More Jhumpa Lahiri

     There is good literature and good reading.

     Sometimes, good, even great, literature does not equal everyone's taste in good reading.  I have trouble with some Joyce Carol Oates and E. L. Doctorow. But, give me Saul Bellow or Joan Didion -- well, I find them elucidating, illuminated and entertaining.

     Jhumpa Lahiri falls in that category as well and for the same reason.Her characters are compelling, her settings are spot on, her plots are familiar even when they feature people in far different circumstances than the reader. 

     You really see this in short stories where many different characters come at you, story to story. Like Alice Munro or Pam Houston, Lahiri is a master of the compact. 

     Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri's 2008 collection, brings the reader into the lives of young Bengalis in the United States. Lahiri was once one of them, although she was born in London and came here at only 2-years-old. She describes herself as "a daughter of parents who spoke accented English."

     The young couples and individuals in the stories are all well-educated, smart and, to one extent or another, successful. But, each has a different outlook, a different set of circumstances.

     The relationships between the accented-English spearkers and their more fluent adult or nearly adult children afre often emphasized. In the title story, a widowed fther visits his daughter and grandchild with a secret. 

     Relationships with Americans are portrayed in the stories Hell-Heaven, Nobody's Business and A Choice of Accommodations."  Siblings dominate "Only Goodness." The stories in Part 2 are linked.

     Lahiri expertly weaves the settings into her fascinating plots and her characters into each others' lives. 
 

45 Words

     Perhaps the most important 45 words in the American idiom are the words of the First Amendment. 
    
     "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peacefully to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." 

     Beautiful words, aren't they?

     This blog was planned for Freedom of Speech Week, but my computer didn't allow that to happen. Better to be thwarted by a machine than by the government, I guess.

     I believe Freedom of Speech Week should be celebrated with, well, ok, maybe not fireworks, but how about church bells. But mostly, of course, with speech. 

     I think every school should have an assembly, presented by the students. They should write skits and do stand-up all about what they are allowed to say. The assemblies should include debates on tough, controversial issues. Simulated classroom discussions on hard topics. The kids should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them. 

    Young people all over the country should talk, write, petition and assemble. Just because they can. 

    Eighth graders should be the ones to coordinate all this as part of their civics classes. 

    The grownups in their lives also need to learn a few lessons. they need to learn to get over their aversion to controversy when it comes to kids. And, they really need to get over knee-jerk political correctness. 

    They need to watch their kids learning to express their views without anger. Learning to argue and raise their voices in passion without getting personal. to separate views from personality. Lessons obviously some adults never learned. 

     Kids are creative. Left to their own devices, they can probably come up with something better than their elders could even imagine.

Retiring? Unthinkable!

     One of the things about getting to a certain age is people you do business with retire.  My attorney left private practice for a part-time assistant prosecutor's gig. I've had a dentist, OB/GYN and my kids' pediatrician retire, all of which were traumatic to a greater or lesser extent. But the real trauma came recently.

     My vet retired!

      Dr. Donald B. Shatto has a bedside manner that would be the envy of most medical doctors. I don't know how vets do it. Their patients can't tell them where it hurts or what happened. But Doc always knew. 

Naomi was an Abyssinian cat I acquired from a roommate who moved in with her boyfriend. Naomi hated the guy. She was correct in doing so.

      Doc took care of many cats for me. From Dandelion, who moved into The Star-Gazette office the night Emile Benoist freaked out and shot six people.  She ended up coming home with me. She was soon joined by Naomi, above. 

     Cats happen.  They are not planned. 

Kali was one of the Terrible Tweedle Twins. She outlived her sister by several years. 

      Doc took care of so many cats for us. Most lived a good long life. Some had their lives cut short by misadventure or disease. But he always knew when we should help it along, like with Dandi and another tortie named Dinah (after the cat on Alice's lap in Alice in Wonderland). And with Kali, above, he knew she would go in her own time. And she did. On my lap one Halloween morning. It was a sad but educational experience for my kids. 

Agatha

 

 

 

       Agatha developed diabetes and didn't drink enough, no matter how we tried. She was the softest cat ever. She was an offspring of one of many cats dumped over the fence of people we knew from church who's satellite dish was visible from Route 80. People can be scum. 

