team needs to win is one more opportunity. It also helps if the ball bounces in your favor.
Opportunity knocked Saturday at Buerkle Field, and the Arkansas Tech Wonder Boys answered. Next, a Southern Ar-kansas Mulerider fumble bounced into Tech’s hands. Then the Wonder Boys proudly held their first NCAA Division II Gulf South Conference football championship above their heads.

That’s about as clunky as newspaper writing should ever be, but I swear to you, it’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever read.
Beneath that paper, the New York Times. Monday, May 27.
Above the fold is a picture of that bridge that collapsed on I-40 in eastern Oklahoma. You probably don’t remember, but I used to drive back and forth to college across that bridge. There was a great truck stop on the Eufala side that had home-made beef jerkey. Sounds really stupid to me now, but I was kind of proud that bridge made it into the New York Times.
Next is the community section of the Daily Oklahoman, from August 11, 1997. The boxed feature is Remembering Elvis.

By Bobby Ross Jr.
Staff Writer
Elvis’ biggest fans cover their walls, their ceilings – even their bathrooms – in his image.

Inside, on page 3, is a picture of my curly-haired mama in a black Elvis T-shirt, and my step-dad in a white, tailor-made Elvis jump suit with red sequins. They’re standing in our bath-room, which is covered with Elvis memorabilia, including one portrait positioned so it always felt like The King was watching you on the throne.
Then comes the New York Times, from Sept. 12, 2001.

By N.R. Kleinfield
It kept getting worse, he started his story. And then later, For those trying to flee the very epicenter of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the most horrid thought of all finally dawned on them: nowhere was safe.

I remember feeling pretty safe up here. And what a trip it was seeing all of you who were here back then kicking into some sort of sub-human-yet-so-human newspaper action. And you caught it. We all did.
The September 13 New York Post is next in the stack. On the back cover is the mug shot of Mohamed Atta. The world hated that guy; couldn’t help it.
And then there’s us, the sumpin-sumpin-Record, at the bottom. And everything in that stinking September 12 paper sounds like you guys bled it.
I’m flipping through.
My dog stands up, turns about half a circle, and plops back down. He looks funny.
And I get it.
What we do is awesome.
Every single day we have the chance to create something that could last forever. We have the opportunity to make people smile, to make people cry, to protect, to feel, to make them healthy, to make them live longer, to make them appreciate their children and their parents, to make them laugh, and learn, to make them start a conversation with a stranger or a neighbor, to bring them comfort or torment, to let them show off their collection of Elvis crap, to mark the day they won some lousy football game, to mark the day their mayor, or their best friend, died.
People hate us. People love us. And people are indifferent.
But every day, we can bring them life.
And every day we get a chance to make somebody want to put the Times Herald-Record in the end table their grandfather gave them when they got married.
That’s cool.

$8 an hour, off-brand toys, living next to the freeway

John Scalzi's Being Poor:

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Sex videos, naked people, dirty Santa and a snow penis

I'm gone a week and the world goes to hell. What ever happened to wholesome holiday stories? Pumpkin pies and snowflaked skies and rasmuffins and tidy greetings?
Kelley has a PR guy pitching sex videos, the Florida Times-Union's Thomas Lake is curious about a nearby nudist resort, John "The Snake" Doherty tracks the history of a snow penis (classic headline), and Ramsey finds the victim of a dirty, dirty Santa.
Completely unrelated: Check out Wright Thompson in River Ridge, Louisiana. "Surrounded by students and teachers, Badeaux handed over servings of his jambalaya. Damn. The recipe was passed down from his father, and it reeked of fan boats and Mamou whiskey parties. It tasted like Louisiana, which, given the devastation the state’s suffered since Hurricane Katrina hit, was a triumph."

the benefits of microsoft paint

You've used this before? Microsoft Paint is far more difficult than it looks, but I gave it a go and have plans to release a full Gangrey.com clothing line. Hats, decorative swords, doggie-sweaters, etc. Order your T shirt today and get 50 percent off the original price of $40. Comes in three designer colors.

A year of reporting in three parts

Read his series on a U.S.-funded program to encourage democracy from its inception to its conclusion.

Turkeys and pistols carved out of wood

I was reminded how good John Prine is when I heard "Christmas In Prison" today and cried. We've talked about him before. I'm obliged to post the lyrics below, but if you can, give it a listen.

It was christmas in prison
And the food was real good
We had turkey and pistols
Carved out of wood
And I dream of her always
Even when I don't dream
Her name's on my tongue
And her blood's in my stream.

Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By god!

She reminds me of a chess game
With someone I admire
Or a picnic in the rain
After a prairie fire
Her heart is as big
As this whole goddamn jail
And she's sweeter than saccharine
At a drug store sale.

Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By god!

The search light in the big yard
Swings round with the gun
And spotlights the snowflakes
Like the dust in the sun
It's Christmas in prison
There'll be music tonight
I'll probably get homesick
I love you. Goodnight.

Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By god!

Enough complaining -- Time to start kicking ass

Zack McMillin with a Gangrey.com exclusive:
According to Forbes, it has been "the year the newspaper industry began to self-destruct."
According to Editor & Publisher, "Fitch Ratings assigns an 'outlook negative' to the overall (newspaper) industry in its latest report."
According to BusinessWeek, "The demise of the newspaper industry has become a favorite topic on both Wall Street and Main Street."
And yet, I'm feeling good about newspapers right about now. Maybe it's the soy milk 'silk' Egg Nogg we're imbibing here at the lactose-free McMillin household. Maybe it's the fumes leaking from the 80-year-old fireplace. Or perhaps it was Ben's 'riff from the past' that got me feeling giddy amid all this gloomy talk.
I do not believe we are, as our publisher told the newsroom recently, "In a death spiral." I'm loving that everyone is pronouncing us dead. When every financial guru sings the same song, that often means a correction is gonna come (see Cooke, Sam).
There was an op-ed recently in USA Today where an Emory U. professor pulled out the ol' anecdotal my-students-don't-read-papers argument. Which got me to thinking: How long has it been since college students could be seen lounging away their spare time with newspapers? Not when I was in school, at Vanderbilt in the early 90s, though the student paper was popular (as I'm sure student papers still are, everywhere).
I'd bet more young Americans are reading actual newspaper articles than ever before in the history of young Americans. They are going online, surfing for things that interest them, emailing stories that move or inform or entertain, developing a thirst for information and stories of all sorts. Teenagers are spending more time reading and writing than when I was growing up in redneck Memphis, that's for damn sure.
Heck, look at what we do at Gangrey. Ten years ago, I'd never have run across Lane's great series. I wouldn't have emailed it to a college friend who works on Broadway but just moved to L.A., and who so happens to be the voice coach for the lead in Hairspray. And Georgia would not have been emailing me back, and shipping the links to her friends. And then I wouldn't have been emailing around the snow-penis stories and Kelley's how-to (my wife says thanks, by the way) and, well, you get the picture.
Even in my insular Memphis sports world, I get emails from people across the country about articles I write. Our audience is expanding. Wall Street may be freaked because ol' Bessie, the cash cow that fed so many the last three decades, is reaching old age, but I cannot see how we are on death's doorstep when we are in fact growing our readership.
For every dire sign financial analysts throw in our face, there is a flip side.
"Your most loyal readers are getting older." Yeah, right. And what are they about to do? Retire. What do retired have time to do? Read the paper. And old people are just getting older (see Prine, John), which is good news. That is, unless we piss off the old people by continuing to use pullouts and rails and quoteboxes and ginormous pictures to pander to the people who wouldn't read the newspaper if we assigned two reporters to cover them and their family and read it to them out loud ourselves.
"Young people don't read newspapers." Bullshit. See above. OK, maybe they don't get the print version, but they are hungry for information. They just get it in different forms. I also don't buy the B.S. that they have short attention spans. Um, hey, smart media types, ever heard of Harry fucking Potter? And there was this Lord of the Rings something-or-other trilogy I seem to recall. Lost, anyone? 24? The Sopranos? Wasn't so long ago that Titanic reeled 'em in. And say what you will about rap, it is not exactly the most accessible medium. Blogs are nothing but text, ad infinitum. The new media consumer wants to be challenged, surprised, delighted, astonished, captivated, enlightened, carried away. What the new media consumer will not take is the same old formulaic drivel.
"More advertisers like the platform TV provides." How much are they going to like it when most viewers have DVRs and are zooming through commercials? How much are they going to like it when Congress makes cable companies sell channels a la carte? And how much are advertisers going to like radio when more and more people choose satellite radio as their medium? Newspaper ads have this great advantage -- they are unavoidable, they are permanent, and they get your entire message across.
Speaking of radio, I saw this quote recently from a radio executive: "We (had) pulled away all of those marketing dollars and thrown them to Wall Street. Then Wall Street turns around, kicks us in the teeth and says, 'Radio's not cool.' IT'S NOT COOL BECAUSE WE'RE NOT INVESTING IN MAKING IT COOL."
"Online content provided by Google and Yahoo!, and classifieds from craigslist, are destroying newspapers." True, except that newspapers are just now starting to figure out how to embrace the technologies that have disrupted our traditional business model. National online advertising is getting huge. In a few years, we're going to figure out how to do that locally. Yahoo!, etc., do not have the local clout of 100-something-year-old newspapers.
The newspaper industry will never be the same. We all know this. And, yes, like other media enterprises, we are working through difficult, uncertain times.
Don't know about anyone else, but I'm tired of getting kicked in the teeth. I say it's time to stop being glum and, like Ben's riff, become loud and proud about what we do.
Time to start (or keep) kicking ass, and prove Wall Street has got it wrong this time.

Alls I Wants....

...for Christmas is to write like these people. May your holiday reading be plentiful and your underwear warm.

The not-so-good ones, from the WP

Hank Stuever overcried. Deneen Brown had Christmas in the basement. Tanya Ballard's mother got an iron and left. And I'm thinking we should do more of these; Easter, St. Patrick's day, whatever.
(PS: Also read Stuever's The Strange Afterlife of Uncles in Seattle's The Stranger. And check out Dan Barry's Ghosts of a Christmas Past, in Plastic and Tinsel. And catch Lane Degregory's The Gift.)

The best stories we missed

From the CJR Daily: "Each day and every week, a great mass of print journalism is produced in this country -- something all too easy to forget when reading a mere sliver of that output in your local paper or scanning the links on your favorite blog. From that mass, the work of the country's Big Five dailies is usually more than enough to keep us occupied in our pursuit of lively, helpful and quick media criticism.

"At the same time, each week smaller papers across the nation quietly publish compelling, thought-provoking pieces of journalism, stories that inform and illuminate. But it's nearly impossible to catch it all; even for those of us who cover the reporters who cover the news, time is often short. And so, in keeping with the season, we give to you our countdown of five excellent newspaper stories of 2005 that you might have missed (as we did, until now) -- our way of focusing some attention on outstanding work done this year that was largely overlooked on the national stage."

(No mention of mine, but a good list nonetheless. Thanks Kelley.)

Front porches, and carrying a torch

James Rainey writes that Times-Pic reporters "have made their front porch the world's. They have become the definitive news outlet for myriad journalists trying to understand this city, and an essential read for its displaced and far-flung denizens.

"Set against the cacophony of bickering local, state and federal officials, the 168-year-old newspaper's voice has been clearly heard.

"The Times-Picayune exposed poorly constructed levees, picked apart obtuse FEMA policies, debunked overblown claims of evacuation center violence, and traveled as far as the Netherlands and Japan to show how other communities have coped with flooding and disaster.

"The newspaper's success in the face of disaster raises a question: Are objectivity and dispassion in journalism overrated?"

I find that answer easy. Why are we trained to pretend we belong to some giant, bland, emotionless, news-producing machine? Why don't we challenge that standard more often? I think we'd all be better respected -- and, by extension, better read -- if we fought the good fight more often.

Someone disagree with me.

Where the stories are

Corey Kilgannon's Beer by the Barrel, Stories by the Scoop: "At the crime scene, reporters compete ruthlessly for exclusive information, hunting and hoarding the juiciest quotation, the grittiest fact and the bloodiest narrative - anything to land a story on the front page.

"But after deadline, many of them head to a bar, declare a truce and order enough beer to douse the daily dose of horror. An eavesdropper can sample the next day's headlines, along with details too gory to print."

Telling an old man's story

Tom French's One life, a treasury of moments: "Sometimes, you can live an entire lifetime in a single morning. Just take a walk with Bill Futch."

It's a bad idea

David Ignatius writes: "Maybe the lesson of 2005 was the same for the media as for the politicians: Hang on tight to your values, and don't be afraid to let that passion animate your work; be careful about making promises you can't or shouldn't keep; and don't try to please everyone, or you may end up pleasing nobody at all."

Avoiding cliche in a place that's headed that way

Anne Hull and Julia Cass with Auld Lang Syne in the Big Easy: "The waitresses at Cafe du Monde hustled out trays with warm beignets and thick chicory coffee, and Maspero's was pressing muffulettas as fast as it could. At the venerable Palm Court, the jazzmen were opening their horn cases in preparation for the $90-a-person New Year's Eve supper."

and useful on airplanes

Fred Grimm: Stop reading for a moment. Flip this over. Notice that the backside of your morning newspaper is utterly unencumbered by cords, plugs, telephone jacks or USB connections.
To hell with Bluetooth technology. We were wireless long before wireless was cool.
Marvel at our paper-thin technology -- each page 40 times skinnier than an iPod Nano. Take it anywhere. Take it to the bathroom. To bed. On an airplane. When the flight attendants hustle through the cabin shutting down Blackberrys, Razrs, Vaios, Shuffles and Palm Pilots, your Miami Herald keeps on working.

It pays off

Jay Allison deserves an award for This I Believe. It makes me want to work in radio. Check out Be Cool To The Pizza Dude: "Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in humility and forgiveness. I let him cut me off in traffic, let him safely hit the exit ramp from the left lane, let him forget to use his blinker without extending any of my digits out the window or towards my horn because there should be one moment in my harried life when a car may encroach or cut off or pass and I let it go."

"Look at me. I'm still stuck here."

Kruse passed along this Bill Plaschke column: History died cruelly, unusually, extinguished by a killer who didn't even lose his breath.

Shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday, Vince Young sprinted across the wet Rose Bowl grass as if skating.

There was no apparent sound. There was no visible sweat.

As the Texas quarterback ran toward me on the sideline, I heard nothing. As he cut past me into the end zone, unhurried and untouched, it was as if he were in slow motion.

He did not hoot. He did not howl. He did not even gasp. He crossed the faded white line, ran through the soggy red paint, and disappeared into a crowd in front of the stands as the referee threw up his arms.

Scott Ware, the USC safety, stood slumped over in a wordless daze. Frostee Rucker, the USC linemen, collapsed face-first into the turf without a whimper.

In the distance there were bands playing and a crowd roaring. But at the precise spot and exact moment it all ended for the USC Trojans, there was nothing.

The loudest college football era in Los Angeles history had died in silence.

"Look at me," the Trojans' Darnell Bing said later, still glued to the bench in his dirt-stained uniform 15 minutes after the game ended. "I'm still stuck here."

A.J. and the beach

Warm day. Cool water. Sand and all.

And two buckets. Maybe we should build a castle! Collect broken shells, then throw them back and start again. Perhaps we should put seaweed on our heads and dance like before! Or ride Bareback Daddy down to the drink?

Or just sit. And let the girl be herself.

Sometimes it's enough to watch her play.

Lonely late-night reading

The way Erin Sullivan asks questions and listens, it's no wonder she was able to get the sensitive details of Jessica's Story. Give it a read when you get a chance.

Reporting the motivation of a man who put feces on doughnuts

Jim Shutze in the Dallas Observer: "I have waited patiently for the holiday season to expire. Now I'm afraid I must bring up the guy who got caught sprinkling his own dried feces on the doughnut display last summer at Fiesta Mart. For some weeks I have been in possession of new information--a haunting burden for me. I kept expecting him to appear among the carolers."

Who's with me?

Anyone else want to see the Times' Vanessa Gezari, who carried her narrative voice to Sago, W. Va., pursue the karma-kissed Mouse Burns House story? What do you say, Vanessa?

Worth A Dollar

It's not every day you get Dan Barry, Michael Brick, Corey Kilgannon, and Tamar Lewin in the same metro section. (And don't miss Lewin's piece on growing up from Sunday.)

Denver Post Series

Baird Helgeson passed along this series from the Denver Post. Looks pretty good at first glance.

Randy Cohen, Philip Gourevitch and Doug McGill

The folks at Nieman have added a program to Public Radio Exchange on rehabbing our business. Here's the description: "Rehabbing the Fourth Estate" is a broadcast special from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. It is hosted by Christopher Lydon. Every year the Program hosts a conference where a thousand working journalists come to Cambridge for one of the largest annual meetings of the journalist community. Harvard's annual journalism conference felt different in 2005. It's always a long weekend conference on the craft of narrative writing. This year it wasn't shoptalk or method, it was more of an examination of an institution. A lot of the talk in fact was of a profession in decline, of a media cowed, incurious and ineffective. The old pros and newfangled bloggers both are feeling the slump of an institution gone soft. Many wonder if the standards of fairness, balance and objectivity even apply anymore. Not that they're ready to take the wrecking ball to the Fourth Estate yet--journalists are wondering if the gated community their profession has become can be the scrappy frontier it once was.
Register then listen here.

First person

When Mom Is Over There: I am driving a hulking Expedition with a yellow ribbon on the bumper that says "Support Our Troops." In the grocery store parking lot, a man nods at me. I'm walking to the shopping carts when it hits me. He thinks I'm a kindred spirit in a country that is losing its nerve. I should turn back and tell him that the truck isn't mine, to clear up his misconception, but I don't.

For one week I find myself pulled into the war effort. I am in Florida to help my brother juggle single parenthood while his wife is serving in Iraq. Jim lives in a cul-de-sac community outside Tampa where the garage doors flip up every night at 6 and swallow incoming cars. His girls are 10 and 9. We spend the week eating Cocoa Pebbles and watching "The Incredibles." We hold dance parties in a bedroom where the stuffed animals are giving way to dreamy teen idol posters. We go to the mall and to the dentist. One night while I make dinner, the girls ride bikes outside in the waning winter dusk. It is a relief to be away from Washington, where politicians in marble hallways proclaim righteousness though they have never carried a canteen. Here in this linoleum kitchen, there is just a crayon calendar on the refrigerator marking the days until Mama comes home.

A Final call on track 15, clearly heard

This is good. That's all I'll say.

A conversation with ricky B.

