Yule-tide and Star Quality

I'm taking a break and will be returning to my blogspot in January. Meanwhile, I'll be working on an article concerned with the question of star quality in reporters. What gives a reporter his or her license to use the first person singular in print? How is such star quality manifest in the text; how is it being justified, maintained and reinforced in the actual writing? Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Merry Christmas.

I'm o.k. and you're some sort of doormat?

Recently I missed a chance to publicly discuss a Danish women's magazine called Nova which is addressed to grown women ("We don't care if you're 35 or 65. If you feel welcome you are welcome"). Here comes a blogpost in stead.

The new magazine which came out on November 23 has adopted the first person singular a lot, as members of the writing staff share their personal experience with readers (the editor in chief, Mette Holbæk, writes a lot of the copy and serves as a permanent cover girl too.) What struck me, however, on reading the magazine wasn't the first person singular as much as the second: "Are you the office doormat? Why you die from being nice." In this fashion, the would be invitational "I" is subverted and one's reading of the stories constantly constrained by heavy-handed guidance.

For instance, a prominent story by Winnie Haarløv written in the first person singular on how I learned that no love can be wrong (as I decided to date a 15-year old pupil of mine) is accompanied by a sidebar giving you 5 good reasons that you would want to pick a younger (!) man too. What seems to begin in a humourous tone turns into very specific recommendations of the sort that "it becomes natural for you to take good care of your skin, eat sensibly and avoid [wearing your comfortable] track suit pants on Saturdays."

And "a diet do-gooder's confessions" about how I learned to listen to my body is accompanied by another sidebar containing categorical pieces of expertise including, for instance, the fact that white bread, white rice and pasta can be counted as "one of the greatest health and nutritional catastrophes of modern food" (so maybe I'm ready to listen to my body, but maybe you had better not listen to yours after all).

Basically, the imperative you-form mocks the readers' ability to process the stories on their own. At least that's how it sounds to me. So just for the record: I'm 33 and I did not feel welcome.

What is journalism anyway?

What makes Bridget Jones's Diary count as journalism? Apparently Helen Fielding refused to write a column for the Independent about her own life and invented Bridget Jones's instead. One of these explicitly fictive and satirical diary entries - Bridget's record of a dinner party with a number of 'smug marrieds' - has been included in Eleanor Mills' Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs: 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women, and by way of introduction Fielding is quoted as saying that

everyone else was writing about politics, and I was writing about why you can't find a pair of tights in the morning and losing weight.

The editors add nothing but a vague comment that "the columns struck a chord with a generation of women" which obviously they did, but I still wonder in what sense the texts are journalistic----so the title of this post is not posed as a rhetorical question.

What does make columns in general journalistic (what would have made a column about Fielding's own life journalistic)? And what makes a fictive diary journalistic?

Not to be

No, photographic immediacy is hard to achieve in writing - so here is how Thompson expanded his ideal idea of gonzo journalism (and this is the purple passage that I had in mind on Monday night; it is located along with the Cartier-Bresson passage in The Great Shark Hunt around page 115):

True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

To be or not to be a fly on the wall

Morten Sabroe paid a visit to the Division of Rhetoric on Monday night and was telling a group of students how he is currently doing research for a story, a portrait piece, and is going on a trip the coming weekend with the man he is portraying:

"I'll try to be a fly on wall... ha, it's a shame that we're such damned big flies."

Elaborating this thought Sabroe then referred to Hunter S. Thompon's jacket copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and related how Thompson had attempted to work as a cool observer in the photographic style of Henri Cartier-Bresson -- and I couldn't believe how he was able to remember that certain passage so wrongly - I even protested from my seat, but, erhh... it turns out that there was no reason to protest. Sabroe's memory was quite accurate. Thompson writes:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in gonzo journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication - without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera . The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive - but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting...no editing.

The passage that I had taken note of - and assumed that Sabroe had in mind as well - follows hard upon, I'll get back to it. For now I just stand corrected and will leave you with Cartier-Bresson who was concerned with

the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.

The sorry truth

"Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit," said Edward R. Murrow.

Quantify your optimism

So if you want to change anything you have to confirm something too (this was one conclusion to the exchange on totem journalism below). You have to establish some common ground and speak in a familiar language in order to (then) introduce some more provocative thinking and make an attempt to move your audience in new directions.

Norman Mailer makes a categorical estimate as to how much "urgent, passionate expression" is usually allowed in relation and in proportion to what he terms "the resistant mechanical network of past social ideas, platitudes and lies":

One must accept the sluggish fictions of society for at least nine-tenths of one's expression in order to present deceptively the remaining tenth which may be new. Social communication is the doom of every truly felt thought.

Making a clean distinction like this between empty and truly original rhetoric (and thought) is definitely problematic, and personally I'm not sure that I even recognize the notion of communication which is not social - ? (except that opening my blog was a striking experience in terms of being only very vaguely social in a public forum.)

It's still interesting, though, to see how Mailer is ready to quantify his personal communicative pessimism, and I dare anyone to do the same. Perhaps Mailer is really rather optimistic in seeing his glass as one tenth full?

Gentle fun, ratty hair

Here is the passage from Tom Wolfe which is echoing in my post on Camilla Stockmann's reporting from the Copenhagen art scene last Saturday. In his introduction to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Wolfe is discussing totem stories in totem news papers, the latter being defined like this:

A totem news paper is the kind people don't really buy to read but just to have, physically, because they know it supports their own outlook on life. They're just like the buffalo tongues the Omaha Indians used to carry around or the dog ears the Mahili clan carried around in Bengal.

The totem story is the type of story Wolfe himself wrote on his first visit to the Hot Rod & Custom Car Show in New York in the early 1960'es,

a story that would have suited any of the totem newspapers. All the totem newspapers would regard one of these shows as a sideshow, a panopticon, for creeps and kooks; not even wealthy, eccentric creeps and kooks, which would be all right, but lower class creeps and nutballs with dermatitic skin and ratty hair. The totem story usually makes what is known as "gentle fun" of this, which is a way of saying, don't worry, these people are nothing.

(Wolfe's story doesn't end there by the totem pole, of course. Some other new journalism grew from it.)

Debut Blurb

I've been blurbed? I have blurbed? I blurbed? Well... I am being quoted (from the interview by Susanne Nielsen in August) on the cover - or the flap [is that really the proper English term?] - of Morten Sabroe's Rejsen til Amerika [The Journey to America] which has just come out. The one which came out the other day was a novel; this title is a new anthology of Sabroe's (quite recent) journalism, introduced and commented on by Sabroe.

I've just read the first part, and I really like the tone of the newly written material. His commentary style is quite brief and understated, and even if he is indeed telling the story of his encounter with Hunter S. Thompson once again, he does it well. This occasion is different and, accordingly, so is the story. In my opinion. So I stand by my blurb: Sabroe has been remarkably consistent - other blurbed adjectives include 'ambitious' and 'imaginative' - in his exploration of his own reporter persona and its potential. From one occasion to the next he has given some thought to his peculiar manners and what they are good for in journalism and in criticism of journalism. And I'll try and get more specific on these matters before long...

Nothing to worry about

Saturday, reporter Camilla Stockmann wrote (and documented with her own photographic snapshots) quite a dramatic story in Politiken concerned with a couple of activists, two foreigners, a man and a woman, who have been making a scene in Copenhagen art galleries lately, masturbating in front of art works, shouting insults, peeing, bringing along excrements and the like. Stockmann sets out in the first person singular to find out who they are and what they are up to.

It is a remarkable adventure which still strikes me as an epideictic piece of reporting --- epideictic as in confirmative epideictic oratory made on special occasions like national holidays, birthdays or funerals. Traditionally, the epideictic speaker is seen to represent the community. The epideictic rhetor knows what values and ideals the auditors basically agree on, and in and by the speech these values must be enacted and consolidated. By the rhetor for the audience and on behalf of the audience which means that the epideictic speaker is constituted as some sort of cultural hero (Dale Sullivan’s term). So back to Camilla Stockmann as an investigator on the art scene – what is she then?

