Paragraph #1.
Summary: The paragraph consists entirely of a quote from photographer Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American, about using a burning building as an opportunity for taking photos. She knew the situation was dangerous, but continued to do so until she turned around at the fear of seeing a girl get hurt.
Role: The paragraph opens the piece with an intense situation to set the tone of the kind of work Ephron did. This is possibly meant to be a standing point upon which to base our expectations of her other works.
Paragraph #2.
Summary: Describes the motions of the photographs with additional detail about the woman (Diana Bryant who died in the fall at age 19) and the fireman (noted to have a strong jaw). The pictures are described as a before, during, and after sequence, telling us the eventual outcome of their efforts to survive result with the woman dying and the child landing on top of her and surviving.
Role: The paragraph provides background context for the photos, instead of leaving us to guess at the details of the situation.
Paragraph #3.
Summary: Stanley Forman is given a brief background description, including his employment at the Boston Herald American. The paragraph then segways into the specific camera that he used, and how it was a revolutionary product for newspaper companies, since it could take three photographs per second. Next, the popularity of the photos is recognized in pointing out that over four hundred American newspapers carried the photos and published them.
Role: In this paragraph, Nora Ephron hints to the significance of new camera technology at the time, and how available and spread throughout the country they were. Not only were the photos valuable for their content, but because of the kind of camera they were taken with.
Paragraph #4.
Summary: Ephron refers to the photographs on both positive and negative notes. While it is incredible that these photos were taken in such a way, capturing the difference between life and death in just three frames, it is unfortunate and saddening that the events caught in the photos occurred at all.
Role: The photos are referred to as "...old-fashioned but perfect examples of photojournalism at its most spectacular." This is to imply the historical significance of the photos being taken of these three particular images, and with technology that was considered highly advanced for its time. Ephron also uses the photographs' content to define qualities of photos taken for photojournalism: "...they're technically superb and thoroughly modern..."
Paragraph #5.
Summary: When the photographs were released, there was an uproar of reaction from opposing sides. Some people thought the photos were offensive to the viewer as well as the people in the photo, while some thought of it as a new way of experiencing what others had experienced.
Role: Ephron points out how people can react so differently to the same thing, as well as the hypocrisy of others, like Marshall L. Stone, who published The Boston Photographs, but would not publish the assassination photo of the Vietcong prisoner.
Paragraph #6.
Summary: The Washington Post hires people (ombudsmen) to determine what the public will and will not react well to. Charles Seib, their ombudsman for the previous eight months, had never seen such a reaction before the release of The Boston Photographs.
Role: Even people whose job it is to relate to the public cannot determine what individual people will react to and how.
Paragraph #7.
Summary: The Washington Post wanted to use the photos for something other than what they were. Instead of focusing on the tragedy at hand, they wanted to create another story about questioning the safety of fire exits just to continue the tangent, instead of focusing on the fact that the photos convey a horrible tragedy that affected peoples' lives.
Role: The person being quoted (I assume to be Charles Seib) is pointing out that this is the kind of business of working in a newspaper. It's not about the truth or what to do about it. It's about making the story sell.
Paragraph #8.
Summary: The significance of the final photograph is pointed out. Would it have been published if it were taken a fraction of a second later and Diana Bryant was just a dead body? Or does watching the last moment of somebody's life captured forever on film have the same impact as seeing their corpse?
Role: Ephron questions the morality of newspaper publishing. While nudity is inappropriate, the moment before death was not. In the newspaper business, showing a breast is more offensive than seeing the pain and suffering of another human.
Paragraph #9.
Summary: Charles Seib asks any editors or publishers to question their morals, and whether or not they should publish something because the reader needs to see it, or because it is what they are most likely to buy because of their own morbid curiosity.
Role: Ephron holds this against publishing companies, saying that they cannot just focus on selling papers. They must also write about good stories that people will not find themselves too disturbed by.
Paragraph #10.
Summary: People would have reacted differently depending on the outcome of the sequence in the photos. If the mother had lived or the child had died, the response would have been very different.
Role: The content of the pictures would not change much, whatever the outcome. It still portrays a tragedy that people will react to either thinking on a positive note that they survived, or on a negative note that the mother died.
Paragraph #11.
Summary: Seib's view raises the concern of over-censorship, through which people will never hear of bad things happening, even though they are.
