Biographies “Author, photographer biographies go deep - Deseret News” plus 4 more |
- Author, photographer biographies go deep - Deseret News
- Bring back rejection letters - The Guardian
- Berry Tramel: Tiger? We knew nothing - Daily Oklahoman
- Metro-east author's book about Chicago mob boss is an offer you can't ... - News-Democrat
- St. Jodoc - Catholic Online
| Author, photographer biographies go deep - Deseret News Posted: 12 Dec 2009 04:55 PM PST They were pioneers in their times — two women who are better known for their work than their names. One for her superb photographs that document the cultural history of America. The other for her books that celebrate ingenuity, family and friends. Their names: Dorothea Lange and Louisa May Alcott. Both women made an indelible mark on society and, in many cases, on our hearts. Two recently released biographies give the public an intimate view of these women's lives, making them great holiday gifts for fans and history buffs alike. "LOUISA MAY ALCOTT: The Woman Behind Little Women," by Harriet Reisen, Henry Holt and Co., 384 pages, $26 (nf) There's no doubt about it, Louisa May Alcott is famous for the family of girls she created in "Little Women." Who hasn't heard of Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy? Published some 140 years ago, the tale is timeless. In fact, "Little Women" has been translated into more than 50 languages and adapted for stage, television, opera, ballet, film and beyond. In many ways Alcott is the central character of "Little Women." Like Jo, Alcott was absorbed in writing and devoted to her family. But Alcott wasn't content being tied down either, choosing an independent path instead. In "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women," author and screenwriter Harriet Reisen has compiled stories and details gathered from Alcott's journals and letters, and recollections of her family, friends and contemporaries. Paired with Alcott's works, which are somewhat autobiographical, this new information gives readers a never-before-seen look at a literary icon. Alcott wrote more than 200 works, ranging from nonfiction and poetry to plays and adult novels. But she also spent time away from pen and paper working as a seamstress, domestic servant, Civil War nurse, abolitionist and suffragist. And Reisen takes readers through all these stages. Reisen has brought together an incredible amount of research in an accessible and heartwarming way. Her enthusiasm for the project is obvious as she captures Alcott's personality and determination with zest. This fascinating work is beautifully written and full of character. As a companion to her book, Reisen has also completed a documentary on Alcott. It's scheduled to premiere on PBS' American Masters on Dec. 28, and if it's anything like Reisen's book, it will definitely be worth watching. "DOROTHEA LANGE: A Life Beyond Limits," by Linda Gordon, W.W. Norton, 560 pages, $35 (nf) "Migrant Mother," an image of a young mother staring off into oblivion while sitting with three of her children, is one of a series of photographs shot in Nipomo, Calif., in 1936. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Bring back rejection letters - The Guardian Posted: 13 Dec 2009 04:58 AM PST A common feature of the biographies of many leading cultural figures is the list of rejections they received before they became successful. So The Beatles were famously turned down by Decca Records in 1962 with the line "guitar groups are on their way out". Twelve publishers rejected JK Rowling before Bloomsbury picked up the Harry Potter books. Whole books have been published collecting rejection letters, allowing us to feel smug at the hapless readers who turned down Borges, Stephen King or John Le Carré. Yet the biographies of future cultural luminaries are going to be thinner for losing this well-loved component of the artists; stories. For rejection today is increasingly communicated not in cuttingly short-sighted (or even far-sighted) screeds, but in something even more unpleasant – the resounding silence. In many spheres of contemporary life, not just in the cultural industries, explicit rejection is giving way to a convention in which non-response has become the way to turn people down. I do a fair amount of freelance writing for online and paper publications and I regularly pitch article and review ideas. While I sometimes get rejections, the commonest response from editors who don't want to publish my work is no response at all. This is the case even with editors for whom I've written before – it's nothing personal, but if my ideas aren't right then a lack of answer is assumed to be enough. (I should say at this point that the Guardian, especially Comment is free, is largely an exception to this rule – its freelance charter encourages swift responses from editors.) It's not just me: a highly respected and well-known journalist with whom I'm acquainted recently pitched an article to a well-known American journal and never heard anything. And it's not just writers who get rejected by silence. It's increasingly common for job applicants to hear nothing if they haven't been shortlisted. Indeed, many job adverts now warn prospective employees that if they haven't heard by a particular date to assume they have been rejected. The reasons for this emerging convention are not hard to infer. With the rise of online communication it is easier than ever to discover jobs, publishers and publications and to pitch applications and ideas to them. As blogs and other writing outlets have become accessible to all, more people than ever before