{"id":305,"date":"2006-04-27T07:05:41","date_gmt":"2006-04-27T15:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/?p=305"},"modified":"2006-04-27T07:10:34","modified_gmt":"2006-04-27T15:10:34","slug":"visiting-colleagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/?p=305","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Colleagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mr. Rifftides has riffed on my rant<\/a><\/strong> from the beginning of this week. He is more dispassionate in a personal context, but passionate about the subject of journalism. Go here<\/a><\/strong> to read his thoughts.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing more fun than discourse, whether in person or from afar, direct or indirect. Sometimes I tire of listening and prefer to just write, alone with my thoughts, but eventually I need the stimulation of interaction. Today, in visiting Terry Teachout’s blog<\/a><\/strong> I find a letter from one of his readers and his response. Their subject is how to appropriately subtitle a biography; should it be “A Life of so-and-so,” or “The Life of so-and-so.” We titled the video documentary of my dad “Jim Hall: A Life in Progress” so you might think I agree with with TT’s correspondent, but “the life in progress” clearly would not have been correct, it would have to have been “His Life In Progress,” but that sounds, quite frankly, rather boring. The logic, understood by both the correspondent and TT is that “the” makes it sound definitive while, in fact, TT’s work as well as dad’s video do not pretend to be exhaustive biographies covering every facet of the life in question. <\/p>\n

What makes someone buy one biography instead of another? For me, it is my curiosity about that particular author’s perspective, his or her version of someone’s life as different from someone else’s, and what that life looks like at a particular moment in time — if the person is alive, where they are in the trajectory of their path, and if deceased then what the past looks like from today’s perspective. So yes, people do have many lives, not only as perceived by someone else but as perceived by oneself and other over time. <\/p>\n

I hadn’t given this quandry any thought when I suggested that my Luther Henderson book (“a” work in progress) be titled “Seeking Harmony: The Life and Music of Luther Henderson.” Does that imply to you that it is a definitive, exhaustive, soup-to-nuts, heavy-weight tome? If so, I will need a new title. Or, if one believes that the writer can distill the essence of a person, then perhaps “the” is still correct; after all, we are not claiming “the one and only life of” whomever. Still it would only be my perspective of his essence. <\/p>\n

But of course it is my perspective, I am the author. I know that and you readers know that. That is why our English teachers, and editors, told us to delete the words “I think” from our pieces. You know it is what I think because my name is on it. If someone else thought or said or wrote it I would have told you so — and if I didn’t, well that’s plaigerism and another story all together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mr. Rifftides has riffed on my rant from the beginning of this week. He is more dispassionate in a personal context, but passionate about the subject of journalism. Go here to read his thoughts. There’s nothing more fun than discourse, whether in person or from afar, direct or indirect. Sometimes I tire of listening and … Continue reading “Visiting Colleagues”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.devradowrite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}