Hannah Hecht's Blog

Sooo, I already wrote a lot of stuff about last week’s trip to UNL in my Bread Givers journal, but I did that journal on Tuesday before the assignment changed, so I’ll expand upon it some more. I wrote a lot earlier about listening to Kristen speak at the University of Nebraska Press, and, as a student looking to go into publishing, I found our conversation to be useful and informative. Sooo, let’s answer some questions.

• Did you have any “a-ha!” moments during these conversations? Did you find yourself making connections to academic or professional debates and issues we’ve touched on in class this semester?

One of the things that really surprised me from the conversations is the amount of sheer luck that goes into literary recovery. A person just happens to have an anthology in their home growing up, and just happens to find the only printed work of a little-known author and fall in love with it, which sparks the only true act of recovery for that author. When Dr. Page talked about his research on Miles Breuer, it reminded me of the foreword of Bread Givers, where the author talked about falling in love with Anzia Yezierska and wanting to find out more about her. Then, I was pretty amazed that Dr. Page was able to find that book with Breuer’s handwriting in the cover. If he had never found that, his work may have ended up fizzling out.

On a different subject, I thought it was interesting that Dr. Jewell said that it wasn’t his business to care whether Cather’s work ends up buried again or whether it ever ends up being part of the core canon. That idea went against a lot of the readings about the canon that we read earlier this semester. The readings seemed to imply that we ought to inject women’s and minority writings from earlier time periods into the canon to better exemplify the human experience of the time period. Dr. Jewell thought that you can’t control what people read, but you can make sure that certain works of inspiring literature and secondary texts are available to the public (through the Cather archives) and then see if the readership will come to it.

• What have you observed about the relationships between the various areas of academic research, writing, and publishing we learned about? How does one area inform the other? What economic, cultural, theoretical, or other factors seem to be shaping the present and future academic research, scholarship, and publishing?

From our experience last week, it seems as if the different areas of academic work, research, writing, and publishing, seem to have a lot of pull on each other. If you’re not going to write down and publish your research findings, then they are essentially irrelevant beyond adding to your personal knowledge. But, it’s hardly worth writing research (aside from in the pursuit of a degree) unless you can find a publisher for it. And then, once your stuff has been written, the publisher needs to contact other scholars to make sure that the research is viable. This is just a hypothesis, but I bet that it is a lot easier for scholars at UNL to find a publisher for their stuff since the press is connected to the university. However, I was astounded with the number of books the press puts out each year and the diversity of works that they publish. From the things that we heard, it sounds like new technology is making it possible for the press to put out a lot more books than they previously could, just because of things like word processing, email, and easy (or easier) online research.

• What questions are you left with? (Or, put another way, is there a question that has come to you since our trip that you now wish you had asked one of our speakers?)

As of right now, not really. Kristen answered most of the questions that I had about her job at the press.

• What are you most hopeful about when it comes to the future of academic publishing and/or digital humanities? What do you feel less optimistic about?

People often like to decry that publishing is dead, or at least, that seems to be the reaction that I get every time that I say that I’d like to work in editing, a reaction that promptly follows “Oh, you’re an English major, so you want to teach, right?” However, Kristen seemed to think that publishing, at least academic publishing, isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it seems as if new technology had helped them to increase their business and streamline it to make it more effective. As long as people are writing, they are going to have a need for someone to edit and fact-check their work, along with someone to work on advertising and marketing it, and (at least for the time being) someone to print and distribute it. I was really interested to hear that they only sell about 10 (or maybe it was 18) percent of their stuff in digital form. I would have expected the numbers to be a lot higher.  The thing that I’m least optimistic about is probably the ability of the lesser-known authors of the past to jump into the canon of today. Dr. Page even said that he only made like $250 on his book, which makes me wonder whether there really is a market for literary recovery. However, Dr. Jewell mentioned that Hollywood can be a big help with that. If a big name director decides to make a movie out of some lesser known piece of literature, that author’s work will skyrocket into the public eye. So, I guess that’s pretty cool.

