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Don´t read if you need brightening up
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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 Don´t read if you need brightening up
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I know. I can be a PITA. Pointing to annoying mess.
Forgive me. Not aiming to harm.
Talked to my best friend yesterday. His older daughter just finished high school.
She was engaged for her school mates, and did things like organizing the graduation party. But only one of the mates was a true friend.
A girl raised as philanthropist. A beautiful soul so I have been told, and an outsider.
Right after school she went to India for to help the poor. Whereas my friend´s daughter planned to fly over to here and afterwards head on to India where she wanted to meet her friend.
Now her friend was found run over by a train. Supposedly suicide. Apparently she could not shoulder the crass situation of Indian paria.
Everyone is shattered.
And you wonder whether ther poor parents might regret to have led their dear onto that path of empathy.
You only wished to have been by her side to sooth her.
I could so use her here as pal. What a shame.
-
And I just saw a report on the leather producing industry. And found myself sitting in the TV chair cringing all the time like with the vast of reports on cruelty.
Men is a species of ideal, and when the ideal is wrong or just missing men will be something so much more indifferent and disproportionate than the term beast or brute could ever cover.
And I have seen their wittness perish before. Always very bright and sensitive individuals who will desperate and give in; suicide.
Some will not, like Sir Nicholas G. Winton who was honored today for having rescued thousands of Jewish children during Third Reich, but those are the strong ones. Exceptionally strong.
Not meaning that the girl on the rails was "weak". Not at all. She only was not able to fend off the horror.
What´s the use of pointing to the beast out there? To billions of zombies and their daily victims and damages in the trillions?
In that report on leather and fur industry it was mentioned how moslems sneak out 2 mio holy Hindu cows yearly from India to let them be sloughtered in Bangladesh. The PETA founder´s report on how sadistically the animals were treated on the way and on arrival has resultet in almost no willful torturing to be seen anymore on the destiny location.
Display helps.
A lifestyle of running around cluelessly with fur trimming in a focus of iPads, late hair cuts and video games means passive vandalism.
Ogre being.
This is where we are at on a screaming creatures planet. If not bothered, not pained for a change, then you are a practical ogre.
A pest.
There is no moderate, no in between anymore. Not at status quo.
I know, you will be thinking of that German girl in India tonight.
Ruphus
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 8 2013 22:32:54
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estebanana
Posts: 9355
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Don´t read if you need brighten... (in reply to Ruphus)
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quote:
And found myself sitting in the TV chair cringing all the time like with the vast of reports on cruelty.
I'm sorry to hear the girls suicide or her death in what ever way it happened. Very sad.
_________________
Different topic
On the other hand Go for a walk!!!!!!!!!!!!! Don't watch **** on TV
Strunk and White is FREE online: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
-------------------------\
90 Year old Bill Zinnser can no longer see, he coachers writers by listening to their prose.
NY Times article on William Zinnser: Author of 'On Writing Well'
A Writing Coach Becomes a Listener
By DAN BARRY
Published: April 28, 2013
The written word looms over William Zinsser. The many hundreds of books in his Upper East Side apartment stand at attention, as if awaiting instruction from this slight man in a baseball cap and sunglasses who, for a half-century, has coached others on how to write.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
William Zinsser, the author of “On Writing Well."
In newsrooms, publishing houses and wherever the labor centers on honing sentences and paragraphs, you are almost certain to find among the reference works a classic guide to nonfiction writing called “On Writing Well,” by Mr. Zinsser. Sometimes all you have to say is: Hand me the Zinsser.
“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” he declared in one passage that tends to haunt anyone daring to write about Mr. Zinsser. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”
The book, first published in 1976, grew out of a writing course that Mr. Zinsser taught for several years at Yale University. And he is still teaching at 90, holding one-on-one counseling sessions for accomplished and aspiring writers at a round wooden table close to those bookshelves. The only difference is that he can no longer see.
So he listens. Sitting with elbows propped and hands clenched, and with the sunglasses and cap protecting eyes damaged by glaucoma, he listens as students read their drafts and fret over narrative.
“People read with their ears, whether they know it or not,” Mr. Zinsser says.
Sitting at his table is Gretchen Dykstra, a woman of vast experience as a teacher and public servant. Back in the 1990s she helped revitalize Times Square as president of its business improvement district and, along the way, took a writing course taught by Mr. Zinsser. Now she is trying to write a book about a colorful grandfather of hers who traveled the Upper Midwest early in the last century, collecting songs of the vanishing lumber camps.
Not long ago North Dakota Quarterly published an essay by Ms. Dykstra on the subject. She reads a few brief passages to Mr. Zinsser, whose smiling grimace, as one former student has put it, can suggest fondness for a person whose writing is causing him pain.
“It reads like a textbook,” he tells Ms. Dykstra. “This is not solved overnight.”
