The Journalist and Mrs. Brown

In her 1924 essay/lecture, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Virginia Woolf talks about how novelists from different literary periods develop characters, and as an example, she creates a hypothetical character, "Mrs. Brown," whom Woolf imagines encountering in a carriage on the way to a train. Some writers, she says, would be inclined to focus on Mrs. Brown's situation (her house, her town, the property laws in her area) and discuss her in relation to it. Woolf, on the other hand, is inclined to start with Mrs. Brown and develop the novel around the character.

I think it's worthwhile to think about how journalists would treat Mrs. Brown, even though Woolf created Brown for a speech about how novelists develop characters.

After all, journalism has limits not only of reality -- you have to describe the people and events you choose to discuss as truthfully as you can -- but also of fiction -- you have to create a story that makes sense, and that sometimes requires you to pass by real people and true stories that don't make sense in the story.  In a story about obesity, for example, you can't just spy an obese person on the street, call her Mrs. Brown, observe her and write about her without interviewing her or asking her permission, as you could if you were writing a novel. Nor would you want to approach Mrs. Brown and say, "I'm writing a feature story about obesity; could I interview you?" Instead, you look for people who admit, by joining a support group or chat room, to being obese and indicate that they are open to discussing it. Even then, you can't just write about anyone. You need someone who is who is obese, willing to talk and has a simple enough story without too many twists and turns. Twists and turns confuse the reader, but in journalism, you have to face them. In fiction, you can just leave them out, or your character might not encounter them in the first place. In order to find a suitable journalistic subject, you may end up sending message after message to people in chat rooms and forums. It's sometimes a lot of work to come up with a real character you can use. (As Coleridge wrote, "Water, water, everywhere; Nor any drop to drink.")

To me, this seems like a contradiction, because I like to think of nonfiction as writing ready-made stories with ready-made characters. In fiction, you have to make your own characters before you can write about them, or as you write about them, which seems like it might be more work.  I realize now that, to some extent, you are making up the character in both cases. In both cases, you have certain requirements for Mrs. Brown: she has to be obese and go through some kind of ordeal. In fiction, you can make Mrs. Brown act just as your story demands. In journalism, you have to choose among a limited number of real people. Sometimes, I think writing fiction might be easier than finessing reality as a journalist.

This journalistic process, of starting an article with a situation and developing a character within it, is analogous to starting a novel in which Mrs. Brown is the heroine by describing her house and the property laws that govern it.

For example, in Katherine Eban's Self piece, "The Hidden Dangers of Outsourcing Radiology," which is about doctors reading X-rays  from afar and failing to communicate critical information, Eban opened with a compelling story about a character who was the victim of this medical neglect, then described the larger problem.  She started with Mrs. Brown, then described her house.  In fact, though, the author started the story knowing what kind of house she wanted in her story, then searched for a character who could inhabit it. The character she found, rather than driving the story, was someone she finally found at the end of a long search for a suitable subject, Eban told my NYU journalism class.

Not only do journalists use characters, like Mrs. Brown, as props in stories about houses, but they sometimes write the stories in a form that makes them seem like they are stories about Mrs. Brown, when really, the stories could have been about anyone who happened to live in the right house.

I think that a novelist does more justice to the real Mrs. Brown by observing her and making up a story about her than a journalist who wants to write a story about housing laws and decides to use Mrs. Brown in the lede. Even if the journalist quotes Mrs. Brown and writes only facts about Mrs. Brown, that journalist may be able to or even want to express what's most important about Mrs. Brown's character.

Mrs. Brown might not tell a journalist that she's a poor old woman about to sell her property to the domineering man in the carriage next to her. The journalist can observe her mended clothes and the way she seems to recoil in front of this man, but the journalist can't print a story about how this paunch-faced old man intimidates Mrs. Brown without quotes or some kind of proof, which the proud Mrs. Brown and the power-hungry man will not furnish. The journalist can't really tell Mrs. Brown's story. The novelist can - but only by making it up.  

