In April, a state-of-the-art facility that caters to the homeless will open in San Antonio
But will enough of the homeless come?
Leaders say that depends on the cooperation of street feeders. And some street feeders say they won’t cooperate.
Food Fight
January 25th, 2010Steps to the Moon
January 24th, 2010
Old Main; originally opened in 1903
For anyone out there who hasn’t completely given up on this blog, let me assure you:
I’m alive. And I haven’t laid down my pen.
Yes, that’s “laid”: the past participle of “lay.” And why do I open my first blog in months with the potentially alienating parsing of an irregular verb?
Because I’m teaching copy editing now. At Texas State University. In the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. On Tuesday nights. For three hours. On the second floor of the campus’ first structure: a hoary, beautiful building in the Victorian Gothic style.
Those sentences were phrases. They lacked verbs. OK, I’ll stop now.
The larger point I’d like to make is that it’s a new year. No duh, right? But I mean this in the most symbolic sense. New things are happening this year. The wheel is turning; old hopes are dropping into the abyss and new ones are clinging to the spokes. Read the rest of this entry »
Papa Don’t Preach II
December 5th, 2009
Octavio, 3
I couldn’t decide what to write about for my latest parenting column.
Then my 1-year-old clawed my face, my 3-year-old went nuts and my 9-year-old made a sword out of branches and masking tape.
Broken Eagle, Decapitated Bear
December 1st, 2009
Photo by Jerry Lara/San Antonio Express-News
This story features a fellow named Chief Broken Eagle, a wealthy landowner, a criminal investigation and a decapitated bear (or, as some prefer, “barrr”).
What more could you ask for? That’s right, nothing. So read the darn thing.
52x Foiled
November 23rd, 2009That certain blooping sound from my iPhone woke me up before 6 a.m. the other morning — a text message.
It was a police source with a terse note: “Tru off dwi acc at 90 and mcmullen. Off being booked.” The tip would spawn this story.
“Tru” stands for Tactical Response Unit, a specialized force that Police Chief William McManus created shortly after he took the helm here in 2006. The unit’s mission is to saturate high-crime areas of San Antonio. It has been criticized — both within the Police Department and without — for a certain latitude in tactics and culture.
Now my source was saying a TRU officer, drunk, had crashed a city vehicle. Read the rest of this entry »
Papa Don’t Preach
November 4th, 2009
Octavio and Gavriel
Faustino
I now have a professional outlet for the weird insanity that is my life as a father to three rambunctious boys: The newspaper has made me a parenting columnist.
Here’s my first column. It’ll show up once a month in SA Life in a rotation with three other writers.
On a related note, I dreamed last night that my wife told me she was pregnant again.
I love my children, folks. But I was happy to wake up.
Recommended: “Zeitoun”
October 25th, 2009
Zeitoun
“Zeitoun,” by Dave Eggers, is a swift, affecting work of literary nonfiction that also works as an essential piece of American journalism.
Count Mr. Eggers as another object of my overactive writer’s envy. This guy has penned screenplays (the fantastic, eerie “Where the Wild Things Are”), novels (“You Shall Know Our Velocity”) and an experimental memoir (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”).
He’s also the founder and editor of an independent publishing house (McSweeney’s). Oh, well, at least he’s not smooching Fiona Apple, like another writer I envy, er, admire.
Eggers, who has a degree in journalism, obviously flexed some investigative muscle for this book. It takes place in New Orleans immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina turned the city inside out. Read the rest of this entry »
Word Nerd Vol. II
October 24th, 2009David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was captured last year by scary Taliban militants and held for more than seven months in the tribal regions of Pakistan, used his own wiles to escape their clutches.
In a recent five-part series that recounts the ordeal, he also uses a wily literary technique: in medias res.
That’s Latin for “into the midst of things,” or beginning a narrative in the middle of the action. Rohde opens his story like this:
“THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.”
An interesting note: Rohde milks in media res to thrust us into the midst of his story, yet paradoxically he manages not to violate Aristotle’s rule of connectedness — the Greek philosopher’s appeal to make sure that everything that happens in a story is a natural consequence of what came before it.
His first paragraph is self-contained, yet it still deposits us right into the middle of the action.
Must-Reads
September 23rd, 2009A New Yorker article on the troubling case of Cameron Todd Willingham.
A New York Times piece on the lost book of Carl Jung.
Where’d they go?
September 21st, 2009
By Brian Chasnoff, September 18, 2009
Simply put, police reports matter.
As a source told me, the creation and filing of police reports is a basic function of any city’s police department, yet they affect almost everything: crime stats, investigations, etc. As such, I believe this story embarrassed the department a tad.