1. Last week we didn’t have class, but instead, we went to the University of Nebraska Lincoln and visited the Love Library and the University of Nebraska Press. The meeting with Kristen at the university press proved very informative, and I’m really glad that we went. I’ve wanted to go into publishing for a while now, and, living in the Midwest, there really aren’t very many opportunities to visit a publishing company and know what they are all about. First, we got a tour of the offices and kind of learned about the process that a book and an author go through before the book hits the shelves. I thought that part was interesting because I was able to learn about all the different people who work in publishing. Then, Kristen talked to us for a while about the press and her specific job as acquisitions editor. For a while now, I’ve said that I’d like to be an editor eventually after college, but I’ve never really known what that job would entail or exactly what type of editor I’d like to be. Her description of the acquisitions editor job was really enticing. It sounds like the type of job where you do a lot more than just working with words (which I absolutely love anyway), and it sounds like you get to do a pretty big variety of things every day. Acquisitions editors have the opportunity to travel, and they spend a lot of time in communication with the authors, experts in the field, and the other people within the company. In addition, it sounded like she got to work with a large variety of different texts and that the edits that she did were broader and more contextual, rather than word-by-word and punctuation edits. She also spoke to the state of the modern publishing industry. A lot of times when I tell people that I want to go into publishing, they lament that it is a dying (or dead) industry. Kristen said that publishing really hasn’t changed all that much with new technology, nor has the press’s output. However, she did say that the industry is very competitive, and that you can’t be in it for the money.

After the University of Nebraska Press, we went to the Love Library and did some research into our final papers. I got access to some resources that I wouldn’t have been able to access at Morningside, so that was nice. Then we talked to a couple of people about their literary recovery projects. Both were very passionate, although I enjoyed the talk with the man who was working in the Cather archives the most. He made me want to read more Cather stories.

2. I’ve used up maybe more of my word count than I should have on the first point, but here goes. The novel that we read for this week was Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. I absolutely loved this book. It kind of reminded me of Ann Petry’s The Street, which we read in Women and Literature, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. The father characters in Bread Givers and The Poisonwood Bible are honestly almost the same character. Both are religiously devout and self-righteous way past the point of practicality and both mistreat their daughters and wives without realizing that they are doing it. I hate them both. One of the sister characters in The Poisonwood Bible is very similar to Mashah, as well. Both use precious family resources to feed into their own vanity. Mashah ends up getting pulled into reality as she gets older, however, while Rachel Price just grows into an even more terrible human being. The book was like The Street in that the main character can never really catch a break. Every time that you start to think that things are going well for the main character or her relatives, something awful happens. But, I guess Bread Givers ends up with a semi-happier ending, as Sara is able to break free of the awful cycle of marrying terrible men, and she’s even able to be successful (if not happy) in college.

3. The secondary texts for this week were the foreword and introduction to the book. I found the foreword the most interesting since it talked about how Alice Kessler-Harris did her literary recovery project. The foreword reminded me of a lot of the same things that the sci-fi guy (I can’t remember his name) at UNL talked about with his literary recovery project. It sounds like literary recovery projects usually begin when someone stumbles across a little-known work that they love, and then they put years and years of work into bringing the author into a brighter light. Literary recovery sounds like a bit of a thankless endeavor. The introduction paints the life of Sara Smolinsky as a semi-autobiography of Anzia Yezierska’s life.

Maybe as a Morningsider and a fellow athlete, it verges on sacrilege for me to criticize the workings of a different Mustang sports team. Or actually, not just another team, the football team. You know, the one that is currently ranked number one in the nation?

However, I feel like this editorial can bring light to something that needs to be said. Across the board, I feel like Morningside is an institution that is friendly and open toward women, especially in the upper levels: the administration, the faculty, the staff. But, the experience I had this morning, coupled with the same one a year ago, has my blood boiling.