     Doc took care of rabbits for us.  At some point he said he was retiring from Guinea pigs and other rodent-types. GPs were the only rodents I allowed.  They don't smell mousy and with all those cats, that's a necessity. 

    When they were little, my kids would do group weigh ins on Doc's large dog scale.  They'd talk to his tropical fish and scan the photos on the bulletin board in the waiting room for the photos we submitted. 

Dante grew from this itty-bitty kitten to a big long-haired tuxedo. 

   

      Dante was our only long-hair. He was found with his siblings in a box in Stillwater. Stillwater well may be the dumped kitten capital of the Western World. 

Ilse was named after the Ingrid Bergman character in Casablanca.  I think she's glamourous enough. 

         Then there was the dog. "This requires some explanation," Doc said when he met Nero. It was simple, really.  I've always loved dogs. Once my ex moved out, a dog moved in. 

Some people might think 64 pounds is a little large for a lap dog. Nero disagreed.

 
      Doc took good care of Nero, too. And boarded him when we went away. Nero actually got to like it there. He loved Trish (Mrs. Doc). Then, when we took in Ivy as a geriatric adoption, Doc became her doctor, too. 

     I believe more tears are shed in a vet's office than anywhere else. Losing those pets was hard, but having a doctor whom I could trust and believe in made it (a little) easier. 

    I find it hard to believe I'll ever find another vet like Dr. Shatto. But, I wish him a wonderful retirement. 
 

Molto bene grazie, Jhumpa

     Jhumpa Lahiri is a hyphenated-hyphenated Italian.

  She is Italian by amore. Londoner by birth, Bengali by ethnicity and American by nationality. But none of those things count quite as much.

  Her first time to Italy, to Firenze where falling in love with la citta is inevitable, was at 24-years-old. She fell in love with la lingua as well and determined to learn it. 

  Pulitzer-Prize-winner Lahiri spoke at a Montclair State University Inserra Chair event on Oct. 5.  The Theresa and Lawrence R. Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian-American Studies in the Department of Spanish and Italain (which should be the Department of Italian and Spanish)presents a series of events celebrating Italian language and culture. 

   Lahiri has been celebrating Italian language and culture since that first trip with her sister in the 1990s. She had earned a BA in English Literature from Barnard College. Her time in Firenze inspired her to study Italian and write her PhD dissertation on the Italian Palazzo. She had toyed with the idea of majoring in the classics and studied Latin and Greek, but that is very different from studying a powerful, living language.In

   That power of language was apparent to Lahiri as a child of parents who spoke accented English.  When her son was born, she said she found she couldn't love him in English, but only in Bengali, the language her parents used to show their love. 

   She realistically identifies her love of the language as unrequited. 

    As she became more proficient, Lahiri began writing in Italian, at first in secret, in her diary. Now she has moved on to publishing a book in Italian In Altre Parole -- In Other Words.

    During her talk, she spoke of the shelter of another language, the freedom to hide in another language. "Passport Control" is the phrase she uses to describe the effect of writing in another language. 

    Her books written in English are Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, The Lowland and Unaccustomed Earth. They have been translated into Italian.  Stay tuned for some reviews.

   

Read This Book

    Ok, I recently told my (few) followers not to read a particular book. Now I'm telling them to read a book if they haven't got to it yet. 

     Toms River received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.  Dan Fagin inscribed a copy for me last spring, but, well, you know, life gets in the way. 

     The book is about patterns.  The patterns people look for when more than one thing happens in a given area in a given time span. The patterns parents are desperate to find when that pattern is a cluster of childhood cancer.

     Nobody wants to think about children getting sick.  We are a few generations removed from the days when parents lost children of the diseases of the country, like tetanus, or the diseases of the city, like diptheria. So we like to pretend children don't die. 

     But, the trappings of the civilization that make us feel immune to dangers are often the very causes of those dangers.

     We love color. Well, not society ladies of New York, but most of us. Plumage, if you will. We attach status to color. Hence, royal purple. 

     While rummaging the racks at Macy's we don't think about the chemical process required to create these colors and to make them more or less fade-resistant. Even those of us who sew don't think much about the process of dying the fabric.  I have a friend who worked as a colorist on Seventh Avenue and I don't think much about the creation of dyes. 

