Gabriel Garcia Marquez; thoughts on using tape recorders

Interviewer: How do you feel about using the tape recorder?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The problem is that the moment you know the interview is taped, your attitude changes. In my case I immediately take a defensive attitude. As a journalist, I feel that we still haven’t learned how to use a tape recorder to do an interview. The best way, I feel, is to have a long conversation without the journalist taking any notes. Then afterward he should reminisce about the conversation and write it down as an impression of what he felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. What ticks you off about the tape recording everything is that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed, because it even records and remembers when you make an ass of yourself. That’s why when there is a tape recorder, I am conscious that I’m being interviewed; when there isn’t a tape recorder, I talk in an unconscious and completely natural way.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a 1981 interview; ‘The Paris Review Interviews vol II’.

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Attack from Within by Barbara McQuade

This looks like a really good read. The author examines ways in which misinformation and the spreading of lies is undermining American democracy. I found these few paragraphs in a recent ‘Guardian’ review and was struck by the intelligence of the solutions McQuade offers. She does not just state the obvious about misinformation and the self-evident truths about the dangers to democracy. She offers some solutions. Read on.

….Attack from Within is not a letter of surrender or obituary of America. McQuade offers solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalising doxxing (the act of revealing identifying information about someone online) and considering a ban on online anonymous accounts.

The former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan urges politicians to get ahead of the curve of artificial intelligence. “I hope that our Congress can do something which we failed to do with social media, which is get ahead of it, because if it can put things in place before they create havoc, it’s much easier than trying to react after the fact.”

Individual citizens, she says, can gain skills be critical consumers of social media. “We can educate ourselves and take responsibility by doing things like, when we read an article, don’t rely just on the headline; we should actually read the article before we forward it to someone else.

“We should look for second sources of a story; if there’s an outrageous story, someone else will be reporting it. If there is data in a story, we should look at that data. How big was the sample set? Was it a sample of three or a sample of 3m? That makes a difference. Were the results of this study a causation or just coincidence with an outcome? We need to do that.”

McQuade also calls for increasing media literacy in schools and a revival of teaching civics rather than focusing on test scores. “Civics education is important for all of us, because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”

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More gems from ‘Shantaram’ by G.D. Roberts

Depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.

I washed my hands in the cold uncaring sea, and my conscience was as silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars.

Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love.

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Book review: ‘Straight Man’ by Richard Russo

“Back when I was a writer, I might have been able to justify such musings, since odd details and unexpected points of view are the stuff of which vivid stories are made, but now such thoughts seem more like evidence of an unbalanced mind, a warped sensibility.” (‘Straight Man’; Richard Russo)

That’s a gem from Richard Russo’s novel ‘Straight Man’ published in 1997. A Birthday present from my Son. That’s the beautiful thing about literature. There is so much of it out there, that even seasoned readers like yours truly have overlooked or simply been unaware of fabulous writing. Of course, being a Pulitzer Prize winning author, it is not at all surprising that Russo’s writing can command attention. I read this book non-stop, morning into night and then the following day. It is a brilliantly crafted story, follows an anarchist English literature professor at a small town university and the intersecting lives of his family and contemporaries. The protagonist, William Henry Deveraux Jr., is a man with whom I readily identify. Observant, pugnacious, sometimes obnoxious, entirely caustic and overflowing with satire. He struggles with the demands of his tenured position at university and the maddeningly frustrating decaying quality of the student body. And his own. I know I’m reading a damn good book when I often reach for my post-it notes to mark brilliant passages. Here’s one that aptly and articulately captures the angst and anxiety of youth.

“If she weren’t talking to her friends, she mighty be listening to other voices in her own head, voices she might benefit from hearing out. Instead, she telephones. When she runs out of people to call, she opts for electronic company, the television in one room, the stereo in the next. She may even consider these part of her support group, for all I know.”

I’m going to look for this guy’s novels and collections of stories. ‘Straight Man’ forced me into several moments of introspection and self-assessment, a sure sign the author has a sensitive and solid grasp of human nature. Check it out. ‘Straight Man’ by Richard Russo.

