[Quincy Lehr]

Lindsey Lohan's public letter of condolence to the family of Robert Altman:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...cle2023859.ece

Quincy

[Maryann Corbett]

It's pretty clear that Ms. Lohan hasn't had much practice or direction in writing in a formal register, or in putting thoughts together to be presented in writing. Most people haven't.

To get the big picture on American literacy, take a look at the National Assessment of Adult Literacy

Admittedly, this is about reading rather than writing, but I think it's relevant, since what we can produce of language is always less than what we can understand.

Maryann

[Quincy Lehr]

Maryann--

But there remains the question of why Ms. Lohan made the decision to release this to the press. From my read, it wasn't leaked. If someone offered to record me singing operatic leads and broadcast it across the world, I'd say no. I don't have the voice for it--and I know that I don't.

Quincy

[Ethan Anderson]

Journalism and schadenfreude, I'm guessing.

Lindsay Lohan is a young person with an alleged drug problem who has earned a living for years by saying words other people have written for her.

Set against the ultimate Western measuring stick--money--she has been so inordinately, precociously successful that she hasn't had to jump through many middle-class hoops. She doesn't have to think, write or speak well using her own words to succeed in her career. She's perceived to have acting ability, she looks good on screen, and draws enough of an audience that her projects earn returns. Which is all that counts in her world.

The fact that a news source chose to cover this "story" says less about Lindsay Lohan, whose shortcomings should already be obvious by now to anyone who follows these things, and more about how journalists and readers like to gawk at the missteps of people they will never meet, and who have no bearing on anything other than the quality of Herbie The Love Bug Turbocharged.

[Quincy Lehr]

I can see your point, Ethan, but again, this is a rather strange case. Fortunately, most of the idiotic things I did at her age were done out of the public eye, and none made the paper. I can see the National Enquirer headline--"Some Idiot You've Never Heard of Gets Drunk at College Party." But this wasn't a case of the papparazzi (sp?) following Ms. Lohan around various Los Angeles-area bars. To an extent, she invited this. It puts me in the mind of the "cries of hate" at the end of L'Etranger somehow.

Quincy

[Maryann Corbett]

My guess: Having no notion of how far her writing fell short, and being moved by things she really had learned from Altman, she wanted to say publicly what she felt. I think she had no idea how bad the publicity would be. I think that agrees with what Ethan said. It's the things we do when we're clueless that embarrass us most.

Maryann

[Ethan Anderson]

She's what? Twenty years old? And she hasn't had academic pressure since she began outearning the GDP of the every country ending in "istan" since the age of ten. So what, honestly, was anyone expecting--Oh Captain My Captain?

Again, why is it news?

If anything, in the age of spin doctors, speech writers, overnight pollsters, publicists and handlers, it's refreshing to read something that was obviously unfiltered and straight from the source. Kind of like finding out that Michael Richards is a racist rageaholic and not Kramer, the scripted, rubbery-limbed concoction that earned him millions.

imo rotfl btw ttfn

[Lo]

For those that are interested - here's the entire letter:
http://usatoday.com/life/people/2006...tatement_x.htm

"I would like to send my condolences out to Catherine Altman, Robert Altmans wife, as well as all of his immediate family, close friends, co-workers, and all of his inner circle.

"I feel as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me and my heart aches.

"If not only my heart but the heart of Mr. Altman's wife and family and many fellow actors/artists that admire him for his work and love him for making people laugh whenever and however he could..

"Robert altman made dreams possible for many independent aspiring filmmakers, as well as creating roles for countless actors.

"I am lucky enough to of been able to work with Robert Altman amongst the other greats on a film that I can genuinely say created a turning point in my career.

"I learned so much from Altman and he was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years.

"The point is, he made a difference.

"He left us with a legend that all of us have the ability to do.

"So every day when you wake up.

"Look in the mirror and thank god for every second you have and cherish all moments.

"The fighting, the anger, the drama is tedious.

"Please just take each moment day by day and consider yourself lucky to breathe and feel at all and smile. Be thankful.

"Life comes once, doesn't 'keep coming back' and we all take such advantage of what we have.


"When we shouldn't..... '
"Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves' (12st book) -everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on.-altman Its true. But treasure each triumph as they come.

"If I can do anything for those who are in a very hard time right now, as I'm one of them with hearing this news, please take advantage of the fact that I'm just a phone call away.

God Bless, peace and love always.

Thank You,

"BE ADEQUITE"

Lindsay Lohan

At first I thought the (12st book) was a quote from the bible, it sounded familiar enough to me. I googled it, tho, and it ends up being the 4th step in AA's 12 Step Program.

However, I'm still unsure about where the soul trampling comes from.

Makes me feel horribly inadequite.

Lo

[Mark Allinson]

There may be factors in this case I have no knowledge of. But this is the general style of expression we should get used to, since it is fast becoming the norm, in Oz anyway.

Down here, the main reason for the rapid plummet of educational standards is (however did you guess) the PC Left control of education, a regime wherein no student is ever exposed to the crippling stigma of being "failed" for any reason.

How damaging to a child's self-esteem to be told they got something wrong or failed!

Competition with other students in tests is also frowned upon, since it makes some students feel inadeequite. Competition, being a capitalist invention, is bad for education, they say, as the standards continue to hit new lows each year.

Oz parents take out second mortgages to send their children to private schools where "traditional" methods are still used, and education is practiced, rather than hare-brained PC politics.

[Ethan Anderson]

I remember a few years back an uproar about an NBA player, Sean Kemp, who had fathered seven children by six different women, all out of wedlock, before he was thirty. Sportswriters jumped on him for being irresponsible and wild, and wrote disapprovingly of his character. A few years later, when it turned out he had a low-end drug problem (apparently restricted to habitual marijuana use), they linked this back to the downfall of his career and his parental irresponsibility.

Now, I don't know Sean Kemp, and neither did the sportswriters. They did report, however, that he was earning upwards of a million dollars annually beginning at age 18, a figure that ballooned to 15 million annually by the age of 25. In the end, his "failed" career in basketball netted him something on the order of $125 million pretax, and out of these substantial proceeds, he was, in fact, voluntarily and reportedly happily financing the upbringing of all seven of his children.

Now it's hardly a single-nuclear-family, middle-class set of values Sean Kemp was exemplifying, but some people really do lead very different lives from the average newspaper reader. It makes for great reading, I guess, and wonderful fodder for journalists to pass value judgments, but it's an odd kind of intolerance, I think. The Lindsay Lohans and Sean Kemps experience the world in ways most of us never will, and the payback for that is that we second-guess everything they do, as a kind of odd, unspoken compensation for the fact that we have to expend a great deal of effort to get a mere fraction of what the world has given them and continues to give them, despite mistakes that, if transferred to our own lives, would do considerably more damage.

[This message has been edited by Ethan Anderson (edited November 30, 2006).]