    But, starting in the 19th Century, making chemical dyes was big business in central Europe. Eventually, the companies that made these dyes moved their production to the United States. The processes weren't safe for workers and the releases from the factories weren't safe for the people who lived nearby. 

    In the 1950s and through the 1970s, state-of-the-art disposal of chemical wastes was dumping it in 55-gallon drums and burying the drums in a field later dusted with lime. In addition, filtering of what came out of the smokestacks was limited or non-existent. 

     Ciba Geigy's plant in Toms River was sloppy to say the least, up to and including building a large pipe that took effluent to the ocean. Compounding the problems from Ciba Geigy, Union Carbide, up in Bound Brook needed to rid itself of chemical waste, so, not surprisingly, they hired a couple of mob wannabees and didn't ask where they were burying them. More SOP.

     In spite of all the evidence of sloppiness and lack of oversight, it was very difficult to establish that there was a cancer cluster that could have been caused by pollution. That kind of proof had only been established once before, in Woburn, MA.  But years of review of the evidence by New Jersey and federal officials produced results that left little doubt of a connection between effluent from the plant and the buried waste and the occurrences of leukemia and brain cancer among children in Toms River. 

     Fagin goes into amazing detail about the search for a connection and about the history of the companies responsible. He even traces back through the history of scientific research into chemicals and their effects. He also reveals the hero of the story: a nurse at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who noticed an unusual number of patients with the same hometown. 

     It's a long book and not an easy read. It's not supposed to be easy. Read it anyway.    

Unethical by Omission

       Ok, here I am back on the ethics soapbox again. . .

   It's the responsibility of every reporter to include everyone in the community int heir stories. 

   Andrew Seaman, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, presented a session titled "Unethical by Omission" at the national convention in September that addressed the communities that aren't often covered.

   These may be communities that haven't often produced the policymakers or leaders. All the more reason the press must include them and must add depth to these communities, to dispel both positive and negative stereotypes.

   We should allow people to discover more than one story but including them in the stories we write.

   Before we can do that, the wise-beyond-his-years Seaman noted we need to take an audit and find our blind spots?

   Who do you overlooks? It's not always, or even often, the obvious: women, minorities.  Is it the young? Do you only look for a source with years of experience? Do you only want to talk to the PIO who used to be a newspaperman? Do you get locked into using the same sources?  Well, you're not alone. I'd venture to say we all do that way too often. 

   It's taken me a while, but I've learned as I cover agriculture, that sometimes the young farmer who is willing to take chances, is a very good source. 

   Sometimes we need to step out of our comfort zone. Sure, use official sources, but sometimes an unofficial source is really the expert.

   I've done stories on floods and droughts and snow emergencies and found the official line is often inadequate. Someone who lives or works in the area of damage and knows it well can often provide the real story.

    We can't allow social media to trap us, either. We need to get out in the communities we cover and talk to the people who are not posting nonstop.

    A tweet or a Facebook post can provide a starting point, but is may not lead anywhere.

    Seaman reminded his audience about the parents on playgrounds and small business people who tend to see everything that does on in their community.

    The services that do reach out to the underserved often know what's going on as well.

    Another tip, read the ethnic media.  In New Jersey, The Italian Tribune often has stories traditional papers don't have and perspectives they don't offer. 

    The bottom line, find out what is really going on.   

Angry

     I got an advance reading copy of a book called Angry Enough to Kill by S. J. Dunn.  It came along with some other books at a professional conference. The copy asked for a review. It shouldn't have.

     The book is about three women who seek revenge against pedophiles. You would think they would be sympathetic characters.  You would be wrong.

     The characters aren't drawn strongly enough to get an idea of why they act the way they do.  They have their reasons, but the way the plot and character development are intertwined, those motives become muddled. "Who is the vet avenging?" "Exactly what happened to the car dealer?" It's hard to keep straight. Add to that the fact whatever happened to them hasn't prevented them from becoming incredibly successful and you get a contradiction that just doesn't work. The supporting characters are equally poorly drawn and some seem to exist strictly to advance a plot point.

    Add to all that an overly complicated plot to do in a particular pedophile that involves too many actors and too much luck and the book simply doesn't work.