Which way of telling a story is more truthful, describing a character or describing a house? I think both ways of telling stories are valid, but I think that people go through life as characters interacting with other characters whose lives are affected by their circumstances but who deal with them on a small scale, not as brushstrokes in the big picture.

The well-trodden paths of ballet class

Pas de basque was the first step in a combination across the floor in class on Saturday at Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn.  It's a step that can be very slow and luxurious, or it can be a quick waltz.  The first time I recall encountering the quick-waltz version of the step was in a class taught by Mary Thompson in Cambridge, Mass.  This step baffled me.  Even though I knew how to do the slow pas de basque, there didn't seem to be enough counts for the quick one.  I was used to the step taking four counts, with a rond de jambe--circling the leg from front to back--on the first count.  In the quick version, you need to rond de jambe and step forward on count one in order for it to work, and I mostly found this out because it didn't work for me. 

So this Saturday, I knew how to pas de basque quickly. My memories of Mary's pas de basque combinations returned.  Yet the memory of being nervous about doing pas de basques and losing a count or a step and not knowing why in Cambridge was somehow pleasant.  A familiar memory was pleasant, even though the experience remembered was one of anxiety. 

I thought of Mary when we did balancés toward the back corners of the room.  Dancing toward the back corner in combinations that ultimately travel forward seemed counter-intuitive to me, but it comes up all the time, and I'm ready for it.  I thought of her when we did pas de chats.  Mary said that the height of the jump, in which you move sideways and bring both feet under you one after the other, was determined by how much your torso rose, not how high you got your bent legs off the ground. 


As we did circular port de bras, rotating the upper body in a circle around the hips, I remembered how my friend and I used to try to look at the floor the whole time, a feat quite difficult when you are bending straight back.  It's a challenge that goes along with using your head in the port de bras, since if you can't bend your back any further, as any limbo player knows, you can always throw back your head. Actually, looking at the floor helped me keep my balance during the port de bras, whereas just using my head without looking at anything made me fall over, or at least feel like I was going to. 

Though these steps may not be familiar to all readers of this blog, they have layers of familiarity for dancers.  Ballet class, which has the same format every time, everywhere, is a routine in itself.  Then come the memories of all the teachers and what they've said about various steps.  "Exhale as you go forward," one teacher said every time we did a bend forward at the barre.  I think she just liked saying it; surely everybody caught on after she said it a few times, since it's an easy correction to apply! 

So during that circular port de bras, exhale as you go forward, don't cut corners, use your head, and try to see the floor the whole time!  And don't get too lost in daydreams. 

Jewels

When I got to my seat in the fourth ring of the Koch Theater, a bronze orb covered in glittering circles of diamonds/clear jewels, the chandelier, hung before my eyes.  Each section of the theater's upper levels had its own matching, glittering circle.  Jewels studded the theater's rings.

I did not wear any jewels to see Balanchine's work of the same name.  I left the house in a flurry, thrilled with the possibility of making it to the ballet, knowing that I might be late.  I didn't take time to fuss with my costume, and I was right on time.  Why do people in the audience dress up for the ballet?  Whereas the performers costume themselves for the audience, the performers can't see what audience members are wearing and probably don't care.  Audience members dress up for each other.

"Emeralds" was lyrical and beautiful.  It used a Fauré piece I particularly like that made me imagine the dancers were in an enchanted wood where miracles, like ballet and falling in love, take place.  During one variation, the ballerina spun around moving her arms intricately above her head.  I tried to imagine an emerald doing so but failed.  It was just interesting choreography.  Balanchine had dancers lift their arabesques in staccato fashion to match the music.  No leg dropped or shook.  Balances were all suspended.  No one broke the spell.

Throughout "Rubies," I kept thinking that the dancers didn't look like humans at all.  Maybe this is what dancing minerals would look like:  flashy, angular, hard.  They danced turned-in and in plié with flashes of extensions to the side and turned-in back attitudes.