The Salem Oregon Statesman Journal talks to Bragg:
"Writers are crazy anyway, we're just looney, and I don't mean that in any romantic sense. We're just generally a restless and unhappy bunch. But I really have found something close to peace of mind here. Don't know if that will last. I hope it lasts the rest of my life."

searching for our souls

Gregory E. Favre: We are going through a period in our industry, at this moment, in which we seem to be searching for our souls; in which the feeding frenzy over the future of newspapers is in full bloom; in which every blogger in the world, with or without any knowledge or experience, seems to be gleefully writing our obituaries. The obits all mention recent circulation figures, but fail to mention that newspapers are holding on to more of their market share than almost all of their competitors. Readership, especially when you combine print with the Web, is doing quite well. And profits are still at extraordinarily high levels. Mr. Undertaker, hold off on the coffin orders for a while.

Yes, we are going through a period in which stockholders are making larger and larger demands and when there may well be sea change for some of our more venerable companies. And there will be deep pain and uncertainty for many of our friends and colleagues as jobs continue to be lost, an estimated 2,000 last year alone.

I was once the managing editor of a grand old newspaper, the Chicago Daily News, that has since died. It was a newspaper staffed with some of the finest and most talented people ever in our business, and that experience, that memory, the crushing pain of that final day in print, will always be with me. But it never stopped me from loving this craft we share.

I know I am an optimist, a true believer. Some might say I make Pollyanna look like a pessimist. So be it. I know that the best newspapers have always found a way to serve their readers with distinction, with strong and relevant content, and, at the same time, make a major profit. Now, we just have to convince Wall Street that journalism and business values are not incompatible.

Show this to your editor

Zack passed on this nugget from Slate's conversation with 24 writer Michael Loceff on why complex narrative works:

Slate: In the last five years or so, television has experienced something of a renaissance, with HBO shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, and network shows like Lost and 24. Viewers seem increasingly comfortable with complex long-form stories. Do you think 24's been a beneficiary of this trend? Are you surprised by it?

Loceff: I recently saw David Lynch speak, and he said that years ago he could not turn certain ideas he had into reality because when he was pitching those ideas, the networks and the studios were not interested in them because they involved long arcs—stories that spanned more than a single episode. Today, that's absolutely not true. Almost every show that you can think of that's tremendously successful is episodic and has huge arcs, and I think 24 has been part of this revolution that's shown that people really are willing to follow stories that extend over many episodes; that they will watch serialized television; that they are willing to come back every week; and that they have an appetite for complex, demanding shows. I do think technological advances have helped with this: TiVo, obviously, makes it much easier to keep up with a serialized show. So, I think there's a combination of a change in the perception of what audiences will go for and a change in what audiences can do (in terms of missing shows and then being able to catch up) that has allowed us to tell these stories over very long arcs. And I'm not surprised that the appetite for shows like ours is out there. My background is in math and science, and I thrive on complexity, and I think lots of people do. People love puzzles; it's human nature to want to solve puzzles. I personally have more faith than the average writer in people's willingness to be complicated, and so I'm thrilled by what's happened. I'm elated at audiences' willingness to handle complexity. In some sense, I feel like my belief in what people are capable of is being validated.

45 is approaching

Kurt Vonnegut says we're smart only four hours a day, and that what we do after the age of 45 is crap.

From our slower, more interesting-looking brothers

How I Got The Story essays from 2005 Alt-Weekly award winners.

He could do it if he wanted to

And when you were finished reading, he'd roundhouse kick you in the face.

where the orchid princess sleeps

So Susan Orlean has a pretty fancy summer home in the Hudson Valley, and she told the NY Times all about it. She even did voice-over for the slideshow, talking about how her home is sort of like a story.
Nice, right?
Timothy Noah didn't think so:
"I don't begrudge Orlean her delight in her new abode. But what possessed her to broadcast it to millions of New York Times readers? Yes, dozens of idiots do it in the Times "Home" section every year, but, perhaps naively, I've always expected journalists to show less inclination to flaunt privilege, especially when the privilege exists on this scale."
While his argument -- "The main thing, though, is that an inclination to state forthrightly, "I have a gorgeous multimillion-dollar house in the country and you don't," calls severely into question the journalist's ability to identify with the ordinary people about whom one is called upon, at least once in a while, to write" -- holds water, I think if you write like her, you should be allowed to live in a palace with walls made of caviar and boast about it nonstop. But I'm biased.
By the way, if our summer homes say something about how well we write, my cozy colonial nestled on the banks of the Hudson, a short drive from
the city and the ski resorts, must mean ... something. It's still on the market, if anyone's looking.

A Christopher Goffard Series

"After passing the Bar exam on his fourth try, Charley Demosthenous wasn't exactly a hot property. Even his father thought he should go sell screwdrivers. Representing the poor and miserable was his last chance to be somebody."

Reporting for something more

Check out Mike Dawson's subtle use of scene in his short story on some neighbors. It makes this story, and is not something you get on the phone.

As in me, the guy telling you all this stuff

Kruse passed on two pieces from the West Coast, back to back: "Both used I (not only that, but "I" was a major character, and HAD to be), and both made me read to the end. Definitely good reading. Maybe a good lesson."

A new book

Stumbled across The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Looks pretty good.

From the pitch:

Ian McEwan: "The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."

Jamaica Kincaid: "All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself--though, thank god I had never committed them to paper--I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore."

Cheaper version at Amazon.

Churning and Burning

Four in a month? I'm not complaining. Anne Hull's latest on a post-Katrina Dickensian encampment in a place called Arabi.

Man. Man. Man.

Sometimes, when I really, really like something I read online, I click the print button twice with a kind of subliminal string – Maybe this will disappear from the WWW, and then maybe, because you never know, one of my copies will be lost or misplaced, so I better print two, just in case. Just in case.

I print Michael Brick twice a lot. I did this one three times:

Then the shots are gone, and 2 o'clock is gone, and the last customers are gone in outsize camouflage, cockeyed caps and big jeans and no belts. The showman takes out a duffel bag, and there are pictures of square sunglasses and leisure suits, chest hair and Pete on drums. Bearded Pete and his girl camera-ready before brown wallpaper long out of fashion.

"When I croak, I have this bag," the showman says. "I'm not alone. I'm not afraid. When you're yourself, you say, 'I did what I had to do.' "

The paper with three names tries something different

Former Times Herald-Record publisher Jim Moss: "And there's a question for us at the newspaper. Do we simply hold up a mirror and report dispassionately about what we see, or is there a positive, albeit less objective, role for us?
The accompanying editorial report is where we came down on this question.
This report required our open minds. It required research and discussions with scores of Newburgh residents. But it is not a news story bound by journalistic requirements of objectivity. Indeed, we come to this as people and as a business with a rooting interest in the this city."
Thus, this report Promised Land, from John Doherty and Tim Logan. It's a great read, and I'd love to know what you all think about crossing the line. Tim, John, how did you feel about it?

A conversation with Katherine Boo

In advance of her coming story on "young, poor mothers in the swamps of Louisiana, their children, and a nurse who is trying to change their lives."

Getting used to this

Make that five: "Hall has red hair and pearly skin. She was born in Kankakee, Ill. Chili pepper lights hang in her kitchen; Southern folk art and pink flamingos abound. In the middle of this bright whimsy is Badie, an austere modern jazzman, as cool as midnight itself, dealing with his homelessness, anger and unsure future.
"This is life in New Orleans now: tenuous, with strange forgings and new beginnings. No one is saying how long the arrangement will last."

Please write more

We want more stuff like this: To get to the place where they like George W. Bush more than any other place in America, you fly west for a long time from Washington, then you drive north for a long time from Salt Lake City, and then you pull into Gator's Drive Inn, where the customer at the front of the line is ordering a patty melt.

"Patty melts! No one makes patty melts anymore," she is saying to the counterman, Ryan Louderman, who knew she wasn't local as soon as he heard the sound of a car being locked. "Can I get it without onions?" she says. "And can I get mustard? On the side? Dijon mustard?"

"I don't think we have Dijon mustard," says Louderman, who is 15 and would have voted for Bush if he could have. "I think we only have regular mustard." But he writes it down anyway and gives the order to Pat Orton, the owner and cook.

"No onions? With mustard?" says Orton, who voted for Bush in 2004 and 2000. "Oh, God, we get some weird ones"

Spreading The Nation

All the cool kids read Gangrey. Please welcome Chip Scanlan into the fold. I should start charging for this wisdom.

How to Wright circles around the flock

Finding something readable on media day is possible. Wright Thompson does it twice. Here he is on Jurevicius and turducken.

When I move, I can feel something inside me

Tom Hallman Jr.'s latest: Nearly all the great ones start out this way. Anonymous. The public has no idea because it's nearly impossible to truly see heart, passion and dedication. But that's what drives the gym rat who'll one day become an NBA star. Or that kid practicing guitar hour after hour, destined to go platinum. Until they hit it big, though, they're just faces in a crowd.

On opening our eyes so as to open those of others

From CJR's Cultivating Lonliness: "With so many low-budget Web logs that do little more than emotionally react to the headlines" -- not Gangrey! -- "rare is the commentator who does the field work necessary to earn his opinions -- or even his prejudices."

"Above all, it is the lack of appreciation for geography in the broad, nineteenth-century sense of the word that is basic to an age of journalism increasingly given to summarizing from above rather than reporting from below."

"Barry Lopez, the nature writer, notes that in the current climate even such a seemingly obvious notion as the American landscape is a concoction of the media and advertising industries: in truth, the American landscape is a product of many little landscapes, each with its local genius, so that only the ignorant would reduce 'the Triassic reds of the Colorado Plateau . . . the sharp and ghostly light of the Florida Keys . . . and the aeolian soils of southern Minnesota' to a single geography."

"Just listening to people, to their stories -- rather than cutting them off to ask probing, impolite questions -- forms the essence of these and all other good travel books."

"The travel writer knows that people are least themselves when being tape-recorded. You'll never truly understand anybody by asking a direct question, especially someone you don't know very well. Rather than interrogate strangers, which is essentially what reporters do, the travel writer gets to know people, and reveals them as they reveal themselves."

Rather than interrogate strangers ?

He's talking about travel writing.

But he's not JUST talking about travel writing.

Readers Found Roundhouse Kicked To Death

Asher was up early -- like, nose-bleed early -- so we strollered down to the Henry Avenue honor boxes in the dark. I could find just two dimes and a nickel, so I played the who-gets-my-money this morning bit.

As I approached the boxes, in the Times box, center page and above the fold, I could barely make out the shadowy, ready-to-lunge-off-the-page profile of ... who is that? I nearly dropped my change.

John Barry examined Chuck Norris' recent fame among teenage boys (and, um, grown men), with a story set in a Largo Boston Market.

It was fun, funny and so different in a newspapers-aren't-supposed-to-do-that sort of way. And it sold at least one paper this morning; I was scared not to buy it. (They may be on to something...)

An award-winner from Boo-thousand and three

She has a piece in this week's New Yorker, but only in the mag. They did link online to her piece out of Oklahoma City from 2003 -- The Marriage Cure. (Print it before it's gone, or read The Best American Magazine Writing of 2003.)

It's pertinent to the dialogue about access and getting out of the office. Obviously, time is probably the biggest challenge here, but hanging out is priceless. The passage below is a tiny piece of this story, but it gives you a sense of the benefits of this massive reporting effort that only comes one way -- by being there:

A slim white woman emerged from Dillard’s department store with four shopping bags, a Burberry satchel, and, dangling from her wrist, a silver peace-sign charm. Kim suddenly grew still. “I’d like to be elegant someday, too,” she said quietly. “But if I ever did get a healthy, wealthy life, I wonder if my children would grow up looking down at people like me.”

When a bus that would have taken her home accelerated past, Kim practiced answers to potential interview questions: “I have a genuine interest in fashion and have been working a cash register since I was fourteen.” When the next bus cruised by, she tried a trick that she’d recently invented to manage depression, recalling in detail the happiest days of her life. “Here’s one I like—my mom’s birthday, in April, 1990. We had nothing to eat, we were suffering at the time, and the thing to know about my mom is that the only pleasure she ever really had in life was bingo—Lucky Star Casino, Will Rogers Bingo Hall, she played everywhere, and sometimes took me along to play a card, too. One of those places had a special deal for regulars—you play free on every Wednesday in the month of your birthday. She went out, and when she came back we were going to bed. She rustled us up and told us to open the door. She’d played U-Pick-Em and won twenty-five hundred dollars in cash and a big old stereo, which was sitting there outside. All eight of us busted out crying. Back then, we thought a hundred dollars was everything, so with twenty-five hundred dollars we could hardly imagine it, we thought we were millionaires. I got a pink-and-blue winter parka, and jeans from the old Fifty-Percent-Off Store. Mom bought some serious groceries and then gave us each ten dollars to spend however we wanted. I went to the 7-Eleven and bought Good & Plenty.”

Another bus was coming through the shopping plaza. Kim stepped forward, signalling furiously. When it swerved around her, she sank to the curb. The bus was not only the seventh one to pass her that day; it was the last bus to Sooner Haven until morning. In terms of landmass, Oklahoma City is the third-largest metropolis in America, and she was a five-hour walk from home.

A pretty woman in a tear-and-sweat-soaked blouse will eventually be noticed by somebody. A Chevy Impala pulled over, driven by a black woman not much older than Kim. “I know, I used to have to take the bus, too,” said the driver, who, as it turned out, was an assistant supervisor at a gift store in the mall. “I’ll drive you home.” She went past the alabaster state capitol and into the northeast quadrant, where Sooner Haven is situated, and where TV crews were covering a shooting from the parking lot of a carryout called Leo’s BBQ. “It as bad as they say around here?” the woman asked Kim when they reached the project’s gates.

“If you go outside and try to be known, you’re going to have trouble,” said Kim, her optimism not yet flattened by the Buckle manager, who would not keep her appointment. “But if you live all low and invisible you’ll more than likely be O.K.”

Let's all shake hands

A lot of new folks are swinging through the ol' bloggy-blog since Chip Scanlan gave us a mention (Thanks, Meg), so I figured it might be useful to highlight some of the stuff the folks involved (some more than others) here at Gangrey have done. Have fun.

Minor-league life, major-league drive, Breaking long years of silence,
Death on Route 17M, QB Cutler in scouts' spotlight, On-court heroics of Finch, others helped 'change hearts and minds', The Biggest Game: Memphis-UCLA Final Four becomes stuff of legend, A small, small world, Mower power to him, Plane freed from icy rest, Munson moving to Liberty, Weather's cooking; so's Hot Dog Lady, For family, affirmation has a cost, Three hours in the dark, 'You can't fix Newburgh', Grandfather left to pick up the pieces, Gone but not forgotten, Body builders give cars a lift, The Promised Land, Take pause for the chorale, Fan wears everything to help Broncos -- to no avail, The Bianchi boys' night out, Coleman emerges from gray past, Reese seeks new life, Someone to watch birds with, Survival's nothing new, Will it ever be the same?

The Story of Briny Breezes

Read Lane DeGregory's story: In Briny, you never have to worry about anything. You don't have to think about dressing up or trying to impress anyone. You are never lonely or bored. You live so close to your neighbors that when you sneeze in your kitchen they say, "Bless you!" Everything you want is within walking distance: the beach and boats, fish and friends, bingo and shuffleboard, Bible study and poker nights.

If you get hurt or sick, everyone rallies around and drives you to the doctor and bathes your dog. And the casserole brigade shows up, always does.

The Scene of the crime

Corey Kilgannon takes a look at the setting of a crazy crime in the Bronx: "White Castles open 24 hours a day have long been a siren for off-kilter customers looking to cap off their evening by gulping down sodas and devouring Slyders, the restaurant's signature burgers, also known by some people as murder burgers or gut busters. They are served with onions and pickles and often consumed in sufficient quantity to sop up a bellyful of beer.

"White Castle marketing officials have marketed this gastronomical attraction as the Crave, and it was this crave that very well may have drawn Officer Eric Hernandez, 24, into the blank fluorescent glare of the White Castle on Webster Avenue just north of the Cross Bronx Expressway."

Dan Barry does too.

basketball and a blind boy

Read Erin Sullivan's story: "His room is a boy's room, mostly frozen in time from when his mom decorated it seven years ago. It is covered with sports things he can't really see. His NASCAR-themed comforter is deep blue and violet. Edgar can't tell the difference between black and blue anymore. Anything black -- black cord, black sock, black notebook -- left on the bed is lost.

"There's a Rusty Wallace border along the top of his walls, which are blanketed with plaques -- of him playing baseball, playing football, the ones when the Florida Marlins won the World Series, the ones when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl. There is a big one of Dale Earnhardt above his computer desk. He can't see Earnhardt anymore, but he still can read the largest word on the poster: Victory."

on closing your eyes and letting your fingers write

Over at WriterL, a chat about personal essays has turned into a detailed discussion on the nomenclature of literary journalism, which Mr. Franklin says is very important. If we're going to talk seriously about journalism, we should all be using the same vocabulary. It's often a bit boring (important, no doubt), but I found a recent post by Walt Harrington interesting. I've always worried about not following the guidelines laid out in Franklin's book when working on a piece, because it seems like everyone who's anyone buys it.

Harrington's post made me feel better. He says he's prone to intuiting story structure. He doesn't make elaborate outlines with "complication this and that." He thinks for several days about his material after long reporting stints.

And after obsessing and relaxing and jotting notes and a rough outline, he sets it all aside, closes his eyes and writes what comes out of his fingers. (By the way, please join WriterL. It's cheap and good.) Harrington believes that writing is NOT mechanics, once you've mastered mechanics.

He paraphrases poet Rita Dove talking about her writing, "Where did that come from?" (He wrote about her.)

He says he has never written a lengthy story that was not a surprise when it was done. He says he's "baffled" by what has just happened.

Thinking about structure is good, but at some point you let go and just WRITE. He quotes Mike Sager of Esquire: Master technique, then forget about it and listen to your heart.

So are Walt and I alone on our own little island? Does anyone care to defend the use of a firm structure, like Franklin's?

Tracing the steps of the man who walked away

Again and again and again.

Reporting from places where lives are really lived

From a conversation between Robert Krulwich and Ira Glass, on the occassion of This American Life's 10-year anniversary. Go read the whole thing. It's chock full of inspirations and insights. Anyone else as obsessed with TAL as I am? Anyone have any favorite episodes they want to mention?

Most people think that what reporting is, is you go to powerful people or really fascinating people and you say, “Whassup?” You know? You go to their press conferences, you follow them around, you ask them for formal interviews. A story gathers around a public figure or someone whom the public already has identified, and tries to notice them well – tries to explain them, understand them, explicate them, celebrate them, something. You start in a well-lit space, and you use whatever your talent is to examine it. But your version of it is sort of upside-down. It's more like “Let's go to spaces where we all are, all the time, by ourselves. Let's go to jealousy, let's go to growing up, let's go to my love of my gun, let's go to the little vanities that take place between one person and another – let's just go to where people spend 96 percent of their lives and turn on the lights.”