     Dunn seems to forget that just because someone is a victim that doesn't justify all out revenge, ignoring laws and morality. Something deeper has to be going on to make these characters sympathetic.

     The book is billed as a thriller.  It doesn't thrill.

Sing it Now: "The cover of the Rolling Stone. . ."

     Jann, how could you?

     For those of us who grew up with Rolling Stone, who turn to it to follow the bands that ushed our maturity and for in-depth features and investigative pieces, this was a betrayal.

      There are a few must-read magazines:  The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic. . . and
Rolling Stone.

     We need long-form journalism, especially today when everything is condensed and aggragated.

     So, what happened with the "campus rape" story?

     Steve Coll, dean of Columbia Journalism School and Kaitlyn Flanagan of The Atlantic discussed just that during a session a the Society of Professional Journalists National Convention in September in Orlando, Fla.

     Coll noted his two daughters first drew his attention to the story.  They were shocked, he said, but thought the premise was plausible as "a symbol of frats," so he read it.

     "I was frustrated by the omniscient magazine narrative," the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New Yorker writer noted.

     Flanagan noted her magazine "gave frats the white glove treatment," but no one believed Rolling Stone didn't have proof.

     Rolling Stone reached out to Coll after an investigation by the Washington Post proved the assualt couldn't have happened as reported.

      Coll explained reporter Sabrina Ruben Erdley turned over all of her files and a number of drafts of the story.  He and a team reviewed all of the material to determine how the editing process failed. 

     He told the audience of professionals and students he investigated what actually happened on campus, what happened at Rolling Stone and what was the best way to evaluate the situation.

     Flanagan said these cases are "living nightmares of our own creation," for journalists.
  
     Coll said Erdely's "basic tradecraft was solid."  He emphasized this was not one of the unfortunate recent cases involving fraud. "This was a failure of collaborative judgement," he said.

     He characterized Erdely as smart, "she wouldn't not have gone on a professional suicide mission."

     Flanagan called it as "clash of cultures. . .the victim culture, you don't challenge."
 
     Coll noted Erdely was interested in maintaining trust with "Jackie," as she identified the victim, a case of becoming invested in reporting over verification. And, Jackie was not a public person.

      The fault, Coll discovered, was in trying to protect a young woman who said she had been gang raped.  Editors chose to use pseudonyms rather than upset Jackie by tracking down three friends she claimed to have told about the rape and whose full names she never divoluged. 

      Erdely started with the Congressional testimony of a UVA administrator, but Congressional testimony isn't vetted. 

      Flanagan said it there was anything that seemed fraudulent, it was Erdeley's feeling "I want a story that proves there is a rape culture on campus."  Not an objective journalism way to start. Colle noted she remained within the activist community.

      They didn't let Erdely off the hook, especially when she convinced editors she couldn't reach people who should have been very easy to reach, like the three friends.

      There are many object lessons that come from this.  Probably the most meaningful is to always practice good journalism. 
   

Who are You?

     There was a time when, unless you were a public figure, you didn't have to worry about your image.

     You probably didn't even have one.

     Now, in the age of social media, everyone has something of a public image.

     That was the subject of a session at Excellence in Journalism 15, the nation Society of Professional Journalists convention.
  
      Social media is a tool to reinforce the idea of what a writer does.  Before social media, we only told the story of what we did everyday on special occasions, like Thanksgiving,when Nona was asking when we'd meet a nice Italian boy. Now, we can post about it every day.

       Which is a challenge to say the least.

        Most of us aren't used to writing about ourselves. We write about other people, about events, about issues. Perhaps an analysis here and there, an editorial, a column (the precursor of blogs).

        So, it's culture shock.
  
        I understand why it's important, but it still feels weird. To say the least.

       And, I understand why branding is particularly important for freelancers.  Our fields of expertise used to be the main thing. The writer's identity was deliberately suppressed.

       Now, people look for you on social media.

       I remember arguing against a head shot on my first column. Today, head shots are everywhere.

       It is probably a good idea to use the same one on each social media, but I find that boring. Actually, I often used by Facebook profile photo to express a mood.

     Currently, it's a shot of an Atlantic City psychic storefront, an homage to my Madame Marie Halloween costume that I wear to hand out candy to trick or treaters at my church.

