Wordsmiths

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050729/asp/opinion/story_5041140.asp
WORDSMITHS AT WORK
Teaching people how to write is a mammoth growth industry. It extends all the way from media studies to postgraduate courses in creative writing, while in between there are crash courses in the summer holidays run by publishers’ associations. Backed by the explosion of media companies and new publishing houses, “How to Write” books have become a distinct list with many publishers.

The question is, what do readers or potential editors gain from these books? Ernest Hemingway once famously said that “every writer should have a built-in shit detector”, implying that writing skills cannot be taught. If you have “it”, the skills can be chiselled over time by trial and error; otherwise not.

Yet it isn’t as simple as that. Writing courses and books proliferate for the obvious reason that there are people who want them. Hence two questions arise. First, what do these books and courses teach? Second, if these exercises don’t teach anything extra, do they, at the very least, help to land a job in a publishing house or the media? What, in other words, are the qualifications necessary for a young editor who wants to enter today’s world of information over-kill and technological change?

What these books teach is the basics of narrative and dialogue, and in cases, the basics of grammar and usage. Also, they drill into you that all writing, whether books or feature articles, are for the reader, whose profile must be kept in mind. The profile includes linguistic abilities, interests and needs. This is an instinct and comes from years of experience and working in the field.

These skills should be taught in school, but in many cases they aren’t. Above all, the feel for language needed by a writer is independent of anything that can be taught. Yet something sticks, provided there is passionate motivation. Writing is a solitary, obscure way of making a living and it has to be driven by commitment, or an instinct to discover and explore the world and human nature.

If you can’t make it as a writer, does it mean that all the efforts have been wasted? If basic writing skills have been learnt, then there is scope for editorial work either in publishing houses or the media. There is a dearth of good editors who can straighten out sentences, cut out the fat and re-shape, revise or rewrite copy. But to do this, day after day, requires the following qualifications: (a) consistency, because all jobs become routine and dull; (b) the ability to get along with others because all good publishing is the product of team work; (c) the curiosity to “check out” facts, and keep abreast of current trends in different fields; (d) some familiarization with computer applications, because a great deal of work is done on computers; and (e) a few academic qualifications across a broad range of subjects. Publishing today is a hands-on job; it has little to do with degrees and PhDs. Simply put, if you know it, just do it.

Ravi Vyas

Love Lawyers

These are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are

things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now
published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while
these exchanges were actually taking place.


Q: Are you sexually active?

A: No, I just lie there.
_______________________________

Q: What is your date of birth?
A: July 15.
Q: What year?

A: Every year.
______________________________________

Q: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
A: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
______________________________________

Q: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
A: Yes.
Q: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
A: I forget.
Q: You forget? Can you give us an example of something that you've
forgotten?
__________________________________

Q: How old is your son, the one living with you?
A: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember
which
Q: How long has he lived with you?
A: Forty-five years.
_____________________________________

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up
that morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.
______________________________________

Q: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo
or the occult?

A: We both do.
Q: Voodoo?
A: We do.
Q: You do?
A: Yes, voodoo.
______________________________________

Q: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he
doesn't know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

___________________________________

Q: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
_____________________________________

Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?
______________________________________
Q: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August
8th?
A: Yes.
Q: And what were you doing at that time?
______________________________________

Q: She had three children, right?
A: Yes.
Q: How many were boys?
A: None.

Q: Were there any girls?
______________________________________

Q: How was your first marriage terminated?
A: By death.
Q: And by whose death was it terminated?
______________________________________

Q: Can you describe the individual?
A: He was about medium height and had a beard.
Q: Was this a male, or a female?
______________________________________

Q: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice
which I sent to your attorney?
A: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________

Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.
______________________________________

Q: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
A: Oral.
______________________________________

Q: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
A: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Q: And Mr. Dennington was dead at the time?
A: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was
doing an autopsy.
______________________________________

Q: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
______________________________________

Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you
check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive
when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive,
nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive
and practicing law somewhere.

