Ellen Carpenter is the quintessential journalist: professional, talented, and hard working. However, with the current title deputy editor of Nylon Magazine and previously an editor for both Rolling Stone Magazine and Spin Magazine, these cookie-cut definitions don’t, well, cut it. Ellen Carpenter is more than a journalist. She’s a mother, a music enthusiast, and “a theater geek”– above all, she is passionate.
Tag: 2012
people aren’t supposed to look back
“‘So,’ said Billy gropingly, ‘I suppose that the idea of preventing war on Earth is stupid, too.’ (Vonnegut).” War and literature are sanguinely germane to Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the Vietnam War, he and postmodern authors analogous depicted the intergalactic—through the wonted use of space travel—as a literal and imaginative frontier to essentially homestead. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, space travel functions as an escape from protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s psychological problems, elicited from his particular and personal experience in World War II; thus metaphorically exemplifying the lives of the American people and the austere realities they faced in the 1950s through 1970s during the Vietnam War. Vonnegut’s science fiction novel, published in 1969, (Reiko, 1) creates literary escapism from subsisting with the experiences that Vietnam brought and continued to produce. The recurring theme in American science fiction—space travel—emerged from the post-depression period, epitomized in Slaughterhouse-five: Where celestial crossings and the fourth dimension symbolically imply forms of detachment from reality and the repercussions of war.
convince + create
“I wish I was your age,” Rick Kogan – yes, the Rick Kogan of the Chicago Tribune – says to one of Columbia College’s introduction to journalism classes that I happen to be apart of. A few of us twist around the plastic chairs to get a glimpse at the man of the hour. I am in the front row of a beautiful conference room with a beautiful view at WBEZ’s Navy Pier home, waiting to be enlightened. Truthfully, I had been doubtful: do I really want to be a journalist? This is a dying field. Rick Kogan walks up the isle with the confidence only a cultured, urbane writer can. “You’re in for a remarkable journey,” he says to our wide-eyed, diverse class. And so it begins.