      Previoulsy, it was a heron on Lake Hopatcong because Lake Hopatcong is home.

      Often, I default back to a shot of me with my idol, Pete Hamill, not only to provoke jealousy among my friends who also idolize him. But, partly.

     On LinkedIn, my head shot is one taken by my older daughter in my kitchen. Yes, LinkedIn is often dismissed, but, it's still the premier exchange for people in the business world. And, like it or not, journalism is a business.

      On Twitter, it's one taken by the wife of a high school friend at a luncheon.

      I did get a free professional headshot after a free makeover at EiJ15.  A friend told me I rocked the Marlo Thomas look, but I think I'll pass on using the shot.

     As far as the words that describe me, I stick to the facts in my profile.

     Well, ok, Facebook gives you choices of a question to answer and I chose (naturally) "if you encounter an alien visiting earth, how will you know the conversation is over?"
 
     I mean, that just begs for the answer:  "When he lights a cigarette."

     I am from New Jersey, after all.

     As far as what I post, it's pretty sparing.

     I abide by the adage, "Facebook is the people you went to high school with.  Twitter is the people you wish you went to high school with."

      I rarely post on either, and I do compartmentalize.

     Facebook is where I check in with old friends. Sometimes I answer comments, but I don't fall victim to political discussions.  I found out pretty early on that people were serious about things I assumed they were joking about.

     I mean, who knew there was something called an "urban dictionary?" Vernacular is the language of the people, so, if it's not your vernacular, why would you be interested in knowing the word? Yeah, that assumption taught me to be careful.

     Of course, I post these blogs on Facebook and Twitter. I also post my stories, mentioning something about them when necessary.

     My Twitter handle is @ReporterJane2.  Not that I'm the second ReporterJane. Anyone who knows me knows that's an homage to Derek Jeter. But the handle is straightforward, which is essential. It's also lasting. Whatever I write about, I'm still ReporterJane.

   Which is comforting in this crazy world.

Bells and Whistles

     The most important tools in journalism haven’t changed: a reporter’s notebook and a Dixon-Ticonderoga #2 pencil.

      But even the most traditional reporters, those of us from the Pleistocine Era, can’t ignore social media and the tools that control it.

     Which is why a roomful of reporters, many of us Jurassic, at least, assembled in a conference center in Orlando, Fla., in September to hear representatives of the Kiplinger Institute for Public Affairs Journalism present the “Digital Deep Dive.”

      Doug Haddix and Kevin Smith, director and deputy director of the program, laid out a few bells and whistles.

      WEBSTA, for example, searches by hastag. People, apparently, used different hashtags for the same thing. As if life wasn’t confusing enough.

     Perhaps people feel the need to be humorous. So they might, rather than #Trump, use #TribbleHead. Or eschew #ChrisChristie for #ChrisChubbie.

     Perhaps they feel the need to be politically correct. So instead of #CuomoDeBlasioFeud, they might use #TinyDisagreementonEducation.

     Haddix even extolled the merits of Facebook, aka Stalkbook, aka WhereYourGrandparentsHangOutBook.

     Besides being an online bocce court, Facebook is an excellent data base. You can use it to find out where people are from, who they are connected to, etc. Not a bad way to sort our people with common names. Kevin Smith who presented the class is Kevin Z. Smith, as opposed to Kevin Smith who made “Mallrats” or Kevin Smith who was in my son’s Boy Scout troop.

     Even those of us with less-than-common names could find duplicates. There are actually two Jane Primeranos with Shop-Rite courtesy cards.

      Twitter and even the chronically under-utilized LinkedIn can also be used for searches.

      Storify is a hand tool for creating drafts and pulling in social media by clicking and dragging. We dinosaurs like clicking and dragging almost as much as we like cutting and pasting. Google Forms enables you to develop questions and even to restrict the interviewee from skipping questions. Talk about an electronic power trip.

      Of course, during the program we iPad-azians, started having trouble with the browser, Safari.  It seems, according to an abashed IT geek, the wireless internet in the hotel sort of decided Safari is a Communist plot.

     Makes you long for the notebook and the Dixon-Ticonderoga #2 pencil.