Today, our swim team had a dual against Coe College, starting at 1:00 pm. Our coach arranged for us to eat breakfast in the caf’ at 9:00 am with the football team, under the condition that we be very respectful. The football team doesn’t usually want other teams in the cafeteria with them on game days, but we were going to be given a special privilege, so we had better be respectful to them.

When we got there, the head football coach was very kind to us. He made sure that we were able to get our food and sit down before the football team began their before-game proceedings. There were a lot of adult males in the cafeteria with the team, and, after a similar experience last year, I thought I knew why.

Once we had all gotten our food and sat down, the coach began the ritual. All of the seniors were told to bring the men who had had an influence on their lives to the front of the room. It didn’t have to be their dad, but it did have to be a male who had “made them into the man they are today.”

The seniors then introduced the adults to the rest of the cafeteria. “This is my dad. His name is John. He coached me in high school football and if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be the strong man I am today.” Some of the speeches had a little more variety; for example, a couple of guys brought up an uncle or, in one case, a girlfriend’s dad. Some said that they had learned how to be a man from their father figure.

Now, this wasn’t all that bad. I mean, I know that my dad has had a huge influence in my life as well, the scope of which I probably can’t even comprehend. The thing that really irked me was the total lack of women in the room (besides myself and my teammates). No player was allowed to bring up his mother and talk about how she had shaped him. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, one in three children in America grow up in homes where their biological father is absent. What if one of the players felt that his mother had been a more integral part of his life? The implication seemed to be that mother figures aren’t quite as important, or at least that they don’t deserve a place at the table before the seniors’ last home football game.

After the introductions, the seniors and their father figures sat down, and the coach launched into a speech about “What it means to be a man.” Being a man means taking responsibility. Being a man means doing your best when you think you can’t do it any more. Being a man means leaving it all on the field. Being a man means living a life with a purpose, a life full of meaning. Being a man means having children and teaching them to live meaningful lives. We need to strive to be strong, powerful men.

I had to agree with most of the things that the coach said. I mean, men should take responsibility and do their best and live a life with a purpose. But, I left with a sense of having been wronged in some way. Are those things really specific to men? Doesn’t that all just constitute life as an adult? If being a man means being responsible, doing your best, and living a life full of meaning, does being the opposite of a man mean that you can’t do those things?

At this point, you might think that I am just nit-picking. But I think that my experience this morning points to a higher problem in our culture. The summer after my freshman year at Morningside, my best friend (a women’s soccer player at a college comparable to Morningside) and I signed up for our high school’s summer weights program. It ended up being the two of us, a couple male wrestlers and the entire Lansing High School football team. That experience taught me a lot about masculinity and football culture. Football players, some in much worse athletic shape than my friend and I, would scream at each other “Don’t be such a pussy!” or “Quit being a little girl” or “Why are you such a faggot” whenever a student was having trouble completing the exercises. And, I guess when a bunch of kids aged 14 to 17 are yelling those things at each other (not that I don’t hear the exact same things here at college), it is indicative of a culture that thinks femininity is inherently weak, while masculinity is inherently strong. If I were to call myself a “strong, powerful woman,” the connotation would be entirely different (and it would probably be cause for a listener to laugh) whereas the football coach can earnestly tell the players that they are “strong, powerful men.”

Really, had the coach allowed the players to bring up any adult who they felt was a strong influence and had he simply replaced the word “man” with “adult” throughout his speech, I think that I and my other female teammates would have been a lot more comfortable in that cafeteria. But, much more than that, I think that he could have been taking a step against an overarching American male football culture with twisted ideas about masculinity and femininity.

With their recent successes over the past season, Kansas City Royals fans seem to be cropping up everywhere across the Midwest, even in places hundreds of miles from the Kansas/Missouri border. Some are coming out of the closet, so to speak, just now ready to vocalize their appreciation for what was, from 2004 to 2012, one of the worst teams in major league baseball. Meanwhile, others are jumping onto the bandwagon while professing to have been true Royals fans all along.

