New York Times – Active Voice

The world’s fastest men and women were feted this weekend in Kingston, Jamaica for their breathtaking exploits in Beijing this summer. The Government produced floats, big trucks pumping music, throngs of joyous people, and keys to new cars and the city of Kingston for many of them. We’re not exactly sure what the latter will unlock; surely a little like giving someone the keys to Pandora’s Box.

I feel like a dog with ten tails, said a woman in the street, beaming with delight the day Usain Bolt returned from the Olympics. And all of them wagging full speed no doubt– what could be more evocative than that? As Brazil is to football, the most stylishly competitive track and field in the world will always be to Jamaica and young Usain will likely occupy a similar place in the firmament as the legendary Pele.

I was going through the newspapers that had piled up on me during those glorious Beijing days and found some really great visual material in them. If the print media routinely lets us down in terms of sloppy writing and poorly conceived and executed texts (no world beaters here, alas!) our cartoonists and advertising agencies rose to the occasion effortlessly demonstrating their world class skills in a series of brilliant cartoons and ads celebrating and commenting on the feats of the Jamaican athletic team.

In this post I’ve reproduced what i thought were the most creative print ads in local newspapers and one of my favourite cartoons by Las May of the Gleaner (apologies for the quality of reproduction, its entirely due to the technology i employed). What price that image of the public awarding a big zero to the antics of the two PNP contenders? (above). Adwise I thought IRIE FM won hands down (see immediately below) with its image of the receding heels of an athlete wearing the Jamaican flag like a cape. No prize for guessing what it says in Chinese–“Usain Bolt run things”–I’m sure.

Congratulations too to Maurice Smith (who has various friends of mine drooling over him); the captain of the team, he is an outstanding decathlete and his role as leader should not be overlooked.

Sorry now to have to drag you from the sublime heights of Olympic stardom to the dismal depths of print journalism in Jamaica but i need to revisit my post of a few weeks ago, Pronounced Dead, (September 5 to be precise) in which i lamented the kind of shoddy writing that passes for reportage and commentary in this country. I return to it now to quote from some of the incisive responses that post received which really bear being quoted and highlighted.

According to V.

the most worrisome part is that, other than illustrating the sloppiness of local editorial practices, the “pronounced dead” narratives also reveal an appalling intellectual dishonesty. Our newspapers know perfectly well that those routine police reports conceal more complex and sordid stories and they should make more effort (correction: MUCH more effort) to uncover and report them.

As Bitter Bean pointed out:

The truth is that those who run the papers care more about the advertising than the editorial content. Articles are just included so that all the ads don’t look overcrowded.

On September 22nd the inimitable Long Bench left this:

I noticed today that the NYT actually created an online page to address the errors that editors and readers find —

http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/when-spell-check-cant-help-a-quiz/

Well, well, well. So my post was a timely one. It’s not only in Jamdown that the print media is being critiqued by its readers for the numerous errors purveyed in their pages. The difference is that being Jamaica (read third world? provincial?) newspapers here have completely ignored all criticism, undeterred in their determination to pepper their prose with the most careless and egregious errors.

The Gleaner shows marginal improvement. In last Sunday’s paper ( all the examples cited here are from September 27) the only thing i could find at first glance was this line from Ian Boyne’s column: speaking of Portia he said “…the odds have been stocked against her…” A good proofreader should have picked that up, odds are stacked against someone not stocked.

From the Herald there were several bloopers: in Garnett Roper’s column I read “What Jamaica faces is an economy which has almost grounded completely to a halt.” Later in the same column “People are wondering around lost because of mounting bills.” Today’s editorial in the Herald is titled “Why Journalists must be troublemakers” and makes the case for aggressive newsgathering and storytelling. i completely agree; the Herald is virtually singular in taking such an uncompromising stand in the quality of the stories it carries. It must also display utmost integrity and intolerance of errors in the language it employs to tell its stories.

Finally the Observer had some priceless ones in its editorial titled “Will somebody please answer Ms Verna Gordon-Binns?” The editors seem quite incensed that Ms. Binns’ proposal that ganja or marijuana be used to make ethanol instead of food staples was unceremoniously laughed out of parliament. Quoting from an unnamed document they refer to ‘mitigating the environmental fallout from anthropological activity’. Now mind you this is a quote but the Observer retails it without commenting on its putative meaning. what on earth is being implied here? That anthropological fieldwork has somehow been destructive enough to cause environmental fallout? where, when and how? is the quote correct? Anthropology is “the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind.” I’m at a loss as to what link there might be to the health of the environment here.