Role: Ephron reflects upon the importance of not censoring the news, since you cannot and should not censor reality. To do this would be to shield the public eye from any bad things that could happen.
Paragraph #12.
Summary: Ephron continues to argue that censorship is a bad idea, because it is irresponsible to pretend that bad things do not happen to people. To show the uncensored truth is to keep the public mentality strong by not shielding it from the truth.
Role: The significance of showing horrible images, such as from war, in the press has been that it stirs up public interest and opinion. When thousands of photos returned from Vietnam, the American opinion shifted overtime to be fully against the war. This is the result of letting the public decide for itself.
Paragraph #13.
Summary: The importance of the photos is not the context, it is that the photos were taken to begin with. They had impact on the world that simply does not come the same way with written journalism, because very little is left to the imagination.
Role: As a closing statement, Ephron backs up the opinion that to show horrible things in the media and to not sugarcoat reality is the way we should always experience the news. We do not get to pick event that happen in real life, so we should not get to pick, let alone have editors and publishers pick, which ones we read about and see depicted in graphic images such as The Boston Photographs.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Response to Stephen King's "What Writing Is"
Stephen King refers to writing as something that transports him, no matter where he is. He carries a book with him everywhere he goes, and has an audiobook playing in the car every time he drives, specifically unabridged audiobooks. My mother does almost the exact same, due to her high stress job and having to drive at least a half hour to get there. It's a way for her to distance herself from the real world for whatever amount of time she can. "You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch...", says King.
I have a similar escape, although instead of reading, it is listening to music. Instead of writing stories, I write lyrics or poems in song structure. Carrying around headphones everywhere I go, I find that it is never a bad time to tune out and escape to my own mind. I found that King and I share the same feelings about finding your escape in situations like waiting in line, sitting around in public areas like airports or train stations, or even just waiting for class to start.
I find that these are some of the best times for self discovery. We all have our own ways, but personally, when I listen to music that I find powerful, I feel the same telekinesis that King refers to. The connection between the transmitter and the receiver is a very personal thing. Whether or not the exact details of the transmission were received, King believes that as long as the general concept is there, that's all that matters. The rest is for the audience to fill in the gaps.
"I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, espeicially that blue eight. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy."
King appropriates a new, more artistic meaning to the concept of telepathy, hinting that it can even be a form of time travel, in the sense that the words he wrote in 1997 still have impact, the evidence for this being that we are reading them in 2014 as though they were only just written down.
"I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room . . . except we are together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the minds."
With that, King hints at the impact of the written language. I have forgotten exactly when and where I either read or heard this, but the written language is a beautiful thing. It is our time travel into the past. Our linguistic DeLorean if you will. It is the closest we have to communicating with the past and knowing the words of people who lived thousands of years ago.
King refers several times to his far-seeing place, where he is able to escape and become either the receiver or the transmitter. I feel that in a way, to be the receiver means to time travel into the past, and to be the transmitter is to help future generations remember what we know as the present.
Stephen King refers to writing as something that transports him, no matter where he is. He carries a book with him everywhere he goes, and has an audiobook playing in the car every time he drives, specifically unabridged audiobooks. My mother does almost the exact same, due to her high stress job and having to drive at least a half hour to get there. It's a way for her to distance herself from the real world for whatever amount of time she can. "You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch...", says King.
I have a similar escape, although instead of reading, it is listening to music. Instead of writing stories, I write lyrics or poems in song structure. Carrying around headphones everywhere I go, I find that it is never a bad time to tune out and escape to my own mind. I found that King and I share the same feelings about finding your escape in situations like waiting in line, sitting around in public areas like airports or train stations, or even just waiting for class to start.
I find that these are some of the best times for self discovery. We all have our own ways, but personally, when I listen to music that I find powerful, I feel the same telekinesis that King refers to. The connection between the transmitter and the receiver is a very personal thing. Whether or not the exact details of the transmission were received, King believes that as long as the general concept is there, that's all that matters. The rest is for the audience to fill in the gaps.
"I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, espeicially that blue eight. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy."
King appropriates a new, more artistic meaning to the concept of telepathy, hinting that it can even be a form of time travel, in the sense that the words he wrote in 1997 still have impact, the evidence for this being that we are reading them in 2014 as though they were only just written down.