aspire to contribute to media outlets. As recent books such as Maggie Jackson's Distracted and Naomi Baron's Always On have shown, we are deluged with information and competing demands for our attention. Pity the poor editor in today's world, faced with an almost unmanageable flood of supplicants, all insisting on their relevance. I know it's tough as I myself edit a website and even the small number of proposals that I get require a considerable amount of time to attend to. In order to cope with this deluge you have to be highly organised. As internet guru Clay Shirky has argued, people need rigorous "filters" to control the flows of information and new technologies and business practices can help in this. But the complexity of this task is such that other influential figures are arguing that it is best just to be ruthless with the "delete" key in the face of the never-ending "you've got mail" alerts. Although the rise of what we could call "deletionism" is perfectly understandable, it is nevertheless a disturbing development. For one thing, one can never be absolutely sure that an email has reached its destination – spam filters can be over-eager and twitchy fingers can unwittingly erase new additions to a crowded inbox – so a lack of response can leave senders in a kind of limbo, unsure whether to take the silence as a rejection or not. But the biggest problem with deletionism is that it is unethical and rude. An attempt to communicate, even if it is an attempt to communicate a lousy idea, should be greeted with a dignified response. In a bewildering and fast-changing world, connection is vital if society is not to dissolve into a mass of atomised individuals. To refuse to connect is to refuse the humanity of the one reaching out. Philosophers like Martin Buber and Emmauel Levinas have shown how one's relationship to 'the other' is the foundation of an ethical society. A polite no – or even an impolite no – does at least affirm that the other exists. Of course even if deletionism is unethical and rude, that does not mean that those who practise it are themselves fundamentally unethical and rude. To some extent we are all victims here, all of us trying to cope with an inundation of information that seems to grow exponentially. The tragedy of deletionism is that it is an unintended consequence of technological developments that should in theory (and sometimes are in practice) be empowering and democratising. Alternatives to silent rejections do exist: form-reply emails are easy to set up, even if they do need to be tailored to individual circumstances. I remember emailing George Monbiot a few years ago and receiving a considerate form-reply that apologised in advance that he could not always answer individual emails (in fact he did a couple of weeks later). We are living in a world in which ethical developments have clearly failed to keep pace with technological developments. It is sobering to think that we might look back with fondness and nostalgia to a time when we received letters of rejection that confirmed that we exist, even as they refused us. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Berry Tramel: Tiger? We knew nothing - Daily Oklahoman Posted: 13 Dec 2009 04:37 AM PST ©2009 Produced by NewsOK.com. All rights reserved.  Share with a friend
Enter multiple comma-separated email recipients.Forget, for a moment, if you can, the sleazy tales of Tiger Woods. The tapes, the details, the speculation. Instead, fast forward to April, to Augusta National, to the Masters. An event he surely won't skip, despite his announced hiatus from the sport. An event he can control to some degree. Unlike the last two weeks. Tiger's putting on the seventh green. Or standing on the 11th fairway at the start of Amen Corner. Or walking across the Sarazen Bridge at 15. How are you supposed to feel? If you once cheered for Tiger — and millions of us did — what do you do now? Do you still hope to see him slide into a green jacket or do you hope to see him slide off the leaderboard? Do you no longer care? Are you suddenly a Phil fan? In a moment of rare clarity, I wrote something a dozen years ago that remains bedrock truth. I compared Tiger to Babe Ruth. Five years ago, I added Elvis Presley to their exclusive club. American originals. Nobody else really qualified as men who not only revolutionized their craft but transcended it. Little did I know. Tiger also has joined Babe and Elvis as degenerates, men who while holding America by a string failed to control the sordid corners of their private life. The Tiger stories seem to pop up daily, of sexual liaisons with women not his wife. A man who for more than a decade maintained absolute command not just of his golf game but of his image, suddenly has shoved Lindsay Lohan off the cover of supermarket tabloids. Tiger, of course, has nothing on Babe or Elvis. Go read one of the good Babe biographies; Babe's philandering makes Tiger look like Father Flanagan. But Tiger forgot in what century he lives. What we ignored in the 1920s and winked at in the 1960s, we are mesmerized by in the 2000s. We can't get enough of Tiger's tales, and in the new-media explosion, they come furious and fast. Some claim disappointment. That's very odd to me. How could anyone be disappointed in Tiger Woods? How could anyone have expected anything, good or bad, out of Tiger Woods? Tiger is the ultimate plastic man. We knew nothing about Tiger Woods, other than his ability to play golf and what his marketers wanted us to see. The idea that Tiger was some kind of solid citizen, some kind of man to be admired, well, that sprang from merry