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Excellent crime thriller by Ian Rankin

I’m reading a thoroughly entertaining novel “Exit Music” by Ian Rankin, a prolific writer of crime thrillers. And sharing some marvelously articulated phrases with my subscribers is a lazy way for me to ensure I do post something onto the blog every day! Thanks for subscribing and pass it on to your friends!

It was the casual arrogance that had flipped his switch, Addison sitting there in the full confidence of his power – and the step-daughter’s arrogance too, in thinking one weepy phone call would make everything better. It was, Rebus realized, how things worked in the overworld. Addison had never woken from a beating in a piss-stained tenement stairwell. His stepdaughter had never worked the streets for money for her next fix and the kids’ dinner. They lived in another place entirely.

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It’s a dog’s life being a mother.

It’s a dog’s life being a mother. There’s no management structure to speak of, no independent arbitrator, no dismissal procedure for repeated offences and no promotion prospects. Emotional blackmail and sexual harassment are rampant and backhanders commonplace. No man would tolerate it. His self-esteem would suffer. (Minette Walters from ‘The Ice House’)

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Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Final snippet.

Here’s my final snippet from Flow. This book, written several decades ago, is more relevant today than it ever has been. As we all search for some meaning in our lives, trying to find some order and relevancy in the chaotic events throughout the world at large and in our own personal worlds, I believe Mihaly Csikszentmihaly laid out a tremendously effective and profound way to achieve that. With cultures clashing, political systems and nations at war, fear and misunderstanding of one another on the rise, Mihaly’s paragraph on ‘optimal experience’ as a possible solution to neutralizing those negative precepts lays a path we might all consider following. Get yourself a copy of this book, you’ll thank me. Cheers!

We have come to accept that our morality simply no longer has currency outside our own culture. According to this new dogma, it is inadmissible to apply one set of values to evaluate another. And since every evaluation across cultures must necessarily involve at least one set of values foreign to one of the cultures being evaluated, the very possibility of comparison is ruled out. If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society. A starting point would be to say that one society is better than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills.

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South: The Endurance Expedition by Ernest Shackleton.

I was feeling depressed, mired in doldrums that kept me encased in a room without windows. This 2 year Pandemic with it’s restrictions on life, as well as some personal dramas, made me, a usually eternal optimist, wonder if there was any opening or escape from this dark box. The right book can always alleviate some of those pressures. The book I’m now reading reinforced for me the fact that no matter how bleak life may seem, others have lived through far worse predicaments and seemingly hopeless periods. One such book is Ernest Shackleton’s account of his epic struggle in the Antarctic in 1914, when his ship ‘Endurance’ got locked in ice and destroyed. The book details the survival of him and his 22 crew as they fight impossible odds, surviving on seal and penguin meat/blubber whilst never giving up hope and never stopping to find a way out. His writing is quite excellent, rife with gems such as this:

“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in his splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.”

I highly recommend “South, The Endurance Expedition” to get you out of your dark space and into the light. It’s never as bad as you think it is.

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Youth need exposure to military life and skills.

Here’s a few snippets from a book review of ‘Our Own Worst Enemy’ (Oxford University Press) by Tom Nichols. The author is a professor at the US Naval College and Harvard Extensions School. He quotes Abraham Lincoln on how threats to American democracy always come from within: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The enemy, Nichols asserts, is “us”. Citizens of democracies, he writes, “must now live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties”. Nichols sees the internet and the “revolution in communications” as the means by which we reached this dark point. Public life has become ever more about dopamine hits, instant reaction and heightened animus. Our fellow citizens double as our enemies. Electronic proximity breeds contempt, not introspection. Social media and cable television provide a community for those who lack a three-dimensional version. Nichols urges America’s youth to spend a summer in uniform, exposed to military life and skills. Most won’t join the army, he thinks, but will come away with a better knowledge of the soldier’s life. Right now, he laments, “there is no longer any common experience related to national defense”. (Lloyd Green, The Guardian)

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