Jacob Meysenburg fits into neither of these camps. Many of his classmates remember that back in 2012, one of those seasons in the so-called “dark ages,” Meysenburg, a senior math and English major, would wear a blue Royals cap all day every game day. He is Morningside’s biggest Royals fan, and he has been nothing short of ecstatic with the team’s recent victories.

“I took a victory lap after the Oakland game,” he said. “I ran down the hall, outside of Dimmitt, and then all the way around campus.”

And if you had ever watched a baseball game with Jacob, you wouldn’t doubt the veracity of his claim. After a hit, especially a double or a triple, he’ll jump up from his seat, clap his hands and let out an excited squeal, his longer-than-shoulder-length brown hair falling into his face from the shock. He taunts the on-screen opposition with a mix of baseball terms that would go over a layperson’s head (“That’s what you get for pulling your starter, Bruce Bochy, even though that was the tactically-correct decision”) to more explicit and direct commentary (“Anyone who cheers for the Giants is a communist!”). He goes beyond insults and excitement, though, and shows sympathy for the players and understanding for the game in a way that only a true fan can. (“It went off the side of his glove. Cain wouldn’t have usually missed that. You don’t see that much from a center fielder.”)

“Watching a baseball game with with Jacob is the most stressful thing in my entire life,” said his roommate and best friend Josh Karel. “I think he’s going to freak out and break my computer or our entire apartment.”

Watching Royals games started off as something that Meysenburg did to bond with his dad. His father was in his twenties back when the Royals lost the World Series to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 and when they won the Series in ‘85, and Jacob’s family has followed the Royals ever since.

“I started watching them in earnest around 2007, I suppose,” Meysenburg said, “And we’d watch every single game on TV, which definitely interfered with my school, but that’s okay… You’ve gotta have priorities.”

While Royals baseball may interfere with Meysenburg’s schoolwork at times, he has found a way to use his passion to do something he loves while gaining workplace experience and building his resume. During his sophomore year at Morningside, Jacob was hired on as a blogger for the Sports Illustrated-affiliated Kansas City sports blog KCKingdom.com. His blog posts are sabermetrically-minded, that is, they focus mainly on the analysis of baseball statistics.

“I was actually awful at math in high school.” Meysenburg said, “Well, not awful, just awful relative to my other stuff. Which is why I’m a… math major?”

Meysenburg thinks that a lot of Royals fans are uniquely interested in sabermetrics.

“As a fan of a team that loses a lot, you try and find ways in which your team can not lose. It’s a very stat-minded community.”

Jacob’s articles, like this one, combine his writing skills and prodigious knowledge of and ability to crunch baseball statistics (hence the English and math double major) into an easy-to-interpret mine of information for fans. His posts are unceasingly professional, but they retain enough voice that you can feel the college student, giddy with the prospect of his favorite team making their way to the World Series, at the core.

“If I were to write an article right now and post it, it would have over a thousand views pretty quickly,” he said, “I became involved with the site because I wanted to do stat-based articles, but those don’t get many clicks. Click-bait gets lots and lots of clicks, though. I’ll go on there and see ‘Three reasons that such and such,’ and that will get a lot more views than my heavily research-based article, so that’s a bit of a turn-off, but on the other hand, it’s really cool to have a platform to publish work that you do.”

His position with KC Kingdom is unpaid, but his experience has helped him to land other internships.

“I just got hired to write for a company that makes a piece of equipment that is supposed to revolutionize the way that physical therapists treat patients with balance disorders.”

Meysenburg, a senior, hopes to use his skills in writing and statistics to become an actuary. Or at least, that’s the goal that his parents want for him.