Well, she is a determined reporter who actually finds out who the two unwelcome guests are: Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz who have a history of making aggressive opposition to commercial and institutional art and who published Anti-Technologies of Resistance back in 1999. And Stockmann puts herself on the line in her story insofar as she tries to confront the two in order to be allowed to ask some questions and has a glass of water thrown in her face. Later on, by means of a determined look and a well-chosen line, she successfully wards off a glass of urine.

Camilla Stockmann never gets a chance to speak to the couple though. And after having identified them she doesn't fill the readers in about their artistic ambitions, at least not in any detail. And she never attempts her own answer to the question which is posed on the front page of Politiken on this occasion: "Is it art to piss on art?" - or actually: She does imply a reassuring no. Stockmann keeps herself detached along with the people she is talking to along the way. People who feel at home on the art scene and whom the readers of Politiken can happily identify with:

The people who are bothered by the activists include "the actor Ulrich Thomsen".

It is an artist (who "is originally Swedish-French") who eventually recalls having seen the two before: "Slowly he recalls their names: 'I believe the woman's name is Barbara ... Barbara Schultz... no Shurz.' ...

A gallery owner characterizes Shurz as "berliner-cafe latte-punk" which Stockmann confirms.

And a German visiting professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art who is witnessing Shurz peeing in a plastic cup still keeps his conversation with Stockmann going and remarks with cool detachment that

"this reminds me a bit of fluxus artist Carolee Schneeman back in the 1970'es who read aloud from a strip of paper which she pulled from her vagina. Something was at stake then. But the woman there is not good - you can tell how she doesn't feel good about herself after doing this."

Journalistic handbooks speak of the reporter's role as that of acting as a substitute for the reader and my point is: this is exactly what Stockmann is doing all too carefully. She seems to presume timidity in the readers so she offers us comfort. She keeps us classy company all along and assures us through arguments of authority not to worry: These people are harmless. They pose no threat to our community.

The Fall of M(&M's)

May the reign of Michael, Mads and Morten soon come to an end, was Leonora Christina Skov's wish as she was pointing out how guys like (Michael) Jeppesen, (Mads) Brügger and (Morten) Sabroe are dominating the discussion of personal reporting in Denmark these days.

The latest issue of Danish KOM Magazine (published by communications trade union Kommunikation og Sprog) is a theme issue on rhetoric, and I have contributed an article about the reasons that journalists would want to play with the old topos of modesty "I'm not a public speaker, and yet I will now have a go..." Through a few examples I am trying to show how the explicit hesitation and explicit search for words in a piece of journalism may raise readers' awareness of various rhetorical mechanisms at play in the text and, by implication, in journalism in general.

Writing this piece and looking for illustrative textual material I turned to my stock of examples which, of course, is currently dominated by the M's already dominating my dissertation, and sure enough:

An M was flashing. Mads' this time.

So yes, well, I picked out two texts by Mads, both of them from Euroman in which Mads on one occasion is reporting from a weapon's fair and on another occasion from the festival Burning Man...

They are both good examples, and/but as sure as eggs is eggs: the sound of M&M's falling to the floor won't be provoked by me. Not this fall.

Back where it belongs

About the dog and its origins, well, people close to me suggested simply looking it up in Dictionary of the Danish Language. And I simply did... which makes me able to announce that the dog phrase can be located in the literary work of Jens Baggesen and Sophus Schandorf and makes a first media appearance in Politiken in 1906.

Details in Danish:

// sagde hunden, (dagl., l. br.) anv. som en slags undskyldning for, at man nævner sig selv (jf. sagde drengen u. Dreng 4.1). *den Fjerde er jeg selv, sa'e Hunden. Bagges. III.355. smst.204. Hakon Jarl siger til Ejnar Tambeskælver: Jeg elsker dig fast som du var en Kvinde: jeg (sa' Hunden) vilde sige til Amalie Skram: Jeg elsker dig, som om du var en Mand. Schand.O. II.134. (vi) kommer trækkende med vognen – La's og mig, sa' Hunden. Pol. 19/2 1906.6.sp.1. FlensbA. 10/4 1910.1.sp.3. //

And about the boy who is mentioned alongside the dog:

Krist.Ordsprog og mundheld.(1890).423. (jf.636ff.). jf.: “Vi” var Operasanger N. N. . . den unge Forfatter P. W. og jeg selv, sagde Drengen. Pol. 18/6 1913.8.

And I guess this is it then...

Journalist meets novelist

Journalist and novelist Morten Sabroe was interviewing himself in Weekendavisen last week on the subject of writing his latest novel Evig troskab (Eternal Fidelity), and at one point the self-conversation turns on his ambiguous or ambivalent role as a writer. It goes something like this (in my English):

"To begin with I had to get away from the language I use as a journalist. Which takes its time. And I didn't have the patience to distance myself from it, so I started writing the story in a very literary language. And precisely because I did that, I was still bound by journalism."
- Not understood.
"I fought hard not to sound like a journalist, and that was because I was still bound by journalism. It was a counterreaction. And you don't counterreact t if you're free from the one you're counterreacting to."
- Is this some sort of wisdom you're expressing?
"You're not done with you're wife as long as you're standing in front of her screaming: 'I'm done with you.'"

What Women

Mmhh, I'm actually on my way on holiday, but before I go... in today's issue of Weekendavisen Leonora Christina Skov is praising a collection of 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women and calls it "a flying brick which must hit any lame excuse for ignoring women's journalism at two hundred kilometers an hour". And it does sound like a really good book --- flying my way at two hundred kilometers an hour. Thus Leonora Christina Skov opens her review by discussing my dissertation and approvingly so, but still pointing out, as she did on radio too, the absence of women reporters in my study.

What I'm still wondering is: Who would they be? To me it seems that spectacular, personal reporting by women is missing in contemporary Danish journalism - and therefore in my dissertation too. Female reporters that work undercover, for instance, usually just do their thing without creating a striking persona for themselves in their texts; they tend not to pose in any elaborate literary fashion. Women may do so as columnists, essayists or critics, but not often as reporters.

I'm grateful for any suggestions and willing to loosen up on the genre categories a bit. Suzanne Brøgger has been brought up before as she's definitely a self-fashioning writer and a daring one. And, well, I remember Lea Korsgaard on one occasion during her trainee period at Politiken was infiltrating some exclusive night club in Copenhagen and reporting from this adventure in the first person singular... but there must be others? Perhaps other examples from Weekendavisen? Or from magazines that I've overlooked?

Kill your dogs

Yes, it's about that dog again. In the foreword to my phd dissertation I use that same Danish formula of modesty myself - "...me, said the dog" - mainly because I found it, well, ironically topical and illuminating in a dissertation concerned with the use of the first person singular. The phrase is a good example in a nutshell of the necessity (or annoying habit) to excuse yourself for attracting attention to your own person when you speak.

Anyway, I had (have) grown still more fond of the dog-phrase, because a reader of a draft of my text was totally confused by it. She'd never encountered the phrase before and left a big question mark in the margin. What dog?? And that incident made the somewhat stale phrase even more appealing to me. It was potentially strange and funny, even exclusive.

Which, however, it really isn't. And tonight a reader of the actual dissertation confessed that he found it totally uncool of me to use it. Not that he wasn't familiar with it, he just found it really trite and out of place. And I have to agree. That dog is a darling of the kind that I teach other people to kill. And now tonight my dog was killed - but it's still there, and I guess it won't go away until I get down to rewriting the dissertation and make my attempt to have it turned into a book.

How can that dog be barkin' in the backyard? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be runnin' by the backfence? We ran over him years ago Ghost of a dog Barkin' in the backyard How can that dog be scratchin' at the back door? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be lying under the shady tree Where we buried him years ago? Ghost of a dog Flyin' through the backyard.

So Gonzo equals Provo?

"The Gonzo journalist is out to expose things, and no politician ought to feel safe," writes Martin Eide in a discussion of Norwegian writer Herman Willis' election campaign diary Kvalmende og hjerterått from 1997, but adds that Willis was never really a menace, if surely sometimes he was annoying:

His provocations became harmless, had to become harmless. For it is by no means easy to live out the part of the jester these days. The potential to expose by construing politics as a drama seems exhausted too. In a time when the mediafication and aesthetization of what journalists must cover is in your face and obvious, there is little exposé potential in construing something as stage managed and media adapted. [transl. from the essay "Den journalistiske hoffnarr"/The Journalistic Jester]

So how to be genuinely provocative in your gonzo writings these days?

