“I blame the topic sentence” or, Ira Glass really is all that

It’s pretty awesome you get to see a famous person live up to his reputation live, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone surpass his reputation. This past Sunday morning, I saw that. I saw Ira Glass address the 14th Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries. I walked out of the Seattle convention center wanting to do two things. 1) finally buy my own iPod so that I can download every scrap of This American Life I can get my hands on and 2) not wait another minute to get on with the work of making stories.

The talk started with Glass in voiceover, from a darkened stage, reminding us that “for starters, you’ve got to understand, it’s radio,” the medium of the human voice. For a second, I was like, oh man, what a cop out. He pre-recorded it–but I realized that was perhaps the cynical side of me and held off on judgment. Ira Glass’s voice then told us about how, spending six months covering inner city gang kids for NPR earlier in his career, he’d always felt that he was a huge advantage over television journalists. If the first thing you saw was black lipstick and a cold gaze, you’d never listen to the words coming out of a 14 year old girl’s mouth as she described the moment when another girl pulled a gun on her and she understood what death meant and that she had to change her life. The voice then told us that he’d asked the conference organizers if he could do his whole talk in the dark, but they’d told him about a librarian that changed her ticket to a later departure at great expense when she found out he’d be there, so he’d better not. Phew!

When the lights came up, he wasn’t at a podium, he was sitting at a table, surrounded by a microphone, CD players, an audio mixing board, and copious notes. I thought this was mostly for effect, but he actually did the talk like a radio show, manually cuing and playing clips of interviews and music to illustrate his message—that human beings respond to stories above all else. If we can make a story that people want to know the end of, we can open their brains and sometimes their hearts. I believed this when he said it, not only because I am a writer, but because I, one of the most incorrigibly web-distracted people you will ever meet, listened to the whole talk without checking my email even one time, even though I had my laptop on my lap and free, fast wireless. I think his talk was a bit over an hour, but I couldn’t even tell you for sure because I was so absorbed it felt like about five minutes.

Naturally, then, this talk was delivered as a story, a story about how an episode of This American Life gets put together. To tell that story, Glass had to talk about how they got their ideas, how he had learned to write the kind of story he wanted to pay attention to, how a good story takes us so deeply into the real experience of another person that we don’t even realize we are learning something, and why stories are the glue of our collective life.

It’s impossible to concentrate the richness of Ira Glass talking about what he does best into a few bulleted notes, but here goes:

On getting ideas: you need lots of them, and you will need to kill lots of those. He held up two sheets of notes that were single-spaced lists of ideas for stories for one TAL show.

On narrative suspense: you can tell a good story about almost anything, but saying interesting things about interesting people is not a story. A story has stakes (I always forget this when I try to write narrative—bad poet habit). The train has to leave the station and we have to care where it is going. Example: the introductory story from Cringe. Listen to it. When it gets to the part about the guy getting down to walk like a crab, IG paused the tape and said “nobody is turning off the radio at this point,” and I had to agree—there is no way I would have let that story slip out of my life, I had to know what happened next.

On why anecdote is not enough: the train has to leave the station, something has to happen that has real stakes, but that doesn’t make a satisfying story. At some point, you have to link that story to the larger experience of human life. Anecdote has to be followed by reflection.

On surprises: both your anecdotes and your reflections have to get to some kind of surprise, or your story is old. Hopefully, a surprise that delights you by how true yet unexpected it feels.

On the relative uselessness of mainstream news coverage and much of public discourse: how did we as a culture come to think of boring writing as good writing (judging by how much of it we expect our leaders and reporters to do)? “I blame the topic sentence. We as a culture have to stop the topic sentence.”—IG
Topic sentences kill narrative—it works better when you start in the middle of a moment, where the story starts, not where you think it should end. (He made a special appeal to librarians to do their part to defeat the topic sentence, which I intend to do by starting my next library class session with a story about a kid who didn’t use interlibrary loan until a week before his term paper was due.)

On why stories teach us better than news: using the example of the story of Sam, an Iraq vet who joined the Muslim students association to combat his PTSD. We get into it because it’s a story about Tom, and telling that story eventually involves talking about what PTSD is. When traditional news covers PTSD, it packages it up with a topic sentence (“and now a story of one Iraq veteran overcoming PTSD”) and kills it. As IG put it: “I already know how I feel about PTSD. I’m against it.” Good stories get information past our auto-judger. We feel like we don’t already know about it if we don’t already know the story.

