ToW #23 - A report commissioned by the Depression-era Federal Writers' Project: "Afternoon in a pushcart peddlers' colony"

One of the nicer Depression-era shantytowns, dubbed "Hoovervilles", found in Seattle.

Reading and Writing Goals:
    To select a text written about an unfamiliar topic and not for a large audience.
    To write with a sufficient amount of evidence, in the form of both quotation and restatement.

        When asked to name a time of widespread suffering in the United States, many jump to a war fought on American soil; either the Revolutionary or Civil. But perhaps more distraught were the Americans of the Great Depression, 25% of them unemployed and millions too proud to receive government aid. "Afternoon in a pushcart peddlers' colony" is a report written by Frank Byrd, a federally employed journalist, about the lives of men living in an encampment by the Harlem River in 1938. While Byrd and his works are generally unknown, he wrote numerous reports like this one throughout the Depression. Not much is known about his purpose or audience, but it seems that Byrd wrote articles only for the government's archives and his own practice. Whatever his prerogative, Byrd's success in recording the state of this Hooverville comes from his sensory descriptions and dialogued testimonials.
        To any reader, the most striking parts of Byrd's writing are his almost ubiquitous and very effective descriptions. He sets the scene with an appeal to touch and hearing -- "It was snowing and, shortly after noontime, the snow changed to sleet and beat a tattoo against the rocks and board shacks" (1) -- giving the reader a taste of the cold and noisy weather. Once Byrd explains that the only shelter the men had were shanties made out of rotting wood, the reader is firmly planted in their scraggly shoes, immersed just enough to understand the direness of the predicament. But, in an effort to lay out the full circumstance, Byrd also describes the luxuries of this Hooverville: "one is amazed (to say the least) by the comfortable divans,
lounges, bookshelves and, of all things, a drinking fountain," (3). It is through these descriptions that Byrd provides a full, unbiased account of his discoveries.
        Still, the reader is left wondering why these men do not apply for government relief. Anticipating this, Byrd brings in his after-dinner dialogue with them. After some small talk, Byrd gets an answer that eludes reformers even today: "'What duh hell do we wants wid relief anyhow? We is all able-bodied mens an' can take it. We can make our own livin's.'" (5). He continues the interview, accumulating enough testimonials for the reader to figure out why the men live the way they do. With the what and the why of the story answered, Byrd concludes his report knowing that the reader will be satisfied.

Source: http://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001373

Provided by the Library of Congress.

ToW #22 - Article from Businessweek: "What Chess Players Could Teach Obama About Handling Putin"

The dreaded stalemate.

    When it comes to modern politics, all that the public sees are the issues of the day. Everybody's eyes become so focused on current events and outrages that hardly anyone sees the big picture. In light of recent tensions between the U.S and Russia, including issues over Russia's handling of the Ukrainian revolution and housing of Edward Snowden, the American public is confused about the aggressiveness with which Russian-American relations are being handled. This is where Peter Coy and his article comes in; in an effort to clarify recent Russian-American politics, Coy likens the fight between these two superpowers to the game of chess. Coy is the economics editor and senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Being a reporter for over 30 years, Coy is to be trusted when it comes to political analysis like this. As he writes to an audience that wishes to be informed about political and economic news, Coy takes on a few strategies to inform his audience, including a semi-informal voice and an article-long chess analogy.

    Readers of Bloomberg Businessweek tend to be both intelligent and strategic thinkers. Realizing this, Coy compares and contrasts chess strategies with the strategies of Obama and Putin. He establishes from the get-go that Putin is playing aggressively, fueled not by responsibility to lead but by personal desires. For the duration of the article, however, Obama's policies are questioned. Should he be on the defensive? Should he punish Russia's advances? Should he even be playing the zero-sum game of chess? This is where Coy brings in the strategic advice of chess experts, citing both an online forum responder who advocates fighting fire with fire and Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, who argues for strategy outside the world of chess. For instance, as Coy concludes, where one cannot put indirect pressure on the opponent in chess, it is best for Obama to do this in reality. As it turns out, real-world political strategy cannot result in the suffering of one's entire populous for the sake of subduing the enemy king.