He suggests that Ms. Dykstra write a personal narrative that couples her grandfather’s exotic travels with her own. She pushes back, protesting that her intention has not been to write a memoir.
Mr. Zinsser is dismissive. “Don’t worry about labels,” he says. “We’ll figure out what it is after you’ve written it.”
Lunchtime arrives. A sandwich is the only payment that Mr. Zinsser accepts for his services. He finds sandwiches easier to eat these days.
“I’ve got ham and cheese, turkey and cranberry, and roast beef,” Ms. Dykstra says. “You get first choice.”
Ham and cheese it is. Mr. Zinsser eats in small bites while he explains how imagination provides the lights and colors in a darkened world. “Much that I no longer see,” he says, “I don’t have to see.”
This may be because Mr. Zinsser has seen so much. He grew up in privilege on the north shore of Long Island, graduated from Princeton, served in the Army during World War II and embarked upon a long life of constant reinvention.
He worked as a feature writer and film critic for the late, lamented New York Herald Tribune; wrote 18 books on myriad subjects; taught nonfiction writing at Yale; worked as a senior editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club; moonlighted as a jazz pianist; and, while in his late 80s, wrote a blog on the arts for the Web site of The American Scholar that won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary. For many years he maintained an office, where he wrote, coached and counseled.
A little more than a year ago his many friends and former students received a written invitation from Mr. Zinsser “to attend the next stage of my life.”
He explained that his old enemy, glaucoma, had caused a “further rapid decline in my already hazy vision,” forcing him to close his office and end his nearly 70-year career as a writer. But he was now making himself available as a teacher, mentor and coach from the apartment he shares with his wife of 59 years, Caroline Fraser Zinsser, 82, an educator, historian and his partner, he says, in all things.
To be more specific, he would be available “for help with writing problems and stalled editorial projects and memoirs and family history; for singalongs and piano lessons and vocal coaching; for readings and salons and whatever pastimes you may devise that will keep both of us interested and amused.
“I’m eager to hear from you. No project too weird.”
And old friends and students have come, to read aloud a work in progress, or rail against their muses, or just visit.
Among his visitors is one of his former students at Yale, the writer Mark Singer of The New Yorker, who has been sorting out a family story based in Oklahoma. At Mr. Zinsser’s suggestion, Mr. Singer recorded their conversations while the teacher drew out the student with questions about his family background.
“He’s remarkably inventive and creative,” Mr. Singer says. “And he wants to be in a pedagogical role whenever he can.”
Mr. Zinsser agrees. People come to him in stages of typed-out paralysis, stalled, uncertain whether they have written too much or too little. He tries to help them organize their thoughts by condensing, reducing — learning what not to include.
“By talking to them, by finding out who they are, I bring out their own personality,” he says. “And ease their mind, for God’s sake.”
This is what Ms. Dykstra seeks as she sits at the round wooden table, writing down in a legal pad the things said by a nonagenarian who cannot quite see her.
He also cannot quite see the volumes of Mailer, Melville, Joyce and Waugh behind him. Or the Walker Evans photograph on a nearby shelf. Or the prints of American Impressionism to his right. Or, on a far wall, the Picasso clown that his wife bought many years ago in Oberlin, Ohio. Or the aboriginal figure that the Zinssers purchased in Mali on one of their many travels.
Mr. Zinsser cannot see these things, yet he knows them so intimately that he does see them. Just as he thinks he sees, once again, a path for another student through a dark thicket of words.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 9 2013 1:40:22
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Don´t read if you need brighten... (in reply to Ruphus)
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I do zap away every other time when a topic is already familiar enough whilst the documentary threatens to only show another finning, clubbing, skinning etc.
Also due to the fact that me receives only three German TV-channels which all three ( including a states-owned station - originally tasked with mission of education) the numbers of documentaries / useful contents has become very scarce anyway.
Yet, with the limitation of humble TV resource contents of careless / intentional cruelty and destruction reach me almost daily and are ever increasing at the source.
At first I didn´t even have TV here and did not want any. The awareness about ogres culture and industry yet would not fade. And in the end I opted to reintroduce TV consumption for to have a notion of home around. ( And weird how there have been launched "reality shows" that play exactly before my former door steps in Berlin and Cologne.)
Taking walks here will not lighten me up. Instead the lack of aesthetical sense visible everywhere and much worse the extreme littering of the whole landscape and living quarters just turns you off. Let alone the mistreatment of fellow creatures that will even haunt you at home when you hear cries of kinds you never heard before.
( Last time from about a week ago, at first I couldn´t even figure what it was. Only that it seemed to squeeze my guts and ending the good mood I had down in the yard with the dogs. Initially it sounded like a muezzin or such, then like a dog, a cat ... Finally it was clear that a big dog was screaming.)