Fair And Balanced equals stiffing readers

G. Paschal Zachary, a Time and Wall Street Journal vet, says it's about time to stop lying to readers: "Trying to be fair and balanced, journalists have failed their subjects and themselves. In seeking to stand above the fray, journalists have denied the obvious. They have robbed themselves of credibility. They are getting torn to pieces fighting the wrong battles."

Vaugh Ververs' rebuttal: "Zachary gives us all a lot to think about, some of it part of an ongoing conversation and some presented in a new way. I would simply say that his “ideal” of “partisan journalism” seems to me to be riddled with troubling holes. ... Which is preferable, an independent press that, while imperfect, at least attempts to hold all to account or a “partisan” press that essentially would serve as house organs for one interest or another while keeping the other side accountable?"

The fake vet and the undercover alley cat

Michael Brick as Joe Friday: "The place was New York City. Crime was the dish of the day, and the main course was injury to an animal with a side of petty larceny. The victim was Burt. Burt was a Boston terrier. He was about to find a friend who looked more like a foe."

Some Random Reading, old and new

Lane DeGregory's A Matchmaker Named Katrina; Tom Hallman Jr.'s Bill Porter: Life Of A Salesman; Rick Meyers' 14 Tips For Building Character; a slew of stuff that won American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors honors in 2004; and, finally, Michael Brick making the Times' Shaken and Stirred column a must-read:

On a television screen above the bar, people named Tia Carrere and Maksim Chmerkovskiy whirled in "Dancing With the Stars." They smiled like idiots in pain. The regulars speculated on who would win and whether Ms. Carrere's costume would come off. They smiled like newfound friends, and they mentioned specialties of the house.

"Try the Long Island Iced Tea," Kim Birkett proposed. "That's how we got here."

"Here" was a place called pleasantly drunk. Jallow Wow, a Gambian barman, poured sneak attack drinks, sickly sweet salmagundis, the Waiting to Exhale and the Kiss Me to start.

Naming Names

An email came in backchannel asking for the names of folks out there who are pushing the envelope without recognition. Gangrey tracks a lot of good writers, but there are no doubt many more reporters we haven't heard of who are doing good stuff.

So let's list them.

Anybody come across brothers and sisters we should be paying attention to?

Lessons from David Remnick

The New Yorker editor -- deep breath -- isn't really worried about what readers want and he isn't dumbing down his product to attract the young'uns. Please forward this to your editor.

"My principle in the magazine - and I am not being arrogant - is that I don't lose sleep trying to figure what the reader wants. I don't do surveys. I don't check the mood of the consumers. I do what I want, what interests me and a small group of editors that influences the way of the magazine.

"I know in my heart that an article like the one that will appear in the double issue next week - about the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan - may attract fewer readers than the humorous article by Nora Ephron in the same issue. But if I only run the humorous piece - we have lost our way."

And this:

Your writers are more apt to write in the first person.

"Absolutely. Why would I be against writing in the first person? But the big question is, have you earned the right to write in the first person? It's a huge issue. What I don't want is writing of self-centered writers of the sort of 'I heard that Hamas won the election and I cried, or I laughed, for a whole week.' That isn't interesting. There are a lot of forms of involved journalistic writing that are not narcissistic."

There are tiny lessons buried throughout the interview. (Thanks, Ramsey)

From the mouths of masters

Robert Redford. Dave Eggers. Sarah Vowell. Elvis Mitchell. Jonathan Caouette. Bonz Malone. Ira Glass. Catherine Hardwicke. Xeni Jardin. Orville Schell.

Go here and listen to all of them telling stories about telling stories.

Bombs, Babies and Bibles

Brady Dennis' The Long Road To Recovery: Lee has bad days, too. He worries, as injured soldiers often do, whether his wife will have the patience to stay by his side. Just last week, he asked her, "You promise you will stay here?"

Maria answered in her best English:

"I married forever."

Hank Stuever on Lloyd Dobler

He writes: "Cusack, who turns 40 in June, was only 22 when he played the part (and, arguably, played it over and over -- the sensitive, mix-tape-making, imperfectly perfect boyfriend). He didn't want to do it, in that way 22-year-old actors are terrified of doing more high school roles. More terrifyingly, in Hollywood trivia myths, it has been said that Kirk Cameron, the teen idol star of TV's "Growing Pains," was up for the part. Crowe had to beg Cusack, who agreed only if he could fuse his own sensibility onto Lloyd. Unlike celebrities who are embarrassed or dismissive of their early work, Cusack is apparently almost always gracious when reporters who are writing about his latest movie ask about Lloyd. And they always ask.

"For Lloyd lives -- largely in our minds, but that's not such a bad place to be."

Zack McMillin Makes a swap

Read his debut: The snowmen melteth.

In the front yards of homes all over Greater Memphis, the last vestiges of Friday's 3 to 5 inches of snowfall were thawing to death.

Wind and sun and 50-degree temperatures had sculpted some into inaccessible pieces of modern art. Others looked like white zombies, frozen in mid-stagger.

Tuesday afternoon, many were mere lumps of ice, their mortal coil resembling ancient gravestones -- with no engraving for identity.

In some yards, the only remnants were the carrots, hats and twigs meant to personify the ephemeral population that came to life for a few brief days. It was the biggest snow some of the youngest citizens around these parts had seen, and they and their parents had taken advantage.

The Story Of John And Lori and the Spring Hill Winn-Dixie

Read Kruse's story:

SPRING HILL - Lori Burns and John Gorman had come Thursday morning to be wed at Winn-Dixie in the frozen foods aisle in between the pizza and the ice cream.

This is a new twist to an old story.

But a good one.

Lori and John: Both of them are from up North and moved down here looking for sunshine. She's 44 and from Michigan. He's 57 and from New York. Both of them have been married before. Both of them have children and even grandchildren.

Both of them say they weren't looking for love.

And certainly not next to any Hot Pockets or Tater Tots.

Hank Stuever on Johnny Weir

Read Hank's story: "These are all things Weir's mother, the equally outspoken Patti, did.

"She raised a kid who would grow up to nickname himself "J. We" and "Tinkerbelle" and tell Sports Illustrated that his only other ambitions right now are to own an apartment in either Chelsea or Soho and start his own fashion line. At home, in Quarryville, Pa., bullies at the rink would shoot hockey pucks at Johnny while he practiced, Patti Weir told the New York Times. "I raised him to speak his mind, even if it's about me," she said.

"Weir has done what so many oddballs, gay or straight, raised by understanding mamas and papas in the sticks, have done -- he became a cultural omnivore. He loves hotels, he loves high fashion, he loves being in the world as opposed to shutting himself off. He's learning Russian. He names his costumes. He is complicated, self-aware to a maximum degree, and he loathes being misunderstood."

And a quick Hank Stuever/Gangrey rehashing, 'cause we love him so damned much: Ooh, ahh, ooh, ahh.

The Unnecessary Death Of Pat Tillman

I'm sure everyone has seen this, but this is the first time I'm reading Steve Coll's two-parter on the death of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal free safety who, after 9-11, turned down an NFL contract to join the Army Rangers. Man, it's good reporting and storytelling. Give it a read.

back in New orleans

Dan Barry and Adam Nossiter advance a parade:

The first Mardi Gras parade of 2006 will strut and shout up Napoleon Avenue and then along St. Charles on Saturday, trumpeting a plaintive, post-traumatic theme: "May God Bless New Orleans." This parade, and the more than two dozen to follow over the next 11 days, through Mardi Gras on Feb. 28, will wend through a city stripped of all but its pride in the wind and floodwaters.

The people on the floats will toss beads and plastic coins onto the New Orleans they love, but not quite the New Orleans they remember — a city where the famous plea of the Mardi Gras spectator, "Throw me something, mister," takes on a newer, more desperate meaning.

One Door Closes, Another Opens

For those of you who remember Sonia Nazario's Pulitzer-winning piece, Enrique's Journey, here's the latest chapter.

Any requests?

A threatening voice mail from a thug name of Monty has me frantically finishing off the first-ever Gangrey.com two-CD Narrative Song extravaganza. Also, we're trying to cajole Michael out of his obvious cultural agoraphobia.

Some songs I culled from past posts include:

Bob Dylan ... Hattie Carroll
Kanye ... 18 years
Steve Earle ... Billy Austin
Robert Earl Keen ... Road Goes on Forever

Any more requests?

a black manager and hasidic boxer find friendship

Goldberg passed along this story from the AP's Desmond Butler: O'Pharrow, known to friends as "Jimmy O'," has been a mentor to Salita since he taught the young boxer to jab at the age of 13. Jimmy O' is 80 years old now. He's given up training on a daily basis, even with Salita, who works mostly with Roca now. But Jimmy O' follows Salita's moves closely. The boxer's career might be the old trainer's last project.

"Dmitriy and I became very close friends," he says. "When he gets hit, I feel it."

using the right ones

Michael Brick in court: "From a juror's vantage, much of the strange courtroom imagery goes unexplained. The disembodied faces on trial are represented by a row of four men seemingly plucked from the far ends of a casting agent's files. Mr. Pearson's new lawyers, John B. Stella and James L. Koenig, are burly enough to stretch their jackets by leaning forward.

"Mr. Hendrix is represented by Steven Chaikin, a philosophical speaker who wears gray suits with hiking boots, an unkempt beard, hoop earrings and a long gray ponytail, the sort who might fit well doing pro bono work for Grateful Dead fans. His partner, Philip J. Smallman, is dark-haired and lanky, moves deliberately and wears narrow spectacles in the manner of a country gentleman or disguised superhero."

Ramsey writes: What is sorta odd about these details is that they're light-hearted, but the case he's covering is so brutal. It's almost inappropriate, no?

Any thoughts?

A city tapping its feet

Read his story: "Trumpets sounded, drums pounded and the feet of a city marched in place, tapping an anticipatory beat on asphalt. Someone gave the noontime signal for a parade to move forward, and it did: exuberant, silly, gaudy, giddy, diminished, defiant.

"It could have been just another parade, even just another Mardi Gras parade. But Saturday's train of floats and marching bands — five parades that seemed to blend into one — was the joyous first step of this year's Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, and the first since Hurricane Katrina altered the physical and psychic landscape here nearly six months ago. Every tossed string of beads, every flipped plastic coin carried the weight of added meaning."

Memories of The Man

Read Erin Sullivan's story from Daytona:

The man they call Wild Bill Owen sat at the bar, looking through photo albums of his hero.

"There's the man."

"And there he is."

"There he is again."

He got his photo taken shaking hands with Dale Earnhardt in 1979, when Wild Bill's beard was brown. It's now gray and yellowed around his mouth. He won't say how old he is.

"Mas viejo que tierra," he says. "Older than dirt."

What are you reading?

Brick's Suspect In Murder-Attempt Case Has Something To Say, Dan Barry's Away From Mardi Gras, Glints Of Life As The Hopeful Trickle Home, Corey Kilgannon's At $2 A Dance, A Remedy For Loneliness, Libby Copeland's Drop Till You Shop, and, wow, I'm not the only one with a thing for Susan Orlean; Ann Hornaday idolspizes her too.

Benham with a man making a comeback

Read Kelley's story: They cruise the bus station, Campbell Park, Lake Maggiore. These aren't places homeless people cluster. They were the kinds of places Tom hid. He was a loner.

In Roser Park, they drove up on a little white bridge over a muddy creek.

Tom knows this place.

"I used to live there," he told Marta. "Under this bridge right here."

Readable in Turin

Kruse pointed it out, and I'm in agreement: Libby Copeland's stuff from Turin is fresh, energetic and, unlike a lot of stuff from the Olympics, readable.

Here are a few of them.

Ciao to all the folks back home.
Drop till you shop.
Knife Dancer.
A red-hot race for gold.
Legends of the fall.
Downhill partying.
Turin, going for the gold.

Being Funny

Lauren Collins in Talk of the Town: Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arrive in a parka and hiking boots, only to find that most of the men are wearing dark suits. Solution: Buy an overcoat and, next time, call ahead to ask about attire. Or, say, you lose your temper and tell a senior member of the United States Senate to “go fuck yourself.” Solution: Issue a statement acknowledging your frank words and let the fuss subside without attracting further attention. Vice-President Dick Cheney carried himself successfully through both of these faux pas. But his accidental shooting of the Austin lawyer Harry M. Whittington presents a more delicate question of etiquette: What is the proper way to proceed after blasting six to two hundred pieces of birdshot into the chest, neck, and face of a personal acquaintance? Mylar balloons? African violets? A casserole?

Roots in the wild west and an aversion to taxes

Ralph Blumenthal with the story of a big small town: What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county's oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

"When I was little, I couldn't wait to leave," said Beverly Hanson, the county clerk. Then, she said, "I went to see the bright lights" — she became an apartment manager in Dallas — married and divorced and happily returned home. "I knew I was safe here," she said.

Wide-Eyed

There's an energy and sense of wonder in Libby Copeland's writing that makes me jealous. Here's another one from Turin: The Americans just attack the snow with their fierce wills, the lactic acid burning up their legs, past the stands filled with exuberant fans waving flags from many nations, but not theirs. This is a sport for the stubborn and the strong.

"In some sense the only reason I'm doing this is because nobody else was doing this when I was young," says Rachel Steer. She is considered the finest female biathlete in America, but when Steer is asked about this, she says: "I hadn't thought about it." Then: "It doesn't matter." Then: "I certainly hope I'm not the best ever."

Some catching up

Corey Kilgannon on a gadfly in a Queens co-op; Kelley Benham on measuring memories; Hank Stuever on The Blue Tarp.

Keep a kleenex handy

Why my man Geoff Calkins is so well-loved here in Memphis.

"I love you more than you love me," Kimberly would say.

Wha?

This is off topic, and I fear it reveals something about me I'm not sure I wish to make known, but what? How could Travis not pick Moana?

Making the scene

Read Wright's piece on Buck O'Neil:

Heading toward the stadium, the SUV ate up highway. Inside, O’Neil was talking about his family’s tribe in Africa, and he was asked how he had found all that out. Did you do genealogical research? Did you find old bills of sale? He laughed. He’s old enough to have talked to former slaves.
“My grandfather told me,” he said. “I knew my grandfather.”
It’s times like this that Tonya Tota, the museum’s operations director and, often, O’Neil’s driver, picks his brain. In the vehicle, she played a game with O’Neil. Word association. The first one was easy.
“Baseball?” she asked.
“Satchel Paige,” he said.
“Love?”
“Ora,” he said, referring to his late wife of 51 years.
“Life?”
O’Neil chuckled. He told the story of his father explaining the birds and the bees to him in a Sarasota pool hall. It started as another bawdy O’Neil tale. Seems Pop overheard some other kids telling him that a young lady named Elizabeth was a sure thing. The elder O’Neil pulled his young boy aside, planting the seeds that would grow into the man we know today.

The story of a 'haunted house' in queens

I love it when a reporter becomes a character. It adds tension to Michelle O'Donnell's A Haunted House, Clinging To Secrets: Every winter, when the trees drop their leaves, a certain house in Laurelton, Queens, comes into full view. It is a decrepit Victorian on a cul-de-sac at 141-36 222nd Street, a structure whose condition has made it known as "the haunted house."

To say the condition of 141-36 is woeful seems, well, woefully inadequate. Its siding is weathered to the marrow, and most of its windows are boarded over. An "X" painted on the cupola warns of weak floorboards. A locked chain-link fence seals it off from society. A small armada of boats lies beached in the yard under a sea of blue tarp.

Three yellow traffic signs posted at the corner announce, with a Cassandra-like quality, "Dead end," "End," "Dead end."

Some fresh stuff for you, like a bouquet of words

Dan Barry with New York's nicest pool player; Damon Hack spins one from Palm Harbor; John Doherty with a narrative state of the city; Colleen Kenney at the famous U-Stop.

Hardship and War Disappear in Beat Of the Dance Floor

Read Emily Wax's story: Under a rotating disco ball and steps from a clay pot sitting on fake flames, Congolese crooner Prince Fisecoze slams down a couple of shots of sambuca bar-side at the ritzy Club Afrique, the latest addition to Nairobi's otherwise edgy nightclub scene.

Hoping to court some loyal fans, he flashes a business card to well-dressed patrons filing in around 10 p.m. Printed in a hodgepodge of fonts, the card proclaims -- in bold -- that Prince Fisecoze Ikalaba M. Wembadio is president of Rumba Japan, an "international band with 6,600 dancing styles."

Minutes later, next to a babbling brook-and-waterfall installation, Prince sprays on some Paco Rabanne cologne for confidence. He smooths his wrinkled outfit, business attire from the waist down, Halloween party from the waist up: orange soccer shirt under a blue dinner jacket featuring an embroidered pumpkin on the lapel, a scarecrow on the back.

blue-collar writer, white collar vocabulary

I stumbled across this short profile of Jimmy Cannon. It's full of lessons, including this: "Jimmy led the classic reporter's life," said Izenberg, who wrote alongside Smith for the Herald Tribune before joining Newark's Star-Ledger. "He read police blotters and paid attention to his city. He spent time in bars and got to know everybody in the room."

Sounding like you sound

How does Garrison Keillor write with such a distinct voice? You hear him speaking as you read his stuff.

From Jimmy Cannon

For those of you nearing the deadline for another daily on yet another day, here's some last-minute inspiration from Jimmy Cannon via a guy who isn't. (From the New York Post)

"THE great multitude, collected around the scaffold in the plain of Yankee Stadium last night, set up a hoarse cackling which, coming from the ledges and the balconies and the temporary seats on the field of that vast place, sounded like the cawing of a flock of jubilant birds.

"For three rounds they had been moved to burbling excitement by Ezzard Charles who had fought off Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champion of the world, with a grave disciplined neatness. But now the skin above Marciano's left eye was torn and bright little streams coursed down his clenched face.

"The champion, who for three rounds had raged like a beast trapped in the pen of his awkwardness, rubbed the shining puddle with the thumb of his glove. The rills of blood became a smear. It was as though he had ripped the frivolously red strings off a Christmas package but others grew in their places before he had taken his hand away. It was then Charles hit him the right uppercut. Marciano, who wears his flesh like a suit of mail, struggled to get out of the box of his ignorance but until the uppercut, Charles' punches had no more effect than feathers thrown into the blades of an electric fan.

"But now, after the jabs, came measured rights. The bloody spray freckled the canvas of the ring after every blow. The champion appeared dazed, not by the punches but by Charles' audacity. The people in his corner were seized by panic.