“I would love to do work for a baseball team; that would be optimal, but I guess I need to be a little more realistic. And maybe I’m being pessimistic, but it doesn’t seem very likely that I could get a job doing stats for a team,” he says, “Alternatively, the dream job would be doing nothing… You’ve got to think of the important things… Yourself.”

The Royals almost made it through to become World Series Champions of the 2014 season, but they came up just short, losing game seven (in best out of seven play) by just one point: two to three.

“It was soul crushing,” said Meysenburg. “Watching the seventh game of the world series was like watching Harry Potter, and Voldemort wins. Actually, watching game seven was like watching Miracle, and the Russians win. Actually, wait, game seven of the World Series was like watching Old Yeller, except they don’t shoot the dog at the end; instead he just infects everyone with rabies.”

This past week, I attended the Sigma Tau Delta Spoken Word Slam as one of my campus events. It ended up being a great chance to listen to a lot of really talented writers on campus. Many of the poems read dealt with injustice of some form, which is one of the things that many of our capstone readings seem to have in common. For example, one of the poems read by the winning competitor dealt with feminism. He emphasized the importance of the male feminist, something that many of our female authors back in the early 20th century wouldn’t have been very familiar with. Many of our texts (I’m especially thinking of Bread Givers, since I just finished it) feature heroines who wouldn’t be able to imagine that a young man would get up on stage to talk about the injustices that women have to go through. Another poem, one read in between the competition sessions, emphasized the importance of women’s bodies in our modern society. She talked about how appearance is perceived as more important than ideas, something that Mashah definitely recognizes and uses to her advantage (at least at the beginning of the novel). A lot of the poems pointed out that though we have come a long way in terms of race and gender relations since the era of the literature we study, there is still a long way to go.

With their recent successes over the past season, Kansas City Royals fans seem to be cropping up everywhere across the Midwest, even in places hundreds of miles from the Kansas/Missouri border. Some are coming out of the closet, so to speak, just now ready to vocalize their appreciation for what was, from 2004 to 2012, one of the worst teams in major league baseball. Meanwhile, others are jumping onto the bandwagon while professing to have been true Royals fans all along.

Jacob Meysenburg fits into neither of these camps. Many of his classmates remember that back in 2012, one of those seasons in the so-called “dark ages,” Meysenburg, a senior math and English major, would wear a blue Royals cap all day every game day. He is Morningside’s biggest Royals fan, and he has been nothing short of ecstatic with the team’s recent victories.

“I took a victory lap after the Oakland game,” he said. “I ran down the hall, outside of Dimmitt, and then all the way around campus.”

And if you had ever watched a baseball game with Jacob, you wouldn’t doubt the veracity of his claim. After a hit, especially a double or a triple, he’ll jump up from his seat, clap his hands and let out an excited squeal, his longer-than-shoulder-length brown hair falling into his face from the shock. He taunts the on-screen opposition with a mix of baseball terms that would go over a layperson’s head (“That’s what you get for pulling your starter, Bruce Bochy, even though that was the tactically-correct decision”) to more explicit and direct commentary (“Anyone who cheers for the Giants is a communist!”). He goes beyond insults and excitement, though, and shows sympathy for the players and understanding for the game in a way that only a true fan can. (“It went off the side of his glove. Cain wouldn’t have usually missed that. You don’t see that much from a center fielder.”)

“Maybe a quote from one of Jacob’s roommates?”

Watching Royals games started off as something that Meysenburg did to bond with his dad. His father was in his twenties back when the Royals lost the World Series to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1980 and when they won the Series in ‘85, and Jacob’s family has followed the Royals ever since.

“I started watching them in earnest around 2007, I suppose,” Meysenburg said, “And we’d watch every single game on TV, which definitely interfered with my school, but that’s okay… You’ve gotta have priorities.”

