STRESSED OUT

posted by James Reel

    Last week, as co-master-of-ceremonies of the student chamber music showcase at the UA school of music, I spent some time backstage double-checking the pronunciations of performers’ names. One instrumentalist brightened and said, “I’m flattered someone would ask!” I imagine she’s gone through 16 years of schooling, her teachers always mispronouncing her last name because they’d never bothered to ask her how it should sound. It’s not a difficult name; the challenge is figuring out whether to accent it on the first or last syllable. Americans tend to shift accents to the beginnings of words, but that’s not where the stress should fall in that student’s name.
    I’d guess that stress is second only to vowel quality among things that tone-deaf speakers get wrong. Think about comedians affecting a French accent: Perhaps confused by all those accent marks over concluding Es, they tend to stress the last syllable of every word. In reality, French is pretty much a flat-stress language, except that a spoken French sentence builds momentum as it goes, and tends to end with a little punch. A rule of French stylistics is to conclude every sentence with a strong or important word, rather than letting it trail off; no doubt this ties in with the tendency to inflect the ends of spoken French sentences with extra weight.
    This brings me to something frustrating in my work as an editor and proofreader. One publisher I work with decreed several years ago that “back yard,” the noun, should be replaced by the more colloquial “backyard,” properly reserved for adjectival use. I’ve even seen this atrocity in the morning paper.
    Why is this such a bad thing? Let me count the ways. First, there’s the stress problem. Look at the word “backyard,” and your first inclination is to stress the first syllable. Which makes perfect sense if you’re saying “I have a backyard barbecue.” It makes no sense if you say “I have a barbecue in the backyard.” Preserving the noun form as two separate words keeps the stress in its proper place, and maintains a helpful visual distinction between the noun and adjective. Maybe those points count as “first” and “second.” So third, it’s inconsistent. We haven’t turned “frontyard” into a noun, and I’ve seen no indication that such a change is imminent. If we still use “front yard,” we need the parallel structure of “back yard.” (Same goes for backseat/back seat.)
    English vocabulary is rich in nuance and useful distinctions. Unnecessary streamlining, like nouning “backyard,” robs our language of that richness.

NICE 'MICE'

posted by James Reel

    Today’s Tucson Weekly holds two reviews by yours truly, one enthusiastic, the other ambivalent. First, the good news: Of Mice and Men at Beowulf Alley:

The entire production has been assembled with quiet care. The acting tends to be subtle and anti-melodramatic, yet heartfelt; the pacing is deliberate, yet never feels pokey. All in all, Beowulf Alley does a fine job of rescuing Of Mice and Men from its low status as required reading in high school English and an inspiration for lots of cartoon parodies.

    You’ll find the full review here. Then there’s Bell, Book and Candle at Live Theatre Workshop; the modern witch-in-love story hasn’t aged well:

We're dealing with a script that's spent the past 50 years as the high school senior play, and somehow, when it's brought out to mingle with the grown-ups, it just doesn't seem very racy or metaphoric anymore. It still has funny bits, though, as long as you don't mind English Van Druten making his Manhattanites all sound like London sophisticates. It's sort of like they're in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, but a bit less blithe.

    Read the rest here.

UNCOMPETITIVE

posted by James Reel

    Sunday, most newspapers in Arizona bragged about their achievements in this year’s Associated Press Managing Editors News Writing and Photo Contest. The Arizona Daily Star announced that it won eight first-place awards, among other honors.
    It ought to be ashamed.
    Why? Because only one of those first-place awards was for news writing: Becky Pallack’s “Dad slain after he confronts intruders.” All the others were for photos, page design and “online presentation.” In 1998, about a year before I quit, the Star began to focus on presentation over reporting, and as a result the paper has won very few first-place awards for writing in the past several years. Instead of being so proud of its photogs and designers, the management should be worried about the quality of its writing and reporting.
    I dislike journalism contests for reasons I’ll explain a few paragraphs hence, but I must defend this APME competition from some typically boneheaded remarks posted by readers at the Star’s Web site. Blurts one respondent:

These um cough cough "awards" are a HUGE conflict of interest and I would add, entirely unethical. As the Star is a customer of the AP, a very valuable one considering the paper is more than half made up of wire stories from the AP. So this is like giving an award to one of your favorite, and most financially lucrative customers, what a joke.

