Crayons to Chaos

a filigree of stories

I'm supposed to have a draft tonight, of my second story on the Z Crew. But my brain is stuffed with too many stories competing for space - two of which are due next week, two of which need to be started next week - bouncing against one another like ping-pong balls. In short, the messy plate sliding off my brain's crowded table:

• Z Crew in Action.  Or How a Bunch of 12-Year-Olds Started a Movement. I'm going back to the same school I invaded in August, but tonight (after this spill) I need to sketch out the story as I see it. Due Saturday noon, setting me up for a Friday all-nighter at this rate.




• House v. Bell.  Since the supreme court keeps refusing to agree to hear Hamdan v . Rumsfeld, despite all the reasons it should, I've taken on a different case for my first story for the legal reporting class: House v. Bell, one of the scores of death penalty cases where DNA evidence has emerged to challenge these sentences. The story told me by House's attorney yesterday, which I'll spill a little on Sunday as I get ready to write, sounds like an episode of CSI:  spilled vials of blood, evidence disappearing and re-appearing, and fantabulous stories by the prosecution, along with a political subtext that reminds you that court-stacking is about more than Roe v. Wade. (That last point, citing House, was made elegantly in a Times editorial last year.) Due Wednesday, October 19. at 4:30 p.m.




• Astoria business story. A new power plant is going up - reportedly so  mean, clean and environmental that even NYPIRG loves it, after years of opposition. Peter Vallone, the local poo-bah, and a coalition community groups fought it until the New York Power Authority agreed to also shut down,  by 2008,  the much dirtier plant next door. I talk to Vallone Friday, and go poke around the site Monday, while trying to get 2 or 3 person-at-the-plant interviews.  Due 7 p.m. Thursday, October 20 at 7 p.m.


• Rant for "Critical Issues in Journalism." I haven't written much about this wild strange class of ours, led by Richard Wald -- wherein 235 students (combined full and part-time) listen to speakers and then engage in a sort of Oprah/Donahue open mike. I'll likely talk about it further as I'm breeding that paper, 750 words on "something we've talked about."  One of which was "Are bloggers journalists?" I'll likely talk mostly about my hero Lindsay, 18 yrs younger than I, whose lovely blog served as the base for an investigative trip to New Orleans -- and inspired her to quit her big pharm job for the freelance life. Due Friday, October 21 - and you can be sure I'll be writing it in the middle of the night, too.


• Astoria feature. This week I need also to start reporting on a long fuzzy feature, a "mood and feel" piece: I'm thinking about the food pantry I've visited; a profile of a Muslim woman I'm about to interview;  or a comparison between Fr. Brady's two parishes - the one by the housing project, which is scheduled for closure, and the one that has services in 5 languages and a more middle-class congregation. Due: full draft noon Thursday, October 27, t work on in  lab.
• Take-home. A long, more complex story, perhaps relating to the masters' project (see below).  I have to generate 3  and send them to Dale and Stacy tomorrow (when??).


• Masters' project. The first draft isn't due till January, but a proposal is due 11/18 and we need to be doing an interview a week. Next week, I'm talking to the gatekeeper at the New York Veterans Administration Centers -- my way into the returning soldiers coordinators, and the lives of those who try to help vets sort out their lives when they come home. Whose story will emerge from all that is anyone's guess.

I'm tired even writing this. Will I have the energy for the girls and boys of the Z Crew? I just wish I already had a camera-phone, for my trip to the school tomorrow.

How can I possibly juggle so many stories? How can so many characters vie for attention? How can I do justice to any of them? Is this phase of the program meant to be like stroke recovery, and have us grow new neurons?

I talked to Sree, for just a moment, yesterday. He said this is much more overload than in a real job. But is that really true? No wonder I want to write books - though I bet most who do are doing that on top of all of the above.

oriented or disoriented

"We orient and disorient at the same time," Nicholas Lemann said to the group of bleary-eyed students on the third floor of Joe Pulitzer's stone palace (which is, like Rome, simultaneously being renovated and excavated: "Don't go to the fifth floor!" we were warned later).  The morning would prove to be both (I'm writing and posting as the lunch break comes to an end).

I was already disoriented; after spending yesterday all excited about my reporting class and meeting one of the two sponsors of my Family Scholarship (my Uncle Joe, who I've written about  briefly in Book of Days) which got me even more excited about all this, I forgot to set an alarm - and woke  up, basically, just in time to get showered and dressed and get here.