And when I used to walk the dogs there was often little left from being intentionally hit by cars / getting involved with idiots. ( While I can´t take the poor animals out anymore as executive has become more brisk, threatening you to take the animals from you and liquidate them.)
What I want to express in the first place however is: You are right, one shouldn´t overly expose to the abyss of cruelty, to prevent harming oneself.
But then again: When you look the other way atrocity won´t vanish in the same time.
I believe that all human people need to view hell on earth so that there be a chance for a change.
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Language wise German is my domaine, and that is where I am doing alright. I can write books that readers won´t put down before finish. Guess that´s not too bad.
- And important letters I used to write for folks have been congruent and terse enough to achieve success at a rate of 100% .
I´m not posting for reading comfort in English, and who cares enough about the context will bear the clumsyness.
Ruphus
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 9 2013 11:08:17
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estebanana
Posts: 9355
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Don´t read if you need brighten... (in reply to Ruphus)
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quote:
Assumably "clutter" in the above example would be when I for instance mention the German channels, to which I add how even the states owned TV station ( namely ZDF ) has turned into trivial broadcast on soap opera level of common private TV..
Guess I´ll stick to the treadmill. :O|
Here's the problem in your writing- when someone says there's a problem, you assume you understand what the problem is instead of ASKING them what they think the problem is. You second guess everyone because you assume you are smarter than everyone and already know the answer to the problem.
If you were to say: "What does clutter mean to other people?" You would get responses. If you were to read Zinnser's book you would get very good examples of clutter. If you were to work on those problems, your writing would never cease to lack the charm, wit and characterful sarcasm you so love to project; while making clearer the social issues you feel strongly about.
But it is your life, and your assumptions that hold you back from being clearer before a larger audience. Do you think a person who writes in German as you write in English should be taken seriously? You're a serious person, you should consider taking communication seriously. Franky, it's pernicious when you get excused by those who read you and who let you off the hook by saying your writing style is quaint and entertaining. There's nothing wrong with what you write about, or what you have to say, but it lacks clarity because you stack up every thought you have inside you without bothering to organize the thoughts so readers will comprehend them. Readers can't read juggled out thoughts and ideas piled on top of ideas and be in your head. Writers need to put the thoughts in front of the reader, but then organize the thoughts so they flow into each other and make a series of points.
The difficulty reading your work is how much effort it takes to cut through the disorganization. The reader gets fatigued and gives up before they can hack through the jungle of word undergrowth you grow in front of your good ideas. When the reader gets tired they wander off and assume you have nothing to say.
You don't have to give up who you are to straighten that out. You can work over your posts and edit them before you post them or after you post them. Write down the ideas. Prioritize them, give them numbers if you have to- Idea #1, Idea #2 and so on. Separate each idea on the page and then develop each idea. Give the reader some stepping stones between ideas. Then go back and look to see if the stones are too close together. If they are, throw them back into the river.
I'll never mention it again.
Do you like American TV sit coms?
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 10 2013 0:56:31
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Don´t read if you need brighten... (in reply to Ruphus)
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Hi Stephen,
I can only agree with that. Definitly makes sense.
A part of the fun with foro discussions is the merge of spontaneity with opportunity to organize the string of consciousness.
I will try to change habit and halt a moment before typing.
Naturally, not as much as it would take for fair copy, but some.
In real life I have jumps of thought all the time while including topical connections. When a late teen and twen the grey cells would suffice to build bridges first and bring all that together while resuming the main branch. Now the batteries are low and what I find myself saying regularly is: "Please do not hesitate to ask when somethings is not clear or when there is a gap". ( It annoys me when people let you babble along, for not wanting to be impolite and ask.)
This is even with verbal German which I can handle pretty well; while in other languages I can be an apparent ball of wool, yet with spontaneous written messages.
I´ll try and see what I can do within still-fun and time range.
-
Yes, I do.
Only rarely will I stay in ( American) sitcoms. Usually only when the other channels provide trash while I have nothing better to do than watching TV. ( During dinner.)
But when I do I always think me should consume them regularly. British and Anglo-American culture to me take the crown of great humour, and Americans have developed artwork in writing sketches. Watching such certainly does me good with cheering me up.
It makes feel weird though, with compunctions for `wasting time´whilst in the same time thankful for the brightness.
The trash in todays German TV consist of mainly comedy, but for the very most it is so lame! I don´t get how it fills halls and stadiums.
( Me used to do spontaenous stand-up before mates as greenhorn, and was way better than the most of todays German comedy stars. I fool you not.)
There was a psychologically rather deep sitcom in the nineties ( was it called "Friends"? It had a Steeleye Span kind of soundtrack with a howling at the moon at its end ...), which I really liked.
I could think of The Simpsons having taken a tad from there.
(BTW, ´love The Simpsons! Just read they want to let die a character? - Though that might not really fit in this thread, I guess.)
Ruphus
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Oct. 10 2013 12:40:47
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