Friday morning reading

Michael Brick and Corey Kilgannon on bad people in New York; Christopher Goffard is out west; look who's being plugged for the Pulitzer's feature prize (yay Lane!); And don't miss this one from Roy Wenzl:

It has been one year since the cops caught the BTK monster and put an end to his deeds.
So many words have been written and so many stories have been told that many of us are tired of hearing how the monster hunted people and hurt children and dressed in women's underwear.
But one story has not yet been told. And it mentions the monster hardly at all.
It's about four little boys.
And how they grew up.
It begins when the boys are still boys, when the monster first goes out to strike. The beginning is scary. But if you are brave and eager, you will soon reach the middle, where the boys have grown big and bold, and the monster has disappeared. And then the end of the middle leads to the beginning of the end -- and the monster returns.
And guess who goes out to stop him?

'you keep the facts alive with people'

This is a letter Jimmy Breslin sent to his editor at the New York Herald Tribune in, I believe, May 1964. He's pitching a series about Harlem. The language is dated, for sure, but there are lessons:

Dear Jim [Bellows]:

Here, for your information and consideration, is a schedule of ideas and the mechanics of carrying them out which I intend to put into effect starting today. I was out bouncing on the street at 6:30 a.m. today so I might as well do something with all this freaking time. . .

Tomorrow night (Tues.) I intend to move into somebody's apartment in Harlem. Joe Glaser is in charge of this. I told him I lived bad all my life and I don't have to live with roaches to know what they are like. So he is getting me something he says will be all right.

What I intend to do there is simple. Build five murderous parts, and build them on the hallmark of anything of this sort: small facts, gathered in many places, and gathered in such numbers that the copy can be flat, understated and totally effective because of the facts. Take a woman at the supermarket. Get her order, can by can, and list it and what she paid for it. With almost no comment on it by me, this list will be meaningful to housewife in Larchmont. Maybe more meaningful than all the big words written of this thing.

You follow this theory with everything. With the schoolyards, which are crowded at 7:30 a.m. because parents have to leave early and the kids are locked out of the apartments with nothing else to do, they go to school. And with the furniture repossessions and water and gas and electric shut-offs and the gas-station habits - 50 cents' worth of gas for a Cadillac. You do this with facts from small people in the street and from merchants and bankers.

But always, you do it with people. You keep the facts alive with people.

Then the violence aspects. Ride with the police for a night. Take my man Bumpy Johnson, the first major Negro criminal. Talk to the unimaginative junkies who steal for their habit; "You think I like paddin' around in the dark in somebody else's bedroom?" And talk to the X's and their people; the ones everybody expects trouble from. And talk to the colored leaders who have sold out their own people so they can be patted on the heads by the whites.

These are people who have had very few heroes, but they are trying to find heroes right now. Some of the ones they look for are bad. Others are exceptional human beings. Who they will turn to when the heat makes the tar on the roofs soft and sticky and it gets into the masonry and comes through the cracked plaster ceilings and makes the apartments too hot to stay in and everybody spills out onto the streets until 2 and 3 a.m. is the question.

The police walk three abreast on the streets now. Their clubs spin on the leather cords. And all around them, the dark faces look at them. The people believe only demonstrations will get them anything. They never got a thing before they started trouble, they all believe. The credo in Harlem is simple: "Anything that costs Whitey money is good." A demonstration, even the threat of one, forces police overtime. Yet the voting rolls show that in this most important of all areas, the people of Harlem are terribly deficient.

"We are missing two million voters," the Democratic leaders say. "They all should come from Negro areas."

Yet ask the average colored people in Harlem when was the last time they voted, and the answer is a stare. So many of these people do not even know where or how to vote. They have no tradition of voting. In the old neighborhoods, Bay Ridge, say, election day is a ritual. It is a ritual because your father, grandfather, and great-grandfather voted so they could have decent shots at city jobs. Now the city jobs are not needed, because there are insurance men and stockbrokerage workers in the families. But the tradition of voting goes on.

The people in Harlem have no traditions. They have no heritage. But they want one. And in some ares, a very good story Walt Kelly handed me, they are after it. An Episcopal church has started a big voter-registration drive and they came to Kelly for help.

"It's a lot more fun to go on sit-ins," he told the kids.

"We want to do it by voting," they said.

"But if you go on sit-ins you can go to jail and be heroes," Kelly told them. "If you go to all the trouble of getting a big vote out, then nobody will be calling you niggers any more and there'll be no reason for sit-ins and you'll have the same dull life everybody else has."

The entire story is based on one idea: these are people. They are bewildered, uncared-about, and angry. They have a right to anger because white people would prefer to speak of them in great generalities and do nothing about the housing or the type of food they have to eat because of the salaries they make. The question is, as this summer comes up, will their anger show in a legitimate drive or will it erupt as it did in 1936 and 1943?

Now this is a nice, big statement. It is on the type I intend not to use. Not even once. But the small facts, gathered and put together, will say the things themselves.

I would have this thing started and into the office by Friday for the Sunday papers and have another in on Saturday for Monday and the remainder in Sunday. The outline of the entire series will be in by late Thursday.

I feel this is the most important thing I can do for the Tribune at this time, and perhaps the most important thing I have done for you at any time. It will work fine, as long as somebody does not throw a garbage can at me from a rooftop. The rooftops, not the sidewalks, are the things to look out for.

respectfully,
j. breslin.

A Gangrey.com exclusive

I'm due to hand my Tampa Tribune-issued computer and various chords over to Darrin, the tech guy here, in a few moments, so I'll rapid-post one last time as Friday nears Saturday. The Tribune has been a fine place to work and I have learned things from dedicated people. I start at the St. Petersburg Times on Monday. Here's to growing, getting better and dropping bylines in new places.

A monument man, a judge and a collision

Dan Barry with an epitaph for a man of monuments; Michael Brick profiles a judge; and check out this piece by Chris McKenna and Kristina Wells, Twist of Fate:

Forty tons of truck rammed the SUV into Hastings' car carrier, which dragged the Land Rover a short distance before dropping it.

McKiver's truck shot across the northbound lanes and smashed into another guardrail, leaving its trailer stretched sideways across the highway.

The first emergency call came in at 12:41 p.m.

Some drivers stopped to help. Others, maybe 15 to 20, steered around the wreckage and drove away. Dave Morris, a 42-year-old trucker from Vermont, got so disgusted that he parked his rig so no one else could drive past.

"Don't even look," someone said as he approached the Land Rover. Hastings brought over a blanket, and they pulled it over the mangled vehicle.

McKiver had been flung through his windshield and lay moaning on the roadway. "There was an accident," he told the first firefighter who got to him. He struggled to get up. His neck was broken.

A rabbi from Fort Lee, N.J., bent beside McKiver, held his hand and opened a Bible to read Psalm 23:

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want; In verdant pastures he gives me repose; Beside restful waters he leads me; he refreshes my soul."

Just watching the red carpet. And taking notes. And writing it up all fun: "They're all predictably thrilled, prepped, dressed, posed. They're all tiny but somehow huge. They toss little standard vignettes about their moods, their day. They smile, and you smile. All you remember from those few seconds, all you really have, is some small and useless detail rendered huge in your mind: the blue vein barely noticeable on Meryl Streep's cheek, or a glimpse at her dental work when she's leans forward to speak into a TV microphone. The slight and brilliant crinkle of crow's feet and dusting of gray around Eric Bana's temple. The warm embrace between Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman when they spot each other -- and they seem to need the warmth. Bullock keeps putting her hands in the pockets of her vintage '50s gown."

Jimmy Breslin's Story

Read his letter, then his story below.

Did Jimmy B. succeed?

Inside the church, the heavy air-conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool. Carroll Tyler and Sandra Hopkins, who had just been married, stood under the machine while the guests squeezed in front of them and kissed the tall, striking bride and shook hands with the groom and then went through the doors and into the hot Sunday-afternoon sun. Outside the church, the Salem Methodist Church on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, the people's voices were drowned out by the whir of low-pressure tires on taxicabs which kept passing by. On a weekend, taxicabs are a poor man's game and Harlem is filled with them.

Tyler was in a tuxedo. He was nervous, but he spoke in a quiet voice. He is twenty-four and in the Marines and he has a neat mustache and a strong-looking neck.

"I've got about seven months to go," he was saying. "I'm at Camp Lejeune. That's in North Carolina."

"Where are you going to live when you get out?"

"We have an apartment."

"Is it a neighborhood like this?"

"Well, you know. It's a neighborhood."

"What are you going to do when you get out?"

"I don't know. I'll be a real-estate agent, I suppose. Why are you asking?"

"Oh, I don't know. I was just wondering how you figure out your life or your future or whatever it is on a day like this when you happened to be colored."

"I don't want to know about that now," he said. Then the bride smiled and said thank you and they went out the door and onto the church steps.

There are three small trees, the leaves fresh green, on the sidewalk in front of the church. The well-dressed guests were by the trees and the limousines were parked at the curb behind them. It was pleasant. But the rest of it, the part Tyler didn't want to think about on his wedding day, was there too. Across Seventh Avenue, in the ground floors of the old stone tenements, were the Harlem Swan Fish and Chips, the Dunbar Pawnbrokers, Bea's Hair Styles, and the Vogue Beauty Shop. On the side street, 129th Street, the red sign of the Elks Imperial Bar and Grill showed on a building sitting between two tenements. Across the street from the Elks are the buildings where, the police believe, the young kids who claim they are going to kill white people this summer sit on stoops and stare at police cars.

And from the windows of the stone tenements, the old people leaned out and looked at the young married couple coming out of the church. Tyler did not look up at them while he helped his wife into the limousine, and he did not look at the hock shop of the Elks Club sign, but it was all right in front of him, standing like the couple of hundred years of history and attitudes that this young guy was walking out of church to face.

In Harlem, words like "history" and "attitudes" come down to plain things. To the paycheck mostly. The paychecks Harlem people earn, and their dissatisfaction with being poor and living in slums, produce the speculation that this will be a summer of racial violence in Harlem. But these same paychecks are why general violence almost certainly won't develop at all. The same Harlem people who have the whites frightened about a race riot are too busy working for a paycheck and too tired from years of being poor to start running in the streets.

In Harlem, from 96th Street to 119th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the East River, the average family income is $3797. From 110th Street to 126th Street, between Eighth and Park Avenues, it is a little higher, $4141. In the lower part of Manhattan, where white people live, income in the area from 14th to 30th Streets, between Eighth and Third Avenues is $6892. And, if you want a real contrast, from 63d Street to 96th Street, between Fifth and Third, a
family averages $15,305.

Money makes the way of life, and low money shows everywhere you go in Harlem. In a supermarket on 135th Street, in the middle of a Saturday rush, the totals on the cash registers keep showing $7.30 and $10.58 and $5.97 while, at the same time, in a supermarket in Baldwin, Long Island, the figures were $28.60 and $41.12.

In the neighborhood taverns, the bartender puts three thick-bottomed shot glasses on the wood in front of you when you order a drink. All these local bars sell drinks on a two-for-one or three-for-one policy. In Maxie's Cafe, on 153d Street and Eighth Avenue, rye, gin, vodka, or run shorties are sold for $.50 per single, two for $.90 and three for $1.20. Cognac and better Scotch sell for $.60 a drink. All chasers except water are $.10 extra. Bar etiquette requires the bartender to place the three shot glasses down and the customer names his game, a single or two for $.90 or three for the $1.20.

The low money shows most in the people. There are 450,000 people living in Harlem, and the talk, and the crime-rate figures, have other people afraid of the Harlem people and afraid to go into the area. The crime figures are high, and the brutality of the crimes of late turns your stomach. But 450,000 people do not run around committing crime. Last week, to see Harlem a little better, and to examine this place some have said is just a big time bomb waiting to go off on a hot summer night, we moved into Harlem. James Putnam, a fifty-four-year-old man who is retired from the Pennsylvania Railroad after thirty-eight years as a business car steward for Davis G. Bevans, the railroad's vie-chairman, was kind enough to put us up in his three-room apartment.

For walk-around company we had James Russell, who calls bartenders "say, my man," and who drinks orange slings as a rule, but V.O. in the Pink Angel, where, he explains, he is "in kind of tight with the barkeep." Mr. Russell is a former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer, and, upon being properly urged, he demonstrates a good, short left hook and gives the impression that he once was a stiff puncher. Also with us was a person known, where he comes from, as "the
First Division." He is called this because of the firepower he keeps in his pocket. He was along because of many warnings from outsiders that Harlem is a dangerous place for a white these days. In five days and nights we didn't draw much more than a stare because people in Harlem are too busy living like people any place else.

This does not mean that trouble isn't there. Pick up a paper and you see that. James Putnam points out that Wednesday-evening services at his church, St. Mark's Methodist on 137th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, have poor attendance because so many women have been mugged right in front of the church. Throughout Saturday night, riding in an unmarked Police Department crime combat car out of the 32d Precinct, Sergeant Frank Weidenburner kept advising us, at each stop, to get into the building in a hurry because the bad trouble comes from the rooftops.

On 129th Street between Seventh and Lenox, which is the area where a small group known as the Blood Brothers stored ammunition for a war on the police, and where the few remaining members still hang out, Weidenburner became insistent. His car was answering a radio call which said somebody in the tenement at 155 West 129th had called police for help.

"Any call on that block can be trouble," he said. When his unmarked car pulled up, two radio cars were there, and two more pulled in later.

"Don't hang around out there," he said when we got out. "Come inside the building with us."

Inside, a man of about twenty-five was stretched unconscious on a second-floor landing. Two women were with him. They said the man had been beaten and stomped on by kids from up the block. Then the women began to fight over who was going to nurse the beaten man.

You see things like this. And then, with bright morning sunlight coming in from the patio, you sit and talk to a woman like Jane Booker. Bright, and almost overly sensitive because of her intelligence, she sits and has a glass of orange juice in her new high-middle-income apartment, and she snaps out the things that bother a woman who is colored in New York.

"Why is it," she says, "that every time I get into a taxicab downtown, the driver turns around and asks me, 'What's the number today?' Just because I'm not white, does that mean I have to know the numbers game? Does he do that with any white woman that gets into a cab?"

And over all of this, over the people and their habits and their misery, runs the layer of arguments. The Negro crime rate is high, the whites claim. The police brutality must stop, or it will provoke violence, the Negro leaders say. A Negro comedian gets on television and says some nonsense about a conspiracy in the white press to suppress the Negro. The words in the arguments are big and important-sounding and in the meantime Harlem sits there, with 450,00 people who have no heritage in life except poverty. And with this long, hot summer coming up that nobody talks about, some of them may step out and do things. But only some of them. And then only maybe.

"Riot?" the bartender was saying in Maxie's. "Who's got time for that? People have to go to work every day. Doesn't anybody know that?"

I mean, come on, how FUN is this? I want this in MY local newspaper.

Some highlights:

This one was reeeeeeeeeal. Understand that we are mostly blase about famous people, see 'em all the time, write chatty little profiles of them when their new moobies come out. We play it especially cool once we get behind a velvet rope.

***
But Ma-freakin'-donna. C'mon. That's another level -- pope and Beatle-not-Ringo level. Even the most tippy-toppest celeb wranglers are atwitter. She and her husband, Guy Ritchie, came, saw, went. (She was heard to say "oy" after experiencing a press photobarrage going in, but that was the Esther talking.) And there they go, back out into the flashbulbs, toward a limo. She's wearing a pink party dress and that '70s curling-iron hairdo she's unfortunately fond of. We feel our knees buckle slightly. And we check a very big, decades-old item off our Things To Do list, one that's been on there since high school:

Come within four feet of Madonna.

Done and done.

***

This party is where all P's are V and I. We easily acquire our much-needed drinkypoo.

Slinging Ink

Read on a break from prepping for next week's Allains trial:
"We are storytellers, an amalgam of journalists, entertainers, poets, jugglers and dodge artists. We sling ink and binary bytes. This does not make us the Supreme Court justices we sometimes like to think we are.
Look deep enough into anybody's life, you'll find another fine mess in there somewhere. You'll find a story to tell.
The question is, to me ... what do you do with it then?
All I know for sure is, there's an awful lot of crap written and said about who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, a bunch of unknowledgeable, exploitive, easy-bake crap, crap that comes down so heavy sometimes I feel like I should wear a hat ... racial, immature, jealous human crap.
In the end, over time, by fate, God, life, whatever you want to call it, a denouement always comes that is instructive.
It's one thing to be human, with a telling life story.
It's another thing to have it told while you're on trial."
(Read the rest of Ralph Wiley's column.)

early wednesday morning

Dan Barry on life going on at ground zero, Rebecca Catalanello on a rescue gone wrong and Andy Grundberg with Gordon Parks' obit.

It's hard out here for a ... hack?

So long as we're talking about origins and keeping it real, welcome to the controversy here in Memphis (where we lay claim to Ralph Wiley, too): To be proud or ashamed of Memphis rappers winning an Oscar for Best Song, that is the question.

Ashamed, says our columnist, Wendi Thomas, and many in Memphis are inclined to agree.

I do not take issue with much of what Wendi says, but could not help being delighted upon seeing someone who goes by the moniker 'Frayser Boy' (Frayser's the neighborhood where I grew up) so genuinely thrilled with winning an Oscar.

And as objectionable as some of Three 6 Mafia's songs and lyrics ("Slob on my Knob" pretty much redefines crude), you've gotta admit that hook from Hustle & Flow is irresistible:

*********
You know it's hard out here for a pimp
When you're tryin' to get this money for the rent
With the Cadillac and gas money spent
Will cause a whole lot of bitches jumpin' ship...
*********

And, there, in the last line, we get to the crux of the matter. Offensive? I can certainly see why. Am I treading down a dangerous path when I rationalize and say this is a character speaking? A character who also tells us:

*********
Done seen people killed, done seen people deal
Done seen people live in poverty with no meals
It's fucked up where I live, but that's just how it is
It might be new to you, but it's been like this for years
It's blood sweat and tears when it come down to this shit
I'm tryin to get rich 'fore I leave up out this bitch
I'm tryin to have thangs but it's hard fo' a pimp
But I'm prayin and I'm hopin to God I don't slip, yeah
*********

This is a little removed from narrative journalism, I realize, but I do think it's related to some of the issues we've discussed.

Thoughts?

Photographs to Poetry

He was a photographer, but he was much more, and we could all learn from Gordon Parks' example of hard work and showing people things they wouldn't otherwise see. Wil Haygood with an appreciation:

In America, he used his cameras like six-shooters, aiming right at the nation's broken souls, her sad-eyed children, her blacks, browns and whites, her shoeshine men and faceless women with both dishrag and dignity.

Quickly

Ramsey Al-Rikabi went to a fire then told people about it; Chris Goffard on
a small tape with a huge impact; and Tomas Alex Tizon with a Katrina evacuee a long way from home:

She didn't know diaper wipes could freeze so fast. One moment they were a stack of moist towelettes, next they were an icy white brick.