Now, just home, my brain is packed full with too many impressions. The TV-worthy New York accent of the public safety officer who lectured us about holding onto our laptops.  My RW1 classmates, from the one who taught creative writing in prisons to the one who left San Francisco shortly before I did to the one who lives in Tijuana, who goes over the border to San Diego "for milk." The classmate with a GI sibling, reminding me where I came from.

But I wanted to start with the morning, which even touched on Plame-gate, via a keynote speech from Judith Miller's employer.

Lemann made a few more opening remarks before introducing his high school and Harvard classmate Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times. A woman six years older than me ("When you’re older than [the new] Supreme Court justice you know you’ve had a long career") whose shoulder-length hair has about as little gray as mine, she began with stories about having known Dean Lemann in college. " I foolishly helped him gain access to my roommates," she said, "who then gave him access to" secrets about sex and drugs in her undergraduate life. The Crimson  story was then offered to all families on graduation weekend. "My parents, in what should have been their proudest moment…." she laughed.

Then it was time to discuss the First Amendment, and Judith Miller, and the responsibility of the journo. We need, she said, to "“push back against public officials, not take their word for it” about matters of great import.

She framed it as a simple First Amendment issue: "Judy had made an agreement with a source to protect confidentiality." She hailed Judith for being "one of the first to write about Al-Qaeda" and the anthrax scare, and described a visit to Miller in the Alexandria jail.

follow me....?

I've threatened to start this blog for at  least two months; I played with the idea of naming it "Scribbledehobble," after my old avatar James Joyce, in tribute to his ability to work with massive amounts of material in six languages.  But even before I knew that name was taken,  I test-drove this, the first one I'd thought of -- from a newer fellow traveler, Marshall Mathers.

My most enduring image of the latter is the scene in 8 Mile where he's on a bus, traveling through Detroit's crumbling neighborhoods,  with a steno pad in his lap. His trademark scowl deepens when he crosses out a line, trying to find the words for what he sees in front of him, what he feels. Perhaps he's writing this invocation for his listeners: "Follow me as I put these crayons to chaos, from seance to seance."

Seance to seance. Bring out your dead. (Not so different from my book of days slugline, Philip Roth's line about being unable to read a newspaper without imagining himself "everyone in it, including the corpses, pal.") Trying to come up with the right phrase, the right sentence, the right paragraph to convey the information you want and make the reader feel something -- it's an impossible task. Suicidally impossible, even if you don't have to make it rhyme.

Yet we all insist on trying, writers do. We do it in poems and essays and long fictions. We do it because we have to -- and sometimes, for what Richard Feynman calls "the pleasure of finding things out,"  we embark on the detective work people still call journalism. Then the challenge is triple -- to do a thorough enough job of reporting so that before we start to write, we have as full a picture as we can.

I've always tended, in the past, to over-report: to not call one organization when three were available, to hunt down as many possible poster children on X story as possible, to squint on more articles and judicial opinions as my eyes could stand. I still think it' s a sound principle -- but it definitely adds to the sense of trying to craft a vessel that can hold it all, without losing what's most essential. Without losing the story. This applies to most of my fiction as well - how to write Jehanne Darc in a way that's both learned and not pedantic? -- but it's in journalism, where a word count reminds you that more is often not better, that the pressure feels most intense.

My stories are good - often good enough to be reprinted and cited deep in legal briefs. But every one of those good stories came at such a tremendous cost -- not only to me  but, frankly, to my editors -- that it wasn't a sustainable pattern for a career in the work.

So I retreated into the safer, if no less taxing, space of teaching - but the bug to tell stories, true stories, never left. And beginning the blog -- a space that so many have used successfully to make real contributions to the national conversation -- only intensified my desire to do all this full time. It also made me more acutely aware that I needed some real hard training first.

Despite all manner of good schooling, I've been entirely self-trained in this craft. And I've never forgotten what that meant when I was working with both trained and amateur actors, for a production of a play of mine in college. The trained actors, when they hit on something that worked --  gesture,  a response -- could always go back there. The untrained ones -- in particular a hugely talented dude named Roy -- would shrug and insist he had done exactly the same thing, even when it wasn't true.

Thus the decision, at age 43, to commence a year at Columbia's notorious boot camp for journalists. I want my top stories to feel less like a blessing and more earned.

Of course, watch out what you ask for: you might get it. And then, at least if you're me, you're completely terrified. I'm both thrilled almost beyond words at the prospect of working, this seriously and this deeply, with people who are quite literally Pulitzer caliber - and quaking in my boots for fear of not coming up to standard.

I'll write more on that tomorrow, in the warmup to Opening Day: and by the time I start blogging in real-time from inside J-school, I hope you'll be rooting for me to prove those fears wrong.