While Royals baseball may interfere with Meysenburg’s schoolwork at times, he has found a way to use his passion to do something he loves while gaining workplace experience and building his resume. During his sophomore year at Morningside, Jacob was hired on as a blogger for the Sports Illustrated-affiliated Kansas City sports blog KCKingdom.com. His blog posts are sabermetrically-minded, that is, they focus mainly on the analysis of baseball statistics.

“I was actually awful at math in high school.” Meysenburg said, “Well, not awful, just awful relative to my other stuff. Which is why I’m a… math major?”

Meysenburg thinks that a lot of Royals fans are uniquely interested in sabermetrics.

“As a fan of a team that loses a lot, you try and find ways in which your team can not lose. It’s a very stat-minded community.”

Jacob’s articles, like this one, combine his writing skills and prodigious knowledge of and ability to crunch baseball statistics (hence the English and math double major) into an easy-to-interpret mine of information for fans. His posts are unceasingly professional, but they retain enough voice that you can feel the college student, giddy with the prospect of his favorite team making their way to the World Series, at the core.

“If I were to write an article right now and post it, it would have over a thousand views pretty quickly,” he said, “I became involved with the site because I wanted to do stat-based articles, but those don’t get many clicks. Click-bait gets lots and lots of clicks, though. I’ll go on there and see ‘Three reasons that such and such,’ and that will get a lot more views than my heavily research-based article, so that’s a bit of a turn-off, but on the other hand, it’s really cool to have a platform to publish work that you do.”

His position with KC Kingdom is unpaid, but his experience has helped him to land other internships.

“I just got hired to write for a company that makes a piece of equipment that is supposed to revolutionize the way that physical therapists treat patients with balance disorders.”

Meysenburg, a senior, hopes to use his skills in writing and statistics to become an actuary. Or at least, that’s the goal that his parents want for him.

“I would love to do work for a baseball team; that would be optimal, but I guess I need to be a little more realistic. And maybe I’m being pessimistic, but it doesn’t seem very likely that I could get a job doing stats for a team,” he says, “Alternatively, the dream job would be doing nothing… You’ve got to think of the important things… Yourself.”

Despite Meysenburg’s passion for the game, his own personal baseball career went no further than elementary school.

“I stopped when we went to player pitch, and the reason I stopped was because I always forgot my cup at home, and we had this player, his name was Brandon, and I’m not going to name last names, but it was Skadoris, and if the ball was made out of metal, then my testicles were made out of magnets, because that thing hit my testicles every time he threw it… I’m not joking. He hit me in the balls every time I was up. And so, after a while, instead of saying ‘I should bring my cup,’ I said, ‘I’m done with this…’ And so now I swim.”

I’m not completely sure how this whole profile sketch thing goes, but I’ll outline what I’m planning on writing for my profile. With the World Series going on this week, and with it being an incredibly historic year for the Royals, I thought that it would be a kind of timely topic to write about Jacob Meysenberg, senior English and math major, and probably Morningside’s biggest Royals fan. He is the type of person who lives and dies with the Royals’ every victory and defeat.  You can always tell how the day’s game went just by looking at his face. Back during his freshman year, he wore a Royals baseball cap all day every game day for good luck.

Over the last twenty or so years, being a diehard Royals fan meant being dejected from March until October every year. But that’s obviously not so right now. Jacob is on cloud nine with the Royals’ recent victories.

The really cool thing about Jacob is that he has taken his love of baseball and combined with his writing and statistical skills to become a featured blogger on kckingdom.com. He’s been writing blog posts on the Royals for two and a half years now.

For my story, I’m going to watch the second game of the World Series (this Wednesday night) with Jacob and describe his reactions. I think that will be a pretty good lead-in to the story. It will set the scene and describe the subject of the profile. He’s a really unique kid, so I hope to capture his voice. I’m also going to interview him pretty extensively about his job writing for the blog (I think that’s the most interesting part of the whole thing) and how he got started loving baseball. I’ll probably talk to his friends and maybe his coach (swimming) or one of his professors to get another couple opinions.

