I found this odd little impressionistic piece, "The Mad Monk Has Left the Belfry...," by one Ashley Halsey, in the Washington Post this morning.
The basic premise is imaginative and slightly charming (that an erratic bell-ringing schedule on a local church is the work of a drunk monk); the story provides a little bit of local lore (the historic church is in Annapolis); but it doesn't seem to lead anywhere. We don't really learn what the real problem was, or why we might care. The only "news" in the item, which we receive indirectly, is that the church has a new bell-ringing system.
There's also the not infrquently encountered problem of a journalist's shaky command of English. If the drunk monk were in the "bowels" of the church, he would have some difficulty ringing the bells; and no matter where he was, he'd have even more trouble trying to make them "peel."
This would be a great little entry on a personal-impressions sort of blog, or a tween's entry in a writing contest...it just seemed a little frothy and unfinished to appear in the Post, even on a no-news Monday. Is this the future of print journalism?
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