More media, more messages

The most artistic and experimental of the Danish alluders to Wallraff represented in my PhD work was the late Claus Beck-Nielsen who is obviously still alive. Beck-Nielsen announced his own death in 2001 and has been performing under various pseudonyms since then.

In writing he has adopted a peculiar persona who is travelling through Copenhagen and Iraq, mostly by foot, and reporting back to his fellow Danes in a seriously dry and alienated tone.

All the more wondrous to watch him ('Some Body') perform live last night in Odense - reporting back from Iran and from his personal life - in song.

Along with him was a band totally superior in their toned-down Black Christmas double bass, drums, guitar and steel accompaniment, and, well, the show made me acutely aware of my usual quite exclusive focus on the written word. So here's a link to Claus Beck-Nielsen Memorial at MySpace where the band is currently fighting the "feel-good-tyranny" of MySpace from within by encouraging visitors to sign up as "friends" of the band in order to become their enemies. Since,

To be a friend or not to be! That's no question. That's tyranny!

The first person in an elevator

Veranda revisited:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm3WvDpPBac&feature=related

How to point your fingers at people

Why do reporters always congratulate each other for having managed "not to point their fingers at anyone" in a piece of journalism? This was posed as a rhetorical question from Mads Brügger who visited the department today and spoke in favour of subjective and, yes, well, moralizing journalism. You investigate a story and find fault with particular people - so why not explicitly blame them?

Well, blaming as such ought not to be a controversial aspect of investigative journalism, so it's surely the manner of blaming which can be controversial.

How do you usually point your fingers at people in writing?

One award winning way is described well by James Etthema and Theodore Glasser in their Custodians of Conscience (1998):

"For journalists who must honor objectivity yet evoke outrage, ironist rhetoric holds great stylistic appeal."

In a chapter on 'The Irony of Irony-in-Journalism' they show how investigative reporters simply quote people and then, just as simply, present facts that contradict or undermine the quoted statements. Alongside each other, those words and deeds/facts create an ironic contrast and appeals to ironic knowingness among the readers. We're put in a position to shake our heads at the liars or hypocrites and say: Yeah right!

Brügger, I believe, was basically pulling away from such subtle yet well-known montage techniques and encouraging reporters to show as well as tell (by saying that, well, "at least it has worked for me").

Small world

All this time I have completely overlooked a striking, if almost completely irrelevant connection between Wallraff and Thompson: In Denmark (and probably elsewhere too) a big nose is sometimes dubbed 'a günter' and sometimes, yes, 'a Gonzo'.

If Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers...

...then what?

Close Writing by Sontag

“Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described,” writes Susan Sontag by way of introduction to her “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964). Her essay is not an argument, but a reflective description, an exemplary one, in which Sontag encircles the elusive notion of Camp through a series of propositions which are stated with bold authority: “Camp is… / Camp taste has… / Camp is art that… / The experiences of Camp are… / Camp taste is, above all,… / The Ultimate Camp statement: …”

Yet Sontag’s notes are notes indeed. Her propositions are tentative, and they’re illustrated or rendered plausible by examples that are compared and contrasted. So examples serve as qualifiers that mark differences between pure Camp and Camp that fails, naïve Camp and self-conscious Camp, etc. The angle changes and the light shifts as we go along, and I kept thinking that this ought to be tried out as a rhetorical exercise. By way of a parallel treatment, paragraph by paragraph, even sentence by sentence, one might approach, let’s say, the elusive notion Gonzo journalism or Gonzo sensibility:

If “the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance” what is the hallmark of Gonzo? If Camp is “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers”, what is Gonzo? If “without passion one gets pseudo-Camp… merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic” what quality differentiates pure Gonzo from pseudo-Gonzo? And so forth.

Basically, Sontag’s notes made me try this at home, shifting my focus into my fingers.

A bad case of self-coverage and not bad at all

When Raoul Duke has escaped his hotel bill and is pulling his fireapple-red shark convertible into the parking lot of a cafe on the fringe of Las Vegas, he hears a roar overhead and looks up "to see a big silver smoke-trailing DC-8 taking off". He is wondering whether his colleagues are on board the plane; his colleagues who were in Las Vegas in order to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race just like himself: "Did they have all the photos they needed? All the facts? Had they fulfilled their responsibilities?"

