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.