Well, it seems that a journalist may earn the gonzo label through provocation - and that provocation tends to become the one single criterion for possessing that gonzo quality.

And provocation becomes a sad end in itself.

But who's being sad about it? Well, the other night I watched Mads Brügger on web tv discussing Hunter S. Thompson as a journalistic icon with host Sune Aagaard (which I paid for a one-year membership of Club dk4 to be able to). Aagaard was asking Brügger about the conditions for writing gonzo journalism in Denmark nowadays, and at one point Brügger was pinning down "the essence of gonzo" by introducing the story of journalist and former chief editor Claes Kastholm Hansen who is said to have defecated on the desk of a colleague at Ekstra-Bladet, used the curtains to wipe his bum and left the building. And thereby lost/quit his job. As far as I know, Kastholm didn't even write about the event, and I can't believe that Mads Brügger (who has written some of my favourite examples of contemporary Danish gonzo journalism) presents gonzo as just a matter of causing outrage and not giving a damn. 'The Gonzo journalist is out to defecate on your desk, and noone ought to feel safe' - ?

No Not the One You Heard About

I saw Simone Kærn's exhibition Open Sky in Malmö, Sweden, in July when actually I had crossed Öresund courtesy of my brother to attend a music festival, Accelerator - the Big One. Kærn took me by surprise as I arrived at the exhibition hall not only unintendedly, but holding her project in low esteem. I'd just read about it in a newspaper, and Kærn's whole idea of flying to Kabul to make (or not to make) a dream of flying come true on behalf of a young Afghan girl in a story by Carsten Jensen seemed sort of old and sentimental hat.

In stead, the music festival was a disappointment (to me) and for all the opposite reasons. I had expected to be listening to fresh, cutting edge versions of all the bands I used to like... and I do see the attitude problem now, but I felt up to it all.

All ears, yet earplugs ready at hand.

And Regina Spektor was fantastic to begin with, singing and being a band on her own, playing the piano and drumming away with her drum sticks on a wooden chair, but her show and her lyrics became more and more curious and yes, well, self-indulgent by the song, and I felt as if I were visiting the weblog of a perfect stranger and grew tired of it. Silver Jews seemed hostile, and I felt only momentarily heartened when they reached the legendary line (of a song-in-character) that up until then I'd only heard my brother recite:

There is a house in New Orleans, no not the one you heard about, I'm talking about another house...

Anyway, we decided to leave the site for a few hours to go for a walk around Malmö. And happened to pass by Kunsthallen where Simone Aaberg Kærn's actual (and actually very little) airplane and her portraits of female pilots in World War II, paintings, videos and more, were on display.

When the exhibition hall was closing for the day, a guy had to pull my sleeve to make me put down the ear phones at a video of Kærn's visit to the States in the homes of some of the pilots who are still alive today. Basically I was caught up in a film of how Simone Kærn was drinking tea with an elderly lady and then getting up to go fly a plane with her. What old interesting and very absorbing hat. And nevermind the music festival and The Raconteurs who closed it for the day.

Simone in a War Zone

Performance artist Simone Aaberg Kærn has told a spectacular personal docutale (in everything but print) of how she flew from Denmark to Afghanistan in an old and very small airplane. Kærn and her partner Magnus Bejmar's way of describing the project reminds me of various opening statements in texts by wallraffers and other concept-conscious reporters: "You can be upset about the war in Afghanistan", thus Magnus Bejmar, "or women's rights and write a letter to the editor and sit in a café and mope for three months, but come on, do something..." Like Günter Wallraff, Jakob Boeskov, Norah Vincent and others, Kærn had nothing but a basically useless indignation and a very abstract idea of things which nonetheless - like Wallraff, Boeskov, Vincent - she decides to act upon by assigning herself a very concrete task. Magnus Bejmar again:

We coined the term docutale. Reality told as a fairytale. Which fits the performance concept well, too: if you prod reality a bit by adding a new element to it, it shifts, which forces you to look at it differently. So it is with Simone, the flyer. She is the object we add to the world, that people have to relate to as we go along.

I'll get back to Simone Aaberg Kærn's story when I've had a chance to see the movie. I'm looking forward to it, even if I was never very fond of The Little Prince.

Intimacy and Gonzo Conservatism

In the Agenda radio show on Saturday Suzanne Brøgger too was mentioned as a possible example of a Danish female gonzo journalist -- I quote the remark from memory that 'She wrote about being raped and that seems pretty gonzo to me'.

Suzanne Brøgger is a novelist and essayist and not a reporter, but she has been nominated in the gonzo category before (to me per e-mail, that is), as I've been encouraged to take a look at her autobiographical novel Creme Fraiche from 1978 which is very personal and very explicitly sexual. And very gonzo - ?

It seems to me that gonzo quality in this sense becomes a matter of the writer/reporter not only putting him- or herself 'on the line'. It seems to become implied that putting yourself on the line as a writer involves making intimate confessions, ultimately of a sexual sort. Hunter S. Thompson didn't do that though (or did he? I still have quite a few pages left to go). Besides from passages from his Rum Diary which to my mind is quite an atypical piece of juvenalia, I don't associate Thompson's writings with sexual (or romantic) confessions or stories of any kind.

Thompson is definitely putting himself on the line in terms of transcending social norms and standards as he confronts himself with the material and people he is supposed to be covering. And of course there's a lot of irony in his hallucinatory remark from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about being a professional and thus determined to "cover the story, for good or ill", but still -

he really is professional in his ways of adapting his written persona to the circumstances from one text to the next. It is done in a weird literary and experimental fashion, but it somehow remains journalism. And I definitely read him as being playfully semi-fictionally professional rather than intimately sincere or confessional.

My point is not that Gonzo Journalism should remain what it was in Thompson's day (even if I've been writing a lot about 'my category' and 'my sense of the words'). I'm curious about the ways that imitation/interpretation becomes creative and is adapted to peculiar local circumstances, and contemporary reporters definitely identify with the gonzo paradigm for different reasons. Now it seems to me that the abovementioned difference is an important one. In a Danish setting Henrik List seems to pull in the direction of confessional intimacy as proof of a reporter's integrity, and Morten Sabroe in the somehow more conservative direction of professionally playful literary journalism. They both expose their mixed motives and celebrate subjectivity in their writings, but one does it primarily on behalf of himself as a troubled man, the other primarily on behalf of himself as a troubled reporter. Eh?

Me in the Media (among others)

The title of the programme Agenda earlier tonight on Danish FM-station P1 was Me in the Media ("Well, not ME in the media," as host Jacob Rosenkrands took the opportunity to point out). I was there on tape - interviewed by reporter Pernille Bach in my office last Friday - and in the studio with Rosenkrands were Camilla Stockmann from Politiken and Leonora Christina Skov from Weekendavisen, both of them writers and columnists and well-known users of the first person singular.

It was a good setup, and I was listenening carefully, especially when they too discussed the curious fact that there are no women represented in the textual material that I've been studying. Stockmann and Skov were reproachful on this account, and they brought up names like Martha Gellhorn and Åsne Seierstad, both good examples of bold female reporters appearing in the first person. Norah Vincent came up too, and she's an even better example in terms of being personal and spectacular in my sense of the words. None of those are Danish reporters though, and that's what I've been looking for: Danish reporters - in recent years - who carry out their somehow spectacularly conceptualized reporting on their own and consistently report from the process in the first person singular. Their rhetoric must be striking - on the level of invention and/or on the level of style - and not simply personal which means, for instance, that Anne Knudsen's report from Iraq doesn't really belong in the category.

Of course, questioning the category as such is still legitimate (and appreciated).

Leonora Christina Skov pointed to confessional literature as a highly feminine text format related to the one that I've designated as masculine, and generally the discussion took a broad scope as regards genres and rhetorical functions of self-centered media appearances.

