Final Project

See our exploration of Pittsburgh's street art here!

Last Class

Instructions: write a description of someone in the room not using name hair color outfit

To the rhyme scheme of “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle,” and/or “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” depending on how cultured you’re feeling.

Just sit right back

and you’ll hear the tale

of a loud but lovely girl.

whose laughter rings throughout the room

as bright as shining pearls.

And Batman is

her favorite dude,

she loves the comic arts,

photography, and videos.

She’s really very smart.

A pink backpack

beside her feet,

and pink most everything.

Inquisitive and curious

with two silver nose rings.

Ask her about

D.C. Comic books,

She’ll talk ‘til she turns blue.

She laughs real loud about most things

and makes great cupcakes too.

American Idol

My goal as a nonfiction writer is to have as interesting a life as Ernest Hemingway, but with less animal killing.

I can smell the books from here

The New York Public Library: I want to go there and read forever.

New rights management for a digital world

We talked a few times in class about copyright issues, the need to protect your work, and the need to exercise caution when using the work of others. These last two points are absolutely vital - you can't rip off other people, and you (probably) don't want people ripping you off, either.

The problem our society and creative culture currently faces, however, is a mangled, overly complex mess of copyright law, over which corporations with the most interest have the most influence. In earlier times, creative culture, or intellectual property, passed out of the control of the creator and into the public domain within a matter of years. This meant that there existed a growing, constantly updated pool of content upon which new creators could draw for inspiration. This is especially important when you realize every aspect of our creativity builds upon what came before. Isaac Newton's famous quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants" is absolutely true (and very probably borrowed from somewhere else.) Rap music came from hip-hop which came from jazz, which built upon the synthesis of classical music, ragtime, and the blues.

Unfortunately, this can no longer be the case. Consolidated content publishing companies like Warner Bros. and Disney have used their influence to lock up intellectual property ownership, preventing new ideas from refreshing the Public Domain for huge periods of time. As copyright law now stands, rights to new intellectual properties stay private for a period of 80 years after the creator's death. Technically, if you want to sing "Happy Birthday" to someone in a room full of fifty people, you'd need to pay money to Warner/Chappell Music, the rights holders.

Enter Creative Commons. Established by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, the Creative Commons system acts as an add-on to existing copyright law, allowing content producers to let others know which parts of their work are free and open to public use. This allows content creators to contribute to sustainable, remixable creative culture and clear up confusing questions about permissions and fair use while preserving the rights to their creations. Writing is just as much a part of creative culture as music or film, and I think the principles of Creative Commons apply as much to us as writers as they do to anyone else.

An example of a Creative Commons license:

Lawrence Lessig even looks smarter than me.

Where writing ends and stand-up begins

Recently, I spent some time researching author David Sedaris for a class presentation and because, well, he's pretty damn great. I needed to talk for 15 minutes, so naturally I started trawling the web looking for a video to show in order to eat up some time. This little gem comes from The Late Show with David Letterman:



Short of analyzing Sedaris' unique delivery or the various techniques he utilizes for maximum humor, what interested me most about this video is the blending of genre lines. Shows like The Late Show or The Tonight Show typically feature stand-up comedians, not writers. So what is Sedaris doing here? Where does the distinction between humor writer and humor performer lie? Is there one? If you're a talented enough writer and your delivery is entertaining enough, can you too perform on late-night television, regardless of comedic content?

Like Storify, but video

The Occupy movement is, it sometimes seems, everywhere and inescapable. Whether you're tweeting, watching the evening news, or merely walking through a particular section downtown in many major cities, you're bound to hear something about the 99% and their criticisms of modern financial and government institutions.

Lacking any real education with regards to economics and banking systems, I find myself unable to weigh in either in favor of or against the Occupiers. I do, however, support without question the right of American citizens to publicly assemble and voice their concerns and opinions without fear of oppression or violent aggression.

Assigned to make a remix video for my Creating Digital Media class, and with the recent police violence at Occupy protests in mind, I made this video, a cut up audio and video footage gleaned mostly from YouTube. And while it's a much more visually-oriented piece, it occurs to me now that my video-making process was really not so different from assembling a Storify - sourcing information, cutting it up, rearranging it as you see fit to say something meaningful. And when you think about it, Storifying is just classic storytelling via a different medium; so really, remix is at the heart of all storytelling.

In the Face of Death

By now you've no doubt ascertained my love of Christopher Hitchens and his writing. At the risk of boring you once more, I wanted to share this new article he wrote for January 2012 issue Vanity Fair. In it, he deconstructs the saying "Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger," by analyzing its source (likely Nietzche, who Hitchens largely dislikes, it seems) while framing the whole thing within the context of his own battle with esophageal cancer and the necessary radiation and chemo treatments. The entire article is fascinating, but it was this paragraph near the end that struck me as particularly poignant:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

I hope to never find myself in the painful situation that Hitchens now does, save for the desperate need to write and speak in order to properly live.

This Western Pennsylvania Life

I adore Ira Glass/NPR's This American Life program (when I remember to set aside 40-60 minutes to listen, that is.) If you ever need a fascinating look at people, flavored with a healthy dose of wit and whimsy, you couldn't do better the "show presented in three acts."

A while back, some friends and I decided to take a road trip to the great state of Kentucky, which was equally as fun as the drive was long. To help pass the time, my good friend Charles came prepared with a bevy of TAL podcast episodes on his iPod so we could listen in the car. We put this one on somewhere in Ohio, and it lasted us through the Pennsylvania border and a good bit of the way back to Pittsburgh. Never before has a public broadcast program made me more depressed or angry.

It's the perfect combination of fact finding and narrative-driven storytelling, and the fact that it hits so close to home makes it all the more compelling. To hear the interviews of people who live within a hundred miles away, and how adversely their lives have been effected by the Marcellus Shale drilling is devastating. Hearing about how Range Resources strong-armed local communities into adopting the company's policies is infuriating.

This is my favorite TIL episode, and I'm not sure I have the stomach to listen to it again.

Bonus: a diagram of how the drilling/hydrofracturing process works

Neil Gaiman and Henry Jenkins

I recently found this video of a conversation between author Neil Gaiman and American media scholar Henry Jenkins. In particular, I think the very first discussion question is fascinating, because it's about how an audience interacts with author's work when it comes in several different forms of media. Gaiman, for example, makes movies and comic books in addition to writing prose. In the battle to get comics the same recognition and respect as other art forms, it's nice to hear someone who does both say, "Hey, the comic is just as good. You'll get that same peculiar kind of buzz."




Bonus interesting point - According to Gaiman, there are a number of people who only read his blog, and none of his other written works.