hearts and silly souls. It's a longing we've long had, to instill in our heroes feats that have nothing to do with what made them heroes. The desire to see in beloved politicians and sexy actors and strong athletes some kind of exalted attributes. That somehow they are better people than we are. But the wise among us know differently. The wise among us know that swinging a ball bat or swinging your hips or swinging a 3-wood better than anyone on Earth means only that you can rule baseball or music or golf. It means nothing else. Those who put Tiger on a pedestal must deal with the laws of physics. Giants fall far. Those of us who cheered for Tiger because we were drawn to greatness — How many shots could he win by? How many majors could he win? — are less scarred by this scandal. Tiger disappointed us in 2009 not by cheating on his wife, but by failing to win the PGA. Tiger has been packaged and manufactured. We no more knew the real Tiger Woods than we know the real Obama or Bush. But we know Tiger a little better now, and in some ways, he's given us all a great gift. A valuable lesson. A reminder of what we should be cheering. Berry Tramel: 405-760-8080; Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1.Share with a friend
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| Metro-east author's book about Chicago mob boss is an offer you can't ... - News-Democrat Posted: 13 Dec 2009 05:48 AM PST "We did a day of filming 'walks and talks' at various historic city and suburb locations, and finally a four-hour interview," said Mars, who used to teach horticulture at Southwestern Illinois College. One of the places was 2222 South Wabash in Chicago. "Capone and Nitti met there for the first time," he said. "Unfortunately, there's not much left of these places. They're all vacant lots." Mars contended with big city street noise, often doing several takes as he told Nitti's story. He was one of six interviewed for the show. "Its fun, but grueling," he said. The show airs at 9 p.m. Friday, Dec. 18, and again at 1 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 19. Mars will sign copies of the 528-page "After Capone. The Life and World of Chicago Mob Boss Frank 'the Enforcer' Nitti" at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 19, at the Belleville Public Library. The book costs $20. He will split proceeds with Belleville Public Library. Mars got interested the underworld when he was a kid. He grew up in West Belleville, but his parents owned an East St. Louis dry cleaning business. "When I was this big," said Mars, measuring with his hand, "I heard all these stories about bombs and extortion." If shop owners didn't pay to play, they'd find their store windows broken, or worse, come across a pair of exploding pants. "Racketeers do that to scare you," said Mars. "They didn't throw dynamite through windows. As a warning, they'd sew flammable material in the seams of a suit. When put under the hot press, they would ignite or blow up to scare you or do damage." TV's "The Untouchables," helped young Mars visualize the bad guys. The show was about prohibition agent Eliot Ness' tangles with Chicago's underworld in the 1930s. "I thought that was the neatest stuff in the world," he said, "especially the Chicago outfit." That included mobster Al Capone and his number two man, Frank "the Enforcer" Nitti. "I first heard about Nitti on 'The Untouchables.' I followed gangster genre." Lots was written about Capone. Not so much Nitti. "Being the curious person I am, I looked into finding more information on Nitti. He sent out all the killers, told who was going to be bombed." In 1990-91, Mars was on semester break from teaching horticulture at Southwestern Illinois College. He contacted William Roemer, a retired FBI agent in Tucson who had written three or four books on his experiences with the Chicago outfit. "I looked him up and called him out of the blue," said Mars. "He told me Nitti is one of those guys who fell through the cracks. He said, 'Why don't you write a book on him?' He gave me all sorts of leads." Mars started his research with the nonprofit Chicago Crime Commission, and never looked back. Most surprising thing he learned in the process: "You can't count on federal documents to be totally accurate. What Nitti told the FBI, they took as fact. They didn't do a lot of back checking on his origins. Part of the reason to write the book was to separate fact from fiction." What was Frank Nitti like? "He was ruthless, but very businesslike. All business, no emotion, the quintessential businessman, boring in a sense. He didn't spend extravagantly. He didn't live an ostentatious life. During the Roaring Twenties, when money was flowing all over, he was investing, saving." Nitti, described by Mars as "a rather dreary-eyed individual," was married three times, and had an adopted son who would be about 75. He committed suicide as he was being indicted for racketeering in the Hollywood extortion case. He was 57 and wasn't in the best of health, said Mars. "He had heart problems, and old gunshot wounds that didn't heal right." What would he be doing if he were around today? "He'd probably be doing the same thing. Whatever he'd be doing, he'd be very successful." Who would like this book? "Anyone who is interested in organized crime. That genre is absolutely nonfiction, all fact. Truth is stranger than fiction. Women have really liked it. There's a part of the female audience interested in gangsters and hoodlums and blood and guts. They want to go to where the action is, right where it starts. Go to Chapter 4. That's where people start