"Diamonds" began like a dry version of "Swan Lake," with dancers in white, accompanied by Tchaikovsky, doing balancé after balancé, but toward the end, it was magical.   As in "Emeralds," the dancers looked like humans perfected, my image of ballerinas. At one point, the entire corps de ballet put on long gloves, and the dancers waltzed around the stage in pairs, the diamonds glittering off the women, so that it looked like a ballroom scene from My Fair Lady.  Though Audrey Hepburn wore black gloves and pearls for Breakfast At Tiffany's, I thought of her, here, too.

This is my take on the ballet itself.  Since I'd never seen it before, I can't comment on the quality of the particular performance apart from the choreography.  Technique was brilliant, as expected.  Some places could have used more turnout, but the dancers used more turnout than I ever will!

 It's important not to let one's own humility toward dancers and their amazing abilities prevent one from being critical.   Just because I don't always turn out well doesn't mean that I can't fault City Ballet on the point.  It's the same concept as science journalists not being so enamored with science that they don't critique it. If I could dance that well, I'd be onstage!

And that was my night at the ballet, the last for a while, since next week, City Ballet is going off on tour?/taking a break?/not performing in New York!  Meanwhile, I'll be concerned with my own academic performance.

Mother just as iconic as daughter

"I really have to pee," the little girl says in the crowded dressing room, as she changed out of her leotard and tights (oh so loose at that age).
"Makes sense; you've had quite a workout," the mother says.
"How do you know I had a workout?" the girl asks.  She's at the question age.
"I sar you dancing."
"Oh.  Did you see when I...?" Of course, the mother doesn't remember that very moment.
"Yes, yes; you're vehry graceful when you're dancing," the mother says, with a hint of sarcasm the daughter would not detect.  Maybe daughter isn't always graceful, particularly not when throwing a tantrum.
"Hey, you're a dancer, right?" mom says to a middle-aged woman changing out of her dance clothes. "What do you do for a sprain dankle?"
"I'd ice it and isolate it," the dancer replies.
"Ice it.  Okay.  And, like how lowng do I have ta wait?  Not like two weeks, right?"
"Well..."
"Can I, like, work out?  'Cawz otherwise, I'll kill myself."
"Well, just be careful.  Take Ibuprofen, ice it, isolate it."
"Is she a doctor, Mom?"
"No, she's not a dawctor, she's a dancer."

Homesick for José's

I'm looking for a ballet class I love so much that I'll do anything to get there.  Something that can light my life.  I had classes like that in Cambridge, MA, but I'm in New York, and I haven't found the equivalent here.

I like a class that starts very slowly and works its way up so that you are exhausted by the end of barre.  Mary Thompson's class at José Mateo Ballet Theatre is that way.  It starts with an exercise facing the barre, then pliés, then infinitely slow tendus.  But the class overall is infinitely fast!  That's the beauty of it.  There's an opportunity to practice every move slowly at least once before doing it fast.  It's like the development of an embryo, starting with a single cell and developing into a fetus.  It starts simply and becomes complex, and it doesn't skip steps. You don't do a pirouette until you've done passé on flat and relevé passé without turning.  This thoroughness not only prepares you for what comes next but it wears you out and warms you up. By the end of barre, I'm sweaty and warm, ready to do a split.  Too tired to talk.  (Talking was always a mistake in Mary's class, anyway.)

When classes start with shrugging the shoulders, I worry.  Not having done modern dance, I fear "ballet for modern dancers."

In some classes I've taken around here, teachers basically go from pliés to fast dégagés to ronds de jambe.  There should be so many more tendus in there!  Tendus from first, tendus from fifth.  Then fondus and ronds de jambe en l'air for strength.  I don't like a barre without développés.  That's a workout.