I really wish I could just pipe a video of his talk from my head to all of my writer friends. In lieu of that capability, I have tracked down scraps of things on the internets that begin to approximate what I heard:

A bootleg clip of the last 8 minutes of the talk that I saw in which Glass brings it all home by paraphrasing 1001 Arabian Nights—watch it while it’s still up.

A manifesto on radio journalism written for Transom.org– great bits here about finding stories that are interesting v. stories that you think should be interesting:

“But it’s the type of story you might hear on the radio. That’s why she was attracted to it. She didn’t think it was interesting, but she thought one was supposed to find it interesting. It was like the answer to a question on a test: What should your public radio story be about? This one had art, culture and someone from a minority group. It was a triple threat.”

Submission guidelines for This American Life—where they come out and say exactly what they are looking for in a story, and give a reader’s digest version of much of what these other links talk about

A piece on making radio stories on Current.org–This is a quote from the piece that is really funny and makes me really grateful that IG didn’t just talk about working for NPR or something he thought librarians would find interesting, but instead shared his craft:

When I was putting together this speech, I spent an absurd amount of time thinking about what to say to you and pulling tape cuts. And some of my staff members told me, “You’re crazy to spend so much time thinking about this. Anybody who’s coming to see you, all they really want to know is ‘dish’ about their favorite public radio personalities. Don’t bother with the tape and the music and the mixing board. Just get up there and what you should do is say things like, ‘Carl Kasell . . . boozer. Robert Siegel . . . has two wives. Garrison Keillor . . . has his own intern.’”

I, for one, am really glad he’s spent so much time thinking about this.

I beat the Carpetbagger

And won my pool. Don’t know if this link works, but, I did. Thank you, overrated Sean Penn.

Oscar Pre-blogging: Hugh Jackman rocked my socks

I am going to an Oscar party sans wireless this evening, so I will not have a chance to weigh in as the broadcast unfolds, so I just wanted to let the world know that I have pre-decided: Hugh Jackman is the awesomest singing-dancing Oscar host of my lifetime. There are going to be some haters out there, and to them I say: bring on the top hats, little tap dancing canes, tails, and even gold-leaf body paint, it’s all good if Wolverine is doing it. Give me a cheesy show tune any day over self-conscious comedians who make me feel embarassed for them when they deliver their first bad joke. More singing, more dancing, more gratuitous hip gyrations! This is going to be fun.

And in related news, I just passed up my opportunity to switch my NYT Oscar Ballot Adapted Screenplay vote from Frost/Nixon to the overwhelming favorite Slumdog to be able to say that. Also, let it be known that I betrayed my heart to vote for Jai Ho over Down to Earth for Best Song.

The call came in

And now I know I can go at least one place to pursue a PhD in English, for better or for worse!!! And, it’s the place I started this whole process with the hope of being able to go, so as far as I’m concerned, I don’t care what any of the other letters say. This is good. And just in time, too, b/c you know there would have been some melodramatic blog reading coming your way otherwise. Seriously, I’ve been walking around reciting Hopkin’s “I wake to feel the feel of dark not day” in my head. That was not a good scene. This is a much better scene. And I’m going to enjoy it as long as I can.

How (at least some) Iowans respond to immigration raids in their state

This type of response is altogether more human, no?

An immigration raid that arrested nearly 400 people in northeastern Iowa scarred a small town and tore families apart, residents said Saturday. Dozens begged a visiting congressional delegation to do everything in its power to stop federal immigration raids.

Instead of blaming the people who want to work, the Iowans who want to end immigration raids in their state blame the people who hire them illegally and then mistreat them with impunity–what a concept:

“The family that owns that place, they’re the ones who should be prosecuted,” he said. “They’re the ones who should be deported, not the workers.”

Plus, who benefitted from the raid? No one:

“This raid did nothing for this community,” he said. “It downgraded us substantially. It caused people to suffer, and it caused our reputation to suffer clear across the country.”

Fingers crossed that some of the Congress people were listening:

Sires, the New Jersey congressman, said he was convinced.

“I don’t see this type of thing working someplace else,” he said. “We don’t want it to ever happen again.”

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Am I having a Whopper for dinner?

No, that’s gross, but I could if I wanted to, because Burger King has stepped up and negotiated with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay a 1.5 cent increase in the per-pound price of tomatoes they buy from Florida farms. I read it in the Herald, but I went to the CIW itself to confirm that this was the result they had hoped for. From the joint press release:

BKC has agreed to pay an additional net penny per pound for Florida tomatoes to increase wages for the Florida farm workers who harvest tomatoes. To encourage grower participation in this increased wage program, BKC will also fund incremental payroll taxes and administrative costs incurred by the growers as a result of their farmworkers’ increased wages, or a total of 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes.