    Says another, complaining about the preponderance of Arizona Republic winners:

I've been watching this contest over the years, and clearly, the Az Associated Press voting body is made up mostly of Az Repugnant staffers...

    OK, first of all, in most journalism competitions—and I’m assuming APME’s functions this way, too—judges are not drawn from the staffs of competing newspapers. For these Arizona awards, the judges were almost certainly from out-of-state. Second, this particular competition has nothing to do with the Associated Press. It’s conducted by an association of managing editors—the people who run individual newspapers—from papers taking the AP service. Yes, you have to be an AP paper in order to enter the contest, but the AP itself does not sponsor or judge the competition, and it’s laughable that getting one of these awards would be any sort of incentive to subscribe to AP services. (If this is a typical newspaper contest, there’s little if any financial remuneration for the winners.)
    So why do I object to journalism contests? Here’s an explanation I supplied in 2004, when I was writing the Tucson Weekly’s Media Watch column:

    Last week, the Star, Citizen and even the Tucson Weekly trumpeted the awards they won in the Arizona Press Club competition, as if anybody outside a newsroom really cares about such things. People inside newsrooms shouldn't put so much stock in contests, either.
    The biggest problem is that there's usually only one judge per category, and the winners reflect that single judge's agenda, or lack of imagination.
    Judges are recruited from out of state, which reduces conflicts of interest, but it's hard for someone at such a distance to know if the reporter has missed certain nuances of the story, failed to ask a key question or had an institutional memory lapse.
    Then there's the question of how many stories are submitted. If there are only three entries in some category, that isn't much of a contest. Meanwhile, some publications flood the competition with entries, presumably to increase their chances of getting an award.
    One reform might be to forget the judges; post all entries to a Web site and have members of the press association vote for the best. Groupthink is a danger, but the results would reflect the opinions of a large group of professionals (including reporters, not just editors with trendy agendas or, on the other hand, antediluvian notions).
    Of course, papers with big staffs could concentrate their votes on their own submissions, which wouldn't be fair. Maybe we should just ditch contests altogether. Does anyone outside the journalism profession think they're important?

'STRINGS' ATTACHED

posted by James Reel

    Saving me the effort of writing anything new as I recover from the two-week pledge drive, parts of the latest issue of Strings magazine are online, including two parts by me. No doubt you will be fascinated by my primer on sight reading (says my source, “Great sight-readers overlook the mistakes they make”). I also have an article about the Section Quartet, a string foursome established to play rock music on its own and with others. The quartet insists on calling itself a band. Call it whatever you want, after you’ve read the article.

VICTORY

posted by James Reel

    The pledge drive is finally over! The end comes a week late, but no dollars short: $51,429 is the initial tally, on a goal of $50,000. After two weeks of this, I feel like I've just been through fundraising boot camp, plus a tour of combat duty at the same time.

PUMPED

posted by James Reel

    Still immersed in the Fund-Raising Campaign That Will Not Die, still no time for original blogging, insofar as anything I do here is original. Merely a link to my latest piece in the Tucson Weekly:

    Hal Hundley's back in town. He's started a new musical theater company, and he's putting on a show this weekend.
    A show that, oddly enough, doesn't really reflect what Hundley intends to accomplish with his group.
    Roundabout Music Theatre is presenting Pump Boys and Dinettes, a country-music revue. "It's not typical of what I do," Hundley admits, "and it's a little difficult to put together, because it's mostly music, not much dialogue, and actors play the musical instruments instead of having a separate orchestra."
    Hundley is usually a traditional book-show kind of guy. He founded SALOC--the Southern Arizona Light Opera Company--in 1976, launched it with the musical 1776, and then went on to standard Rodgers and Hammerstein-style fare. That's the sort of thing Hundley intends Roundabout to present in the future, on a reduced scale, but for now, he wanted something that would appeal to both bikers and Woody Guthrie fans--he hopes to draw an audience from this weekend's Tucson Thunder biker gathering and the Tucson Folk Festival. The Sound of Music probably would not have been a good choice.

    Read the rest here.