too many Daves

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Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:07:42 -0700

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Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:10:31 -0700

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Sun, 29 Aug 2010 01:18:00 -0700

"I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer..."

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:21:00 -0700

“I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.”

- - from “A letter to my students” (8/24/10) by Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at Berkeley.

A friend and fellow Berkeley grad used Facebook to link to O’Hare’s letter. That’s how I saw it. The overall message makes me wish I could still vote in California. Things are bleak.

What moved me most, though, is O’Hare’s mourning over students being less and less equipped to “push back intellectually against me or against each other.”

SInce it was just a couple of days ago that I used this blog to push back intellectually against another Berkeley professor, I want to give O’Hare props for craving students who can push back intellectually. (I write “props” even less than I say it, but it’s the only word I can think of right now. Not much sleep last night. Besides, “give O’Hare props” beats “I’d like to salute O’Hare” and the other feeble alternatives my brain is offering.)

"Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to..."

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:32:00 -0700

“Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting. The genius of the American experiment in religious liberty is precisely this long-term confidence that equal rights for all religious groups builds the loyalty every democratic society needs. Certainly American Catholics learned that lesson long ago.”

- John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby, Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (via nybooks)

I have yet to read the full piece that this excerpt links to. The excerpt itself is sensible and worthwhile, so I’m reblogging it. It reminds me of a post I wrote in ‘08 for Huffington Post about the anti-Catholic smears Al Smith endured when he ran for president in the 1920s. I’d been ignorant of that.

**********************

UPDATE:

Now that I’ve read what McGreevy and Appleby wrote, I want to call attention to another passage from their post: “For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent ‘religious other.’ Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense.”

They go on to acknowledge that “historical comparisons are bound to be inexact.” Even so, their rundown of the American Catholic experience is helpful. They do leave out Al Smith, though. So here, for whatever it might be worth, is a link to my aforementioned 10/19/08 HuffPost, “A Cell Phone Call During Mass (Remembering the Anti-Catholic Smears of the 1928 Election).” (I just re-read it. Parts of it make me cringe. Style stuff. Not substance. Let’s just say that it was written at a certain historical moment that is not now. I’m tempted to delete the link, but the stuff I quote from NYT stories in 1928 is worth knowing about. For example, one Alabama senator refused to vote for his fellow Democrat because Smith’s Catholicism supposedly would drive him to use the presidency to annex Mexico. Because Mexico has lots of Catholics, see? And then pretty soon the Protestants are outnumbered and America is ruined. “Smith!!!!” Crazy, bigoted stuff.)

"… prose in itself does not describe at all. The words rely very much on what the reader brings..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:59:11 -0700

“… prose in itself does not describe at all. The words rely very much on what the reader brings to them. In fact, it is the associative power of words rather than their “meaning” that makes prose work on its ultimate level. It seems to me that Hemingway’s achievement, whether calculated or instinctive, was to get his effects by making the reader do the work. This was not a completely original perception (as readers of HUCKLEBERRY FINN must know), but if one tries to write like Hemingway without understanding that, as I did 20 years ago, one ends up with merely a Hemingway gloss.”

- Tom Stoppard’s “Reflections on Ernest Hemingway.”

So often, with interesting lighting, my phone’s camera...

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:39:00 -0700

So often, with interesting lighting, my phone’s camera won’t shoot even a facsimile of what I’d manage with the total control of my Nikon. This evening it did just what I wanted as I waited for the bus on Market Street in the glare of the 7 o’clock sun.

76 comes before 50 and other soft-boiled lessons from a lesson on The Sun Also Rises

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 01:16:04 -0700

I have just made a mistake that, with better luck, might not have been a mistake at all. I searched the iTunes U collection for lectures about Hemingway, specifically about The Sun Also Rises, a novel that keeps calling me back for more this summer. The search led me to a lecture by Associate Professor John Bishop. Bishop devoted two of the 27 lectures in his English 45C course to The Sun Also Rises. Great. Bishop teaches at Berkeley. I graduated from Berkeley. Great.

But no.

I regret listening. I can only regret listening more if I take the time to explain all the reasons I regret listening.