When I picked up In and Out, a 1997 semi-romantic comedy, from the stack of DVDs on the desk in our classroom, my expectation was that it would land somewhere in the realm between unwatchable and solidly good. And honestly, it ended up right on the line. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but I also wouldn’t try and stop someone who was about to press play on her VCR (you know, back in ’97).

In and Out opens with Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline), a Shakespeare-loving English teacher in the small town of Greenleaf, Indiana, preparing for his wedding to fellow teacher Emily (Joan Cusack). When Cameron Drake (Matt Dillion), an actor and one of Brackett’s former students, “outs” Brackett on live television at the Academy Awards, Brackett’s life swings out of hand as he tries to convince the town, his fiancé and journalist Peter Malloy (Tom Selleck) that he is, in fact, straight.

Most of the movie felt really hokey to me. From the flat characters to the over-the-top, feel-good ending, the entire film felt insincere, even for a comedy movie.

None of the actors’ performances really stood out to me as being particularly good; however, I absolutely hated Cusack’s portrayal of Emily, a performance for which she (astonishingly) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Emily’s only real character attribute is that she used to be fat, and the movie milks it for all that it’s worth. For example, at one point she is in a state of anguish, for very good reason, and she immediately grabs a bowl of peanuts and says she is going to “gorge herself.” You know, because peanuts are basically the most terrible and unhealthy thing you can possibly eat. And because, once you know that a woman used to be fat, then that’s really the only thing you need to know about her. During this same scene, she runs around screaming in an awful whining voice for what felt like fifteen minutes in a very unconvincing portrayal of her sadness.

Despite its low points, there are places where the movie shines. Through satire, it does a pretty solid job of conveying the silliness of both the media’s focus on trivial things and its treatment of gay celebrities. During one scene, Brackett finds himself backed up into a corner by journalists yelling out ridiculous questions about his sexuality (“Do you know Ellen?”) Moments like this are where the movie finds its high point. These scenes verge on satirically-biting and hilarious cultural criticism, although they end up missing the mark overall.

There’s a lot of potential for comedy in the main premise of this movie, but it didn’t quite make it. Maybe it could be good if it were remade today with funnier actors and more edgy writing. In and Out is the type of movie that I wouldn’t turn off if it were the only thing on television, but I definitely wouldn’t seek it out at the Blockbuster (again, 1997) or recommend it to a friend. 2 out of 4 stars.

When I scanned the list of books available for this review, one name stood out among all the others. I had heard it called “the great American novel” and the first real piece of literary journalism, it was written by my favorite author’s best friend and I had heard that many pieces of the book took place in my hometown of Lansing, Kansas. The audio version of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (published in 1966) was a no-brainer, and I clicked the play button on my iPod on a drive back home in happy anticipation.

The book started off in full descriptive mode, painting Holcomb, a small, sleepy town in western Kansas to the very last detail. The town was vivid and full of dynamic characters, a postmistress, a sheriff, the owner of the local restaurant, all speaking in a distinctive western Kansas dialect that I knew well from visiting my grandparents on the other side of the state as a kid. Holcomb was the type of place where each person knew every one of the other 269 people in town, and they never felt the need to lock their doors at night. That is, until the gruesome murder of the Clutter family, father, Herb; mother, Bonnie; daughter Nancy and son, Kenyon.

In Cold Blood carefully examines every single aspect of the case, starting with the victims by scrupulously accounting for their last days on earth and then moving on to the townspeople’s reactions, the detectives on the case, and, most importantly, the murderers themselves, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith.