At one point Stockmann and Skov readily agreed that appearing in the media in the first person has a price in terms of never knowing when you'll be called names in furious letters to the editor next - or when you'll be receiving excrements in your mail next: 'You too? It may be the same guy ---- '

Just another lost dog?

"And me, said the dog" - I wonder where this phrase came from? When Danes include themselves in a story they're telling, they may choose to add it and thus attribute the very mentioning of their first person singular to some dog. Please don't hesitate to post a comment if you happen to know which dog and why.

(Og mig, sagde hunden? Torben Sangild (dk) has posted this same question more than a year ago, but to no avail.)

How about your elf?

I have been reading Peter Elbow's Writing With Power on different occasions without ever noticing the typo which has caught my eye now and which by mistake is introducing a sprite or little creature; a mythological being, esp. one that is small and mischievous into the writing process.

The mistake is really quite insignificant: Elbow is summing up what he hopes to achieve with his book, and in stead of saying that the reader in the second person - and that's you! all through the book which quite a few students have found tiresome, but rarely without recognizing how much valuable advice is actually handed over in this undisguised friendly fashion - anyway, back to my original sentence: in stead of expressing the hope that you should become able to take charge of yourself in the writing process Elbow is actually expressing the hope that you should "take charge of yourelf".

And why is this significant after all? Well, Elbow is a sympathetic writing instructor who knows all about painstaking production of text that ties people in knots and makes them incoherent, and he is not afraid to discuss the somewhat magical aspect about (good) writing. Accordingly, a writers' elf is not really that strange a creature to come across in his pages. Actually Elbow is already explicitly speaking of both demons, snakes and steers to be dealt with:

To write is to overcome a certain resistance ... [But] somehow the force that is fighting you is also the force that gives life to your words. You must overpower that steer or snake or demon. But not kill it. (p 18)

I agree. A component of mysterious resistance and unpredictable challenge is a given when you're writing and it's okay like that. Especially in the self-indulgent types of writing that I'm exploring in this self-indulgent blog form. Over a solitary process of just me meeting myself and my own familiar phrases around every corner, I'd always choose collaborative writing performed by an unstable constellation of me, my elf and I.

A Rule of Thumb (on the other hand)

Perhaps the notion of a power struggle between rhetor and critic (a question of who's under whose thumb) is a crude one to introduce, as in a certain sense I do believe the critic should always be operating on the rhetor's terms. So to balance the picture I'll cite a passage which has for a while been my favourite description of rhetorical criticism as I'd like to practice it:

Interpretive criticism emphasizes the particular object of inquiry, and instead of seeking to rise above particulars, it adheres to the rough ground covered by the material of the discipline. From this perspective, since the genius of rhetorical activity consists in adaptation to constantly changing circumstances, rhetorical scholarship should not lead to and from static generalizations. Abstract principles can never govern the variety and mutability of rhetorical practice, and so they have limited utility when viewed in isolation or arranged within self-contained theoretical structures. The goal of criticism is not to generate governing laws that subsume critical observations but to offer what anthropologists call a thick description of the case at hand. Principles are not regarded as autonomous entities but as flexible tools that change configuration whenever they are asked to do rhetorical work, and they become intelligible only as they are instantiated in concrete cases.

Thus Michael Leff on Rhetorical Criticism in the Interpretive Mode (2003).

One should adhere to the rough ground and pay attention to the text, yes - of course? - but without simply reproducing points already made by the rhetor right there on the page ("Norman Mailer seems to be almost advertising himself here...")

And more importantly, one should adhere to the rough ground and pay attention to the text without letting the rhetor's assumed intentions limit the scope of inquiry. A study of the notion of polysemy, democracy, Italy, or irony in a given text may become fruitful even if the rhetor himherself didn't see that coming.

But this is beginning to sound banal, isn't it, and that may well be because I'm not discussing any texts in particular. There's no rough ground to adhere to in this post. I'll end it right away.

On Who's Under Whose Thumb

Last December at the Division of Rhetoric we did a seminar called something like "Where Does the Critic Stand? Norms and Values in Rhetorical Criticism". There was a morning of public presentations (Christian Kock, Hanne Roer, Lisa Storm Villadsen and Marie Lund Klujeff all took a stand), there was a student discussion panel and generally lots of students attending. As I recall it, Lisa Villadsen wrapped up the discussion that morning by saying something along the lines of:

"Where does the critic stand? Well, we seem at least to be able to agree that she shouldn't be under the rhetor's thumb (i lommen på retor)."

So what was pointed out as the bottom line was the fact that the rhetorical critic must set her own agenda and cannot let the speakers/writers prompt the norms or the conclusions! of her readings. This is certainly a sound principle which can still be rather hard to follow, especially when you're studying self-aware reporters like I've been doing (and I've been blogging about this issue before).

So for the Rhetoric in Society conference in Aalborg the coming November, I decided to take Lisa's cue and submit a paper about approaches to rhetorical criticism of self-aware reporters and calling my abstract Under Their Thumb? And I'll be returning to this when we get closer to November and as this semester's BA seminar on the Presentation of Self in Writing evolves.

Doctoral blogging

So hi there, I'm back with a PhD degree! As for blogging all about the event, I'm afraid that I gave up on immediacy on this occasion too. And the defense (including the celebration) seems to have taken place at the expense of my immune defense, but still - it's a thrill.

I used my newly adopted power point skills to show a few pictures, book covers and text examples - no key words or bullet points, but during the reception afterwards, my graphic illustration (see above) of rhetorician Richard Lanham's notion of a toggle switch was classified as "downright consultant chique" (konsulentlækker). There's a blurb for you - and a cliffhanger, since I won't be getting into Lanham and his 'toggling attitude towards utterance' and the 'at/through oscillations' tonight. But it's all about the rhetor's ability to toggle from depth to surface; from serious to playful; from being absorbed to being analytical - a quality and an ability that I argue can be especially well realized in spectacular personal reporting.

None of the three official opponents mounted a wild hobbyhorse of their own (as other opponents on these occasions have been known to do), but discussed my work more or less on the terms laid out in my dissertation. Not that they didn't question everything - the possibility of establishing a stable genre based on two such diverging figures at all, my way of analyzing, my way of interpreting and being sometimes too implicit, my somewhat essayistic writing style, my way of being normative, the immanent ideology of the texts under scrutiny - but it seemed to me that they questioned it for all the right reasons. For clarification or to make me develop a thought that hadn't been presented or treated with proper care. So they didn't just pass judgment, but were all pointing forward. And I really appreciate that.

There may have been about a hundred people there to listen, including my family and otherwise familiar faces, but none of them posed a question ex auditorio when the opportunity was there, so one out of five half hours was left unspent. I had expected to perhaps be confronted by visiting reporters - or readers - with first hand experience and strong opinions of personal and spectacular writing, but that didn't happen on this occasion. Looking in my mailbox though, it seems that there will be other such occasions in the coming months. So see you later, says Dr. I

All set

Yesterday was a mess, but today is Friday, and I'm fine. A benevolent audience of one volunteered for my rehearsal in the authentic (if empty!) auditorium that I'd booked for four o'clock on Thursday afternoon. At the last minute I had to skip that arrangement and go grind my teeth in my office in stead. So - I'll be going straight to the authentic auditorium at one o'clock today and see who's there. May the first person in print prevail.

I'll be returning to my blogspot with a report some time after the weekend.

Watch me now

Three people called this morning to make sure that I'd seen Politiken. I haven't yet (it'll be here any minute), but apparently the interview by Susanne Nielsen is prominently placed in today's paper with a fine drawing and a title which goes something like: "Watch me now, I'll be making a scene". And, mind you, this is what the spectacular personal reporters ask of their readers. It's a good little speech-in-character which (through the drawing) is attributed to Morten Sabroe and addressed to the average reader of Politiken.

Well, 'any minute' is up now.

Not my tattoo

It belongs to someone called Kristina who posted it at this unofficial gallery for the hopelessly devoted.

A friend was introducing me to power point last night (yes I know, this is 2006; and true, it doesn't seem terrifically complicated), and we were scanning some book pages and looking around for pictures for Friday's presentation. It is striking (as well as great) to see how many good ones of Hunter S. Thompson have been produced over the years, drawings as well as photos, even embroidered portraits (and tattoos) as a proof of the graphic and contagiously playful style of the late Doctor of Journalism.