    In order to make his message better received, Coy combines his chess analogy with a fairly informal, passive tone. This makes his argument read more as analysis, a form of writing that cannot be so easily contested. It seems that, in the end, Coy took his own advice and subdued his chess-like aggression in favor of real-world reason.

ToW #21 - IRB by Ernest Hemingway: "A Moveable Feast"

        A Moveable Feast is by far the most uniquely composed book that I have read to date. Each chapter is a few succinct pages long and loosely connects to the next with only a hint of chronology. Every sentence is honest, unromantic, and never speculative. A few mantras are repeated throughout by example and statement, "poverty teaches discipline" and "one must only think of work while working". Ultimately, this journal-like account of Hemingway's life in Paris reads as it was written: in Hemingway's voice and completely grounded in reality. Thus far, Hemingway has described to me his working habits, his relationship with Gertrude Stein (his mentor), his addiction to betting on horse races, and his life between jobs, impoverished almost by choice as he attempts to write a novel.

        Through all of this, he tells stories and proves wisdoms as if he is the father of his readers; one who hopes that others will learn from his life and not make the same mistakes as him. No other purpose seems evident in Hemingway's writing; his memoir is most certainly not a scientific and objective study -- it is more of a life's story told for the sake of telling, perhaps for writing practice or for lack of subjects to create stories about. But the style with which Hemingway writes is not one that needs much practice or getting used to; he only employs one rhetorical strategy: "Write the truest sentence that you know." This simple statement seems to describe Hemingway's entire writing process. He simply writes down sentences that he has heard or thought in passing with the knowledge that sentences from reality will sound the most convincing to the reader. Essentially, as a retelling of his life, A Moveable Feast is the purest form of Hemingway's style; it is purely a collection of moments that came from reality, sentences that are nothing if not true, honest, and unobscured by manipulative rhetoric. This is what makes Hemingway's style so strange and new to me; his writing is not about reality, it is reality. He has no purposes other than to retell his experiences in all of their factuality. He makes no arguments and analyzes no data. He simply describes life.

ToW #20 - Op-Ed from the New York Times: "Looking for a Mirror"

    "Looking for a Mirror", an opinion by journalist and author Lee Billings, is a peculiar mix of science education and sentimental poetry. Billings, who has written an entire book on the subject, discusses our hunt for Earth-like planets in the universe in this article. He begins with the inspiration of the search, the Apollo 8 crew's view of the Earth as a tiny, both remarkable and unremarkable sphere suspended in space. Most of the article speaks of our next step in the journey, basic location of planets akin to Earth in the immediately observable universe. The entire subject is deepened by Billings' effortless transitions from purely informational text to purely emotional prose, expressing the duality of this quest: scientific intrigue mixed with loneliness-fueled exploration.
    The more scientific of Billings' essay is more-or-less standard to articles dealing with technology; it sufficiently and methodically explains uncommon phenomena and defines any outlandish terms with straightforward words. Given the relative intelligence of his audience -- readers of the New York Times, and a science selection, no less -- Billings simply does not have a lot of explaining to do. Many of his readers either already have a technical understanding of his subject or can infer the specifics given the premise. So, what Billings leaves out in topics, he makes up for in vividness of explanation: "By measuring how light interacts with molecules in a planet’s atmosphere, a world can be surveyed for “biosignature” gases such as oxygen and methane, allowing scientists to sniff out the breath of life at interstellar distances." Rather than plainly stating that scientists can predict atmospheric composition based on light behavior, Billings goes deeper, using an extended metaphor to spruce his description up.
    But this rhetoric does not even compare to his more poetic paragraphs. Whenever a scientific method is explained objectively, Billings chooses to describe it in a subjective way. He often weaves the objective and subjective together: "A small rocky planet is a dim mote of dust lost in the glare from a thermonuclear fireball we call a star. For every photon of planetary light that goes into making a picture, 10 billion stellar photons must first be filtered out; remarkably, researchers have already devised several ways to do this." This technique beautifully captures the dichotomy that drives this planet-identifying project. Throughout the essay, he implies the source of the motivation to find "mirror Earths": scientific capability and curiosity meets with human motivation and sentimentality. For truly, if we did not feel a sense of belonging to our own planet, why would we use up its precious resources in the quest for its brethren?