dying." From the book On Frank Nitti joining forces with Al Capone: "The initiation was likely simple: 'Here's your job, here're the rules, don't break them -- or else.' "(Frank Nitti) was a natural fit, as he possessed useful Chicago bootleg and business skills, a coarse Brooklyn Navy Yard and a greater Chicago experience, and an Italian heritage. Capone could use him plus Nitti was nearly old family to the Capones and could be trusted as much as or more than any other individual in their Chicago realm." On marking victims: "Using more sinister means to torment victims, the names of targeted persons might be tacked to a distinct tree, a notice board to the community -- 'Dead Man's Tree,' as it came to be known. The sparse, scrawny poplar, a stick somehow growing in the strained city soil on Loomis Street, stood in front of tenement number 725. Those whose names were psted for all to see became victims." At a glance The show: Biography of gangster Frank Nitti. When: 9 p.m. Friday; 1 a.m. Saturday. Where Arts & Entertainment Channel Book signing: Author Mars Eghigian will sign copies of "After Capone. The Life and World of Chicago Mob Boss Frank 'the Enforcer' Nitti" at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Belleville Public Library. The book costs $20. He will split proceeds with Belleville Public Library. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Posted: 12 Dec 2009 11:58 PM PST Feastday: December 13 St. Jodoc (Josse) Confessor December 13 A.D. 669 Those Britons who, flying from the swords of the English-Saxons, settled in Armorica in Gaul, upon the ruins of the Roman empire in those parts formed themselves into a little state on that coast till they were obliged to receive the laws of the French. Judicaël, commonly called Giguel. eldest son of Juthaël, became king of Brittany about the year 630. This prince soon after renounced this perishable crown to labor more securely for the acquisition of an incorruptible one, and retired into the monastery of St. Meen, in the diocese of St. Malo, where he lived in so great sanctity as to be honored after his death with the title of the Blessed Judicaël. When he resigned the crown be offered it to his younger brother Jodoc, called by the French Josse But Jodoc had the same inclinations with his elder brother However, to consult the divine will, he shut himself up for eight days in the monastery of Lammamiont, in which he had been brought up, and prayed night and day with many tears that God would direct him to undertake what was most agreeable to him, and most conducive to his divine honor and his own sanctification. He put an end to his deliberation by receiving the clerical tonsure at the hands of the bishop of Avranches, and joined a company of eleven pilgrims who purposed to go to Rome. They went first to Paris, and thence into Picardy in 636, where Jodoc was prevailed upon by Haymo, duke of Ponchieu, to fix upon an estate of his, which was at a sufficient distance from his own country, and secure from the honors which there waited for him Being promoted to priest's orders, he served the duke's chapel seven years, then retired with one only disciple named Vurmare, into a woody solitude at Ray, where he found a small spot of ground proper for tillage, watered by the river Authie. The duke built them a chapel and cells, in which the hermits lived, gaining by the tillage of this land their slender subsistence and an overplus for the poor. Their exercises were austere penance, prayer, and contemplation. After eight years thus spent here they removed to Runiac, now called Villers-saint-Josse, near the mouth of the river Canche, where they built a chapel of wood in honor of St. Martin. In this place they continued the same manner of life for thirteen years; when Jodoc having been bit by an adder, they again changed their quarters, the good duke who continued their constant protector, having built them a hermitage, with two chapels of wood, in honor of SS. Peter and Paul. The servants of God kept constant enclosure, except that out of devotion to the princes of the apostles, and to the holy martyrs, they made a penitential pilgrimage to Rome in 665. At their return to Runinc they found their hermitage enlarged and adorned, and a beautiful church of stone, which the good duke had erected in memory of St. Martin, and on which he settled a competent estate. The duke met them in person on the road, and conducted them to their habitation. Jodoc finished here his penitential course in 669, and was honoree by miracles both before and after his death. Winoc and Arnoc, two nephews of the saint, inherited his hermitage, which became a famous monastery, and was one of those which Charlemagne first bestowed on Alcuir in 792. It stands near the sea, in the diocese of Amiens, follows the order of St. Bennet, and the abbot enjoys the privileges of count. It is called St. Josse-sur-mer. St. Jodoc is mentioned on this day in the Roman Martyrology. See the life of this saint written in the eighth century; Cave thinks about the year 710. It is published with learned notes by Mabillon, Act Ben. t. 2, p. 566 Gall. Chr. Nov. t. 10, pp. 1289, 1290. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
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I will have a hard time wanting to see Tiger be successful in his golf game going forward. The guy didn't just cheat on his wife with a woman, he had several. My hope is that he gets his life together and become the man God has called each of us to be. If he never plays golf again, but keeps his family together, that would be the greatest thing ever for him.