And of Ralph Steadman.

The Gunter-Hunter Connection

Working on my presentation for the public defense of my phd on Friday and one thing is certain: I'll have to make clear how the rhetoric of these two men differs in a way that makes it valuable to study them side by side.

A cycle of one's own

Self-fatness will lead to self-fatigue. And then! to a reinvention of self... on to indulgence... groove... to self-fatness... and to self-fatigue...

The fat of the self

A harsh, if also slightly humorous neologism in the Danish language is the term selvfed which literally designates people as being 'self-fat' or 'self-fattish'. There's a prehistory to this as 'fat' as an adjective in Danish can mean 'cool, fine, groovy'. So if we're 'self-fattish' we feel groovy while unfortunately we appear vainglorious, self-indulgent and all too full of ourselves.

I wonder where selvfed came from (?), but it is a slang term which has now been adopted on a broad scale and is often used to add some street credibility to a text. The effect is questionable though, and I'm glad to have deleted the word from a draft of my own this afternoon - on good advice from a street credible colleague.

Well, TV anchorman Jes Dorph-Petersen had his picture on the cover of a free newspaper (one of the still more free newspapers) the other day with a headline saying: "People call me self-fattish" - the story being that 'I'm really not, so I don't mind'.

And literary critic Leonora Christina Skov in Weekendavisen bluntly names writer Jens Chr. Grøndahl (cf. the ravioli in nut sauce affair) "King Self-Fattish himself" in a debate over what qualifies a man or a woman to be called "a Big White Man" (as yet another term of abuse). Actually this was a debate which came down to the question of being self-fattish or not.

The term seems to become useful when people are exposing their personal aesthetics without questioning its superiority (and this is basically what I ask of the texts that I have studied too). Exposing yourself in your work requires a strong sense of proportion which is bound to fail from time to time. And before you know it, you're a pretentious rascal.

No wonder that teachers of journalism tell their students to keep clear of the first person singular. Use can lead to abuse and to fatal self-fatness in no time.

Founding fathers and a Norwegian daugther

I had the unaccustomed pleasure of giving an interview today (nothing will ever be the same after August 4). The journalist stayed for an hour and a half and seemed a very professional interviewer. She was rather quietly making me talk... and what a peculiar experience to be discussing things like controversial reporters who usually provoke rather strong emotional reactions, without ever knowing the other person's opinions about it all.

Along the way she actually raised the question of the missing women, not just in my dissertation, but in the paradigm of spectacular, personal reportage as such. Given the fact that the paradigm has modelled itself on the work of two men, Wallraff and Thompson, it's really not that strange. So there's one explanation. But still - women do write essays even if the essay genre is traditionally considered to be shaped by a man, another founding father.

Female wallraffers exist, but they don't seem to get as obtrusively personal and gonzolike as their male colleagues.

Actually the Norwegians have a female gonzo journalist by the pen name of Syphilia Morgenstierne who has been canonized by Kjetil Wiedswang in his fine book on Fear and Loathing in Norwegian (Angst og bæven. Gonzo på norsk). I haven't yet read what she's written, but just now I found her SPHLOGG.

On vacation

Back in a couple of weeks.

First person live!

The first persons on stage in Tivoli's Concert Hall tonight were four puppeteers manuevering a small Beck + small band members around on strings on a little stage on stage, performing to a playback version of - yes, there I go, another song-in-character! - I'm a Loser, baby... so why dont you kill me.

The puppets didn't just serve to get an obligatory hit song out the way. They were imitating the band all through the concert and getting filmed and projected up on to the large screen at the back of the stage. They were dressed the same as their live people, and we got nice closeups of Beck puppet singing away and playing guitar while Beck sung some ballads and played his guitar, and one puppet was even taking over the camera at one point, walking up to the musicians one by one, filming them and projecting them up on to the screen. The musicians were carefully professional, but casually playing around, dancing, changing instruments, enjoying a meal by a wooden table and drumming away on the plates and glasses. Not a bad evening at all.

During an encore, Beck entered the stage in a full bear costume, microphone down its throat for him to be able to sing. Theatrical seemed back in style, big time.

Tell it in passing and don't even think of showing it

First person reporter (and connoisseur of wines) at 'paper for personalities' takes popular controversial writer/poet to Northern jetset seaside resort where they hook up with well-known photographer friend, and they are all invited to have dinner with bestselling novelist and his wife in summer residence.

A few years ago, this novelist host put out a book on painter residing in Rome, and I recall one reviewer making fun of novelist's somewhat pretentious descriptions of novelist and painter enjoying a fine dish of ravioli and nut sauce along with delicious frascati somewhere humble along the Via San Martino (yes, I looked it up now to get the details straight; the reviewer was Klaus Rothstein). A passage like that may at best have had an ambivalent appeal to readers by evoking also some envy of such a stereotypical meal on a stereotypical day in the lives of artists hanging out in Rome outside of holiday season, but the title of the review included the ravioli in nut sauce and the dish stole the picture.

My point (part I) is: textual showing in the first person was being read and ridiculed as showing off.

Back to our first person reporter who includes abovementioned Northern dinner event in prominently exposed story in 'paper for personalities' two weeks ago and who is obviously running the same risk of exposing himself to ridicule. And here comes my point (part II): The stage is set for pretentious specific details concerning the meal. Readers are ready to scorn the reporter and his friends, AND they are probably somewhat curious too to be informed of what are in fact the appropriate pretentions to have foodwise this year up North. And readers are reading it, aren't they? And I was reading it, wasn't I?

And what happens?

We are just told in passing that "the food was good and the wine was good". There's no showing it, and the lacuna in the story made me remember this really quite brief and insignificant passage two weeks later. Which is well done by reporter, and/but really annoying. The experience of having my expectations thwarted stays with me, and what is more: it even feels like all the pretentions now stick to me rather than to the reporter. And this, of course, is an especially annoying thing about it.

I like to celebrate first person journalism for making readers aware of rhetorical mechanisms at play in their reading. This is an example of it, and I did learn a lesson. And there's certainly no use crying over figures of speech (like this... proslepsis?)

Still, what namedropping as such is doing to readers on a global level and on a daily basis remains a dire thought. And one thing is certain: My dropping Jamie O's name on my blog about a week ago immediately directed an unknown visitor from Bath and one from Slough to The First Person in Print, but they only stayed here for a few seconds.

Elderly new journalist blogging

Hunter S. Thompson would have made a fine blogger, or so I was saying when Peter Svarre mentioned HST in passing. Besides from artfully-spontaneous literary reportage, HST readily published parts of his apparently many, many personal letters and served as an online sports columnist -- so why not a blogger too.

Well, Norman Mailer who is a canonized new journalist from the same generation and who hasn't been shy to put books like "Advertisements for Myself" in print, has in fact tried his luck as a guest blogger a year ago at Huffington Post. As far as I can tell, he wrote two posts in two months - and got lots of response (it's been closed down for comments now).

Like I was saying in a comment below, it may be that to print personalities like Mailer there's not enough to be achieved by getting personal in the blogosphere. It's not a spectacular gesture in itself, so you don't really feel anything...

Just for the record: I'm a supporter

Don't get me wrong here. My dissertation is not written in order to brand spectacular personal reporting as "self-indulgent scribblings" in any crude negative sense. On the contrary, I've been trying to twist these negative labels and show what good can be achieved through self-indulgent scribbling. And Rasmus Ø. Madsen doesn't do negative branding of the material either. The title of his article, just like the title of my dissertation, is quoting a label, a standard viewpoint, which my work is supposed to challenge.

Who me?

It's official! My dissertation gets a full page in the Ideas/Media-section of Weekendavisen this week. A photo of Hunter S. in a tuxedo, his hand raised in salute, leads you to the right page.

"Self-indulgent scribblings" says the headline, and I'm really happy to tell you that it's not my work, but my object of study which gets branded like that. My dissertation has been in good hands and is both well represented and contextualized by Rasmus Øhlenschlæger Madsen. He introduces the subject as such by reminding the readers of Weekendavisens own slogan and profile as "a paper for personalities/strong characters" which is 'not only meant to flatter the readers', but alludes to the high percentage of high profiles among the journalists and the exceptionally high frequence of the first person singular in their pages.