Why don’t all three papers take a leaf out of the book of The New York Times? Mind you the level of incorrect language used in the NYT pales in comparison to the local newspapers yet in contrast the NYT had the grace and humility to acknowledge its shortcomings. Here’s how their article on editorial errors started:

Even in the rush to publish, writers and editors at The Times strive for polish and precision in our prose. Sometimes we succeed.

But sometimes, after the dust settles, we are dismayed to see painful grammatical errors, shopworn phrasing or embarrassing faults in usage. A quick fix might be possible online; otherwise, the lapses become lessons for next time.

Will the local print media do the right thing and start paying more attention to copy editing what it puts out in the way of editorial matter? Jamaica’s Olympic team has raised the bar very high but will the Press Association of Jamaica take even a baby step towards demanding (and attaining) internationally benchmarked professional standards in journalism from its members?

I returned from San Andres a week ago, turned on CNN to catch up with the democratic race in the US and found myself tuned into a fast-paced international current affairs program hosted by Fareed Zakaria. For some reason this filled me with immense pride, especially as the show turned out to be sharp, humorous and acutely insightful—It’s called GPS, Global Public Square, and airs on Sunday at noon in these parts—refreshingly different from most such programs on the channel. What a relief too to finally have someone on American TV who can pronounce ‘Mohammed’ and ‘Muslim’ the right way.

Described as “the best in the world at boiling down – without dumbing down – complex issues” Bombay-born Zakaria was formerly managing editor of Foreign Affairs and is currently editor of Newsweek International. In GPS Zakaria manages to come across as a brain without being nerdy and displays a certain hipness when he tosses off statements such as “…and because history is cool” when introducing a videoclip on CNN’s humble beginnings however many years ago.

I can just hear my left-wing friends chiding me for bigging up a ‘”rightwinger” (which Zakaria is perceived to be) but hey if there’s one lesson we should have learnt from the last few years it is that its time we started listening to each other, no matter what party, faction, sect, subcaste or global group we align ourselves with. No one side has the privileged vantage point or all the answers and with a book called The Post-American World how could what Zakaria has to say be irrelevant? He speaks for many of us whose views thus far have been inaudible and invisible in international fora.

If Zakaria is the most recent example of a subcontinental/Asian/person from the global South to gain international visibility in a highly competitive field, Salman Rushdie–also Bombay-born–was perhaps the first, in the Anglophone world at any rate. So my curiousity was piqued when I read a harsh review of Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, in the New York Times. The reviewer, an obscure American writer named David Gates, freely admitted to being afflicted by a ‘philistine cussedness’ saying “I’m probably not Rushdie’s target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious — as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka — marvelous.”

Perhaps the New York Times should have asked someone more competent to review Enchantress. Or at least someone with a nodding acquaintance of and sympathy for the literary mode of magical realism. The latter does little for my gladbag either but Gates seems to use the review as an opportunity to take the mickey out of a great writer, dismissing Rushdie as a “multicultural dream weaver” whose fiction “revels in writerly self-congratulation”.

I’m hardly a great Rushdie fan myself (I don’t consider people’s sacred beliefs to be fair game for caricature; cows are sacred in my opinion and should be handled with care and respect even when they’re obstructing traffic) but Gates’ hostility moved me to read the first chapter of Enchantress the NYT made available along with the review. What, i wondered, was Gates fussing like a walrus with a sore tusk about? For what it’s worth I’ve decided on the basis of the first chapter to buy this book though I haven’t read any of Rushdie’s novels since the first three. So thanks Mr. Gates for inadvertently leading me to rediscover why Salman Rushdie has the reputation he has. Let’s hope you get there someday.

In the meantime here are two interesting quotes by the author of Midnight’s Children. As Rushdie poignantly observed in another recent NYT article on him (Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras, May 25, 2008):

“There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self,” he said. “To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.”

And this detail from the first chapter of Enchantress sheds light on the use of the word ‘coolie’ in the Indian context where it is often a synonym for ‘porter’:

“Turbaned coolies in red shirts and dhotis ran ceaselessly hither and yon with bundles of improbable size and weight upon their heads.”

As discussed at length in an earlier post the term ‘coolie’ is as overloaded and burdened as the porters signified by it who often carry baggage two or three times their weight at Indian railway stations.

There is much else to talk about; San Andres was a trip and a half and I didn’t get to blog much about Calabash, which was outstanding this year. Nicholas Laughlin gives a good account of it though in his UK Guardian blog “The distraction of Walcott vs Naipaul“. Suffice it to say for now that I think the Calabash team should invite Salman Rushdie to Treasure Beach next May. More on San Andres and the Raizales in a few days.