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...