Patti Tobias had left her infant's wipes in the back seat of the car on a morning when the temperature dipped to 7 degrees below zero. "Huh," she said, inspecting the block and grinning.

Her relatives in New Orleans would get a kick out of this.

She would share it as part of the chronicle of "a little black girl in Alaska," the story of her new life as told to friends and family in daily long-distance phone conversations. Her dispatches included stories of moose and mountains and white people. Patti, 39, had never been around so many white people. Most have been quite nice.

Lessons from Gay talese

Got in the mail the other day a dog-eared copy of The Literature of Reality. The introduction is by Gay Talese. It's called "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer."

Some bits of wisdom:

"I learned to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments (as the listening skills of my patient mother taught me) people often are very revealing -- what they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time. However, I have also overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided -- a reaction that I think had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively-posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as a trustworthy individual in whom they could confide. My mother's best customers were women less in need of new dresses than the need to communicate."

*

"Each of my books, in fact, draws inspiration in some way from the elements of my island and its inhabitants who are typical of the millions who interact familiarly each day in stores and coffee shops and along the promenades of small towns, suburban villages, and urban neighborhoods everywhere. And yet, unless such individuals become involved in crimes and horrible accidents, their existence is generally ignored by the media as well as by historians and biographers, who tend to concentrate on people who reveal themselves in some blatant or obvious way, or who stand out from the crowd as leaders, or achievers, or are otherwise famous or infamous...

"And yet I have always believed, and have hoped to prove with my efforts, that attention might also be paid to "ordinary" people in nonfiction, and that without changing the names or falsifying the facts, writers might produce what in this anthology is called the 'Literature of Reality.' Different writers, of course, reflect differing definitions of reality. In my case, it reflects the perspective and sensibilities of a small town American outsider whose exploratory view of the world is accompanied by the essence of the people and place I have left behind, the overlooked non-newsworthy population that is everywhere, but rarely taken into account by journalists and other chroniclers of reality."

*

"In reading through old newspapers and other antiquated periodicals in the school library and elsewhere, as I sometimes did in my leisure time, it seemed that most o the news printed on the front pages was historically and socially less revealing of the time than that was published in the classified and the display advertising spread through the middle and back pages. The advertising offered detailed sketches and photographs showing the then current fashion in clothing, the body styles of cars, where rental apartments were obtainable and at what cost, what jobs were available to the white-collar and the laboring classes; while the front pages were largely concerned with the words and deeds of many seemingly important people who were no longer important."

*

" ... that gift from my mother: curiosity. My mother also knew that there is a difference between curiosity and nosiness. ... Nosiness represents mainly the interests of the mean-spirited, the one-night-stand temperament of tabloid journalists and even mainstream writers and biographers seizing every opportunity to belittle big names, to publicize a public figure?s slip of the tongue, to scandalize every sexual dalliance even when it bears no relevance to that person?s political or public service."

*

"The telephone, to me, is second only to the tape recorder in undermining the art of interviewing because, among other things, it denies you from learning a great deal from observing a person's face and manner, to say nothing of the surrounding ambience. I also believe people will reveal more of themselves to you if you are physically present; and the more sincere you are in your interest, the better will be your chances of obtaining that person's cooperation."

New faces and places

If you haven't noticed, posts this week have come from a few different people and have hit a variety of subjects. Three reasons for that: I'm pressed for time, Kruse and I don't have enough new ideas to keep people interested, and, finally, that's what Gangrey should be -- a diverse and ongoing conversation about writing and reporting and gangsta rap.

Since new folks are dropping by all the time, I figured it's a good idea to introduce the writers behind the names at the bottoms of the posts lately.

* Michael Kruse is a staff writer in the Hernando County bureau of the St. Pete Times.

* Zack McMillin is a metro reporter at the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Zack moved to metro from sports a few weeks ago and has hit the ground running, bringing a literary narrative flavor to the paper's local pages.

* Ramsey Al-Rikabi is a cops reporter at the Times Herald-Record. Ramsey has a fresh voice and the talent to do great things.

I'm Ben Montgomery and I work in the St. Pete Times' Brandon bureau.

We're always looking for new people to learn from. If you have a spark or know anybody who does, or if you come across something -- a story or a tip or a subject -- that we should be talking about, please give me a shout at bamontgomery@hotmail.com or leave a comment. Let's help each other get better.

Meanwhile, read Michael Brick, Dan Barry and this Op-Ed on what young newspaper readers REALLY want.

Are Katrina Victims Going Back?

Read Vanessa Gezari's story from Houston: On the way to Wal-Mart, they passed a mosque and a truck selling tacos. Inside, Jauney wondered at the food on the shelves: the giant taro root, rough-skinned and hairy, the dried chili peppers and lemon-flavored Lays.

"I wish they had crawfish," she said.

Missing the media in Santa Maria

Read Hank Stuever's story: Even though the courthouse is right next to Santa Maria's lone shopping mall, many people in this town of 83,000, three hours north of Los Angeles, were able to ignore the fuss completely -- if they wanted to. ("Welcome Canadian Golfers," read a big sign in the Holiday Inn lobby this time last year. "Welcome Canadian Golfers," it says again now.)

But many of the courthouse regulars liked it. It started every day at 8 a.m. and ended at 2:30 p.m. Some days it felt as if the court was running a summer camp for tabloid reporters, who would file their stories manically, breathlessly; then, at night, the Fleet Street freelancers and maybe the Japanese film crew, along with their new stateside colleagues, would all go to a bar down the street, Maverick's, which has a mechanical bull, and they would goad one another into riding it. It was Jacko porn by day and "Urban Cowboy" by night -- how American and frivolous it all seemed.

Inside a coach's dilemma

Read Wright's story: They climb higher and higher, the ride a gift from a friend, just one of a thousand little acts of kindness that have gotten the Holleys through. It climbs up toward heaven. Sitting in a gray-leather seat, Larry Holley clutches a snapshot of his entire family, back when they were whole.

“It still doesn’t seem like this is real,” he says. “It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It can’t be happening to Ann. She’s so healthy and full of life. One day, she’s feeling fine, and the next day, she’s code blue. … I have no idea where these 31 years have gone.”

The chain of influence

Check out this innovative series by Janine Anderson, from the Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin (You may have bumped into her on Grangrey). Here's the tease: If a reporter called you on the phone and asked you to name someone who has touched your life, what would you say?

What to leave out

This Fresh Air interview with David Mamet and Shawn Ryan is instructive for storytellers in any medium.

********

Mamet ...

The trick is to leave everything out. That's the whole trick to drama. It's like the ability to hit the fastball, it's the ability to leave out the narration. You've got to leave the narration out because anybody can say, "Well, Jim, welcome back from Antarctica. We haven't seen you since we cured cancer together in 1985. How's your wife? Is she still an albino?"

If you take out the idea that you can overburden the show with narration ... then the question is: What information is really, really needed? And what information can we really do without?

Fast-forwarding Fatherhood

Read Malcolm Garcia's story: He walks the aisles of the supermarket, scrutinizes prices against his coupons.

It was here by the meat counter one afternoon a woman stood and stared at the girls rude as she could be.

“You want to know what happened to us,” Megan said. “We were in a car accident and our mother died.”

“Sorry about how your girls are,” the woman told Rusty.

“Nothing sorry about it,” he said. “We get along.”

A Cold Kind of Sad

The lesson here is always read the classifieds. Damn. Read Jim Walsh's story from City Pages in Minneapolis/St. Paul (Thanks, Sara): He placed his first ad in the "I Saw You" section of the City Pages classified ads a few days later. "Hi, Denise. It's Kevin. Met at Minnesota Music on 2-28-04, great night! Gave you a rose, you taught me to dance. We had some romance. Please call to talk. Denise, you're sweet, can we again meet?"

He heard nothing. He has placed a version of his ad in every issue of City Pages every week ever since. Two years, over one hundred ads, to the tune of $1,500. Last week it ran in the "Message Center" category. "Denise: Miss you. Sweetheart...love you true, only took one tender kiss, touch, yeah, miss sweet kiss, company much, what's phone? Keep in touch, MMC 2-28-04, dance, talk, more? Kevin is lonely, need you only, much."

Read John Jeremiah Sullivan's Upon This Rock: But as my breakfast-time mantra says, I am a professional. And they don't give out awards for that sort of toe-tap, J-school foolishness. I wanted to know what these people are, who claim to love this music, who drive hundreds of miles, traversing states, to hear it live. Then it came, my epiphany: I would go with them. Or rather, they would go with me. I would rent a van, a plush one, and we would travel there together, I and three or four hard-core buffs, all the way from the East Coast to the implausibly named Lake of the Ozarks. We'd talk through the night, they'd proselytize at me, and I'd keep my little tape machine working all the while. Somehow I knew we'd grow to like and pity one another. What a story that would make—for future generations. (Thanks Mark)

More Hank Stuever: For woe unto the manly. So scorned, so sublimated. When was the last time you could throw a punch? Not in the professional world, with its PowerPoint, no-I-in-team manners. We've reduced ideas of manliness to a blue-collar art form -- the lifeguards, the bodyguards, the guys you pay to come over and repair appliances. Congress -- so unmanly, only aiming to please. Lawyers, actors, agents -- nary a manly man among them, settling as they do for a percentage of the action. The only manliness left, Mansfield supposes, is the bad kind, excessive manliness. (Example: Taliban.)

The best narrative songwriter you don't know

My former wiffle teammate, Cory Branan, is releasing his second album, and anyone lucky enough to pick up his first effort, The Hell You Say, knows why it's much anticipated. Anyone who has heard most of the material from 12 Songs (shout out to Randy Newman), knows it's going to be $15 well spent.

We love him here in Memphis. Rolling Stone loved him two years ago, too.

Some sample lyrics, from Whiskey Grove, which will be on the Gangrey CD spectacular when my CD drive regains its mojo.

my mother was dead by the time i was born
in the black of my eyes the gypsy nurse warned
she could already see my path torn between the sun and the moon

so i walked it and i walked it straight
until i passed through so many a gate
that not even the blame and the hate of my father could follow

so roll me into my last shallow bed
use carpenter tacks in the lid
waste not the silk on my head my lover has wove
see that no roses touch my grave
no prayers to a god i never forgave
no final wishes, save that you
bury my body and me down by Whiskey Grove

In Iraq

Jeffrey Gettleman, good guy and proud alum of the Hernando County bureau of the St. Petersburg Times, is back in Iraq for the NYT.

Check out the ending on this bad boy (and the beginning, too, for that matter):

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 13 -- Shiite vigilantes seized four men suspected of terrorist attacks, interrogated them, beat them, killed them and left their bodies dangling from lampposts on Monday morning, witnesses and government officials said.

(Now THERE is one hell of an "authorities said" graf.)

And here's the ending:

As two of the bodies were brought into a Sadr City police station on a flatbed truck, several people spat on them and one man called them dogs.

And a story

Please read Andy Newman's story about a guy who bought a table and got a New York story: Funny how a piece of furniture can bring strangers together.

Beau Willimon and his girlfriend were looking for a table for their apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

On the Web site Craigslist, they saw an elegant oval dining table with a rich mahogany finish: $65. Mr. Willimon called the number. The man at the other end, a Mr. Klein (he never volunteered a first name) would not deliver the table unless he had the money in hand. So Mr. Willimon and his girlfriend took the long train ride to Crown Heights. This was eight weeks ago, on a damp Tuesday night.

Money doesn't matter

Read Kelley Benham's piece on an unhappy swamp rat: It is, by almost any standard, a nice house. There's a Beware of Dog sign in the bay window and some junk cars around back, but compared with his old place, it's a mansion.

The codger cussing in the driveway does not care for it.

"It's just a g-d--- house,'' he says.

Why can't we do this?

Found the StoryCorps site last night and spent an hour being blown away. This is good good stuff. You guys think there is a way to do this sort of thing in print?

"Sweetie, your restaurant is right here."(Listen to this one. It is my favorite so far.)

"Have you ever lied to me?"

"Tell me about mom."

"I got a great, big rock ... and heaved it through the back window of his car."

"Now I want you to know you may be dying. Are you telling the truth?"

All those hits and more at StoryCorps.

Go there. Do it. Now.

Michael Brick's continuing coverage: Most murder defendants do not testify in court; the strategy is too risky. But then, most murder defendants do not take on a SWAT team with a kitchen knife, stab a lawyer during a courtroom escape attempt, apply to represent themselves, face banishment from the courtroom or make obscene gestures at the jury via videoconference.

Kayson Pearson, accused of raping and killing a Hunter College student in April 2003, rounded out that list yesterday. After five weeks of testimony by prosecution witnesses, he took the stand in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn to deny involvement in the killing.

Of Brooksville

Kruse dropped this piece in the Hernando edition on Tuesday.

Read Doherty's story on commuting gangsters: "Mobsters are just like everyone else - it's simple demographics. The money is moving to the suburbs and the Mafia follows the money," says Selwyn Raab. For years, Raab covered the Mob for the New York Times. His 2005 book, "The Five Families," traces the Italian Mafia from its beginnings through the first years of the 21st century.

"Another reason these guys move to the suburbs is they think they'll be harassed less," Raab says. "The FBI isn't as deeply entrenched there."

I meant to post this a few days ago. Please read Jeff Klinkenberg's story about a man who won't give up: Through the open door Freddie spots the Cadillac, looking for parking space among the pickup trucks. Perfectly coiffed, smelling of after-shave, the driver glides into the building. Freddie comes forward and wipes his hands on the back of his dungarees and extends a hand still dirty from harvesting pole beans.

"Do you own this land?'' the stranger asks, giving Freddie's hand a shake.

"Yes, sir,'' answers Freddie, who has tabbed the guy as a developer.

"It's worth a lot of money,'' the developer says. "Ever think of selling?''

"No, sir.''

"Are you sure? You could retire right now. You and your wife could afford to travel. Maybe go to Europe. You could get you a real nice car. Your wife, too.''

Freddie - who was born here 68 years ago and likely will die here - tries to be patient. He says he has no desire to be a millionaire. He lives comfortably. He says his 15-year-old pickup truck is still going strong.

An evening of reading

Check out Dan Barry on a circus in a circus; Wright Thompson on ending the song where it began; Erin Sullivan on a bird man who cries; Colleen Kenney with The Ghosts Of Whiteclay and a love story.

A few things

Roy Wenzl watches people watching a game; Zack McMillin watches a man run; this one from the Oregonian could have been a narrative; the Seattle Times with a massacre that left seven dead; Tizon profiles Dirk Kempthorne; and Libby Copeland at a dress-up party.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Series

Read John Mangels' seven-part series, Plagued By Fear: Dr. Thomas Butler was the government's go-to guy if you were worried about a plague attack - and in the hair-trigger months after Sept. 11, 2001, a lot of federal officials were. For parts of three decades, he had treated the Black Death's bloated victims in the Third World. He'd plumbed the bacteria's dark secrets in university labs in Cleveland, and later in Lubbock, Texas, searching for better ways to blunt its lethal kiss. After Jan. 11, 2003, none of that mattered. (Thanks, Mark.)

I could give flip about Mizzou basketball, but this is why people know Wright Thompson's name: Truman the Tiger sat in a darkened hallway, mascot head by his side. A small crowd had gathered inside Mizzou Arena, some to see Mike Anderson be named head basketball coach, others for the circus.

There was certainly going to be a news conference Sunday afternoon. Everyone knew that. But as the appointed hour approached, no one was sure what would happen. A hiring? A firing? Both? Forty-five days after Quin Snyder had been shown the door, 45 days of increasingly weirder news coming from Columbia, the strangest was saved for last.

The day began with word of a new coach and of an emergency Board of Curators meeting, called to discuss the future of Missouri Director of Athletics Mike Alden. It was a meeting Alden himself didn’t learn of until he arrived home Sunday morning from walking his dogs. The smart money said he was gone.

Inside the arena, a stage was erected. Every so often, the PA announcer would make an announcement to the small crowd, which let people know that Alden’s fate was unknown. “We’re waiting for the end of that meeting,” he said.

Cheerleaders took their places again and again, returning to their seats after each false alarm. Women’s basketball coach Cindy Stein walked into the building, smiled and shook her head. Athletic department employees joked about hitting Shiloh, a local bar, for a round.

And endings

First this, then this this one yesterday. Makes me think Andy Newman is just a read-to-the-end kind of guy.

A lesson in tight writing

I go back to this piece once in a while for a reminder of the power of brevity. I remember watching Steve work on this story. He listened again and again to a tape of Charlie speaking and tried to write with Charlie's voice.

Here it is: Charlie's walking through the graveyard in his new sneakers. Gray New Balance with red and black laces. First ones he ever bought.
He's wearing his new watch. Silver and gold. From Wal-Mart.
He wants to learn to tell time. He's working now, packing nail polish, first job.
Charlie keeps walking past the headstones. He must find his mother. Emily Nessi. He has something to give her.

Lobsters and a walk-on wife

Feinstein is known best for his sometimes long, padded, sappy books, but he does know a thing or two about access -- and, like in this story, how to use small details to show bigger stuff: Last Saturday night, as has become tradition during this remarkable NCAA tournament run, the George Mason basketball team was having night-before-a-game dinner at an Outback Steakhouse. This wasn't just any dinner or any game: The next afternoon the Patriots would play Connecticut for a spot in the Final Four.

Liz Larranaga had happily ordered a salad, a small steak, a baked potato and a soda. Then she happened to notice that several people had ordered lobster tails to go with their steak.

"Jim, you think it would be okay if I had some lobster?" she said to her husband of almost 35 years. "It looks pretty good."

"You want lobster; you got lobster," Jim Larranaga answered.

When the lobster arrived, the man who was about to become America's Coach turned to everyone at the table and said with a smug grin, "I think Liz is enjoying being on scholarship."

To which, without missing a beat, his wife replied: "Don't you think I deserve it? I've been a walk-on for 35 years."

A few stories

Dan Barry with A Safe Haven, but Not Safe From All; T.O. does Dallas, so the Morning News finally makes it to Alexander City, Ala.; Robert L. Smith in Cleveland with Ohio new 'border' town; the LA Times starts a series; and, man, I sure am enjoying Gary Smith's Beyond the Game (Thanks, Sara). Check out this opening graph of Damned Yankee, which doesn't let up for a second:

Everything you will read on the next 23 pages revolves around one photograph. The rest of the old man's past, you must understand, is all but gone. The framed baseball pictures were smashed by his hammer. The scrapbook thick with newspaper clippings was fed to the furnace in the basement of the Sears, Roebuck in Paramus, New Jersey. The trophies, with their figurines of ballplayers and eagles and angel-like women, were placed on a portable table in the middle of a ball field and annihilated, one day, by the old man's rifle arm. Have you ever heard the popping sound an angel makes when it's struck by a fastball?