One of the things that most amazed me about the book was its ability to keep me reading, even though I knew (and all of Capote’s intended readers knew) exactly what was going to happen next. Throughout the first section, the one highlighting the Clutter family’s last day, Capote reminds the reader over and over again that they are going to die soon. By the time the neighbors find the bodies, the reader already knows who the murderers are, and the back cover already tells us that the murderers will be convicted and executed. (In fact, I can distinctly remember one of my elementary school teachers telling the class about the Clutter murderers being the last two people hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary, just three blocks from my elementary school.) But yet, Capote’s storytelling and pacing kept me interested in the book from start to finish. At first, I wanted to know exactly how the Clutters died. Then, I wanted to know the motive. Why did Dick and Perry kill them? Why in such a gruesome and terrible way? What was the connection between the murderers and the Clutter family? Then, I wanted to know about the murderers’ lives. Capote sets up a situation where the murderers are characters that you feel sympathy for, which given the depth of their crimes, is no easy feat.

Capote, already a successful author of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and many short stories, plays, and pieces of nonfiction, became inspired to write In Cold Blood when he read a 300 word article in the New York Times about the Clutter murders. He was captivated by the story and traveled to Holcomb with his best friend Harper Lee (author of To Kill a Mockingbird) to learn more about the story. He ended up taking four years to research, interview, write, and follow the story to its end, the execution of the murderers. To write the story, he had long conversations with everyone involved, without taking notes, as he claimed his memory retention for quotes was “above 90 percent.” Harper Lee helped him by befriending many of the townspeople that he wanted to interview.

Capote started off writing the story just because, having never been to Kansas, he thought he could write it in a fresh perspective. At first, he just toiled around in the city for a long time, interviewing, finding out every possible detail of the case, until the detectives started to make some breaks in the case. Then, he interviewed the detained suspects in their cells at the Finney County Courthouse in Garden City, KS, covered their trial, then followed them to their final home, death row at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing. Over four years, he was able to determine almost every single detail of that fateful day, and then to trace the two murderers around the country during the time that they were on the run after the crime. He even went back into Dick and Perry’s personal histories, talking to their family members and people who had known them in their past lives.

Although the story is written from a journalist’s perspective, the reader can tell that the author ended up being very emotionally involved. Capote evokes a sense of sympathy not only for the victims, but also for the criminals, a feat which requires an unparalleled emotional connection to the story and its characters.

For me, this novel definitely lived up to the hype. Its pacing and characterization kept me engaged for all 384 pages, and it is the type of read that will stick with you long after you finish it. In Cold Blood truly deserves the title of the great American novel, and I highly recommend it.

Ten people drown in the U.S. every day. While accidents happen, and many drowning deaths are not 100% preventable, I believe that everyone, adults and children alike, ought to know how swim.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I worked at the Bonner Springs Aquatic Park in Bonner Springs, KS as the head lifeguard. I had dealt with a lot of different rescues before, usually young kids who went into water over their heads, but one really stuck with me. A twenty-something nonswimmer jumped off the diving board and went straight into the arms-over-head active drowning position. One of my coworkers, a friend and teammate on the local swim team, jumped in and rescued her. The shock of the rescue threw the victim into a seizure, and, as the head lifeguard, I had to respond. I swear, it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head and her chest thrusted up and down as if she was possessed. The ambulance came and took her away, and I’m not sure what happened to the woman after that.

I spend a lot of time around water, whether swimming, lifeguarding, coaching, or teaching swimming lessons. And I’ve seen a lot of people go into water too deep or lose their footing and start to drown. Each time, the look in their eyes is haunting. The wide, darting eyes, desperately searching for help. The mouth gulping for air like a beached goldfish. The tensed muscles and flailing arms and legs. And that final look of resignation as they start to slip beneath the surface.

For me, swimming is not just a sport or something you do for fun. It’s one of the most essential life skills. Somewhere between a third and one half of American adults cannot swim the length of a typical pool. In addition, 54% of American children between 12 and 18 can’t swim in the deep end of a pool.

In the end, I believe that in this day and age, all people (with the exception of infants and very small children, although this video shows a lot of promise for reducing drowning deaths in infants and toddlers) ought to learn to swim through either self-teaching or formal lessons.