Class at Peridance with Alexandre Proia may not have been ballet for modern dancers, but it was ballet for someone other than me.

This class was more about teaching style and choreography than teaching technique.  In my opinion, the barre was scanty.  Center was interesting and had its own merits.  The teacher made jazzy combinations and demonstrated them fully, which many teachers don't do. It was wonderful to watch. We had a great pianist, too, who played tunes close to my heart (Edith Piaf and Khatchaturian).

This is a former City Ballet dancer.  Have to respect him and his approach.  I agree with him that learning a long, complex combination is good for the brain and that expression is important.

I do live in a glass house, made even more fragile since school started and my dancing became more sporadic.

But I do know what kind of class I want, and Proia's was not it. I suppose the class would be better for people who take many classes and have already had a workout for the day, people who want to work on style.  Not a bread-and-butter class.

City Ballet Report: "2 and 3 Part Inventions" and "Apollo"

"E107" was my seat at New York City Ballet for $15, the student rate.  At first, I assumed I was in row 107, which made sense for the price of my ticket. Not so, as I found out later.

Out in the courtyard, the fountain I'd read about in The New Yorker was doing its magnificent display.  The water suddenly shoots up from its percolating resting position into patterns that suspend in the air for a second, then fall.  They were like fireworks made of water.  Soon the rain decided to join the show.

I headed to a Starbucks for dinner and bought a bistro box, a very nice pre-made lunch of prosciutto and salame, cheese, olives, lettuce, crackers, and a piece of chocolate for dessert.  Because of the rain, I chose the bistro box over something that might have been less expensive and farther away.  Standing room only in Starbucks.  I stood at the counter where people pick up their specialty drinks, like in the Italian cafés you hear about where people pay extra to sit.  What I refused to do was buy bottled water.

Back at Lincoln Center, I went to the bathroom where, to my surprise, there were stalls available, as a woman in black pointed out.  I told her I just wanted a drink, washed my hands, cupped them, and made up for not buying bottled water.  At intermission, the same woman was in the bathroom again telling people which stalls were available.  I took another drink.  She had a little white, ragged apron on, ragged like Apollo's tunic, and I realized then that Lincoln Center probably paid her to monitor the bathroom. The loo lady. 

When I got to my seat, I found that "E107" was fifth row, center.  I felt like a phoney, sitting there dressed up as if I had bought a very expensive seat.  Of course, I didn't pretend complacency but trumpeted my luck to people nearby.

To the ballet.  The first piece was "2 and 3 Part Inventions," choreographed by Jerome Robbins for a School of American Ballet workshop performance.  It's traditional to open a show with a white ballet, but in this one, the men broke dress code by wearing blue tights with their white undershirts.  A live pianist in her own spotlight played the inventions, in which the two hands play a duet with each other, taking turns with the melody.  In the ballet, pairs of dancers took turns at series' of steps.  The ballet seemed appropriate for a school performance in that the dancers really seemed to be playing with each other.  During one dance, two women slap their palms together, like in a handclap game, then shimmy up and down in that position.

This ballet was danced by very good company members, not principal dancers.  I was so close that I could see their smiles and the seams of their tights.  Each dancer had his or her own, unique part and individual flair to go with it.  Not at all a corps de ballet.  As a dancer starting out, City Ballet must be appealing for that reason (among others!).  By the way, one of most featured dancers had her hair not in a bun but in a French twist, another bit of individuality.

As a watched a dancer in white alone on the stage, I realized why dancers say that performing is freeing.  For so long, that concept evaded me.  Performing took what I could do passably well in the studio and made it ten times harder as my nerves took over.  Not freeing.

I realized last night, sitting in the packed house, how free the lone dancer was in so many ways.  She had space, time, and license to dance her heart out.  This dancer had the whole stage to herself in the middle of a crowded city.  She had the right to go up there and dance not her own steps but the choreography the way she wanted.   The whole audience was there to see her dance.  And unlike in rehearsal, there was no ballet master to stop her and tell her to do it differently.