I can't say enough how important it is that you read W.C. Heinz's Death of a Racehorse: They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, two year olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for the purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of the cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped working on the kidding to watch, most of the interested in one horse.

"Air Lift," Jim Roach said. "Full brother of Assault."

The morning of a big sports night, especially when it involves a team from L.A., Plaschke, of course, is a must-hit on the Web run.

Read up heading into tonight's game:

"The player tonight might be thinking they will play many more games like this in their careers," O'Bannon says. "I'm here to tell them, they will not."

(The Lady In the Mask)

Saundra came in a few weeks ago talking about a wacky obit she ran across. Turned into a damn fine story: Magdalena and Andres married and had six children together; she worked in the circus and he dodged the clutches of his lions. But Ramos couldn't resist the fawning attention of his female followers.

Magdalena left him. But her rope-and-mouth routine couldn't pay the bills. She had six children to feed. So she turned to the next best thing: boxing. After knocking the daylights out of a woman one night, she got an offer from a promoter.

"You'd make a great wrestler," he told her.

Wrestling paid better. And Magdalena was good at it.

From Donald Murray, Pulitzer Prize winner and writing teacher: "The more pofessional we become, the greater the danger that we will see what we expect to see. Experience, of course, is an advantage, but it has a dark side. It may keep us from seeing the real story ... The effective writers must always have an essential naivete -- skepticism must be balanced by innocence. The reporter must be capable of seeing what is new. Cliches of language are significant misdemeanors, but chiches of vision are felonies."

Brick strikes again

Read his story: The old musician died on a southbound Q train. It was after midnight on a Sunday and the body of the old musician rode to Stillwell Avenue where the subway tracks end and there is an amusement park and then there is the sea.

The drama behind the drama

Check out Alexa James' piece in today's Times Herald-Record: On a December night, in the high school auditorium, junior Noah Meyer finds himself steaming across the Atlantic on a luxury ocean liner.

Ignore the plaid pants and Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt. Ignore the red hair with two black stripes, like a skunk, that run from his forehead to the nape of his neck. Noah is now an English gentleman, and he's about to do the highly anticipated "hot pants" scene.

Knock, knock.

"Come in," he calls.

"Freeze! Let's hear that again, only louder," booms a woman's voice in the back of the auditorium. It's the director. "I can't cast somebody I can't hear."

McMillin on the road

Let's hope Zack stays safe out there covering the tornados in Tennessee. His stories are stellar. Read them here and here: The saddest hillside in Gibson County was clogged with the remnants of a young family's life, blown away by Sunday night's deadly storm.

A mounted deer wedged under a fallen tree. A stuffed bear, still able to chirp, "Time for the bear, cha cha cha." A purse, glittery and multi-colored. Diaper bags. Children's sneakers.

"Hey, Mama," Ashley Austin yelled out from near a huge tree that had been peeled and filleted into some monstrous sculpture, "I found a video camera. You think it's got anything in it?"

Ashley and her mother, Tammy, spent two grim hours Monday foraging through what appeared to have been a thicket of woods behind the property that had belonged to Tammy's cousin, Brad, and his family.

Maybe that video camera held images of 5-year-old Tyce Taylor's first T-Ball game, played just Friday.

Maybe it showed his father, 28-year-old Brad, hoisting his latest trophy animal.

Or maybe it showed the whole family together in their big house -- 29-year-old Tanya and 3-year-old Kyle with Brad and little Tyce -- before a powerful tornado barreled onto the ridge and took their lives.

At a Strip of Gay Clubs in Southeast, One Last Inning Before Striking Out

Read Hank Stuever's Ballpark Blues: No amount of Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey songs could mask the pain. One by one, until the wee hours Monday morning, the reigning drag queens of Half Street SE descended the stairs at Ziegfeld's cabaret to strut their last, blowing kisses to admirers and making a few more sweepingly glamorous gestures -- all of it a farewell to the shabby but perfect place they called home for three decades.

Ziegfeld's, and four other establishments on the same forsaken industrial block at Half and O streets, closed yesterday in a cruelly predictable high school metaphor: The jocks win.

A Different way to tell a story

Check out S.I. Rosenbaum's story of trapeze artist Simone Dykes (click the link under Brandon Times), told in a comic. We ran this in the section, and they added the cool online component with her audio. What do you think?

Drama behind the drama, repeat

I'm posting this again because I didn't realize it was a more than a single part. Man, I enjoyed this. Here's Alexa James' series on a high school play.

Thomas Lake's St. Pete Times debut: Yvonne Holcombe stood firm as night fell on her husband's mind. She busied his hands with household tasks. She watched as he wandered the back yard, gathering twigs. She coaxed him back to bed when he rose to hunt for phantom intruders.

Then she had brain surgery for a blood clot, she said, and she came out too weak to chase him. So she sent him to a group home where she thought he'd be safe.

Someone else liked it, too

Guess who Nell Lake just threw up at the Narrative Digest. (Hint: We talked about it.) Nell has a fantastic critique of the piece.

"We like the spareness of this story's telling, the nodding at the theme of human connection, but the stepping back from it, just as the events themselves do," Nell writes. "We like the quirky details of Klein and the wonderfully timed line about the half-full glass; Klein's pressing his face against the screen; his sudden and mysterious death; and the ghostly ending. This is the kind of story that signals to readers that they're getting something other than the usual civic-oriented news. But it's also the kind of story, we think, that can make readers feel they belong to a readership -- especially, in this case, if they're urban and, perhaps, young."

Driving The Devil To Montana

Doyle Murphy passed along this piece by Mike Peters from the Greeley Tribune, on a schizophrenic who killed his folks a few years ago:

Just above his bed in Ward F-7 at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, attached to the calendar, is a small photo of his parents, Victor and Elizabeth Hillman. They are smiling.

Larry Hillman remembers the good things: How his father taught him to play the guitar; riding the ranch in northern Weld County; his mother, the teacher.

And he will never forget the day he killed them.

In a Community Where Many Roads Lead to the Military, Deciding Whether to Enlist Becomes a Turning Point

Mark said it, and I agree. Anne Hull's latest is a lesson in journalism:

Blake Johnson is almost 18. Tan and muscular, he plays third base for the Clarkdale High School Bulldogs. He is a B student who says "Yes, sir" when his coach corrects his batting stance. Wisps of brown hair fall above his green eyes, and a rope choker is clasped around his neck. He lives in a mobile home with his mother and younger brother on Old Highway 80 on a piece of land that never quite dries.

On the afternoon before the opening of baseball season, a balloon floats inside the cab of his truck, a gift from one of the Diamond Girls at school, with a note that says, "Go Big Senior!" But any poetry about the waning days of youthful abandon feels false in this part of central Mississippi, where the bridge to Iraq is a short one.

Read Hank Stuever's latest: Tony from Gardena, Calif., is calling: "My question is I'm in a band now and we're starting off and we came up with a name and want to know if any other band has this name. Like, is there a Web site where we can put in the name and see? And if we use this same name . . ."

"Okay, Tony," Escalante says. "I've got a Web site for you. Ready?"

"Um, yeah," Tony says.

"Okay, I'm going to spell it for you because it's kind of hard to pronounce. Ready? G. . ."

"G," Tony repeats.

"O," Escalante says.

"O. . . . "

"O. G. L. E," Escalante continues.

(By the way, Hank IS back from editorland.)

Who's that?

This year's Masters was all about Damon Hack and Wright Thompson.

The Story of a kid running

Check out Colleen Kenney's piece from Huron, S.D.: This is the first thing he remembers: It’s dark. Maybe 3 a.m. He’s in his hospital bed in Rapid City about a month after the seizure.

Something takes hold of his legs and pulls him to the foot of the bed.

He hears animal noises. Buffalo.

He thinks he’s hallucinating, or dying. Then he remembers the vision he had five years before, when he was a boy in a sacred run around the Black Hills.

The brown buffalo and the white buffalo cornered him on the road, told him he would be the fastest runner around.

My cave is my home; My corner is my freedom

The story of Mike Russell: Out on the corner, some people drive by and shout FREAK, others tell him to ROCK ON, MAN, and then there are some who sit at red lights and put up their windows and flick their locks.

The kids around Spring Hill call him the Caveman. The seniors at Springstead call him "Most Likely to Become a Superstar" in their yearbook superlatives.

His mother calls him Michael.

"He's a good boy," Shari Russell said last week.

Newburgh Rising

John Doherty on a rally in Newburgh: It took 10 minutes for them all to pass. They sang in Spanish, carried signs in English and chanted seamlessly in two languages. They carried flags, but an old pro like Martinez could pick them out by their haircuts, their faces: Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, a Peruvian here and there, and, most of all, Mexicans. They stretched over a quarter-mile, and the white police who stopped traffic for them put their number as high as 2,000.

They drew an audience from shops and eateries, blurred the line between marcher and onlooker, and they made real for once what the U.S. Census had announced five years ago: there are more Latinos today in Newburgh than either blacks or whites.

"Oh. My. God," said Mayor Nick Valentine when the procession reached City Hall.

From this week's Sports Writing conference at the institute

SI's Tom Verducci, in a handout, from a breakout session called "Bringing a magazine sensibility to the daily paper":

"The bottom line is I think newspapers think in terms of snapshots instead of movies, as magazines do. By that I mean, the newspaper will look for a moment in time to feed the deadline of the day. The magazine allows many snapshots to occur and puts them together. Often that's a case of manpower. The newspaper has to be willing to yank a writer off a beat or a column for a more extended period to get the bigger bang from a story."

Really?

Do we agree with this?

My take: We look for snapshots, sure, but that doesn't mean we can't string them together to make a "movie." I think we newspaper folks generally just make short films instead of Hollywood blockbusters. Which is fine.

Also ...

Someone asked a question about narrative and called it "the latest newsroom revelation." Ugh. Then he went on to say how he looked for "five times" the detail when he was reporting for, you know, a narrative, instead of, you
know, a "regular" story. Ugh.

Made me want to cry.

(Keep up with the conference tips and talks here)

Alexa James and notebooks in a grocery bag

I asked Alexa James from the Times Herald-Record in upstate New York to give us some background on her series about a high school musical. Alexa is a still-new-to-newspapers beat reporter and it was her first attempt at a series. You'd never know it. I ate it up, and I'm sure readers did, too.

Here's Alexa:

Started as an idea that had been floating around in my head for a while. Knew it had been done before, at big papers. Thought it could work here too. Of the two school districts I cover (Valley Central and the gigantic Newburgh Enlarged City School District) I thought VC was more universal. That's clutch at a paper like ours, which covers three counties that usually could care less about one another.

Talked with VC administration about it off and on for months, but almost missed call backs. I had a funny feeling I should check in at the school, and what do you know, the audition were that night! So I just showed up. At least I was already familiar with the show (I did it in high school.)

After auditions, I was hooked because I knew I'd have great access. The director was candid and unguarded, and because she'd been with the district so long, she didn't have anyone (administration) looking over her shoulder. I could come and go as I pleased. The kids gave me cell phones and myspace pages and plenty of info I could have done without.

The trick, as always, was convincing the editors to take the bait. We batted it around at some casual meetings, but I really twisted my regional editor's arm. He probably said Ok just to get me out of the office. I was banking on the fact that he'd sell it big when the time came.

I never promised the kids, teachers or parents anything (because I wasn't convinced the paper would stick with me.) I just told them I was going to do something about their show. They found out that week, along with yours truly, that three consecutive stories would run in the daily news section.

The reporting came easy, maybe because I have a 17-year-old brother, or maybe because all the girls liked my heels, but what surprised me most about the whole process was how few questions I had to ask. There was not one scheduled-in-advance or phone interview. You just show up, and the teenagers suck you into their lives. The hard part was keeping up. They can sing, dance, solve math equations, talk on the phone, plan outfits, flirt and scavenge for food all at the same time. They don't edit their personal lives. I actually learned a lot about them from the questions they asked me.

All that and the week before I was terrified that I didn't have a story.

1) Nothing Earth-shattering had happened. No tragedies, no scandals, no close-calls. In all, the whole process rolled along as planned. That's not news.

2) Because nothing outrageous happened, I neglected to dump my notebooks. I just carried them around in a grocery bag, figuring I'd probably lost all the good ones anyway. I was afraid to type up my notes because I didn't know if I had enough. I was out of time, and now, the editors were finally on board and expecting three stories.

The only real plot point I'd pin-pointed early was Ed's haircut. I told him from day one that I wanted to be there when he finally shaved his head. I reminded him every time I saw him.
"Now, Ed," I'd say. "What are you going to do before you get your hair cut?"
"Call Alexa," he'd say.
"Show me my number in your cell phone. Ok, good. Don't forget."

The call came on a Saturday:
"Uhh, Alexa."
"Hey, Ed. What's up?"
"I think I'm gonna get my hair cut today."
"Cool. Where and when?"
"Uh, I think I'm gonna need a ride, so whatever works for you."

When I finally dumped the notebooks, I realized that since I'd never done any formal interviews with well-planned questions, what I really had was just a massive collection of things that amused me about teenagers. It seemed super generic, but when I talked about it with friends, those
things seemed to amuse them too.

So I was counting on my little collection to appeal to readers, for whatever reason. Maybe they have teens. Maybe they were in a musical or on a sports team or a math team or whatever. The process is the same - young people putting themselves out there to see what will happen to their
identities if they do.

A fellow reporter, John Doherty, read the rough drafts and really helped me close the seams and pace the action. As for the editors, on the first day I just dumped it in their laps and crossed my fingers. They liked it, thank God, and left me and Doherty to our own devices the next two days.
Luckily, nothing too crazy happened anywhere in Orange, Ulster or Sullivan counties those three days (though the Grand Rebbe almost died) so the stories got nice play.

They ran consecutively, and the last one came out on opening night. It was bizarre to still be hanging out with the kids as their personal stories were playing out in the paper. Plus, I was still reporting for the last piece.

I never gave them clues about what I was going to write about, but everything that ran was stuff we'd talked about at least a few times throughout the course of reporting. In other words, I knew they'd recognize their own details and conversations when they saw them in print.

I also inconspicuously double-checked stuff I was planning to use during the last few rehearsals to make sure my older notes were still sharp.

The day before the first story ran, I gave them a little speech about how I could never squeeze a cast of 60 people into a story by name; about how I had to write a series that would mean something to people that had never met them, had never been to Montgomery or Valley Central High School, and maybe, had never even seen a musical.

They got the point, and they liked the results. I didn't even get any parental complaints, which is miraculous when writing anything about anybody's kids.

So there you go. You actually can have fun now and then writing good stuff about a school district. But you'll probably have to do it on your own time. (At one point, two weeks out, I was reminding the photo dept. that we needed to shoot a dress rehearsal and the response was, "Is this that story about the high school musical? Who cares.")

Ha ha. Anyway, glad you like it. Thanks for the post.

Garage Crew Marches, Boss Worries About Profit

Read Finkel and N.C. Aizenman from a few days ago: On most days, Mohammed Butt and his older brother, Imran, can be found in an office decorated with photographs of their family back in Pakistan. A dozen years after entering the U.S. on tourist visas, both are permanent U.S. residents who share a four-bedroom house in Northern Virginia and co-own a business that is utterly dependent on Latino workers.

Every one of the six mechanics they employ is a Latino, and as all six made plans last week to go to the rally and shut down the business for at least part of the day, the two brothers sat in the office, bewildered.

"I don't understand why they are doing this," Imran said. "I swear I don't."

A man who touches happiness, then lets go

Read S.I. Rosenbaum's profile: In Clancy Huffman's life there have been 825 moments of pure happiness.

They haven't been his. But he was there. He was close enough to see the bride's hand tremble. He doesn't know what brings them to this moment, when he pronounces them husband and wife. And he doesn't know what will happen when they leave.

Huffman just says the words he transcribed from a scene in a black-and-white movie long ago:

"To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer ..."

Dreaming of Citizenship

Read Corey Kilgannon's story: He lives in a small room he rents for $400 a month in Woodside with a bathroom in the hall he shares with three other men, all Colombian and in a similar situation.

He commutes on the elevated No. 7 train, known as the immigrant express, which rumbles along Roosevelt Avenue, bringing workers into Manhattan from Flushing, Corona, Jackson Heights and Woodside.

Mr. Carvajal works evenings for $6.50 an hour at a small parking garage in Manhattan, where the required skills are parking in tight spaces and saying as little as possible. He knows just enough English to tell customers how much they owe for how many hours parked.

A man tells of family responsibilities

Read Chris Goffard's story: He said the Brotherhood killed one gang member for engaging in openly homosexual activity, and killed another inmate for informing to authorities. He said the Brotherhood provided protection for mob boss John Gotti in prison, and Mills hoped that Gotti would supply him with a good lawyer to handle his appeal on a murder conviction.

Roach said gang member John Greschner once bragged to him of murdering, on Brotherhood orders, Richard "Rhino" Andreasen for snitching.

Roach said he and Greschner were bonding.

"Murder stories," said Roach, "are part of the getting-to-know-each-other process."

A liberal blogger finds an outlet and a community

Read David Finkel's story: In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

"Darfur is not hopeless," she begins typing, and pauses.

"Ugh," she says.

"You are not helpless," she continues typing, and pauses again.

"Weak."

She deletes everything and starts over.

"WAKE THE [expletive] UP," she writes next, and this time, instead of pausing, she keeps going, typing harder and harder on a keyboard that is surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, a can of nonalcoholic beer, an album with photos of her dead father and a taped-up note -- staring at her -- on which she has scrawled "Why am I/you here?"

Till The End

Read Thomas Lake's story: One week ago today on a boulevard in Jacksonville, an uncommon woman punched her accelerator and rolled west toward the skyline.

She drove a dark SUV full of teenage boys, none of whom seemed to know where she was going. They would never find out.

A man in a red BMW coupe cut into the middle lane just ahead of her bumper, and the uncommon woman hit the brake. She also mashed the horn. This last fact is crucial to our story, because it shows us the start of her anger, and anger runs through our story like a boiling stream.

The P-p-pulitzer prizes

David Finkel won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for his piece on exporting democracy to Yemen.

And check out who was a finalist for explanatory: "Mark Johnson and Kawanza Newson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for their riveting chronicle of a teenage girl's miraculous recovery from a rabies infection that medicine had previously considered fatal."

Congrats, Mark. That's huge, man.

Here are the rest:

PUBLIC SERVICE
Two Prizes: The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.
The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, La.

BREAKING NEWS REPORTING
Staff of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, La.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Susan Schmidt, James V. Grimaldi and R. Jeffrey Smith of The Washington Post

EXPLANATORY REPORTING
David Finkel of The Washington Post

BEAT REPORTING
Dana Priest of The Washington Post

NATIONAL REPORTING
Two Prizes: James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times

Staffs of The San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING
Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley of The New York Times

FEATURE WRITING
Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo.