It gets even better! John Chidsey, BK’s CEO says:

“We apologize for any negative statements about the CIW or its motives previously attributed to BKC or its employees and now realize that those statements were wrong. Today we turn a new page in our relationship and begin a new chapter of real progress for Florida farmworkers.

For more than 50 years, BKC has been a proud purchaser and supporter of the Florida tomato industry. However, if the Florida tomato industry is to be sustainable long-term, it must become more socially responsible. We, along with other industry leaders, recognize that the Florida tomato harvesters are in need of better wages, working conditions and respect for the hard work they do. And we look forward to working with the CIW in the pursuit of these necessary improvements. We also encourage other purchasers and growers of Florida tomatoes to engage in dialogue with the CIW in support of driving industry-wide socially responsible change.”

Damn straight. It’s about time. Onwards.

yesssssssssss

You know what I’m hearing? Thunder. You know what I’m seeing from my second floor outpost among the scanners in the digital library? Fast, slanting rain.

Rainy season!

I’m a strange Floridian, I’m actually happier when it’s raining. There’s a word for this kind of Floridian: San Franciscan CORRECTION: normal, storm-loving Flordian. I only lived in SF as a very small child, but I think rain is in my genetic code.

Thus, my favorite Florida time of year has just begun. The natural world of Florida is probably what I’ll miss most when I’m surrounded by cornfields. I never get tired of watching palm trees sway in the rain.

Move along

So, I got a phone call tonight.

I’m moving to Iowa! D is too, eventually. Soon I’ll be wandering out on the hills of Iowa, and I will be thinking ofyou.

I wanted to post this picture to celebrate, but alas it is copyright protected. And now I’m officially going to be a liberrian, so I should start paying attention to things like that.

This blog will be out of hiatus on May 1, but I just couldn’t wait to share the news with anyone who is still checking.

Back to biography paper.

Marathon update!

For those of you following, I am pleased to report that my sister (who really needs a pseudonym already…I’d go with a simple “The Bean Counter,” but that would piss her off royally) completed her 20 mile training run today w/ no endurance problems. She can’t walk anymore, but whatevs. It’s not the marathon’s fault she killed her knee in marching band. I tried to get her to send me a pic of how she looked after those 20 miles, but for some reason she thought that was a bad idea… silly accountant.

Shameless re-link for all your end of year Leukemia & Lymphoma Society donation needs–and I am thrilled to say that some of you blog peeps have come out strong already and will later reap your beery rewards, so if you are one of those and you know who you are, disregard.

Good Things: 2007 edition

All it took was a Moonshine Martini post to get me in the mood to list. It’s that time of year when everybody’s putting in their two cents about what was most world-rocking in Aught Seven, so I’m going to give it a whirl. This is actually more for myself than anything else, because yesterday as I was trying to come up with answers to Reading for Writers query about the best books I had read this year, I realized 1) I don’t keep enough records of what I’ve actually done and 2) that most of the lists I could come up with were actually lists of the best books I had started but never finished. (And the other night, when D got me sucked into a half-hour infomercial for Firebrand.com, a web channel where you can watch all the world’s “best” commercials, I think I figured out why.) It’s true–I started a lot more than I finished this year, which is an issue I hope to deal with in in the coming year, but it’s too late now, so for the time being, I’m just going with it. Because you know what they say about good things: they come in threes. Also, things on this list aren’t necessarily new, but they were new to me.

Top 3 Novels I Finished This Year

1. Tripmaster Monkey (Maxine Hong Kingston)
2. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card, not like a literary masterpiece or anything, but I read it at the same time I started reading Jane McGonigal’s disseration on ubiquitous gaming and it hit a nerve)
3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (You know I’d be lying if it wasn’t on this list)

Top 3 Memoirs/ Creative Nonfiction

1. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn)
2. A Good War is Hard to Find (David Griffiths)
3. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman)

Close call: Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert–I feel that this book is more than a little annoying due to the sell-out factor plus the spoiled rotten factor, but I laughed my ass off right at a time when I really needed to because of this book)

Top 3 Movies I Watched All the Way Through This Year

1. After the Wedding
2. Black Christmas
3. Deja Vu (this made the list b/c of the strength of its surprise factor–I feel that it was much better than any trailer let on and I won’t say anything more than that for fear of giving something away, plus it got bonus points for being set in New Orleans (American city of the decade), and having a version of my top joke of the year (more cowbell!)).