Rasmus Ø. Madsen writes freelance for Weekendavisen and yes, he's a phd student at the University of Copenhagen, but not an old buddy of mine. Surely, though, from now on he is.

Lost dogs on close inspection

All stories look the same from a distance, and the ambition of narrative journalists is to make readers realize that a given story is 'not like all other lost dog or love stories'. This is how Nancy Graham Holm phrases it as she explains why subjectivity is No Longer a Dirty Word:

Narrative journalists have a social conscience and they claim their mission is to remind us what it means to be human. Information alone, they say, does not inform. In the postmodern age, journalists must assign meaning. Participation in events and subsequent interpretation are required to break down the psychological barriers of apathy and cynicism.

To me there's a remarkable echo of passages from my own dissertation here (except that I avoid using the term 'postmodern' all along). At one point I sum up the ambition of personal and spectacular journalism as that of 'making the world seem interesting and workable' which might as well have been phrased in Graham Holm's way as 'breaking down the psychological barriers of apathy and cynicism'. And this is why close readings as well as field work (taking close looks and making close descriptions) are important in journalism studies. They supply the details which prevent our work from being just one more lost dog story after the other.

End of masquerade

That we're all wearing masks 8-) in our daily lives is a notion which has gone somewhat out of fashion, at least in academic discourse. The theatrical metaphor is a rigid one, as it implies that we play our roles consistently, that we follow a script and that we are somehow more authentic behind our masks. Our real selves would show when every once in a while we put the masks down (and when would that be?)

I'm done reading Norah Vincent's story now, and she has, of course, been wearing a mask in quite a literal sense. She was Ned. But what she concludes after 18 months as this self-invented man - going to bars, bowling, working etc. among other men - is not just that her masquerade was a frustrating experience in itself. Her great distress came, she says, [and don't read on now, if you're planning to read the book],

from the way the world greeted me in my disguise, a disguise which was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was such a masked ball. (273)

There's no mistaking the theatrical terminology here. And what is more, in Norah Vincent's experience her men's group of all places was where masks were let down:

Only in my men's group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every other guy in the room. (273)

Pulling off everybody's masks at the end seems an overly simplistic way of wrapping the story up, and it came as such a disappointment after reading Vincent's close and carefully prepared descriptions up until then. Discharging the idea of social masquerades as such may be hasty, but these lines that I've quoted do sound crude, don't they (especially when read out of context). Still Vincent presents this as a true and extraordinary experience which eventually made her suffer a mental breakdown and puts an end to her investigations.

It is always striking how undercover reporting turns questions of appearances and social interaction into very practical matters. Social mechanisms become obstacles to be instantly dealt with by the reporters in order to keep their cover intact, so social mechanisms in these texts tend to be described in terms of exactly that: mechanisms. And masquerades. It all becomes very literal and heavy-handed which might explain why many of these adventures - despite their playful setup - seem predetermined and, end of post now, become quite depressing stories to read.

I'm hearing too much hand movement

Some wallraffers set their example closer to Wallraff's than others. Fabrizio Gatti at Lampedusa is a close one.

[læs også her.dk]

He really does have that Essex accent and, no, it doesn't sound affected

PS: Emma Cox was her name, the spy in Jamie O's restaurant. My cousin did find the article for me, and what Cox was exposing from behind the scenes at Fifteen was not grim stuff, but confirmations along the lines of: "He really does say "mate" all the time." Thus the News section of Sunday Mirror on Feb. 2, 2003.

Up the tabloid tree

There is undercover reporting as a long and rare form and there's undercover reporting as a tabloid matter of course.

In Denmark, the first kind is tried out perhaps every one or two years, and the reporter, sometimes an artist as such, is likely to get a lot of attention for experimenting with journalistic form and playing with identities. At one point in my studies I was looking around for more cases like that, involving perhaps even some women working under cover. My cousin who was living in London at the time didn't really get the point when I asked her about it: '- Cases of women doing under cover reporting---The tabloids do it all the time of course...how do you mean?' And of course they do, in Denmark too, if not as often and intensively as the British.

Tracing the term 'under cover' in the Danish print media a few years back produced one hit concerned with a British female wallraffer - and it was Jamie Oliver who told us about her in an interview. Here's how he described the event in his web diary as part of an overall Bummer Weekend:

One of the receptionists [at Restaurant Fifteen] who had been working for us was secretly a journalist and had been spying on us for one of the tabloids. She seemed like a really nice, bright girl but obviously the hunger of working up the tabloid tree has eaten away at her morals. To be honest it's made me a bit paranoid and a bit vulnerable as I'm working 70 hours a week, not getting paid for it and could do without the worry of looking over my shoulder and wonder who is going to shaft me next. The good news is that it wasn't a bad piece but it's knocked my confidence a bit. I think the students [the ca. Fifteen chefs to be] were very upset. Oh well, c'est la vie!

All the best
Jamie O x x x

Strictly Scandinavian

For those with knowlede of Danish: My PhD dissertation Skribenter der skaber sig (Writers Who Make a Scene) is now available as a pdf-file for download at Retorikportalen. Please feel free to comment on it here or there.

Don't be brief

By the way, I'm now receiving daily and well edited mail from WriterL and it sure seems promising. The thread running at first was about Polishing (your text) and has run on to Rhythm and Pacing. The welcoming email is a fine followup on their initial pickup line as they're explicitly saying that they

don't have any length limitations for posts, so when you join the discussion, please feel free to take the space necessary to clearly make your point.

That's a fine and serious invitation, isn't it?

Birth of a Salesman

I've now been through Love, Sex, Life and Work with Norah Vincent, and the Work chapter (I'll be sure to get back to the others later on) made me think of both Günter Wallraff's dressing up to pass for an ad man/copywriter at his job interview at the German tabloid Bild, and Danish artist Jakob Boeskov's dressing up in order for him and his fictive weapon (the ID Sniper) to blend in with professionals at a weapon's fair in Beijing.

To make his way as a tabloid reporter Wallraff has been using a sunlamp (this is the 1970'es) to tan his face, and he puts on way too much Aqua Brava aftershave in the hope that people won't notice how much of a cold sweat he's in. Which apparently they don't. 'Believe me, I'm a terrible actor,' says Wallraff, but is amazed to discover that his new employer doesn't notice all the false notes in his self-presentation: 'Apparently he's no better actor than I am.' (Lead story, 1977). (Reporting is not simply a sales job, of course, but Wallraff-disguised-as-'Esser' and his new colleagues are certainly treating it as one.)

"My black suit is my armour," says Boeskov as he walks through the crowd at China Police 2002 with shattered nerves and stomach cramps. But Boeskov isn't found out either, and the bluffing is so easy that it scares him. ("My Doomsday Weapon", Black Box 2003).

Norah Vincent/'Ned' - 2006 - has just spent a few weeks in a secluded abbey among monks who were uncomfortable and eventually became hostile towards her, basically because they considered Ned to be a homosexual (man) with an inadequate sense of discretion. Now, however, (s)he's entering the job market of what by the sound of the job ads "appeared to be fast-track corporate environtments" that were looking for "steam-spewing go-getters who were "high-powered" and "hungry for success"".

Norah Vincent's experience is similar to that of Wallraff and Boeskov: Being undercover as a self-invented man is hard indeed, but a self-made business man, in her case a door-to-door salesman, is remarkably easy to pull off:

"No business casual," they said. "Wear a suit." Even better, I thought. ... I was walking taller in my dress clothes. I felt entitled to respect ... For the first time in my journey as Ned I felt male privilege descend on me like an insulating cape, and all the male behaviours I had until then been so consciously trying to produce for my role, came to me suddenly without effort. ... Nobody ever thought this Ned was gay.

So - business is a game. Formal dress codes and corporate lingo make you feel safer, and your uniform serves to guide yourself and the people around you. Business people are basically role players, and the whole idea of self-made men stems, of course, from competitive business attitudes like those tried on by Wallraff, Boeskov and Vincent. On different occasions and for different reasons, but all three of them seem basically appalled by the experience. It makes them confident in passing, but basically it fills them with self-loathing.

