Eric wrote:richardMdBorn wrote:
The confrontation in the Fishbowl flowed like a swollen river into the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders.
Fugitive days 56.
I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents. . . .
Dreams 394
Richard,
Do you honestly think the above passages came from the same person? I really am having a hard time seeing what you apparently see in this comparison.
Hi Eric,
I agree with you that this one passage doesn't prove anything. More compelling are the nautical terms used in both books and some of the other similarities. As Jack Cashill wrote today
These include the 55 or so maritime allusions used by both Ayers and Obama; their shared "rage"; the matching Homeric structures of their respective memoirs; and their relentless postmodern talk of constructed realities, of narratives, of fictions, of interior struggles, of uncertain memories, of metaphorical journeys, of traps, of contradictions, of correctives, of rewritten personal histories. The pair also dabbled in advanced postmodern slang -- the "grooves" into which they have fallen, the "poses" they assume, and even the "stitched together" nature of their lives.
In their reading of my book, the Mail editors were struck by the focus on eyes and eyebrows both in Dreams and in Ayers's memoir Fugitive Days. Ayers, for instance, writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." As it happens, Obama also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."
Obama is the rare writer to fix on eyebrows -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. There are seven references to "eyebrows" in Dreams. There are six references to eyebrows in Fugitive Days, an eyebrow-fixation that borders on fetish.
The editors asked me to explain computer-based literary forensics, and this I did too. As I noted, the most sophisticated study on this subject came from Chris Yavelow, a composer who hashelped pioneer what he calls "computational corpus linguistics." His 27-page report compared Dreams with Fugitive Days on any number of variables: attributions, characters per word, syllables per word, sentence length, structure, flow, paragraph length, readability, verb use, modifiers, contractions, redundancies, clichés, and more.
Every variable Yavelow tested -- save, tellingly, for dialogue -- argued for shared authorship. On the subject of clichés, for instance, Yavelow noted that out of more than 3,000 clichés, the two memoirs used less than 7 percent and had 62 percent of them in common. "And, not only in common," Yavelow wrote, "but often in anearly corresponding position on the distribution list."
Concluded Yavelow, "There is a strong possibility that the author of Fugitive Days ghost wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recordings or notes). Alternatively, another scenario might be possible: Ayers might have served as a 'book doctor' for Obama and given extreme license to edit and rewrite."
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/why_uks_daily_mail_got_cold_feet_on_dreams_fraud.html