"I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room . . . except we are together. We're close. We're having a meeting of the minds."
With that, King hints at the impact of the written language. I have forgotten exactly when and where I either read or heard this, but the written language is a beautiful thing. It is our time travel into the past. Our linguistic DeLorean if you will. It is the closest we have to communicating with the past and knowing the words of people who lived thousands of years ago.
King refers several times to his far-seeing place, where he is able to escape and become either the receiver or the transmitter. I feel that in a way, to be the receiver means to time travel into the past, and to be the transmitter is to help future generations remember what we know as the present.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Dickerson & Ung
Both authors are discussing the aspects of journalism versus personal writing (memoirs), and how the two can sometimes have to be blended in order to tell a specific story. Debra Dickerson, who wrote for The Record at Harvard Law school, was accustomed to writing about topics that affected other people, or stories taking aspects from other peoples' lives. Rarely was she to put pen to paper and create a personal work. However, after her nephew, Johnny, was shot at the age of sixteen and later learning that he would never walk again, she published a work in which the horizons between journalism and memoir writing were blurred.
No, the piece was not about her in particular, but it was her close family. Her nephew recounted the story of how he was shot in the back, and lay in the road waiting for death, fully conscious. Then, breaching into the more journalistic side, she anonymously interviewed Johnny's shooter, Dale Barringer, while he was in prison, and took the opportunity to learn about his story and his background, and found that he and Johnny had much in common. Mainly, they both lacked a father figure in their lives to guide them and help them to decide what was wrong or right. Johnny would live to be a well brought up individual, as far as we can perceive from the reading, whereas Dale struggled with doing the right thing, and grew up to be an angry, violent, drug-dealing young father of five children.
By taking these two peoples' life stories, Dickerson shows us how people from a similar background and upbringing can diverge onto very different paths.
Loung Ung similarly uses journalism to tell a personal story in an almost first person form. At a young age in Cambodia, she escaped the war and what would have been her upbringing there by coming to the United States with her brother. Her sister, however, was not so fortunate, and grew up uneducated, forcefully married with five children, and living in very poor village.
Ung wrote the book Lucky Child as a way of translating the words and memories of her sister into not only English, but into a way that would make sense for the reader. By having two different understandings for both American and Cambodian cultures, Ung feels responsible, in a way, to bridge a cultural gap between the two.
Ung would worry that Lucky Child would spark controversy over its 'dual narrative'. While she told a story almost as if from her own perspective, it was really an attempt at piecing together the bits and pieces of her sister's life, which showed difficulty in that her sister had no real measurement of time other than the rising and setting of the sun, the change of the seasons, and the harvests that came with them.
No, the piece was not about her in particular, but it was her close family. Her nephew recounted the story of how he was shot in the back, and lay in the road waiting for death, fully conscious. Then, breaching into the more journalistic side, she anonymously interviewed Johnny's shooter, Dale Barringer, while he was in prison, and took the opportunity to learn about his story and his background, and found that he and Johnny had much in common. Mainly, they both lacked a father figure in their lives to guide them and help them to decide what was wrong or right. Johnny would live to be a well brought up individual, as far as we can perceive from the reading, whereas Dale struggled with doing the right thing, and grew up to be an angry, violent, drug-dealing young father of five children.
By taking these two peoples' life stories, Dickerson shows us how people from a similar background and upbringing can diverge onto very different paths.
Loung Ung similarly uses journalism to tell a personal story in an almost first person form. At a young age in Cambodia, she escaped the war and what would have been her upbringing there by coming to the United States with her brother. Her sister, however, was not so fortunate, and grew up uneducated, forcefully married with five children, and living in very poor village.
Ung wrote the book Lucky Child as a way of translating the words and memories of her sister into not only English, but into a way that would make sense for the reader. By having two different understandings for both American and Cambodian cultures, Ung feels responsible, in a way, to bridge a cultural gap between the two.
Ung would worry that Lucky Child would spark controversy over its 'dual narrative'. While she told a story almost as if from her own perspective, it was really an attempt at piecing together the bits and pieces of her sister's life, which showed difficulty in that her sister had no real measurement of time other than the rising and setting of the sun, the change of the seasons, and the harvests that came with them.
Clutter 'Twitter' post
At this particular point in time, I presently find many of the words of my personal thoughts to be redundant #theenglishlanguageceasestolive
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