Friday, October 21, 2005

"We are not descended from fearful men..." Just as the talk shows are featuring stars of Good Night and Good Luck, Washington State University has unveiled a website about its most famous alumnus, the namesake of its communications school, Edward R. Murrow, class of 1930. The site includes a batch of quotes from Murrow that WSU faculty use to inspire and instruct their students. Here are a few, the first (appropriate in this era of media convergence) building on a comment by a famous newspaperman: "Heywood Broun once said, 'No body politic is healthy until it begins to itch.' I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers.[per thou] "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box." "Imagine you are telling a story to a professor at dinner while the maid's boyfriend, a truck driver, was listening from the kitchen. Describe things in terms that make sense to the driver without insulting the professor's intelligence." "Writing for television is not unlike writing for radio. It must be the language of speech, lean copy, sparing of adjectives, letting the pictures and the action and the indigenous sound create the mood, and then maybe a few words--the fewer the better." "Unless you watch it, there is a tendency for you to think that because your voice and your picture are transmitted from one end of the country to the other, you're more intelligent and more important than you were when your voice only reached from one end of the bar to the other." The new murrow.wsu.edu site features video trailer from the movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," materials about Murrow's legacy, and more than a little self-promotion by the university's Edward R. Murrow School of Communication, which already sponsors an annual Murrow Symposium. For other views of the new George Clooney film and its treatment of Murrow, see the News in Black. White and Shades of Gray in the Times and Good Night, and Good Luck and bad history in Slate magazine. 3:40:53 PM    comment [] Go to Stanford U via Podcast? Want to take in a lecture or two at Stanford University for free? The university is making some lectures available as podcasts so that students (or would-be students) can download them and listen on their computers or portable audio players. The service was started in cooperation with Apple Computer, whose iTunes program and iPod audio players are popular podcasting tools. "Stanford on iTunes will expand in content and features in the coming months," according to the university website. "Soon users will be able to access descriptions of each track, listen to over 30 lectures from Reunion Homecoming 2005, and even watch video of select programs." The Chronicle of Higher Education said Stanford is the first university to make an institutional commitment to podcasts through Apple, although individual professors elsewhere (including here at UT) have offered podcasts of lectures or other information. 12:12:15 PM    comment [] Editor's favorite lyric, set to a new tune Does this song sound familiar? (Quoted from a New York Times story): At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the elevated catwalk ... and sang mellifluously of punctuation and orthography. "Do not use a hyphen between words that can better be written as one word: 'water-fowl, waterfowl,' " he intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: "The steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words eventually become one." The setting with the remarked-on acoustics was the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. The unlikely libretto is one I point students to every semester, Strunk & White's Elements of Style. The Times story introduces a new edition of the Elements, with a twist: This time the "little book" of grammar rules has pictures... and a song cycle. The Times asked Maira Kalman, the artist who did the pictures, whether William Strunk Jr. and his more famous pupil E.B. White would have approved of this multimedia approach. She thought they would: "They both had a great sense of humor and were very irreverent," she said. "It wasn't about being prim and proper." Perhaps they would have shared an ironic chuckle when the Times had to run a correction on its "'Style' Gets New Elements" story. The online edition of the Times notes that the newspaper story earlier this week "referred incompletely to the book's origins." That is, it mentioned only the 1959 edition, which introduced White's additions to Strunk's 1918 booklet. For those on a budget, or those who want to get back to the basics of basics, that 1918 just-Strunk edition -- with no pictures, no sounds and, unfortunately, none of White's updates -- is available for free on the Internet at Bartleby.com. 12:56:33 AM    comment []

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