Duke himself has been famously distracted by drugs and by Las Vegas itself and has covered all these weird and spectacular circumstances in stead. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even know who won the race and here's were another notion of self-coverage comes in:

I wanted to plug this gap in my knowledge at the earliest opportunity: Pick up the L. A. Times and scour the sports section for a Mint 400 story. Get the details. Cover myself. Even on the Run, in the grip of serious Fear. . .

This may seem like a rather coarse demonstration of Hunter S. Thompson's attitude towards traditional journalism. Just as coarsely demonstrative as the recent booklength adventure of Morten Sabroe did seem at first. The word went that Sabroe had gone to New York to write a book about Hillary Clinton, but ended up writing a book about himself. Naughty fans giggled in anticipation while tired non-fans wrote letters to the editor saying, oh, surprise, surprise! How long can Sabroe be allowed to go on like this?

As it happens, Sabroe's book is very good. Hostile readers might like it very much too. It's mainly about Sabroe's mother Who Art in Heaven (and about himself). And about Hillary Clinton too, but not much. I had the book handed over late at night on the day of its publication, read the first half before going to sleep, the other half on the train the next morning and didn't want to put it back in my bag after finishing it, but rather, well, advertise it, let it glow as I carried it along through the hallways to my office. I wasn't exactly among the hostile readers to begin with, of course, but still I wonder why the sense of identification is that strong. More later.

The Case of Self-Coverage

That phrase, the subtitle of an article in a 2004 issue of Journal of Communication, caught my attention for reasons obvious at least to myself. My terministic screen misguided me, though, as the curious term self-coverage is not about individual introspection, but about corporate introspection, i.e. journalists reporting on cultural products and activities produced by the same combined 'news and entertainment firms' that they themselves work for. The term is also used about media self-coverage in general, metacoverage and 'news from our own world'.

But - what is dawdling then?

"I wasn't kidding around"

Barbara Ehrenreich, undercover in low-wage America working as a waitress, a cleaning person, a nursing home aide and a retail clerk, picked a spectacular form of field work which helped her build a compelling narrative ('Will she be found out? Will she even endure it?') and which offers itself to being passed on as a sensational anecdote ('Do you know what she did to be able to discover these things?').

Still Ehrenreich's presentation of the events is rather understated concerning the dramatic action involved, and one line in particular stayed with me after first reading Nickel and Dimed:

There's no way, for example, to pretend to be a waitress: the food either gets to the table or not.

[Read the full introduction here.]

You're a matter of course! So - embrace yourself? Or please try to distance yourself from yourself?

Rumspringa is the name [and what does it mean?] of a new magazine edited by journalism students at my new workplace in classy cooperation with students from the Funen Academy of Fine Arts. And this is roughly how the editors present their work by way of introduction:

In the long stories here at Rumspringa the narrator isn't hiding behind objective observations, but becomes part of the story himherself. ... Journalists are just as entangled in the world as everyone else, so we don't pretend to be writing through an objective filter ... we're honestly dishonest. ... We don't invent, and we don't direct, but neither do we pretend that we're not there.

Well, of course we're there, they seem to be saying in the blogosphere at CVA ['Centre of Wild Analysis'], and of course we're entangled in the world. So the rhetorical strategy for the CVAers becomes the opposite of the rumspringars': They make an attempt to dissociate themselves from their entangled individuality and do not sign their blogposts individually.

So are they hiding behind CVA? Or are they just kidding around? Well, they claim that they're not. Rather they want to 'keep their positions of enunciation open' in an attempt to 'keep the symbolic alive', and they argue for their collective strategy (roughly) as follows:

The trouble with real writers [bloggers or others] is that they feel and eat too much and they think too much about sex. We distinctly want to dissociate ourselves from that! CVA [and blogging collectively] is ... about exercising your ability to change your position of enunciation. ... It's a mistake [made by Descartes and others] to equal your position of enunciation with your being.

You may change your being by changing your position of enunciation.

Both arguments are very appealing - and the latter is rather new to my own way of thinking (and blogging) too. What's at stake here? Is there a difference on the level of awareness and/or ambition? Or is it a matter of attempting social change by means of rhetoric on two different platforms: The journalists challenging themselves and their readers by abandoning the standard prose style of their colleagues in printed reporting - opposing the voice of what Tom Wolfe called the 'pallid little troll' - on the one hand; and philosophers challenging themselves and their readers by challenging the self-aware blogger style on the other?

