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