Naked Bodies

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050724/asp/look/story_5025503.asp
Naked truth
NILANJANA S. ROY
How could they do that?" my friend said. We were discussing photographer
Spencer Tunick's "installation" in Newcastle, for which he persuaded roughly
1,700 ordinary people to pose naked. My friend is a bright writer, but to
her the idea that you might strip in public along with a bunch of strangers
was repugnant.
She hated the images Tunick produced, found them unsettling and
disconcerting. In Mumbai, the critic Khalid Ansari excoriated Tunick: was
this really art, he asked, this display of "ugly, disgusting bodies?"
I looked at those two adjectives and suddenly, what Tunick is trying to do
fell into place. If you look at his images without prejudice, you can't help
but be touched and surprised at the amazing patterns human bodies can make:
like shoals of fish in the sea, like pink and white streaks of light. Very
few people have perfect forms. The men have bellies that sag, or skinny
legs, or drooping shoulders; the women have heavy hips, fat bottoms, sagging
breasts, too little muscle on their stomachs or too much.
You could call those bodies "ugly" and "disgusting", if what you're used to
seeing is the absolute standard of perfection that the media forces on us.
Male nudity has never been as titillating or as much of a commodity as
female nudity; to me, the value of Tunick's pictures was that they made me
realise how seldom we are offered pictures of naked men, how little we
assess or analyse or think about the male body.
Female nudity is all over the place; in "wardrobe malfunctions", in the
films, on the Net, hinted at in ads. And what we see is. perfect. Tunick's
pictures made me realise how little those images have to do with real women.
Real women have bodies that unfold like maps, every wrinkle and scar and
curve of fat telling its own story. Real women have cellulite and boobs that
aren't aerodynamic marvels. I hadn't noticed how seldom we see real women,
how eagerly, pathetically, painfully we try to live up to some impossible
ideal of beauty.
"We live in a world where the media can go out of its way to mock those in
the public eye whose bodies aren't perfect and it's easy to absorb the
message that an extra 10 lb or 50 lb makes you unworthy. When people pose, I
think it heightens their awareness of their own bodies, how precious life
is.," Tunick said of his work.
You have to be blinkered, sick and a slave to the idea that there is only
one standard of beauty for the body, to think that those bodies in those
photographs are "ugly" and "disgusting". Tunick's images offer hope, a
counterpoint to the world of swimsuit calendars and beauty contests, a sense
of wonder in the ordinary, astonishing bodies that all of us are stuck with.
I think of all those young men ferociously working out, filling their bodies
with steroids; all those anorexic, neurotic young women who know that no
matter what they do, their bodies will fall short of some adman's ideal. And
I wish they could look at these pictures that don't idealise the nude but
celebrate the human figure in all its variety, and see that beauty can lurk
in the most imperfect of things.

Why We are What We ARE

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1534396,00.html
Why we are what we are

Thomas de Zengotita argues that the modern media shape people's lives in totally new ways in his haunting study, Mediated, says Peter Preston

Sunday July 24, 2005
The Observer

Mediated: The Hidden Effects of the Media on You and Your World
Thomas de Zengotita
Bloomsbury £10.99, pp291
At first sight, the latest media studies thesis in town isn't exactly cutting-edge. Indeed, the Bard of Avon had the jump on Thomas de Zengotita, professor of anthropology at New York University (and Harper's guru). All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players? Just so. It's precisely what the prof is arguing. But at least his Shakespeare arrives in postmodern, anti-terrorist dress with high-tech gadgetry attached.

Long ago, he says, de Zengotita was taking a course in method acting, simulating extreme grief, when news came banging at the door. John Kennedy is dead! And suddenly his Lee Strasberg-trained class dissolved into true grief, except that, audibly, visibly, no one could tell the difference. The method was the continuing message. It is this utter confusion of reality and virtual reality that sends his mind spinning on.

Were the hundreds of thousands of Londoners who turned out for Princess Di's funeral genuine mourners, gripped by genuine emotion? Perhaps, in a way; the mediated way of his title. But they were also volunteer players on an ad-hoc stage, groundlings seeking their moment in history's arc-light. And if that was true for Di, and for the thousands who thronged St Peter's Square when the Pope died on nonstop cable news, think what de Zengotita would have made of London two weeks ago and its silence for the slaughtered lambs.