Here are just three reasons:

1) Professor Bishop seems not to have noticed that the novel has scenes that are really, really funny and that there must have been days when Hemingway sat at his writing desk laughing out loud.

2) Professor Bishop quotes the novel out of context. Repeatedly. I only know this because I’ve started to memorize The Sun Also Rises. Not on purpose. Not with any premeditation. It’s just from repeated exposure to the prose. Very concentrated exposure. All of it during this summer. Really, all in the last few weeks.

3) I’ve eaten a hard-boiled egg. Many of them by now, at 37. So experience clashes hard with Professor Bishop’s statement that “You probably noticed hard-boiled eggs showing up throughout the novel. On page 73 and 126 in Spain, hard-boiled suggests everything looks hard on the outside but it’s very soft on the inside.” Symbolism is nifty, but I’m here to say that an egg is sometimes just an egg. Even so, I’m also here to say that a “hard-boiled” egg that is “very soft on the inside” needs to go back in the boiling water. It hasn’t been cooked enough. My dictionary says so. Its definition for “hard-boiled” begins with “1. (of an egg) boiled until the white and the yolk are solid.”

I’m not writing this because of eggs. I’m writing because of words like this in Professor Bishop’s lecture:

The characters who are admired keep their pain to themselves. We know that they’re in pain. And they include Bill Gorton, who on page 76 to 77 we learn has just come back from Vienna and he can’t remember what happened there, presumably because he’s been on a drinking binge. And he says that, “I make it a point never to be daunted. Whenever I feel daunted, I creep off like a cat and hide.” Now, that line’s repeated by Harry Stone on page 50. The stoic characters just go off, like Jake Barnes in his hotel room, crying to himself, and not telling everybody how miserable they are.

The least important problem with those words is that I can’t find a place where Gorton says that. Not that exactly. His speech is clipped. It’s clipped because he’s drunk. Drunk and ridiculous. So Gorton’s doing stuff like trying, on the way to a restaurant dinner, to talk Jake Barnes into buying a stuffed dog from a taxidermy shop. To me, that’s funny all by itself. Same with Jake’s disingenuous attempt to fend Gorton off with “We’ll get it on the way back.”

Damn near everything that follows is funny, too:

“All right. Have it your way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

We went on.

“How’d you feel that way about dogs so sudden?”

“Always felt that way about dogs. Always been a great lover of stuffed animals.”

We stopped and had a drink.

“Certainly like to drink,” Bill said. “You ought to try it some times, Jake.”

“You’re about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me.”

“Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public.”

“Where were you drinking?”

“Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George’s a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted.”

“You’ll be daunted after about three more pernods.”

“Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”

“When did you see Harvey Stone?”

It goes on. But I’ll stop because that last line matters so much.

Harvey Stone matters to Professor Bishop. (Bishop calls him Harry Stone, but that’s nothing.) Harvey Stone matters to Professor Bishop because Stone “on page 50” repeats what Gorton says “on page 76 to 77.” I promise I’m not being pedantic by insisting that the guy speaking earlier on page 50 cannot repeat the words another guy speaks later on page 76. The whole point is that Gorton (page 76) is repeating Stone (page 50).

This matters because it’s this nice little joke that we’re in on with Jake Barnes. Like Barnes, we’re many, many steps ahead of the pitifully sloshed Gorton. Barnes knows he’s way ahead of Gorton. So when Gorton says “I’m like a cat that way,” Barnes doesn’t say “You know, I heard Harvey Stone say something like that a few days ago.” No, he’s so sure of the source of the “like a cat” talk that he answers straight away with “When did you see Harvey Stone?”

That makes me laugh. I’m not saying it needs to make you laugh. I’m not saying it needs to make Professor Bishop laugh. I’m just saying that Professor Bishop, minimally, needs to not ask his students to pretend that page 50 comes after page 76. I’d also urge him to rethink whether the buffoon going on about “road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs” should be put quite so cleanly into the category of the “characters who are admired” and whether there isn’t actually a certain vulnerability inherent in confiding to a friend that “If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”

Professor Bishop laments that “Bill Gorton and Harry (sic) Stone seem to me like versions in the novel of what Jake Barnes would look like if we weren’t privy to Jake Barnes’ thoughts and reflections.”

