Monday, Monday

No news quiz today. (And after all that prognosticating!)

Instead, we spent all three hours of the drill writing obituaries. Professor Padwe had salvaged old files from the J-school's former morgue, and each of us was given a stack of brittle clippings to work from. I got controversial author Joe McGinniss, while other classmates wrote about the demises of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Geraldo Rivera, Luciano Pavarotti, and other famous folk.

Once again, I really stumbled in the drill. What I should have done, I now realize, was go straight to the internet to get the basic info on my guy, then go through the old clippings to round out the picture. Instead, I spent way too much time reading the items in the file and had to race to get some sort of coherent narrative together before time ran out. The guy wrote 10 books (including "The Selling of the American President" and "Fatal Vision"), topped the bestseller list at age 26, got into trouble for two different ethical lapses, had some personal travails, and then scored a comeback. Oh, and did I mention that he just happened to be a co-columnist with Prof. Padwe early in his career? And that Padwe offered to let me interview him for the obit? That's what you call a gift, ladies and gentlemen. And what did I do? Looked it straight in the mouth (aka completely ran out of time and had no chance to get what I'm sure would have been a juicy quote).

So my obit sucked -- it was both incomplete and about 250 words shy of the assigned length.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

In our seminar later in the afternoon, we found out that our next assignment was to do an analysis of the mayoral primary (taking place the following day). More on that later. We also had a really interesting discussion about objectivity, led by our adjunct professor, Brent Cunningham. Cunningham is the managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, and he authored a piece called "Re-thinking Objectivity" a couple of years ago that was fairly controversial.

After all that (6 hours of class, if you're counting), my RWII (aka elective) class started at 6:30PM. It's called The Art of the Profile and is taught by John Bennet, a senior editor at The New Yorker. Among other assignments for the first class, we were supposed to write a query letter proposing a subject for a profile. For whatever reason, I had a hard time coming up with someone and didn't write the query letter until Monday afternoon.

So -- again, if you're counting -- by this point in the day, I have done a completely intense news drill, had a three-hour seminar, and written a query letter. And I'm expecting that the first class with Bennet will be one of those easygoing, get-to-know-you affairs.

Wrong.

After the obligatory round of introductions ("tell us your name and why you took this class"), he got right down to business. We'd been assigned to read a profile of a musical duo called Gillian Welch that appeared in the magazine last year. (Yes, I did the reading. Even though I read the piece the first time around. Great piece, by the way.) Next thing we know, he pulls out a DVD of them performing and has us watch two songs, then write a profile based on what we saw. Right then. As in, you know, my SECOND drill of the day. And in case you're wondering, this one sucked, too.

What did we get to do next?

Go around the room and read our pieces aloud, followed by a couple of sentences of critique from Bennet. (By the way, he told us explicitly NOT to call him Professor Bennet. We're actually supposed to call him John, but bear with me. I'm kind of formal sometimes.) This is pretty standard fare in writing workshops (of which I am a veteran), but I don't think any of us was expecting it. What was particularly painful was the fact that the woman who happened to go first had written a great piece. It's one thing to read your sucky piece out loud after some other sucky ones, but it's a very different matter when pretty much everyone ahead of you has somehow produced literary prose with amazing images, rich physical descriptions, and the kind of musical detail that eludes someone like me (a verifiable musical illiterate). And if you think I'm exaggerating the suckiness of my piece, let me just say that Bennet said NOTHING after I'd read it. That, I can assure you, is not a good sign. That's a sign of not wanting to cream someone in the very first class.

Oh, and there was one more surprise. Those query letters we did? After going around the room (lots of that tonight) describing the person we wanted to profile, Bennet said, "OK, so turn those in next Monday." My first two-deadline week. Yippee.

Did I mention that the class ran a full HOUR longer than scheduled, meaning we got out at 9:30PM? Translation: home at 10:30PM, eating dinner at almost 11:00PM.

Quotes of the day:

The one bias of journalism is coherence. -- John Bennet

The truth is you guys have no street cred at all. -- John Bennet

We don't buy newspapers and magazines to feel depressed about the world. -- John Bennet

Chronology is your friend. -- John Bennet

The best writing doesn't have transitions. -- John Bennet