In New York City, where else can you dance alone in such a big space?  You can't just start dancing on the sidewalk.  Before ballet class, everyone stretches, no one dances, and even if the big studio is there to dance in and leap across, it feels awkward to do so alone in front of everyone.  In class, you do the prescribed steps in a group.  In your apartment, you worry about making too much noise.  On stage, the dancer can go all out in a way she can't anywhere else.  She's free.

"Apollo," choreography by Balanchine, music by Stravinsky, surpassed my expectations, which were  a serious man in white tights and tunic dancing austerely.  No, it was a lighthearted ballet.  Apollo and his three muses danced and flirted in so many ways.  It seemed to me that the muses were vying for Apollo's attention and that he wasn't particularly interested in them.  At times, they seemed to be creating architecture with their arms and legs.  They made archways and went through each other and wove among themselves in the style of a folk dance. At the end, the dancers stagger their arabesques to create a stunning final pose.  It reminded me of that drawing of the supposedly perfectly-proportioned man whose outstretched arms and legs fit in a circle. 

One thing I didn't like about "Apollo" was the beginning, when Apollo pretends to strum a mandolin-like instrument as a solo violin plays double-stops with a bow.  Incongruous.

I noticed that a lot of the dancers looked younger than I am.  An odd realization.  Not only am I not good enough/not cut out to dance professionally "when I grow up," but I'm also getting old!   I'm still young enough to be taken seriously in classes.  Cherish it!

I didn't stay for the third ballet of the night.  I got my money's worth, and I'll be back again!

Why My Journalism Assignments Are Not Easy

When I studied biology, I used to think a lot about what kinds of experiments I wanted to do.  I wanted to study the intricacies of the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA->RNA->protein).  Yet I came up with few experiments.  It's much easier to have a given question and design experiments to answer it. 

Researching a given question is what I did in my undergraduate lab internships.  I didn't allow myself to think much about how important I thought worm defecation was to the world when I aspired to work in a lab studying the process.  I decided that the question didn't matter.  In my view, science was about how cleverly and thoroughly people went about answering their questions.  "It's not what you do; it's how you do it."  The so-called elegance of an experiment was what interested me.

In the popular science articles I read, experimental design gets very little mention.  Not the original questions, not the scientific methods, but the results are what the stories describe.

Now my assignment is to come up with several news story ideas.  In one case, the ideas have a given, broad topic (climate change); in the other, any scientific topic is fair game.  I find myself reading websites about climate change and getting background information and asking myself lots of questions.  But unlike in my idyllic, imagined scientific world, in journalism, all questions are not created equal.  I can't just pick a random research paper and analyze it to death.  A mediocre experiment about HIV will mean more to readers than a clever experiment about periodic pooping in roundworms.  What I choose to write about matters.

 I haven't come up with any story ideas for the class where I can write on any topic because I haven't picked a topic yet!  I could write about anything, and that makes it hard to choose a topic.   

I might like to write something about the various consequences of glacial melting.  I'm interested in how reduced salinity in the ocean water near the surface would affect ocean levels and levels of ocean ice.  On one hand, the melting of freshwater glaciers would raise the sea level.  But decreasing the salinity of the ocean's surface would make that water freeze at higher temperatures.  A higher freezing point would counteract the melting of ice on the ocean surface:  because the glaciers melt, the ocean water is more likely to freeze at a given temperature.  So on one hand, global warming may be causing the ocean's ice to melt, but glacial melting could actually counteract the melting of the ice in the ocean, even if that effect is small.

So for what it's worth, my scientific mind thinks about this stuff.  But what of all that thinking, by me and by other scientists, would make a good story idea?  That's harder to decide.  It's also about being analytical but in a creative way.

I wish I could just draw a story out of a hat or pick from a list the way I did when I wrote for The Somerville News and me being free the night of an event was reason enough to cover it.