There — right there in that lament — is Hemingway’s triumph in The Sun Also Rises. With minimal fuss, minimal sharing of feelings, we see right through to the hurt at the center of Jake Barnes and the people around him. There’s real beauty in that.

For reasons I only partially understand, I love projects like...

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:13:23 -0700

For reasons I only partially understand, I love projects like this one.

photojojo:

Is it possible to reunite owners with their long lost photos?

The folks at Is This You? have been collecting photos found on the street and in photobooths for years

…and they’ve found almost half their owners!

Long Lost Photos Found at Is This You?

"INTERVIEWER Do you feel competitive with novelists? TALESE Yes, I do. Journalism is not given much..."

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:51:00 -0700

“

INTERVIEWER
Do you feel competitive with novelists?

TALESE
Yes, I do. Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only I use real names. If you chopped my books into single chapters, each one could be a stand-alone short story. You could take the chapter about McCandlish Phillips in The Kingdom and the Power, Garibaldi in Unto the Sons, and Harold Rubin in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and they would work together as a short-story collection.

Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can’t quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

”

- - from “The Art of Nonfiction No. 2,” an interview with Gay Talese in last summer’s issue of The Paris Review

Thanks to my massive, short-lived, amicable dispute with Doreen Marchionni about creative nonfiction and New Journalism, I picked up Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties, a book which, at this moment on Amazon, can be purchased new in hardcover for $262.91 or used in hardcover for 86 cents. My copy is from the library.

It’s huge and I’ve read little of it. The first few pieces I started didn’t hook me. Then I noticed something by Gay Talese called “Looking For Hemingway.” These days I will taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Hemingway. So I started the Talese piece, which turns out to be about the earliest days of The Paris Review. I could just say that it’s great, but maybe it’s more useful to say that the piece left me primed to taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Talese. That’s how I got to the interview I quoted at the top of this post.

Meanwhile, someone at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, who may or may not have permission, posted Talese’s “Looking For Hemingway” here. Whether via that link, your local library, an 86-cent book, or a $262.91 book you should find a way read it.

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UPDATE: I kept looking and found a way for anyone who’s interested to get “Looking For Hemingway” while putting some money in Mr. Talese’s pocket: 2009’s The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters.

I dream up weird stuff, but so often the world is weirder.

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:52:00 -0700

I dream up weird stuff, but so often the world is weirder.

"Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers..."

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:12:00 -0700

“Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it has always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a Command that didn’t feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an Administration that believed the Command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space. It was inevitable that once the media took the diversions seriously enough to report them, they also legitimized them. The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in a sane world, and if much of it was sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about. The most repulsive, transparent gropes for sanctity in the midst of the killing received serious treatment in the papers and on the air. The jargon of Progress got blown into your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new gains in ARVN effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive. And after enough years of that, so many that it seemed to have been going on forever, you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a six-week low, only eighty GI’s had died in combat, and you’d feel like you’d just gotten a bargain.”

- - from Michael Herr’s Dispatches.

I started Dispatches yesterday and am close to finished now. With virtually every page, I’m realizing more and more why this book is considered a classic. Here’s a measure of how effective Herr’s reporting and writing are: My very first thought upon waking this morning was an overwhelming sense of gut-level thanks that I get to rest in comfort, that I get to sleep without fear that I will wake to the sound of the bullet, the mortar, the grenade that will end my life.

Herr tells of learning from two Marines that another Marine from earlier in the book had died in combat. Herr couldn’t remember the guy’s name. Neither could the two Marines. Neither could I. Maybe that just means I’m inattentive. But I don’t think so. I think, rather, that a masterful storyteller put just enough space between the Marine’s final living appearance and the news of his death. This left me, as the reader, as something more than a spectator to the forgetting of this young man’s name. The effect is all the more haunting and heartbreaking because Herr never acknowledges what he’s doing or preaches about the shame of it all.

The quote above is haunting in the more macro sense that we must always worry that we are repeating old mistakes, that we are part of some new “cross-fertilization of ignorance.”

Screw the Seattle Times. Honestly. I’ve written and...

