<<<  <<  -- 7 --  Gordon Rumson    'IT'S ALL LIP-SYNCHED'  --  >>  >>>

The history of literature is full of falsehood. Many authors had books ascribed to them that they never wrote (like Aristotle) and in some cases these spurious books were more influential than anything the authors actually did write. The medieval philosopher Raymond Lully is said to have written hundreds of books on alchemy and his influence in the Alchemical Art is vast. Sadly, it seems he wrote none of them.

There are cases where someone needed to write a book and a ghost writer was called in. H P Lovecraft was asked to write a story for Harry Houdini. And dare I mention the book by John F Kennedy that described his war-time experiences? The practice of ghost writing is an old one. (We must be wary of those cases where an author had assistance in the writing of the book. The question is -- how much?)

Writing a book or an article for someone else is considered very bad form, but what do we make of speeches written by one person and 'given' by another?

When someone stands up to read a speech he did not write, and perhaps had next to no input into, is he lip-synching? Many years ago, a writer acquaintance of mine wrote all the speeches for a major music festival. He is not a musician, though a decent writer, and he certainly knows little more than the accepted platitudes about music. Can what he wrote have any real significance? I shudder to think of what similar cases may have occured.

Perhaps this is why so many speeches are so terribly boring: they are written by someone who knows little except how to craft a phrase, and spoken by someone who does not believe (or even understand) the content of the speech.

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