Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Happy Bloomsday! As I write this, the Bloomsday Centenary celebration is but a few hours away from starting at its Dublin epicenter. As you may well have heard by now, on June 16, 1904 James Joyce hooked up with Nora Barnacle and changed his life forever. So much that Joyce set his masterpiece, Ulysses, on that very date in that very place. Like many other Joyce fans, I haven't actually conquered Ulysses myself, but I'm starting to work up the courage. Meanwhile, it will be a great day to find an Irish pub and celebrate Leopold and Molly Bloom and Steven Dedalus and the great city of Dublin. Meanwhile, you can read one writer's retracings of Bloom's journey at The Guardian if you've a mind. We don't know if he plans to get lucky in the process. 8:34:30 PM    comment []

Truth to Power (or at least asking the right questions) Wrestling with the big questions is something I spend too much time with. Defining my purpose in life has been hard. In the early days I spent great gobs of time speaking truth to power, then trying to get power. After awhile, I decided what I really wanted was just to speak with the powerful and became a journalist. These various purposes all still fight with me, one or the other holding me in thrall for some months/years, then another phase kicks in. For my inner journalist, it was great to hear of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism's new Watchdog project from Poynter Online's Web Tips column. Following up on my mini-rant the other day on the lapdog media, here is one of the antidotes. The site is subtitled "Questions the press should ask," and it goes easy on the media criticism. Instead, they suggest that when a story breaks, it's sometimes hard to come up with the right questions with a permanent deadline just over the horizon. So Nieman does that for you. One bit of hometown trivia that many who follow the Nieman Foundation's activities at Harvard may not know or realize: The foundation's founder, Lucius Nieman, was the founding editor of The Milwaukee Journal. And I think he'd hate what his paper has become today, but that's another story. 8:13:12 PM    comment []