Close calls: Stranger Than Fiction, HP5, 28 Days Later, The Lives of Others, Tony Takitani

Top 3 Documentaries (I watched so many, they deserve a category)

1. The Heart of the Game
2. Blue Planet
3. Jonestown

Top 3 Television Shows

1. Friday Night Lights
2. The Wire
3. Lost

Close calls: The Countdown, Weeds, Veronica Mars, Freaks and Geeks, the Nova documentary on training for the Boston Marathon

Top 3 Books of Poetry

1. Curves to the Apple (Rosmarie Waldrop)
2. case sensitive (Kate Greenstreet)
3. Leaves of Grass, 1855 Edition (Walter Whitman, via the Whitman Archive, like wow)

Close calls: almost every other book of poetry I’ve read this year and one that I plan to: The Middle Room (Jennifer Moxley)

Top 3 Biggest Wastes of Space on my Netflix Queue

1. Flightplan
2. Rumor Has It
3. The Break-Up

I swear I have nothing against Jennifer Aniston.

Top 3 Movies I Am Shocked I Haven’t Seen Yet

1. The Bourne Ultimatum
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Away From Her

Top 3 Songs I Never Tuned Away From While Driving (ie, Top 40 songs)

1. What I’ve Done (Linkin Park)
2. Shut Up and Drive (Rihanna, b/c Umbrella is just too predictable)
3. Apologize (One Republic feat. Timbaland, okay fine, I’m predictable)

Top 3 Songs It is Somewhat More Respectable to Admit to Liking (By Women)

1.  Fidelity (Regina Spektor, I know, I’m behind)
2. Mushaboom (Feist)
3. Central Reservation (Beth Orton, it took me forever to figure out the name of this song)

Top 3 Songs It is Somewhat More Respectable to Admit to Liking (By Men)

1.  Black Cab (Jens Lekman)
2. That Was the Worst Christmas Ever (Sufjan Stevens)
3. Oh What a World (Rufus Wainwright)

Top 3 Beers (keep in mind, I like wimpy beer)

1. Lamar Street Pale Ale (I think this has a lot of B Vitamins in it, I always feel stronger after I drink it)
2. Sam Adams (never had a taste for it before I made some good Boston memories to associate with it)
3. Stella & Guinness going halfsies

Top 3 Wines (you can tell I’m a slacker b/c I didn’t keep track of the vintage, just the name on the pretty label)

1. Cono Sur 20 Barrel Pinot Noir (limited availability, alas)
2. Vieille Ferme Red (can’t beat the price or the drinkability, my credit card bill won’t lie–we’ve bought more of this than anything else this year)
3. Conclass Verdejo (most likely to be gifted by us this year)

Close calls: Anything Portuguese, Bitch (not just a pretty name!), cabernet sauvignon in general

Top 3 30 Minute Meals

1. Good Fennels Pasta
2. Creamy Artichoke Saffron Pasta
3. Roasted Portabella Mushroom Burgers with Red Peppers

Top 3 Ways to Get My Nerd On

1. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography (Sidonie Smith)
2.  Ties that bind : the story of an Afro-Cherokee family in slavery and freedom (Tiya Miles)
3. PMLA Genre Issue

Top 3 Lessons Learned

1. Never give your prospective landlord cash before you see a lease AND a roof w/o holes in it (this lesson learned vicariously, courtesy of my sister and her beau and their move to Miami)
2. Tequila shots: no. (this lesson not learned vicariously)
3. Don’t give up on your faith, fool, love comes to those who believe it. Keep everlastingly at it and don’t let yourself off the hook with a cheap out, please the in-law’s, I need to settle down and have kids excuse. Try before you decide you’ve failed.

Close call: Don’t waste summer reading time on summer books. I think I went seriously astray there, spending weeks reading fluff like The Ruins when I could have been reading Faulkner.

Top 3 Punctuation Marks

1. colon
2. comma
3. dash

Top 3 Cities I Fantasized About Moving To

1. Washington, DC
2. New York, NY
3. Columbus, OH

Top 3 Things Totally Worth the Extra Money

1. DVR
2. a night in a bed & breakfast instead of a motel
3. new running shoes

Top 3 Publix Premium Ice Cream Flavors

1. Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
2. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
3. Buckeye

Top 3 Babies (in alphabetical order, you know I can’t rank babies)

• Charlotte
• Luc-Luis
• Nathaniel

Okay, that’s as silly as I can get right now, and if I think of any more between now and December 31st, I’ll post.