Nominated: "Dan Barry of The New York Times for his rich portfolio of pieces capturing slices of life in hurricane-battered New Orleans as well as his own New York City, and Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune for her intimate and compelling story about a federal judge whose husband and mother were murdered by an angry former plaintiff."

COMMENTARY
Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times

CRITICISM
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post

EDITORIAL WRITING
Rick Attig and Doug Bates of The Oregonian, Portland

EDITORIAL CARTOONING
Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY
Staff of The Dallas Morning News

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY
Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo.

Thoughts? Ramblings? Insight?

Andy Newman's $65 table

We've talked about Andy Newman's story a few times (here and here) but if there's ever been one worth revisiting, it's that piece.

Kruse hit him up for some more info. Read it again, and consider their back and forth:

MICHAEL: The $64,000 questions about the story on the $65 table: How did it come up? How did you hear about it? And once it did come up, what made you choose to structure it the way you did, saving Mr. Klein's weird, random death 'til three grafs from the end?

ANDY: i got incredibly lucky on this one. the guy who bought the table is a friend of a times reporter. he asked her to put him in touch with the reporter who wrote the initial story about the murder. that was me.

as to how it wound up with a somewhat nonconventional structure (for a newspaper story), it was just the only structure that made sense. i knew immediately that the only way to tell the story so that the murder would have any real impact on the reader was to spring it at the end. i've tried stuff like that a few times here at the times but always gotten bounced, but this time my editor, who suggested maybe having a mention of the murder up high, quickly agreed with me that it was way better to save it for the end.

most of the work of the story was just boiling it down. initially it was supposed to be very short, like 500 words, for this short-feature thing we do on tuesdays called INK, but when i started writing i knew that wouldn't be enough, so i asked to take it out of the Ink well and give it more space. soon it had ballooned to like 1100 words which i knew was way too long. so i started chipping away.

the guy who bought the table, a playwright, had mentioned that the whole episode had reminded him of a john cheever story called 'the lowboy' about a family battle over a piece of furniture, and i had never read cheever at all, so i (uncharacteristically) got his collected stories out of the library and actually read a bunch of them. i had avoided cheever because i don't much like reading stories about the problems of rich people, but i was completely won over by the ruthless economy of his prose and in fact his general ruthlessness, and tried to bring it to bear on my story, doing as much by inference rather than exposition as i could get away with. (lest you think we at the times always have the leisure on every story to sit around reading cheever and honing our prose for days on end, suffice it to say that we do not).

the main trim to the story, though, was done by the metro editor, who simply lopped off the last 200 words. he said it had the best chance of getting on page 1 that way, and once it was accepted for page 1 i was in no position to argue with him, even though i loved a lot of what was in the trimmed part and thought it put the whole episode more in perspective. in the end, though, i had to agree that the shorter version packed more punch.

if you wanna compare the 2 endings, you may do so:

published ending:

Mr. Klein 's shooting remains unsolved. The police have not been able to find a witness. The table sits 10 feet from Mr. Willimon's bed, next to the desk where he writes all day. He looks over and sees Mr. Klein on his knees, polishing the table legs.

original ending

Mr. Klein's shooting remains unsolved. The table sits 10 feet from Mr. Willimon's bed, next to the desk where he writes all day. He thinks about Mr. Klein on his knees polishing the table legs.

"It's kind of like having a tombstone in your dining room," he said as he sat at the table last Thursday, smoking.

But he cannot let go of the table. Or of Mr. Klein. He pulled up a photo on his computer and pointed to a young man in a basketball uniform.

"This is Keval Williams, who pulled him out of his car," he said, the last person to see Mr. Klein alive, or possibly the first to see him dead. Either way, Mr. Willimon would like to talk with him if he can find the nerve.

Mr. Willimon thinks about contacting Mr. Klein's brother, his grown children.

"It's a delicate balance," he said. "These people might say, 'What is this, some kind of morbid curiosity?' " He conceded that his interest in Mr. Klein may be, in part, professional. "But it's more than that. He was a real person. I want to know who he was."

"This is random," Mr. Willimon said. "But at some point it's as random as you choose it to be. And it's not random anymore."

thanks for the attention,

andy

(Cool of Andy to do that. Michael, too. Look for more posts like this in the future. Hope you find them useful.)

A pulitzer finalist retrospective

I asked Mark Johnson for a link to his fantastic Pulitzer finalist piece, and he sent this: "Feel free to let us know what worked and what didn't and what we could have done to make it better. Just like you, I'm trying to get better at this."

Says a lot about Mark. So here's your chance. What did you think?

Doing something historical

Meg Martin wrote the other day about Alex Wolfe's tips on doing the historical feature. Fantastic opportunities exist for that, although we don't do many in the news pages. We've talked about Michael Brick's The Man Who Walked Away and a few others. But it seems like sports writers do this more.

Two examples: Alex Zesch pointed out Year Zero from the OC Weekly, and Keith Goldberg passed along Long Memories From A Baseball Classic, from the Washington Post. Both are good reads. Both make me want to do something similar. Anybody have success with these? How did you start? Where did you go?

Check out Chip Scanlan with Samuel G. Freedman: There's a temptation, once you've mastered a certain skill or form, to endlessly repeat it, especially if you're praised for doing it well. Routine is safe. But routine is the enemy of growth. So you can't grow unless you're ready to risk failure and to stare down your own fears.

A mystery in concrete

Read Michael Brick's story: In the days after the disappearance, the Randall family had a backyard party. Neighbors later told the police of a foul odor; Ms. Randall said that a family dog was buried in the yard.

In 2000, Ms. Randall moved to North Carolina. That same year, Ms. Williams went to meet the new owners of the house on Harman Street. She brought a police detective, who asked for permission to dig up the concrete. The new owners said they had planned to do the excavation themselves within the year.

'Whatever I do in life, it’s gonna bother me'

Read Wright Thompson's story: Zack Greinke is alone, something that seems to both comfort and frighten him. The normally busy baseball facility has gone silent. Just green grass and brown dirt and white chalk — the simple things that have always drawn him to the game.

When the young Royals pitcher speaks, his voice is quiet but strong. “Most people who have my problem have it when they’re by themselves,” he says.

A man and his chalk

Read Lane Degregory's story: Find him if you can. Stake out the sidewalks. The poet is as elusive as his verses.

He signs his work in script: Jacob Christiano. A lyrical name.

It's fake. Another one of his creations. Jacob Christiano doesn't exist in any state database. No driver's license, birth certificate or court records bear that name.

So you ask around town. Has anyone seen him? What does he look like? When does he work?

"I'd guess he's in his late 20s, early 30s,'' says Mark Lecato, who owns Schakolad chocolate shop at Central Avenue and Fourth Street. "He always rides his bike and carries a backpack. He's kind of quirky.''

The poet has left three poems outside Lecato's shop. Sometimes he comes in to ask for a cup of water. "He sells copies of his poems too. A page for a dollar,'' Lecato said. Someone at the shop bought a sheet of hot pink paper with four poems printed on it; two e-mail addresses were hand-scribbled between the tiny type.

But when you try to send a message, it comes back "undeliverable." So you pass around your card, beg people to call if they run into the poet.

Weeks later, outside a deli, another poem appears:

Remember that night

We meandered

Down to the beach

& huddled together ...

Read to the end

Here's Mike Dawson: The man just wanted to start his lawnmower. But things this afternoon got complicated and dangerous.

Fast.

A few stories and an invite

Here are Hank Stuever, Tom Hallman Jr. and Michell Roberts, and Tomas Alex Tizon. Please post something good if you see it out there.

I should've called

Sorry. I slipped out on business for a few days. Hope all is well out there in NewspaperLand.
Mark Johnson asked Dan Barry for his Pulitzer entries, and here they are. Forgive the funny characters.

A Last Whiff of Fulton 's Fish, Bringing a Tear
By DAN BARRY

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of
glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes;
fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna's cigar. Of Canada ,
Florida , and the squid-ink East River . Of funny
fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat
onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with
coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented
ice.

This fragrance of fish and man pinpoints one
place in the New York vastness: a small stretch
of South Street where peddlers have sung the
song of the catch since at least 1831, while
all around them, change. They were hawking fish
here when an ale house called McSorley's opened
up; when a presidential aspirant named Lincoln
spoke at Cooper Union; when the building of a
bridge to Brooklyn ruined their upriver view.

Take it in now, if you wish, if you dare,
because the rains will come to rinse this
distinct aroma from the city air. Some Friday
soon, perhaps next month, the fish sellers will
spill their ice and shutter their stalls, pack
their grappling hooks and raise a final toast
beneath the ba-rump and hum of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive .

And on the Monday, they will begin peddling
their dead-eyed wares inside a custom-made
building in the Hunts Point section of the
Bronx , to be named the New Fulton Fish Market
Cooperative, and the old Fulton Fish Market --
that raucous stage of open-air overnight commerce -- will be no
more.

The fish market's closing should come as no
surprise, though it does. From the beginning,
New York questioned the location of this rough
and odoriferous trade. In 1854, a city elder
wondered whether ''a more advantageous
disposition may not be made of that valuable
property by the removal of the Fish Market.''
And in 1859, another sachem suggested moving
the market uptown, in part because the ebb and
flow of the East River was, as The New York
Times delicately put it, ''not sufficiently strong to carry off the
>offal.''

Offal and the official's concomitant complaint
of a blanket of maggots on the water were not
issues in the decision to move the market
finally to Hunts Point (a plan that dates back
at least to the mid-1950's). Instead, the
creeping conversion of Manhattan into a
monstrous mall for the affluent played a role,
as did the grudging realization that the market
had become impractical, anachronistic.
Fishermen haven't unloaded their catch there for more than a
generation.

Before it leaves us, then; before it lives only
in news footage and movies like ''Splash'': one
last look at a part of the city taken for
granted, save by fish people, nighthawks and
urban anthropologists. One long, last
inhalation of the exquisite Fulton Fish Market bouquet.

Three in the morning, and forklifts clatter
over rutted pavement, unloaded trucks sigh in
escape, and workers pierce wax-coated cases
with grappling hooks -- whup! whup! -- as they move fish from here
to
>there.

Some lights of the market stand before the
silvery truck of a man who calls himself Steve
the Coffee Guy. Beansie, the union official, is
there, smoking a cigar, and Richie Klein, a
burly fish salesman, savoring a cigarette, and
Joe Tuna, on his forklift, drinking tea. When
Joe Tuna glides over curb and cobblestone, his
meaty biceps jiggle so much that the tattoos move like cartoons.

They wear rubber boots and soiled sneakers that
never cross the thresholds of their homes;
clean jeans and fish-bloodied shorts; polo
shirts and T-shirts, some torn in the back by
the tips of the hooks slung over their shoulders.

In winter, the East River winds blow through
you no matter what you wear, so Steve the
Coffee Guy will warm himself with a propped-up
propane heater, in homage to barrels of flames
that once flickered wickedly along South
Street. On this summer's night, though, the
muggy air clings like lotion to the skin, and
coolness is found at the coffee truck's icy bed
of soda, over which hangs a dated photograph of
a beautiful young woman in shorts, briskly walking.

The rumor, or the hope, is that it's South
Street Annie, also known as Shopping Bag Annie,
that shrunken woman with wild gray hair who
strolls the market calling ''Yoohoo!'' Selling
cigarettes and newspapers from her red-wire
cart, she is coarse, ribald, ubiquitous: the
flawed mother of fish town. A worker confides
that on his first day in the market more than a
decade ago, he was instructed to kiss one of
her pendulous breasts -- for good luck.

In the market, superstition demands that you
watch out for stray animals and broken people.
The men take care of her, enduring her rants,
her feigned grabs at their crotches. The New
York Post costs a quarter; the men give her a
dollar. The Daily News costs 50 cents; they give her a dollar, maybe
two.

Thank you, sweetie, she says. What a guy.

Burly Mr. Klein grabs his coffee and walks over
to Stall 31, where he and a partner run Third
Generation Seafood in what is known as the New
Market Building; the old building was
demolished after a chunk of it fell into the
river in 1936. He passes crates of croakers,
porgies and ''day-boat'' Montauk fluke, which
means it was caught less than 24 hours ago.

He pauses to watch one of his fillet men,
Wilson Quirizumbay, slice a tuna carcass so
close to the bone that only maroon wisps of
flesh remain. ''They have a feel for the bone,
and for the knife,'' Mr. Klein says. ''The
skill is in the yield. He's gonna give me 70 percent.''

In the next stall stands Vince nt Tatick, of the
Joseph H. Carter Fish Company. His father ran
Frank Tatick Fillet under the old Sweet's
Restaurant. Both are gone now, and here is the
son, twirling a grappling hook as though it
were a child's toy. He wears a dark-green
shirt, dark-green pants, and a camouflage
headband, sports five pencils and a pack of
Parliaments in his breast pocket, and keeps a
Marine Corps knife on his hip. Rambo among fish.

Mr. Tatick has no opinion about the market's
move, he says, other than: what is, is. But he
wonders about leaving behind the nuns at St.
Rose's Home, on the Lower East Side , who nursed
his father in his final two years. During that
time, the Taticks agreed that it would be nice
to give the nuns some fish, 25 pounds worth, every Friday.

When his father died, Mr. Tatick says, ''I
didn't know how to say, 'Sorry, the deal is off.' So I never said
>anything.''

That was more than 40 years ago, he says. ''I still give them
fish.''

This is just one story among thousands, tens of
thousands, to rise from the fishy swirl, only
to dissipate from memory with the passing of time and old
fishmongers.

All those market fires, including the
devastating blaze of 1878, possibly caused by
rats munching on matchsticks. That strange,
huge turtle brought to shore in 1900. The dream
that a customs official had during Prohibition,
leading to the discovery of 2,000 bags of
whiskey hidden among tons of fish in the hold
of the schooner Caroline. The dead fisherman
found hanging over an ice machine in 1939,
leaving nothing but a last known address of the
Seamen's Church Institute, 25 South Street .

Many of the stories centered on characters who
worked hard for their nicknames: Iceberg Tommy,
who settled his nerves by immersing his feet in
ice; Shrimp Sammy, who promoted the freshness
of his shellfish by eating them raw; Porgy Joe,
who strolled the market with two live crabs
clinging to his ears by their claws. Men of the water, now dust.

There was Alfred E. Smith, governor and
presidential candidate, who often bragged of
earning his degree from F.F.M., for Fulton Fish
Market, the educational institution of his
fish-peddling youth. And Joseph Lanza, a
mobster who controlled the market for decades
-- whether in or out of prison -- and whose
sobriquet of '' Soc ks'' referred to his penchant
for punching those who refused to pay him for the right to sell
fish.

A hearing in 1931 became one of the first
tutorials in the true ways of the market,
thanks to the testimony of several
uncomfortable witnesses, including a fish-store owner named James
>McAleese.

''A man called up and told me to send down $40
by my buyer, or the carriers would not deliver fish to my truck.''

''Why did you pay it?'' he was asked.

''Because I wanted my fish.''

The mob and the market became so intertwined,
with tribute to wiseguys as common as a buck to
Annie, that a government investigation of some
kind always seemed under way. Successful
crackdowns have considerably reduced the mob's
presence, but still: one section of the city's administrative code
begins with the assertion that the fish market ''has for decades
been corruptly influenced by organized crime.''

More than the ghosts of characters, though,
more than the whiff of the mob, there lingers
in this city corner a palpable, connective air
to who we once were; what we saw; what we said.
The eels wriggling free along Fulton Street .
The hook fights among fishmongers. The
ice-coated masts of sloops in winter. The
fedoras, the aprons, the scales of fish
justice. That market man who, on one summer's
night in 1872, called out an order:

''Lively, Jim , 10 baskets of lobsters.''

On this night, one of the last, it is Frank
Minio who calls out. ''Lemon sole is
one-thirty-five today, and the large is
one-fiftyI got one day-boat gray sole left, three-fifty.''

Mr. Minio is bald, muscular and in full command
of his domain, a business on the west side of
South Street called Smitty's Fillet House. A
college graduate, he had planned to ''pursue
theater,'' as he puts it, but his father died
in this very stall 27 years ago, and, well, it's a family business.

He says he looks forward to some aspects of the
move to the Bronx : not freezing in winter, for
example, and not paying for so much ice in the
summer. Still, he wonders, couldn't the city
have built an enclosed market here, alongside
exhibitions that celebrated New York 's inextricable connection to
the
>water?

''It's been done this way a long time,'' he
says, before moving toward a man poking at the
cheeks of fish. ''Good morning,'' he says to
the bold customer. ''One-sixty on the pollock.''

The sky begins to lighten. Below a for-sale
sign on an old brick building, circa 1830, a
fat man eats a turkey-on-a-roll near a gray
mound of grouper. A skinny man shovels ice,
shoosh, onto some snapper the color of the
pinkish dawn. Someone calls out, ''Frank-e-e-e!''

Another forklift clatters past. South Street
Annie appears, selling fresh news. Behind her,
the Brooklyn Bridge , looking almost new.
-------------------------


May 11, 2005 , Wednesday Late Edition - Final
Section B Page 1 Column 1 Desk: Metropolitan Desk Length: 794 words

About New York ; An Old Hand, Betrayed By His Belt
By DAN BARRY

JOE GILLUM of Harlem fell from the sky last
week. He plummeted silently through the air of
a Silk Stocking neighborhood and broke upon
impact, as did that extra appendage of his, a squeegee.

He washed windows for a living, often working
so high above the ground that your hands
perspire just thinking of it. At 68, he was
still strapping on his trusty old belt -- too
old, it turned out, and not so trusty -- and
suspending himself in the air, his back to the
world, his silhouette reflected in the soot-caked windows of others.


Until last Thursday, that is, when he dropped
nine stories in about the time it takes to soak
a rag in a pail of soapy water. Up above, the
two canvas straps that he had secured to the
sides of the window could do nothing now but wave goodbye in the
breeze.

The initial police report on his accidental
death attached his middle initial of L to the
end of his given name, and so in most of the
brief news accounts he was rechristened Joel
Gillum. ''It was Joe,'' said his wife, Ollie. ''It was Joe.''

Mrs. Gillum, 67, small-boned and white-haired,
sat deep in a couch's hug in the worn apartment
on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard that she
had shared with her husband for more than 30
years. She seemed composed, but this was Monday
morning, within the exhausting awkwardness that
comes after the death and before the wake.

The telephone beside her rang again, but her
sister-in-law, Marie Colbert, in from Oklahoma
for the funeral, was fielding calls and jotting
messages in a spiral-bound notebook. ''Thank
you for calling,'' Mrs. Colbert said again into the receiver.

