From the Headlines I Wish I’d Written Department:
Some headlines are so bad, they’re great. The award today goes to the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal likes to feature an offbeat human interest story at the bottom of its front page. Today’s entry is about art of butter sculpting, in particular the butter carving competition at the Minnesota State Fair.
The headline: “When It Comes to Butter Carving, There’s No Margarine for Error”
What are they teaching in school these days?
Up at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, you can learn about the nine amendments to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights.
Nine amendments? Yep, at Albemarle High, they apparently don’t have much regard for that first one.
Here’s what happened last month: The student newspaper, The Revolution, published an editorial by the incoming editor.
The principal, Jay Thomas, didn’t like it. Some of the faculty didn’t like it. So the papers were destroyed. The principal’s rationale: There was a typo in the headline, and he was worried about “the impact” a controversial article would have on the author. The paper was reprinted two weeks later without the offending piece.
So what was the controversy? Did the new editor, Ellie Leech, advocate the legalization of marijuana? No. Did Leech write about teen pregnancy or, say, back the distribution of condoms? Nope again.
She wrote that student athletes who participate in school-sanctioned sports should not be required to take physical education classes. The piece, entitled, “Student’s P.E. groans might be warranted,” is available here.
Apparently the P.E. department at Albemarle High interpreted that as criticism, squawked and set in motion the destruction.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1988 decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, ruled that public high schools can control, even censor, the content in student publications if the action is “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
Courts have cited the Hazelwood test to stop articles in high school newspapers on the two topics cited above, drug decriminalization and teen sexual activity.
And here? Well, the principal, Thomas, cited the typo (Sean Cudahy, the outgoing editor, admitted the word “warranted” was misspelled in the original paper) and concern for the writer. But Cudahy told The Hook, Charlottesville’s alternative weekly, that those reasons were not aired at a meeting with Thomas and Kim Aust, the paper’s faculty adviser. And Leech said she wasn’t worried about the “impact” of any controversy and that she could take the heat.
Aust defended the school’s action by noting that the piece caused a “disruption to the educational process,” particularly in P.E. classes. Potentially a valid reason, but Leech’s pen is pretty powerful if it can stop gym class with a single stroke.
Adam Goldstein, a lawyer with the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, told the Charlottesville newspaper, The Daily Progress, that this is “one of the silliest censorship cases I’ve ever seen.” Cudahy and Leech would have a good lawsuit, he added.
Proof that the students at Albemarle High may have more common sense than some of their elders: Both students said they do not plan to sue. They also said nice things about Thomas and Aust, even if they disagreed with what they did. Cudahy, who graduated, will study journalism at American University. He’ll have quite a tale to tell when he gets to college.
Thomas, Aust and the P.E. department have to be glad that this all went down just before the summer break. In prepping her story menu for the fall, Leech actually can breathe just a little easier. She now has a lead for her first issue.
Aust called the episode a “good learning experience” for the student journalists. Perhaps, although you’d have to ask the students exactly what it was they learned.
All this was going on at a high school in Charlottesville. Wait a minute. Isn’t that where Thomas Jefferson came from?
I was watching a baseball game the other day on TV when a batter popped up a pitch.
“Infield fly rule,” one of the announcers was quick to say, as if that explained it all.
You can look it up: The Infield Fly Rule comes into play if there are fewer than two outs and there are runners at first and second or the bases are loaded. Any playable pop fly within the infield is an automatic out. Why? It would be easy for the infielder to say, oops, my bad, and let it drop, then pick up the ball and start a quick double play on baserunners who thought the ball would be caught. (See picture for how this might look).
Since a number of conditions have to converge, you don’t hear the Infield Fly Rule called very often. But watching this game made me think of something I heard back in law school — that some guy actually once wrote a law review article on the Infield Fly Rule.
Yep, there was a note published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1975 entitled, “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule.”
It starts off, rather elegantly, with the line, “The Infield Fly Rule is neither a rule of law nor one of equity; it is a rule of baseball.”
For eight well-footnoted pages, the author slyly discusses the rule with the high tone and seriousness of purpose one finds in most law review articles. But he is, remember, talkin’ baseball.
The guy who wrote it, according to the New York Times, was William Stevens, who died two years ago. Apparently no one had ever had fun in a law review article before Stevens; one observer said Stevens’ little baseball note started “a cultural revolution.”
Well, a revolution among those who write law review notes, anyway.
Many people know that Patrick County Circuit Judge Martin Clark has a day job as a judge and a second job as an author.
He has published three novels – The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, Pure Heathen Mischief and The Legal Limit. The first has been optioned as a screenplay; CBS/Paramount has the third in development as a miniseries.
Clark (at right) was the guest speaker at the Richmond Bar Association monthly luncheon today, and he talked a lot about writing.
The Legal Limit was launched in Richmond, at Fountain Books, owned by a friend of Clark’s who suggested they host a signing at a nearby bar. The signing party was going pretty well, and for each reader, Clark said he said what he always says: “Thank you for buying my book and I hope you enjoy reading it.”
At the end of the night, one drunk woman made her way to the table for a signature. Clark offered his typical greeting. She said, “Oh, I’m not going to read it. I bought because I felt sorry for you.”
“So Richmond has always been good to me!” Clark said.
A few nuggets on writing:
He said he’s a believer in a “big plot.” If you’ve read any of Clark’s novels, that’s apparent. He added that there should be a beginning, a middle and an end to a story. “There should be a pay-off” to reader for getting to the conclusion, he said.
There are many writers. But there are degrees of difference. Some writers take you to the carnival and “describe the Tilt-a-Whirl.” The good writers “put you on the Tilt-a-Whirl.”
And he has found there are many people who want to be writers, even some who have a manuscript that’s been kicking around, even some who have collected a few rejection letters.
Clark said he decided he wanted to be a writer in college at Davidson. He wrote his book and when he was in law school at UVa, he thought he had found a guru, someone who might help him navigate the way to publication. He took his manuscript and a bottle of Scotch and put them in the mailbox of a celebrated local writer, then waited for a response. Several weeks later, Rita Mae Brown returned the manuscript with a note. For help getting published, that’s what agents are for, she said.
And after reading his manuscript, she suggested that he choose what he wanted to do. “You’re either going to end up a half-assed writer or a half-assed lawyer,” she said. “Literature is a full-time passion.”
For those people with a manuscript and the dream of seeing their work from the first word on paper to the printed volume, Clark counseled perseverance.
It took him 20 years to get published, he said. “Have a thick skin. It’s a long road,” he said. “Be persistent.”