Consequently, it remains an immense challenge for these under cover reporters to communicate more than loathing of the people whose shoes they have decided to step into. They can't help celebrating their own status as independent reporters, writers, artists in the process.

Wallraff and Vincent do accomplish more than that, and they do display a level of solidarity with the people they're impersonating. The time factor seems to be decisive here. They stay on longer, they stay in the field beyond the smooth birth of their business man. Long enough to get a sense of what might happen in the actual life of one.

The social motives of Bonzo Journalism

Speaking of Mads Brügger - and speaking of genre:

Brügger is a reporter who tends to steal a march on critics (and keep them entertained) by simply making the critical remarks himself. In "The Clown Wars" (Black Box Magazine 2003) he anticipates blogposts like this one by categorizing his text on his own:

I would also like to add a paragraph about genre. I call this kind of reality programming Bonzo. What defines Bonzo is no research at all, total honesty, no use of tape recorders, a self-confidence of grotesque proportions, self-inflicted sleep-deprivation and lots of alcohol.

So, well, Bonzo Journalism is constituted by one man's text on one single occasion - and so much for genre theory through the ages. This piece of journalism is obviously written for educated people taking a day off. You can relax and enjoy yourselves, he seems to be saying, there's no need to make clever observations on this one.

Anyway... neither textual features nor social motives are taken into account in Brügger's tongue-in-cheek definition of genre, but what is highlighted is the unprofessional-and-devil-may-care approach of the reporter which becomes the defining constraint for the way his piece of Bonzo is going to turn out (sort of an easy gonzo approach). And the story has a wallraffing dimension too as Brügger and a friend are basically infiltrating a clown festival disguised as clowns - and Brügger starts out by apologizing for this:

I'm sorry for faking my way into the dark and secretive world of the "claaaawn" ... abusing the trust of my fellow clowns, who really believed that my associate Caramba and myself are true-blue clowns when in fact we are nothing but dilettante impostors.

In some sense there's an ethnographic (or just feature journalistic) motivation to the setup. A subculture is being portrayed if in a very rude fashion. But to me these opening remarks on form (that I've been quoting above) is underlining a completely dominant social motive which is that of the writer being simply out to create a good time for himself and an exclusive group of readers. This is a valid motive and even more so in a halfway underground magazine like Black Box.

Or what? Can this motive stand alone? And does it? I might well have overlooked something. The way I see it and this is is due to the undercover approach in particular, the guys are having their fun at the expense of people that are never interviewed, but just observed (for no obvious reason) and ridiculed. The actual true-blue amateur clowns are portrayed as completely pathetic - and they may have been that, but reading this at length (oh, those long forms) leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't know what to make of the ironic or just insincere (?) apology above which seems to imply a bad taste in the mouth of the reporter too, which, however, he has chosen not to act upon. The text is there in print, richly illustrated and 12 pages long, and with Brügger serving as his own editor-in-chief. What to make of it? Is this a personal piece of journalism gone private?

Those long forms

More than anything else, literary journalism appeals to me because of the amount of time which is obviously invested in writing it. This dawned on me when I read Danish reporter Mads Brügger's report from World Economic Forum in Davos (Six Days that Shocked the World VIRUS magazine 5, 2000) which has made a lasting impression on me by being not only well-written (originally in Danish), but by being 40 pages long. And it told you so from the beginning:

We have a good offer for you; in front of you lies a very, very long article, but in turn, it has everything you need to know about the future that lies ahead of us.

I was so very well entertained by that article then. And now I have signed up for a subscription listserv called WriterL, not because it is advertised as 'reminiscent of Paris of the 1920'es', but because it is

tailored for the discussion of narrative writing, feature writing, explanatory journalism, book journalism and the high-level reportage that is associated with such writing.

This already looks extremely appealing to me, but then came the crucial cue: "Most of our members write narrative nonfiction -- those long forms that Tom Wolfe called "the new journalism."" The long forms part made me sign up - and it's only been about 5 days, but I haven't actually heard back from WriterL.

They may be on holiday.

The implied sort of genre theory

Concerning a theoretical discussion of genre possibly missing somewhere in my work:

Noone would bring this matter up for the sake of producing some free-floating genre theory in the middle of July. What is called for is an explication of theory which, supposedly, is already there. My implied genre theory simply needs to be taken seriously - by me, as I do realize that the genre perspective is fundamental to my approach.

It is a critical point in itself that I adopt a genre perspective on rhetorical artefacts which rather seem to call for something like auteur theory. I have singled out two writing auteurs, Wallraff and Thompson, who have each established their own personal brands of journalism: wallraffing and gonzo journalism. Hitherto they have been recognized for having as much in common as a somehow alternative approach to reporting which in both cases includes participant observation. Individually they have been hailed as original while the many colleagues that they've somehow inspired are often ridiculed as poor wannabes. And what I've done is ----- okay, I'll just be quoting my own English summary now:

This dissertation [Writer Who Make a Scene] argues for establishing spectacular personal reportage as a subgenre [of creative nonfiction] based on wallraffing and gonzo journalism as rhetorical patterns which include a common ethos based on a belief in the individual (and revealed) rhetorical agency of the reporter.

Through close readings [...] of texts by Wallraff and Thompson alongside texts by some of their prominent Danish successors (Michael Elsborg, Allan Nagel, Mads Brügger, Jakob S. Boeskov, Morten Sabroe, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Michael Jeppesen, and Flemming Chr. Nielsen), the dissertation highlights a number of rhetorical pitfalls regarding the writer’s presentation of self and enactment of agency.

Generally, however, an argument is made for recognizing this subgenre as a potential stronghold for rhetorical agency in the print media. More specifically, [...] the texts are read as performances of critical and mediatory epideictic work-in-progress. Each writer sets out to experimentally establish some common ground between the social situation in the field on the one hand and the rhetorical situation on the other. They seek, sometimes almost desperately, to affirm and exemplify basic standards of journalism or human interaction, in a substandard world.

All of the reporters in question pose as being more independent, alternative, sensitive and creative than reporters in general, and studying them as belonging to the same tradition and genre makes it possible for me to point out what is in fact traditional and typical about them and what counts as a more or less interesting variation or transformation of the personal&spectacular form. The genre perspective has supplied me with some sort of standard for making critical judgments - and I am being normative in my readings.

What has perhaps prevented me from discussing genre theory as such is precisely the overlap with my discussion of both rhetorical imitation and rhetorical tradition (in the latter I take my cue from Michael Leff's Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric). Both of these discussions are similarly concerned with the writers' way of dealing with their rhetorical precursors and their being constituted by some sort of formal tradition.

So now I'm back to vague.

What if someone asked: What is a genre?

What sort of genre theory?

One thing my committee has asked for is a more explicit theoretical discussion of genre to form the basis of my characterization of spectacular personal reportage. I recall a fellow PhD student presenting her genre-studies-in-progress and saying: 'If any of you have been thinking about studying genre as such, I advice you not to do it... I'm serious...' And I have in fact kept discussions of genre theory to an absolute minimum, but made sure that I point to Carolyn Miller to express my trust in her

rhetorically sound definition of genre [which] must be centred not on the substance or form of discourse, but on the action it is used to accomplish. ("Genre as Social Action", 1984, p 84).

With my general focus on rhetorical agency, I have attempted to characterize precisely the social action which my particular band of reporters make such spectacular efforts to accomplish through personal recordings of their field trips. I read one or two reporters and one or two texts at a time, and I qualify their participation in the genre as I go along, but it's true that I haven't defined in any strict sense what is, for instance, a sufficient criterion for participation. And I wonder if I'm being strategically vague about it to spare myself some work, or whether I really don't find the more strict approach fruitful? Genre theory won't become fruitful by itself, I know, but if I ought to put work into it, I am simply wondering where to begin and for what reasons.

Meet Me on My Vast Veranda

From the speech-in-character to the song-in-character. When I opened this blog I thought about naming it My Vast Veranda to echo a line which was echoing in my head anyway - "Meet me on my vast veranda / my sweet untouched Miranda". One's own blog is always an appropriate place to point out a favourite song, I guess, but luckily (accidentally...?) We Both Go Down Together from the album above is even written in the first person singular, so here I go with no time to lose.