Some of the callers were friends and relatives.
Others were wondering where their window washer
was. ''His clients don't know,'' Mrs. Gillum
said. ''They're expecting him today.''

Joe Gillum, of Georgia, and Ollie Colbert, of
Oklahoma , met nearly 49 years ago in a Harlem
nightclub on Eighth Avenue . He was working in a
hospital morgue then, and she was setting fake
gems in costume jewelry at some factory. They
talked about where they came from, how they had
wound up in New York City -- jobs, basically --
and what they liked and disliked. At some point
she revealed her love for apricots. Next day,
here comes Joe Gillum, bearing apricots.

They married in 1957, and shared more fruit,
bitter and sweet. The first child, Joe, died in
infancy. The second child, Sabrina, would give
them three grandchildren. And one of those
three would give them a great-grandson.

The years can blur into one long workday. But
Mrs. Gillum said she is sure that her husband
started his own window- and floor-cleaning
business in the mid-60's, because it was after
President Kennedy's assassination and before Martin Luther King
Jr.'s.

After 30 years of wrestling electric sanders
over parquet floors -- those machines have
minds of their own -- his back hurt so much
that he decided a decade ago to concentrate on
windows. By then he had built up a good
clientele, which meant that every spring he was out, and up.

''He never was afraid of heights,'' said Mrs.
Gillum, her eyes looking for distraction from a muttering
television.

''That was his life,'' said her brother, Nemiah
Colbert. ''That's what he did for a living.''

The telephone rang again. ''They're calling for
him to come to work today,'' Mrs. Gillum said to the television.

LAST Thursday morning, the Gillums made plans
to go food shopping that evening. Mrs. Gillum
told her husband that she might be a little
late from her job minding an apartment on the
Upper West Side . ''His last words, and it was
so soft,'' she said, ''was, 'I'll be right here waiting for you.'''

Then Mr. Gillum headed for a job at a nice
brick apartment building at 430 East 57th
Street, carrying, his wife recalled, ''his
belt, his pail, and his squeegee.'' When asked
whether her husband ever updated his equipment,
Mrs. Gillum slowly shook her head and said, ''Uh-uh.''

By 11, he was dead. By noon , his blood had been
scrubbed and sprayed from the sidewalk by one
of the building's employees. And by the
afternoon, a neighbor of the Gillums who had
spoken to detectives had taped a note to their
door, saying, ''Please see me, it's an emergency.''

A funeral service was held at Canaan Baptist
Church in Harlem yesterday morning, followed by
the long ride out to Calverton National
Cemetery on Long Island for the burial of a fallen window washer.

For the record, his name was Joe Gillum. Joe L. Gillum.
------------------------------

November 2, 2005 , Wednesday Late Edition - Final
Section B Page 1 Column 1 Desk: Metropolitan Desk Length: 861 words

About New York ; Button Up Your Overcoat
By DAN BARRY

E-mail: dabarry@nytimes.com

THESE days have been uncommonly mild for
autumn, but Derek Ivery insists on wearing a
sweater and jacket over his tall and very thin
frame. He cannot get sick. He has things to do.


Mr. Ivery is an office worker in a city of
office workers. He works Mondays through
Fridays, 9 to 5 , in the biology department at
Queens College . He answers the telephone,
registers students for classes, and makes sure
that professors get their mail. Then he walks
to the home he shares with his mother in Flushing .

An average man, living an average life. But he
is only 26, with plans to go to graduate school. He has things to
do.


Growing up, he did not stand out among the
3,300 students at John Bowne High School , save
for a brief speaking role in the school's
production of ''Les Misérables.'' And he didn't
stray far when he enrolled at Queens College ,
down the street, to become one student among some 17,000.


His only extracurricular activity was with the
college's peer advisement program, which trains
students to assist others in making the
sometimes-difficult adjustment to college life.
Soon, he was helping to recruit other students for the program.


One day in 2002, he met another one among the
17,000: Nidha Mubdi, a young student who wanted
to become a peer adviser. The daughter of
Bangladeshi immigrants living in Briarwood,
Queens , she had a riveting smile and an upbeat
demeanor that belied the life story she shared with him.


In August 1998, when she was 18, Ms. Mubdi was
told she had leukemia. When she was 19, she
underwent a bone marrow transplant. When she
was 20, her kidneys failed -- the payment due
from all that chemotherapy and medication -- and she began dialysis
>treatment.


Through bad movies and graduation parties and
gentle teasing, a platonic friendship developed
between this Muslim woman and this Methodist
man. Mr. Ivery became accustomed to her
dialysis routine. Three mornings a week, she
sat for three hours in a medical office in
Jackson Heights , hooked up to a machine that
did the work her kidneys could not. After that,
several hours of sleep. This was her life, at 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.


A year ago, Mr. Ivery had an idea, but set it aside. No, he decided.
No.


Then, a few months ago, Ms. Mubdi e-mailed to
her friends the address for her Web site, which
included a section called ''My Story -- Looking
For a Miracle.'' It began: ''Could you be a
person of selfless sacrifice & godly humanity
able to donate their spare kidney?''


That idea returned to Mr. Ivery. Without
telling his friend, he had his blood type
checked and learned that it matched hers. Then
he sent her an e-mail message that opened with
a couple of goofy jokes and ended with the
words: ''But if you want a kidney you can have mine.''


Ms. Mubdi did not answer right away, and has
trouble articulating why. In the past, others
had expressed interest in donating a kidney,
but for this reason and that reason those plans
fell through. ''I was taken aback,'' she says.


A WEEK later, the two friends went to a
fast-food place on Union Turnpike. He had a
vanilla milkshake, she had some strawberry-ice
concoction, and they talked about it. She was
surprised that he didn't have any questions
about the process. He was surprised that she
was so quiet -- brought to wordlessness, it
seemed, by the enormousness of what was being offered. .


That evening, the Methodist gently patted the
hand of the Muslim. ''To let her know it's all right,'' Mr. Ivery
says.


The two friends underwent testing to confirm
the compatibility between his kidney and her
body. He had to meet with his ''transplant
team.'' He had to have a C.T. scan. He had to
be examined by a psychologist, to make sure he knew what he was
doing.


Through it all, Ms. Mubdi has assured Mr. Ivery
that he can still change his mind -- it would
be all right. Mr. Ivery has assured her that
this is what he wants to do. They both worry
about complications, including the possibility of rejection.


Now the time is upon them. Ms. Mubdi and Mr.
Ivery are scheduled to report early Friday
morning to New York-Presbyterian/Columbia
hospital in Upper Manhattan. But they have been
warned that the transplant will be postponed if either one of them
gets
>sick.


That is why Mr. Ivery bundles up during these uncommonly mild autumn
days.
----------------------------------------


September 8, 2005, Thursday Late Edition - Final
Section A Page 1 Column 2 Desk: National Desk Length: 1215 words

STORM AND CRISIS: STREET SCENE; Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on
Union
>Street
By DAN BARRY

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7

In the downtown business district here, on a
dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank
automated teller machine, across from a parking
garage offering ''early bird'' rates: a corpse.
Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.


Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on
Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves
with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a
parting snapshot like some visiting
conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.

Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the
body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around
the corner knew all about it: murder victim,
bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The
police marked it with traffic cones maybe four
days ago, he said, and then he joked that if
you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.


Night came, then this morning, then noon, and
another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.


That a corpse lies on Union Street may not
shock; in the wake of last week's hurricane,
there are surely hundreds, probably thousands.
What is remarkable is that on a downtown street
in a major American city, a corpse can
decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.


Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse,
half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.


Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood
to say strange things, and then return into the
rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate
and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge,
and old signs from les bons temps have been
replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.


The incomprehensible has become so routine here
that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On
Sunday, for example, several soldiers on
Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads
of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics
store.


A car pulled right up to this tense scene and
the driver leaned out his window to ask a
soldier a question: ''Hey, how do you get to the interstate?''


Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here
-- not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here -- is
rooted in the intensive news coverage of the
hurricane's aftermath: floating bodies and
obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the
concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity
of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the
nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.


Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news
conferences and search-and-rescue squads, has
granted haunting glimpses of the past, present
and future, with the rare comfort found in,
say, the white sheet that flaps, not in
surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St.
Charles Avenue.


''We Shall Survive,'' it says, as though
wishing past the battalions of bulldozers that
will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and
rearrange the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether
different New Orleans.


Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where
open fire hydrants gush the last thing needed
on these streets; where one of the many
gag-inducing smells -- that of rancid meat --
is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the
presence of a market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.


The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a
soldier's boot print. The ''take-away'' signs
outside restaurants taken away. The corner
kiosk shouting the Aug. 28 headline of New
Orleans's Times-Picayune: ''Katrina Takes Aim.''


Rush hour in downtown now means pickups
carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses,
S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters
hungry for action, and the occasional tank.
About the only ones commuting by bus are
dull-eyed suspects shuffling two-by-two from
the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.


Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the
portal to the Williams Super Market in the
once-desirable Garden District. And who could
blame them if all they wanted was food in those
first desperate days? The interlopers took the
water, beer, cigarettes and snack food. They
did not take the wine or the New Orleans postcards.


On the other side of downtown across Canal
Street in the French Quarter, the most raucous
and most unreal of American avenues is now
little more than an empty alley with balconies.


The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone
cooing ''ma chère,'' of men sporting convention
nametags and emitting forced guffaws -- the
absence of us -- assaults the senses more than any smell.


Past the famous Cafe du Monde, where a slight
breeze twirls the overhead fans for no one,
past the statue of Joan of Arc gleaming gold, a
man emerges from nothing on Royal Street. He is
asked, ''Where's St. Bernard Avenue?''


''Where's the ice?'' he asks in return, eyes
narrowed in menace. ''Where's the ice? St.
Bernard's is that way, but where's the ice?''


In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods,
the severely damaged streets bear the names of
saints who could not protect them. Whatever
nature spared, human nature stepped up to
provide a kind of democracy in destruction.


At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude
Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass spill from
the crushed door, offering a view of the
complementary coffee table. A large woman named
Phoebe Au -- ''Pronounced 'Awe,''' she says --
materializes to report that men had smashed it
in with a truck. She fades into the
neighborhood's broken brick, and a thin woman
named Toni Miller materializes to correct the record.


''They used sledgehammers,'' she said.


Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks
rumble past a smoldering building, the roads
are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The
city parked them on the riverbank for the
hurricane, after which some hoods took them for
fare-free joy rides through lawless streets, and then discarded
them.


On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire
continues to burn where a warehouse once stood,
a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke
to introduce himself as Strangebone. The nights
without power or water have been tough,
especially since the police took away the gun
he was carrying -- ''They beat me and
threatened to kill me,'' he says -- but there are benefits to this
new
>world.


''You're able to see the stars,'' he says. ''It's wonderful.''


Today, law enforcement troops began lending
muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin's vow to evacuate
by force any residents too attached to their
pieces of the toxic metropolis. They searched
the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and
that woman whose name sounds like Awe.


Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of
another evening crept like spilled black water over someone's
corpse.
---------------------------------------


October 3, 2005, Monday Late Edition - Final
Section A Page 19 Column 1 Desk: National Desk Length: 1554 words

CORRECTION APPENDED

STORM AND CRISIS: NEW ORLEANS; One Month Later,
Flickering Lights Reveal a City That Is Far From Being Reclaimed By
DAN BARRY

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 2

Abandoned city buses on deserted streets, doors
opened for the boarding of ghosts. Fast-food
restaurants, darkened and reeking of rancid
meat. Tainted tap water, unsafe for contact
with skin. Entire neighborhoods of empty, moldy
houses, waiting for that bulldozer's first punch.


No children.

If you can imagine this. If you can imagine a
helicopter that crashed weeks ago still planted
across from a post office, like a piece of
public art. If you can imagine officials
warning that you enter many parts of this major
American city at your own risk. If you can
imagine all this, you can begin to imagine what
it is like in New Orleans a month after the deluge.


True, those from the luckier west bank section
of Algiers can hug their children and sleep in
their own beds. True, discarded refrigerators
now stand like upturned white coffins on the
high-ground streets of Uptown and the Garden
District, signaling that housecleanings have begun.


And true, some lights have returned to this
city's naughty-Disney thoroughfare, Bourbon
Street, the reports of which may have led
people elsewhere to sigh and think that
normality, as manifested by the tossing of
beads and the flashing of breasts, cannot be far behind.


But consider what those lights now reveal: more
businesses closed than open; pockets of
stinking garbage; gawking bands of
firefighters, disaster relief workers,
journalists, all from somewhere else. Traffic
on the street means a United States Marshals
vehicle, then a sheriff's pick-up, then a
National Guard Humvee, then a New Orleans
police cruiser with one headlight out.


And the lights of Bourbon Street do not shine
upon, say, the Martin Luther King Jr.
Elementary School and Library in the Lower
Ninth Ward. The school's doors gape open, mud
cakes the floor, mold creeps across the
portrait of the namesake. Outside, not far from
a brimming sewer in which small fish dart, a
volume of a youth classic lies in the muck, and
it is almost too much: S.E. Hinton's ''That Was Then, This Is Now.''


Anyone who dares to return home might be fooled
at first by the illusion of quick recovery. The
bus and train terminal has a bustling air, but
only because it serves as a makeshift jail.
Cars without telltale flood marks glide along
the streets but belong to postcatastrophe
cleanup companies with names like Amigos Restoration.


And some businesses operate amid the rising
mounds of garbage, including the Sheraton
Hotel, where the 1,000 or so guests -- mostly
journalists and people with the Federal
Emergency Management Agency -- can almost be
fooled into believing that what was New Orleans, is.


Hotel valets will park your car in a garage so
that the powdery mist of recovery work does not
cloud your windshield. Hotel buffets on the
second floor offer an option to the Salvation
Army food truck outside. Hotel televisions
offer HBO, once you click past the in-house
commercials for the ''chocolate dipping
fountain'' at Harrah's New Orleans Casino, just
down the street and all boarded up.


And the rooms, especially ones on the 40th
floor and above, offer a Zeus-like view of a
metropolis in seeming repose. But leave the
hotel womb, and you remember again that this is
not urban repose, but urban shock.


A month after the hurricane, nearly two-thirds
of the power is out, telephone and Internet
connections remain down, and tens of millions
of cubic yards of debris need to be carted away
-- with ''debris'' the catchword for everything
from tree branches to family possessions.


In once-desirable Lakeview, hard against the
17th Street Canal that famously gave way, the
several feet of water that sat for weeks has
finally receded, leaving behind a
neighborhood's skeleton to bake in the hot sun.


Walk past a tossed-aside car, past the dangling
strips of siding that slap and groan in the
warm breeze, across a silt-browned lawn that
once received a lot of care, and peer through
the beveled glass of someone's front door. This
is what you see: black mold several feet up the
white walls and three-quarters up the carpeted
stairs; thrown furniture wearing a mucky
veneer; and mud on the floor that is still
shiny wet. The whiff through a cracked window is of something awful.


These conditions were not bad enough, at least
not yet, to earn one of the orange city
stickers that are suddenly so ubiquitous,
saying, ''This structure is unsafe and its use
or occupancy has been prohibited by the building official.''


The other famous markings, of course, are those
left by rescue-and-recovery teams on every
building, every abandoned bus -- even that
downed helicopter, across from the Mid-City
post office -- to answer the question: Bodies inside, yes or no?


In Uptown, two of these markings festoon the
porch at 4734 Laurel Street. One dates from
early September (one body), the other from late
September (no body), an inadequate account of
why the house's owner, Alcede Jackson, lay dead
for nearly two weeks before men in white
protective suits finally came to collect his body on Sept. 12.


The different-colored scribbles on a house
nearby provide a dialogue between animal-rescue
crews: dog in yard; dog given food and water; dog still here; dog
>''taken.''


Of course, virtually no one is here to read
these markings. A visitor can drive for miles
along dusty, mosquito-infested streets and not
see a soul, especially through poor
neighborhoods like Bywater and the Lower Ninth
Ward. A war zone is not the proper analogy; something approaching Chernobyl is.


Stop anywhere, and uneasiness takes hold. Pull
into the parking lot of the Sarah T. Reed High
School in New Orleans East, and park between
the vandalized Ford Windstar and the vandalized
Dodge pickup. That crackling beneath your feet
is not autumn leaves, but hundreds and hundreds
of dead perch. And those abandoned dogs racing
toward you: they are not looking to be petted.


The few people moving across this deserted stage have stories to
tell.


Here, leaning against an old car on Dauphine
Street in Bywater: Dennis Landry, unshaven, and
Donnalee Eyraud, in Winnie the Pooh sneakers,
drinking in the unnatural evening quiet with
whatever is in that cooler on the ground. They
talk simultaneously to create a symphony of
hardship: no power, cigarettes hard to come by,
a days-old Times-Picayune cherished as though
it were the Gospel, looters still lurking.


''I'm telling you, I've been packing a gun in
my pocket for a week,'' Mr. Landry said.


''Not me,'' Ms. Eyraud said. ''I have my machete. I'm not into
guns.''


And here, sitting on the ground outside a work
camp in Algiers, waiting for The Man to pay
him: Tyrone Brustie, just one of thousands of
workers from near and far who are now cleaning
out putrid food lockers, picking up fly-swarmed
piles from the curbs, buzz-sawing through downed trees.


He is a Tom Joad of this disaster. A carpenter
from the city, he was evacuated to Houston,
hitched a ride back with a Pentecostal
minister, hooked up with one of the many
disaster-relief contractors and got a job
collecting garbage from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. He
sleeps in one of those tent cities cropping up
along General Meyer Avenue in Algiers, where
the men in the exhaust of their nights talk about how they better
get paid.


Mr. Brustie is supposed to be paid $10 an hour,
and that was why he was waiting patiently for
The Man, who drives a black Humvee. Others who
wanted to get paid -- a few subcontractors, a
truck driver, a secretary -- shuffled nearby,
and their muttering made sheriff's deputies
guarding the camp get out of their cruisers.
There was no confrontation, though, because The Man never came.


When nighttime falls on this city under curfew,
it conceals the devastation like some Mardi
Gras mask. But New Orleans always lived for the
night -- for the food, the talk, the music. And
just as there are no children, there is no music.


Except here and there on Bourbon Street. In a
club on Saturday night, a crowd of 20 listened
to a zydeco band called the Bonoffs sing old
songs for a spectral city, with an exuberance
intended to wake the dead. Their words called out to empty streets:


Talkin' 'bout, Hey now! Hey now!


I-ko, I-ko, un-day


Jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-né.


Jock-a-mo fee na-né.


A large man in Louisiana State purple and gold
raised his fist in the air and howled long and loud, as if to say: Exactly.