Randy Shilts' book and the original reporting that formed the basis for the book offer much for us to consider.
The San Francisco Chronicle's online site has posted a May 13, 1982 Chronicle story that Shilts authored. Look at it to consider the evolution in cultural attitudes, and medical scientific understandings about HIV/AIDS.
What specific reporting and writing strategies can you identify in the book?
What weaknesses can you identify?
What are you learning by reading the book that will help you think more deeply about the role of a journalist and journalism?
How does this work fit into the overall realm of "The Literature of Journalism?"
Read this story about the French virologists who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for their research about HIV. Note the reference to Dr. Robert Gallo of the United States who was in competition with the French researchers.
BH
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monsters and men
An article in today's New York Times reports from the trial of a commandant of a notorious prison run by the Khmer Rouge in which an estimated 14,000 people were tortured and executed. It is the first trial of a senior Khmer official -- 30 years after Pol Pot was driven from Cambodia.
When considering the actions and behavior of seemingly regular, unremarkable people during events like the Killing Fields or in Hitler's Germany, I think it's instructive to consider the words of Primo Levi:
"Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions."
When considering the actions and behavior of seemingly regular, unremarkable people during events like the Killing Fields or in Hitler's Germany, I think it's instructive to consider the words of Primo Levi:
"Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions."
Monday, March 30, 2009
It Is Difficult
Here is an excerpt from an introductory frontispiece of IT IS DIFFICULT, a book about Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project from 1994-1998.
Jaar quotes Nigerian writer Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991.
In "A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING," Orki writes:
Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead.
But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses outside.
The dead in the school were--forgive the paradox--alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against at wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race. I prayed--knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time--but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well.
And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover's--I sang all through the recognition.
I sang silently even when a good-hearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world--and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.
Jaar quotes Nigerian writer Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991.
In "A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING," Orki writes:
Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead.
But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses outside.
The dead in the school were--forgive the paradox--alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against at wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race. I prayed--knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time--but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well.
And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover's--I sang all through the recognition.
I sang silently even when a good-hearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world--and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Walker at the Met
An exhibition of some 700 of the 9,000 postcards collected by Walker Evans during his life is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times ran a review of the show and said of it, "Although small and prosaic, [it] is also richly resonant."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Clarity and Purpose=Project Completion
Here are some powerful ideas that can help us work and live with more vitality, clarity, and purpose:
1. On the door frame outside his workroom, [writer William Styron] tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
2. “A task left undone remains undone in two places - at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. They siphon off a little more of your personal power every time you delay. No need to be a perfectionist, that’s debilitating in an imperfect world, but it’s good to be a ‘completionist’. If you start it, finish it - or forget it.”
– Brahma Kumaris, quote courtesy of David Allen
1. On the door frame outside his workroom, [writer William Styron] tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert written on it:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
2. “A task left undone remains undone in two places - at the actual location of the task, and inside your head. Incomplete tasks in your head consume the energy of your attention as they gnaw at your conscience. They siphon off a little more of your personal power every time you delay. No need to be a perfectionist, that’s debilitating in an imperfect world, but it’s good to be a ‘completionist’. If you start it, finish it - or forget it.”
– Brahma Kumaris, quote courtesy of David Allen
Friday, March 13, 2009
Stranger With A Camera
Elizabeth Barret's 2000 documentary from Appalshop, "Stranger With A Camera," raises many provocative issues we need to consider as journalists and students of journalism. Irate about media outsiders coming into his community, Hobart Ison of eastern Kentucky shot and killed Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor in Jeremiah, Kentucky in 1967. The documentary raises, among others, questions such as:
What is the role of someone who uses a camera to document a community?
What is the role of an outsider who goes into a community with a documenting camera? What is the role of an insider who wants to document his or her community?
In your comments on this blog, consider other questions and issues that the documentary brings to your mind.
Consider how Barret, as an insider of a particular kind, told her story. What raw materials did she use? What points of view?
How does this documentary work fit into the work of Agee and Evans in Hale County, Alabama; Shelby Lee Adams in Kentucky; Birney Imes in Mississippi; Jacob Riis in New York's Lower East Side; Rory Kennedy's in Kentucky; August Sander's in Germany; Adrian Le Blanc's in the Bronx; Alex Kotlowitz's in Chicago. And Nellie Bly, Barbara Einreich, Jonathan Kozol. And many more?
BH
What is the role of someone who uses a camera to document a community?
What is the role of an outsider who goes into a community with a documenting camera? What is the role of an insider who wants to document his or her community?
In your comments on this blog, consider other questions and issues that the documentary brings to your mind.
Consider how Barret, as an insider of a particular kind, told her story. What raw materials did she use? What points of view?
How does this documentary work fit into the work of Agee and Evans in Hale County, Alabama; Shelby Lee Adams in Kentucky; Birney Imes in Mississippi; Jacob Riis in New York's Lower East Side; Rory Kennedy's in Kentucky; August Sander's in Germany; Adrian Le Blanc's in the Bronx; Alex Kotlowitz's in Chicago. And Nellie Bly, Barbara Einreich, Jonathan Kozol. And many more?
BH
A Note About Balance
Here is an email I got today from David Allen, who thinks deeply about Getting Things Done. See davidco.com
He says this:
[Balance is tough enough when you are aware of all your goals, values, projects, and commitments. But it’s impossible if you don’t revisit the whole game consistently.
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world." – James Fenimore Cooper]
So this reminds us to spend an hour or two each week--I do it on Friday or Saturday mornings usually--reviewing all of our projects.
This time is not spent DOING the projects. It is spent going over the project list, adding to or subtracting from the list, of what is important and what needs to get done in the short term, medium term, and long term. It is spent thinking about the discrete parts of the project and what are the Next Steps.
Keep a notepad, virtual or otherwise, close by. Your mind will remind of things undone. You can also keep a list of the items you can do in two minutes or less. And you can schedule a time to tackle a batch of those. It can be SO SATISFYING to complete quickly some of those tasks. Set a timer. See if you can finish some of them in two minutes. You will become more aware of what can be done quickly and what cannot. You will see how you may or may not misjudge time.
In the end, you will get more accomplished of what you want to accomplish.
If you have other ideas about how to get things done, share them with comments here, in class or with your small group.
BH
He says this:
[Balance is tough enough when you are aware of all your goals, values, projects, and commitments. But it’s impossible if you don’t revisit the whole game consistently.
"The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world." – James Fenimore Cooper]
So this reminds us to spend an hour or two each week--I do it on Friday or Saturday mornings usually--reviewing all of our projects.
This time is not spent DOING the projects. It is spent going over the project list, adding to or subtracting from the list, of what is important and what needs to get done in the short term, medium term, and long term. It is spent thinking about the discrete parts of the project and what are the Next Steps.
Keep a notepad, virtual or otherwise, close by. Your mind will remind of things undone. You can also keep a list of the items you can do in two minutes or less. And you can schedule a time to tackle a batch of those. It can be SO SATISFYING to complete quickly some of those tasks. Set a timer. See if you can finish some of them in two minutes. You will become more aware of what can be done quickly and what cannot. You will see how you may or may not misjudge time.
In the end, you will get more accomplished of what you want to accomplish.
If you have other ideas about how to get things done, share them with comments here, in class or with your small group.
BH
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