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 09:30:00 -0700

Screw the Seattle Times. Honestly. I’ve written and rewritten this first paragraph several times, typing tediously on a phone. No version, prior to this, has used the word “screw” or anything like it. I’ve tried instead to stress positives: that the WNBA’s Seattle Storm locked down a perfect 17-0 home record last night, that I got to see them do it, that 9,685 others got to see them do it too, that we yelled our faces off and left happy. The link between all that goodness and “Screw the Seattle Times” is that the Storm and their home perfection are on page 3 of the Times’ Sunday sports section, bumped from the first page by a story on “Why Seattle’s three major sports teams fell apart” and an NFL pre-season story that literally begins with the words “The Seahawks lost a meaningless game Saturday night at Qwest Field.”

The phrase clanking around my head just now is spoken by an aggrieved character in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: “a distinct flavor of minor-sport prejudice about this whole thing.”

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Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:35:00 -0700

My weekend: disagreeing with an ex-colleague, causing poor Susan Orlean's blood to boil, and learning more worthwhile stuff than I will share here about an old thing called "New Journalism"

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:00:00 -0700

The web demands no decency when we disagree with strangers. We can hurl vicious critiques, slurs, and threats at people who, if we choose, will never even know who we are.

It’s different with friends. If someone we like and respect writes something online that upsets us, it’s awkward. That kind of awkwardness has hounded me since Friday when Doreen Marchionni, who used to be an editor at the newspaper where I used to be a reporter, blogged some career advice to a teenager interested in journalism. The teenager, who blogs as nessieonthelane, had submitted this question to Doreen:

Hiya! I’m 16 and would most certainly need help in the career path of Creative Non-Fiction Journalism…I have been fascinated with this category of Journalism since, I began to learn the creative side of writing…although, I do not want to be involved with media base Journalism, especially the news. But, I would love to work with publishers etc. If, you could kindly help me to begin my journey…that would be great!…I am in no clue…where to start…

Doreen’s blogged response started like this:

I’m not quite sure I know the kind of journalism you’re talking about, but let me take a stab at answering your question, and if I misunderstood, just let me know.

Back in the 1960s/70s, a different kind of journalism developed called “New Journalism.” It basically consisted of writers doing non-fiction reporting but filling in the gaps of a story, so to speak, with fictional elements to make the story read more like a novel. Lots of these writers became wildly famous, among them Truman Capote. Beautiful, intoxicating writing.

Many traditional journalists were deeply offended, and this type of journalism quickly fell out favor. That’s because one of the core principles of journalism is accuracy and not making stuff up to tell a better story. It’s ingrained in what we do.

If by “creative non-fiction” you mean “new journalism,” I’d encourage you against building a career on it. You’d probably have a tough time getting published in journalism circles. On the other hand, if you simply mean non-fiction reporting on human-interest feature stories, as opposed to hard news, I’d definitely encourage you to go for it.

Doreen’s response went on from there, but the quote above includes everything that upset me. If she’d been a stranger, I would have blogged an immediate rebuttal, called her out on Twitter, and tried to contact the teenager to give some very different advice. But Doreen is not a stranger. I didn’t blog, didn’t tweet, didn’t go behind her back and tell the teenager that, of course, she can practice, work, and study her way into a career writing nonfiction that is creative, factual, and as hard as the hardest news this big, bad world has to offer.

No, I didn’t do any of that. I e-mailed Doreen.

First I sent this (which I’ve souped up for this post by adding links to what started as plain text):

Hey, Do.

Sorry. This is going to be curt. I’m away from my computer and I hate typing on my phone.

Unfortunately, you’re way off the mark in your post on creative nonfiction. Think John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Jon Krakauer. Also, I’m pretty sure the “new journalism” people just borrowed storytelling techniques from fiction. If some of them also faked facts, that wasn’t something they acknowledged publicly. It was supposed to be journalism.

Google a book called “The New New Journalism” for a great overview. The book has a fine website. I also wrote several posts about the book.

Sorry to keep this so short. Hope things are great for you guys.

- Quigg

Then, after Doreen wrote back unconvinced, I sent this:

Who fudged facts, though? Really. Or who is fudging facts now? Please rethink this, Do.