The following remarks are clipped from the Radio Paradise chatroom:

The lyrics make me giggle like a fool...i don't think I've ever heard mention of a veranda in a song before, much less a VAST veranda. Also: "cliffs so high you can't see over." Damn, now that is high.

Arrrgh, I was reading King Lear for class today, and every time they mention Dover, I would hear this nasal "cliffs so high you can't see over" in my head, and then, inevitably, the vast veranda/Miranda bit.

"you wept, but your soul was willing" does that creep anyone else out a bit?

Yeah, it creeps me out too. But then a lot of the Decemberists' lyrics creep me out. I imagine their stuff is what the Addams Family listens to.

Creepy it is. The song is a monologue by a rapist who is deceiving himself - but not the attentive listener, of course - by putting an epic and romantic spin on his crime. The rape part in itself might count as a good reason not to name your blog after it - the obscurity of the reference might count as another - but as hippiechick in the chatroom remarks

I hope they are being very ironic in pointing out violence and sickness. I think this is why i am drawn to their songs, plus I really dig the music.

The Speech-in-Character

Eating fish cakes with friends a few years ago, one of us was suddenly chewing a cigarette stub which must have been dropped into the cream of fish out the back of the fishmonger's shop at some point. Oh, bother. And when we went back to the shop the next day (well, not me, I wasn't ready to face their disgrace) and told them what had happened, all the man behind the counter could think of saying was: "I guess you weren't very pleased with that..."

That was all. No apologies, no free salmon, no please don't tell the local press...

That same year I had just started teaching composition, and Swedish colleagues had introduced me to the ancient progymnasmata programme, a sequence of 12-14 basic rhetorical exercises among which is: Impersonation. Frank D'Angelo calls it the Speech-in-Character and introduces it as

a speech put on a person's lips in an imaginary situation for the purpose of characterization. It is the imitation of a person's moral character, habits, and feelings. (198).

So - the following week I asked my students to compose a speech-in-character attributed to the guy at the fishmonger's. They were to estimate what was at stake in his rhetorical situation and compose a fitting response in the form of a dramatic monologue. As I remember it, the students (at least those who volunteered to read their versions out loud) composed some excessively rude responses, drawing a caricature of a man of very poor character, and I can see how I - as well as the man himself, of course - was asking for that.

When on a different occasion I tried out the exercise again, a friend of mine did in fact compose a more than appropriate response, a performance in damage control that I - as well as the man himself (not to mention his boss) - could only have dreamt of. It went along these lines: "We can't make this up to you, and I see how this incident might have put you off fish for a while--and I can't really blame you for not shopping here anymore--- still, why don't you come back in a few months when shrimp from the fiords are at their very finest, and we'll treat you and your friends an incredible amount..."

There's a fishdealer-in-character. Kind as well as proud in a situation which was nothing to be proud of.

I said it as plain as I could make it. "I'm not a man, you guys. I'm a woman."

Norah Vincent's book on her Year Disguised as a Man has arrived, and so far (taking a break between chapters 2 and 3) it's, well, interesting! well done! and really well-written.

The opening chapter - besides from Norah's figuring out how to dress, speak and act in order to pass for a man - includes her unceremonious reflexions on what siginificance it might have as a premise for this particular book that she's a lesbian: "Practically from birth, I was the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene."(5) "How else to explain..." she continues, recollecting incidents from her childhood and puberty, keeping matters open and allowing the readers to ponder them on their own.

She has a fortunate talent for describing people's manners (her own too) and takes good note of the way these manners change when she introduces herself as Ned and hangs around with the guys for a while. Eventually - and this is not the typical thing for reporters in disguise to do - she lets people know that she's really Norah. She is simply letting them in on her secret after a while and is taking their response into account as part of her research and part of her story.

So much for Getting Started. And for Friends. Next on Norah Vincent's table of contents is: Love.

Dear Old Louis

March 10, 1924

Dear Old Louis:
Since last I saw you I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder. Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. Some fair to good writers have no style and so leave us ignorant of how they take themselves. But that is the one important thing to know: because on it depends our likes and dislikes. A novelist seems to be the only kind of writer who can make a name without a style: which is only one more reason for not bothering with the novel. I am not satisfied to let it go with the aphorism that the style is the man. The man's ideas would be some element then of his style. So would his deeds. But I would narrow the definition. His deeds are his deeds; his ideas are his ideas. His style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds. Mind you if he is down-spirited it will be all he can do to have the ideas without the carriage. The style is out of his superfluity. It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward. Emerson had one of the noblest least egotistical of styles. By comparison with it Thoreau's was conceited, Whitman's bumptious. Carlyle's way of taking himself simply infuriates me. Longfellow took himself with the gentlest twinkle.

Robert Frost to his friend Louis Untermeyer

Dear me

I'm puzzled by a critical response to my own academic prose: that I'm slightly inclined to use rhetorical figures like homoiotéleuton. I had to look that up to discover that what I do is that I tend to give words similar endings, sometimes they simply rhyme. (Looking for an example in the posts below: "I handed in my dissertation, and so far it doesn't feel much like a conversation"). Too much figuration like that is inappropriate in academic prose, and why is that?

The form of a prose composition should be neither metrical nor destitute of rhythm. The metrical form destroys the hearer's trust by its artificial appearance, and at the same time it diverts his attention, making him watch for metrical recurrences, just as children catch up the herald's question, 'Whom does the freedman choose as his advocate?', with the answer 'Cleon!'

That's Aristotle's functional answer (Rhetoric iii,8), and it's a good one, displaying even a certain sense of humour (no?). The last point about hearers collaborating with the rhetor through form, even against their will, is discussed by Kenneth Burke too:

Many purely formal patterns can readily awaken an attitude of collaborative expectancy in us. ... Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites participation regardless of the subject matter. Formally, you will find yourself swinging along with the succession of anthiteses [for instance], even though you may not agree with the proposition that is being presented in this form. (A Rhetoric of Motives, 58).

So rhyming or homoitel. and other rhetorical figures can sometimes be distracting in themselves, and deceptively so. But what is more, of course: they tend to draw undue attention to the responsible rhymester too. And a prose rhymester might well appear smug and self-absorbed (without even introducing her first person singular).

Accidental tourist

Friday after posting my promise to discuss some female reporters, I turned too this week's issue of Danish paper Weekendavisen (the only paper that I subscribe to at the moment) and on the front page was editor in chief Anne Knudsen reporting from Iraq. The report is not spectacular in my sense of the word, no remarkable rhetorical strategy or formal concept is put into play, but it is very personal. So there I go. By 'shamelessly taking advantage of her position' (her own words), Anne Knudsen is visiting the Danish military camp in Basra where one of her own sons is stationed too. Her report is certainly not critical - except of other critics - of the work being done by these Danish forces and which is presented to the press on this occasion. Anne Knudsen is there as part of a group and is enthusiastically reporting from a guided tour. Mainly she identifies herself as a worried-but-proud mom and expresses her sympathy with other worried moms (and no, not parents, just mothers are included in the bonding). There is not much of a professional or inquisitive reporter about her when she is watching Iraqi police officers demonstrate how they go about searching cars and concludes that "it looks very convincing to me, but then again I'm only familiar with these things from the movies". At one point she is stressing how she takes special interest in the intelligence work at the camp, because "the truth about Your special correspondent is that I'm wholly and irrevocably an ethnographer or anthropologist at heart", and as such she is trained to make similar 'secret investigations' of local communities. Well, her background as an ethnographer certainly qualifies her for a field trip like this, but she seems to be telling us about this training as just another curious fact about herself on a line with a preference for sea food or liqourice. She is not showing us this professional attitude in action. As it happens, she falls ill and nearly dies from lack of salt in the tremendous heat on site which adds genuine drama to her story, of course, and tells us something about the general working conditions in Basra too. But generally Anne Knudsen's attitude in the text comes across as the attitude of a tourist - in a slightly comic contrast to the photo above which accompanies the article and to her general front cover appearance as chief editor leaving her desk on a special mission. And that's too bad.