Mickey Mousing around

Loading up and flying off to a Golden Birthday week excursion to Disney World... I can hardly contain my excitement. That was sarcasm. Though it shouldn't be "that bad," the over-commercialization of the place, like a small country where every experience is manufactured and manicured, is not normally an experience I seek out. But for the favor of a six-year-old, I will go smilingly. I hope to do a little writing about this experience and hope to weed out the cynicism while I'm at it. We'll see how it goes!

People of Places in the Twittersphere: Who are you?

As an avid Twitter user I am on the look out for like-minded folks "out there." Using HootSuite.com as a way to manage the various streams of Twitter activity (lists including media, politics, environmental comm, various people I follow, and a list I call "people of places") has been effective for segmenting the nonstop flow of information.

Unfortunately, my list of People of Places is a little thin. Other than the fact that I think most of us are people of places, there are few who ring true as overt persons of place, so to speak. Though I've had little in the way of ongoing engagement on this blog, I welcome it. Indeed, dear reader, this would be an excellent time to start letting me know what you think.

My short list of people of places includes a few that stretch my (rather loose) conception of what or who people of places means. But it includes only nine entities! This, compared to the 66 members of my "Intelligentsia" list, is, as suggested, a bit thin. Again, I am open to suggestions!

On the list so far are the outdoor sports and recreation magazine Outside (@outsidemagazine); a regional advocacy group from Madison, WI (@ThriveHere); a group offering the Rainbow Bridge from a Native perspective (@Native_TRB); author and co-founder of the Children & Nature Network, Richard Louv (@RichLouv); a group focusing on nature deficit disorder (@naturedeficit); a group operating out of a barn in Yorkshire (@SenseOfPlaceUK); a place protector from Virginia, USA (@MFinnemore); and a regional booster group focusing on Wisconsin tourism (@TravelWI).

Who else is out there in the world of social media focuses on Sense of Place?  This could be from an academic perspective or simply as an informal personal interest. I welcome input from all quarters.

Zinsser, On Writing Well about Place

Paging through a 20-year-old copy of William Zinsser's entertaining tome On Writing Well, I have happened upon a few pages on place. Samples of WZ's thought on writing about place are included below. Please forgive the gendered language. Apparently, even in 1990, gender neutral language was yet to be considered in On Writing Well.

Nevertheless, some Zinsserian nuggets...

"People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built."

"Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels."

"As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self -- the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells -- and keep an objective eye on the reader."

"One man's romantic sunrise is another man's hangover."

"...choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion -- it's probably one of the innumerable cliches that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing... Strive for fresh words and images."

"...whatever place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it special. Usually this will be some combination of place and the people who inhabit it."

"...when you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it. But if the process should work in reverse, let it draw the best out of you."

The Topophilian Daily

I am finding lately, in my just-a-little-too-busy lifestyle, that the aggregation device I use to collect more-or-less interesting tweets from the network of Twitter users I follow is an efficient way to get a sense of the daily news. It's only a slice of all the news out there, but among active twitterers in my sphere of influence, so to speak, it works. Granted, my busy lifestyle could use a little time-out. But that's another blog altogether. Check out The Topophilian Daily for a peek into my sphere of news & information.

FAWM

Where have I been all month?  With my head stuck in a sound hole, that's where. It was February!  This means February Album Writing Month (FAWM).  Although I have not enough time and a shortage of good ideas, I took on the challenge. Not having quite made the goal of 14 songs in 28 days doesn't matter so much as just simply trying. I developed 7 or 8 songs. A few of which are worth further development.

Get a sample of this work at my FAWM site. Or on the YouTube.
Enjoy!

On the Passing of Anthony Shadid, Journalist.



Anthony Shadid 1968-2012
credit: Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post

The world of journalism mourns a great loss. Anthony Shadid meant a lot of things to a lot of people. To those of us who have passed through the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Shadid was nothing less than one of The Absolute Best. His passing from an apparent asthma attack while covering the ongoing political and cultural turmoil in Syria is a huge loss for American global journalism. He was 43.

A stirring tribute can found in The New Yorker and a photo gallery highlighting Shadid's "lyrical and poignant" work is also available from the Washington Post. Acknowledgement on the homepage of UW-Madison, of which Shadid was a proud J-School alum, at first lead to a piece from The New York Times itself, where Shadid had been a senior foreign correspondent for many years. UW has now generated its own journalistic tribute in this story. Video excerpts are also available through the Times, here. On a local note, stalwart Madison journalist and long-time mentor to UW interns writing at Isthmus newspaper, Bill Lueders, offers this reflection. No further evidence of Shadid's genius is likely needed.

On assignment inside Syria, having crossed the border from Turkey under cover of night and without permission from Syrian officials, Shadid had an apparent allergic reaction to the horses being used to transport him and his associate, NY Times photographer Tyler Hicks. The level of personal peril that Shadid repeatedly faced is all but impossible to comprehend. The fact that he did it time and again is simply heroic. The Washington Post acknowledged that Shadid was one of "the most incisive honored foreign correspondents of his generation."

An excerpt from the NY Times explains some of his immense impact:

The death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two children, abruptly ended one of the most storied careers in modern American journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq reporting, both of them for The Washington Post. He also was a finalist in 2007 for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by The Times for his coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for the past year. 

Students at UW have had the opportunity to hear Mr. Shadid talk and to talk with him. His calm and down-to-earth nature were appealing and made for easy conversation. He was a great journalist and a great writer of humanity's struggle in the Middle East and elsewhere. These words do not say enough and cannot convey the grief very well. I'm not trying to represent UW or any other group or individual. I'm just trying to cope with the loss of someone who positively influenced me and people like me.

The release date for Shadid's forthcoming book, “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East,” has been moved up. It will be released on Feb. 28, moved up from March 27, 2012.

Photographs and Memories

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this collection hosted by the New York Times is priceless.

I will let the power of these images speak for themselves. Oh, the places you will go!