Pretty much anything in The New Yorker fits into the category the 16yo is asking about. If you want to make the case that the nonfiction in The New Yorker is partly fictional, you need some facts of your own to prove the allegation. If you prove that, it will certainly be a massive bombshell in the worlds of publishing and journalism. David Remnick would certainly get fired.

Don’t take my word for any of this. Ask around. Read about McPhee’s longtime class at Princeton. I think you’ll find that a lot of the best project journalism at, say, the Seattle Times grows out of this tradition. It’s not something you need to warn a kid to avoid.

Sorry to rant. I respect you and like you. This is the sort of thing that’s best to correct before some jerk who doesn’t know, like, or respect you decides to tee off on you online.

- Quigg

P.S. Please please please speak up if you ever notice I’ve got my facts wrong in a post.

It was at that point that Doreen wrote back, stuck to her guns, praised my passion, invited me to post a comment on her blog, encouraged me to write a post of my own, and signed off with a smiley face. I thanked her and told her I’d send her a link when I wrote my post. I did not sign off with a smiley face, which may mean I’m not a very nice person.

Next, I did what journalists — or ex-journalists or whatever I am — do: I sought information from people who know more than me. Susan Orlean was one of those people. Orlean is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most famously, of The Orchid Thief. She is markedly less famous for being one of the three writers I invoked in my first e-mail to Doreen.

In an e-mail to Orlean, I quoted from Doreen’s post, linked to to it, stressed the amicable nature of the disagreement, and asked for a reality check: Was I correct in my understanding that absolutely everything must be factual in her brand of journalism?

Orlean’s answer, which came Sunday morning, went like this:

Hi David,

Just a quick reply here, but I have to say this topic makes my blood boil. I don’t understand how there can be a confusion between fact and fiction. Stories that are made up are fiction, even if there is a core in them (as is very often true of good fiction) of fact and detail that’s accurate and authentic. Non-fiction — whether you call it journalism, creative non-fiction, reportage, whatever! — is the delivery of factual information. It might — and indeed is — subjective, in the sense that it can’t pretend to be the work of an all-knowing omniscient narrator — but to the best of the ability of the writer, it is TRUE. When there are gaps, they are acknowledged and treated artfully but never artificially. AAAAAARGH this makes me so insane. I can’t believe it’s even a topic of discussion —- and yet it manages to be. Somehow we haven’t made the idea of truth as bullet-proof as it should be.

Cheers

Susan

I am tempted to edit out the “AAAAAARGH,” but Orlean is active on Twitter and the world realizes by now that she, like anyone worth hanging out with, sometimes expresses herself in ways that are beneath the dignity of ACaslon Regular.

Maybe terminology deserves some blame for Orlean’s lament that “we haven’t made the idea of truth as bullet-proof as it should be.” After all, it was nessieonthelane’s reference to “Creative Non-Fiction Journalism” in her question to Doreen that started all this. Doreen, making an honest guess at what the term meant, basically came up with this string of equivalencies: creative nonfiction = New Journalism = filling in reporting gaps with fiction = you’ll never work in this town again.

Doreen isn’t alone. Lee Gutkind, who publishes a journal called Creative Nonfiction, wrote this in the introduction to his book Forever Fat:

Journalists have, over the years, been so stifled from being creative that they don’t exactly understand what the word creative might signify beyond the parameters of fiction. William Zinsser, author of the highly respected text On Writing Well, has acknowledged his uneasiness with the phrase “creative nonfiction” because he associated “creative” either with fiction or with writers who “fudge the truth.” Young writers, he fears, will take the word creative as a license to fabricate. Zinsser agrees that nonfiction can be creative when “a writer raises the craft to an art by imposing an interesting shape or organizing idea on it,” which to me is one of many ways in which writers can write with style without sacrificing substance. But clearly he doesn’t have much confidence in the intelligence of our young people, if he thinks that students will take creativity as a license to lie.

It really is a curious response to the term “creative nonfiction.” If I hear that there’s “creative food” at the new restaurant around the corner, I won’t expect “creative” to nullify “food” and cause the chef to prepare grilled linoleum with cyanide salsa.