Almost everything, you see, comes to us through some media prism, which, in turn, colours not just our view of this life, but our own self-definition. We are products of immense, often inchoate, media indoctrination.

Moreover, the very pattern of life we take for granted, our normality, is hectic, digital and new, quite different in kind from that of even recent generations. You know where you were when Kennedy or Di died or the Twin Towers came toppling down. But does anybody, except those few who were there, on the spot, remember Pearl Harbor?

No, because no instant, vivid media existed to bring the enormity of that moment to you and make you share it. Our lives, as recently as the first half of the 20th century, were different in kind: isolated, unchanging, experiencing great events at a sluggardly distance.

You recognise that in so many ways if you pause and ponder. De Zengotita, who has a wonderful way with personal anecdotes, says silly little reconstructed things can make you cry, and he's right.

I remember, a few years ago, weeping uncontrollably in my living room at the sweep of a panning shot which ends Mississippi Gambler as Piper Laurie rushes aboard the steamboat into Tyrone Power's arms. Why weep? Because, 50 years after I first saw that film, a lone schoolboy in the back row of the Victory cinema in Loughborough, experiencing it all over again, as though I was still that boy, first tears remembered and frozen in time.

No generation before had such a bank of mediated memory to draw on. Old music hall stars perished and vanished forever. Old wonders of history were written about, not experienced. The world had heroes, say, Nelson or Alexander, but the world did not see them close up, if at all. Human existence was cramped, confined. Most people had few life choices to make because life itself gave them few options.

Rivetingly, de Zengotita examines what that means for the ages of man. Childhood? That used to be a brief, passing phase between cradle and a full working life, not a decade or more of anxiety and expense. Teenage years? The very concept of 'a teenager', all acne and slammed doors and CDs blasting out, is a totally 20th-century construct. We didn't have teenagers with teenage problems before then: neither the word nor the concept existed.

At which point, other puzzles fall into place. Take the supposed political apathy of the young. If, for years on end, they're sifting the mediated options, deciding who they are or want to be, then is it any wonder that politics, using pop video techniques and pop slogans inferior to the pitch on cans of Diet Cola, is the option they never find time for, one limp message among many more compulsive ones?

It isn't the spin that turns them off; it's the style and the tone of voice. It's Clinton and Bush and, yes, of course, Tony Blair acting again, because acting is what they all have to do while the media carousel turns.

This is a fertile, haunting book, with a thesis that peddles awareness, not conclusions. But once you've absorbed the awareness, you're bound to see life a little differently, and to keep asking the most vexing of questions. If I am a sponge, an assemblage of images, sounds and influences, always looking out for my 15 minutes of fame, always rehearsing what I'll say if a camera pokes its head round my doorway or a producer from reality television comes knocking with a contract, then where is the real me, the inner core, not the outer show?

De Zengotita remembers looking at his mother one day in the kitchen and thinking: 'That woman bore me in her womb.' We've all done that, I guess. But is it reality or a line from a movie somewhere?

And so, inevitably, queasily, back to the biggest mediated experience of our age. On the morning of 9/11, de Zengotito was sitting in a park by Brooklyn Bridge. What was that bang? A gas main exploding? It's days before he's allowed to cross the East River to see for himself. 'It was chaos, a gigantic instantiation of necessity and accident.' It had cracked apart the expected frame of media representation. It was a tangle of shapes and miseries on a beautiful September day. It was - the exact word - surreal. More, much more, than a Hollywood blockbuster: a shattering experience because without the gloss of art or intellectual point or meaning, a glimpse of reality unmediated, the difference between watching a screen and being there amid dust and rubble.

Was that the difference for Londoners between the choking blackness of the Piccadilly line and the silence of Trafalgar Square? Or had one bitter reality been subsumed by mediated mourning? The professor, witty and pungent throughout, says he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, so he's not infallible.

But if you want to think afresh about who you are and how you came to believe what you believe, start here.