Maybe this is all the fault of “New Journalism.” It’s New Journalism, according to Doreen, that “basically consisted of writers doing non-fiction reporting but filling in the gaps of a story, so to speak, with fictional elements to make the story read more like a novel.”

But, as best as I can determine, that’s not what the New Journalism people thought they were doing. Quite the opposite, really. I didn’t know this with any confidence before last night, when the marvel that is the Internet permitted me to read something Tom Wolfe wrote for New York magazine way back when I was literally still a fetus: “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe” in the magazine’s February 14, 1972 issue. Wolfe wrote:

We were moving beyond the conventional limits of journalism, but not merely in terms of technique. The kind of reporting we were doing struck us as far more ambitious, too. It was more intense, more detailed, and certainly more time-consuming than anything that newspaper or magazine reporters, including investigative reporters, were accustomed to. We developed the habit of staying with the people we were writing about for days at a time, weeks in some cases. We had to gather all the material the conventional journalist was after—and then keep going. It seemed all-important to be there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the details of the environment. The idea was to give the full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective or emotional life of the characters. That was why it was so ironic when both the journalistic and literary old guards began to attack this new journalism as “impressionistic.” The most important things we attempted in terms of technique depended upon a depth of information that had never been demanded in newspaper work. Only through the most searching forms of reporting was it possible, in non-fiction, to use whole scenes, extended dialogue, point-of-view, and interior monologue.

But the writers anointed as the heroes of New Journalism weren’t always so rigorous, according to Marc Weingarten, who wrote The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution. In a 2006 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Weingarten fingered Jimmy Breslin as someone who “used a lot of made-up dialogue with impunity.”

When you read what Wolfe wrote about Breslin in that 1972 New York magazine piece, though, you realize that making up dialogue would have amounted to a betrayal of the New Journalism virtues that got Breslin invited into Wolfe’s little club to begin with:

A crucial part of Breslin’s work they didn’t seem to be conscious of at all: namely, the reporting he did. Breslin made it a practice to arrive on the scene long before the main event in order to gather the off-camera material, the byplay in the make-up room, that would enable him to create character. It was part of his modus operandi to gather “novelistic” details, the rings, the perspiration, the jabs on the shoulder, and he did it more skillfully than most novelists.

Wolfe explained how he tried to do the same:

Sometimes I used point-of-view in the Jamesian sense in which fiction writers understand it, entering directly into the mind of a character, experiencing the world through his central nervous system throughout a given scene. Writing about Phil Spector (“The First Tycoon of Teen”), I began the article not only inside his mind but with a virtual stream of consciousness. One of the news magazines apparently regarded my Spector story as an improbable feat, because they interviewed him and asked him if he didn’t think this passage was merely a fiction that appropriated his name. Spector said that, in fact, he found it quite accurate. This should have come as no surprise, since every detail in the passage was taken from a long interview with Spector about exactly how he had felt at the time.

Doreen or anyone else might reasonably question whether even the best reporting is up to the challenge of “entering directly into the mind of a character, experiencing the world through his central nervous system throughout a given scene.” But pushing reporting to the breaking point — and even unwittingly beyond the breaking point — is not the same as what Doreen described as “filling in the gaps of a story, so to speak, with fictional elements.”

The basic message isn’t changing much here from Wolfe to Gutkind to Orlean to Doreen. Wolfe: “gather all the material the conventional journalist was after—and then keep going … (Be) there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the details of the environment.” Gutkind: creativity is not “a license to lie.” Orlean: “Non-fiction — whether you call it journalism, creative non-fiction, reportage, whatever! — is the delivery of factual information.” Doreen (in a passage I haven’t quoted yet): “great journalism is built on one thing and one thing only: great information-gathering.”

Here’s one other thing. Reporting is just way more fun than making stuff up and trying to pass it off as fact. I’m not talking about writing fiction and labeling it — honestly — as fiction. That’s a joy and a rush.

But there’s another joy, another rush to be found in getting paid to notice the real world, to take notes as real people do things, say things, wear things that no journalistic fraudster would have dreamed up.

Think of it like this: Journalism is to “filling in the gaps of a story … with fictional elements” as a vibrant social life is to South Park’s Eric Cartman having a tea party with Polly Prissy Pants. This has all been so respectable until now. Please treat the Cartman reference as my version of an “AAAAAARGH.”

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UPDATE (8/18/10): After seeing my post, Doreen wrote a response called “Fiction, Non-Fiction and the Art of Journalism.” In it, she is “struck by how much we agree on the value of sophisticated reporting.” She discusses how transparency, which she calls “one of the least understood or appreciated concepts in journalism,” helps build trust with readers. She praises Susan Orlean and David Remnick. Her full reponse is here.

Photo

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:30:07 -0700

Aerial reconnaissance carried out while waiting for the bagels...

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:33:00 -0700

Aerial reconnaissance carried out while waiting for the bagels to toast.

this morning’s random inspiration

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:29:00 -0700

this morning’s random inspiration

George Plimpton's 1958 Hemingway interview in The Paris Review

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:42:00 -0700

My re-infatuation with Hemingway is even more ardent than it was when I wrote about it here ten days ago. Since then, I’ve finished For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises. Both were audiobooks. My friend Josh insists this doesn’t count. I’ve started listening to The Sun Also Rises a second time. By Josh’s count, very soon I will have not really experienced the novel twice.

Here’s a passage I would have noticed in The Sun Also Rises if I’d actually read it:

When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town. They would race through the streets and out to the bull-ring. I had been sleeping heavily and I woke feeling I was too late. I put on a coat of Cohn’s and went out on the balcony. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up the street toward the bull-ring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls galloping, tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter, and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together.

Knowing I’m not the first person to read Hemingway and that I am sure to repeat what many, many, many others have written elsewhere over the decades, I’ll keep this short. Hemingway kept it short. That’s what floors me here. His characters are in Pamplona. Pamplona equals Running Of The Bulls; Running Of The Bulls equals Pamplona. Hemingway’s in charge. He’s the writer. He could stop time. He could go frame by frame. He could do a whole slow-mo chapter on this iconic Pamplona ritual. Instead, we get this paragraph, these dozen or so sentences. The bulls pass in a blur, but Hemingway knew he didn’t need to write “blur” to create the blur. Hemingway also knew enough to leave the bulls unmentioned and unseen in the sentence that already included “more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running.”

Enough of this. My title claims this post is about Plimpton’s Hemingway interview in The Paris Review, so let’s get there. I know I read the interview about 15 years ago, but I didn’t remember any of it. I read it because I wanted to be a writer and Hemingway was this officially great writer who’d been interviewed by a publication that interviews officially great writers. So I read and forgot. Now, suddenly, the interview thrills me. How great that The Paris Review gives it away for free online. Greater still that George Plimpton persevered to make the interview work despite what he delicately described in his intro as the “occasional waspish tone of (Hemingway’s) answers.”

“Waspish” like this:

INTERVIEWER

Do you ﬁnd it easy to shift from one literary project to another or do you continue through to ﬁnish what you start?

HEMINGWAY

The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don’t worry.

But there’s gold, too:

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than ﬁfty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the ﬁshing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.

Decades of Paris Review interviews are here. Some are free. In my experience, the ones that aren’t free are worth buying or, at minimum, worth a visit to the library.

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad Blueprint for a Post-Literate Future

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:58:14 -0700

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad Blueprint for a Post-Literate Future:

“I haven’t been to San Francisco for a year or so. In that time, I’ve become more and more in tune with my iPhone, so much so, that I’m not even looking at anything anymore,” Gary told me. “Things are pinging on my phone. I’m looking at it. I could cross from Valencia to the Castro without any change in emotion. That’s just not right.”

“So why not get rid of it?” I asked.

“I know. Why not?” he said.

He, like all writers, is a small businessman. The phone helps him stay in touch. The iPhone makes it easier to receive pictures of his dogs while he’s on his book tour.

We all have a million reasons for why we don’t use the gadget and stream for what they are good for, and then put them away sometimes to take a walk or read a book. Instead we reload, reload, reload. Refresh!

madregale:

In which I confront my favorite author outside of Colson Whitehead… In which I confront my love for technology… In which a dachshund makes an appearance.

The best thing I’ve written in… Ok, ever.