Either you're with us

My comments' box here at Blogger seems to be able to swallow comments rather than publish them - but one was rescued in summary and sent to me by e-mail in stead:

The commentator, R, had a striking experience with Danish reporter Camilla Stockmann's writings. A few years ago Stockmann covered an event in R's own professional surroundings, and her account struck him as arrogant and condenscending as she was portraying his colleagues as members of some peculiar, exotic tribe in a remote country (which, in fact, they are not).

Then, via links in my previous blogpost, R read Stockmann's account of Alexander Brener and Barbara Shurz' provocative appearances in Copenhagen last year. As it happens, R himself has encountered Alexander Brener live in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a couple of years ago where Brener turned up at a public meeting where Brener approached Slavoj Zizek, who served as a moderator at the event, and spat Zizek right in the face, twice. Reading Stockmann's reportage R suddenly found himself siding with her, partly grateful for getting some more information about Brener, partly having his feelings of contempt for the man confirmed.

So what R is suggesting is that Stockmann's writing style is certainly able to communicate a sense of facination, but also a - cheap, says R - sense of identification at the expense of people who are portrayed in the journalistic coverage without getting heard.

I've returned to Stockmann's text on several occasions now, so it may not come as a surprise that I tend to agree with R. Stockmann's article immediately caught my interest when I originally saw it in the paper, but as I was reading it I felt invited to develop contempt for the two provos, even to pity them. And they may have deserved it, the text does make a good case that they do deserve it, but the reassuring or affirmative drive of the narrative against the two still seemed unfair. Let me stop here, though, and just link back to October06.

What's the sound of a name dropping?

A reporter hanging out with celebrities is in a position to investigate how it is that people feel aroused, elevated, humbled or annoyed by celebrity presence or by having celebrity names dropped at them. What forces are at play? They are strong forces, for sure, which are used daily to get all sorts of people hooked on journalistic stories.

In an article (in Danish) on star quality in reporters I have argued that a given reporter who himself admits to feeling hooked or somehow affected by the stardom of people he is interviewing, has gained some common ground with his readers by acknowledging an element of more or less irrational fascination. But what is more, he has also reached a level of awareness where he is able to play with namedropping as an element of style and be critical of the dynamics that it may cause in the reading process.

My article is not an academic piece, and one reader, I've been told, has already concluded that it sounds like something out of a ladies' magazine. So I'm ready for all sorts of comments on my specific readings (of four first person accounts of reporting in the company of celebrities) or on the subject in general.

(The idea of studying star quality in reporters was inspired by an article by Nadja Pass in Reflexioner (2004) on the various dimensions of character which might add up to media stardom.)

Unobtrusive

Capote, the movie, (orh yes, it's highly recommendable) portrays Truman Capote as not just a vain reporter, but one who gets heavily involved, personally as well as financially, in the story he's covering.

[15:35-- Hmm, when I say financially involved I'm thinking of Capote taking some action to influence the legal proceedings, offering some sort of support, pulling some strings, but actually I don't remember the details as to whether or not money was involved.]

All the more striking is his self-portrayal in writing. This is how obtrusive he gets (and I suppose it's him though he doesn't even use the first person singular) - and this is how much he lets readers in on the explicit subject of his field work - after more than 300 pages:

'That was a cold night,' Hickock said, talking to a journalist with whom he corresponded and who was periodically allowed to visit him [on Death row]. 'Cold and wet. It had been raining like a bastard, and the baseball field was mud up to your cojones. So when they took Andy out...

What was he thinking?

In an attempt to challenge my suspicion towards American style narrative journalism I've been reading Truman Capote's 1965 classic In Cold Blood. Surely a memorable book. Surely a "remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative" (thus the back cover of my Penguin), but the synthesis remains dubious too. No matter how many farmhands, friends and relatives Capote has been interviewing I can't help feeling offended by his way of reconstructing another man's unaccompanied morning walk on a particular morning.

Capote builds such a narrative which suggests an interior monologue, a train of thought, that the thinking man in question, Mr Clutter, has not been alive to confirm:

After drinking the glass of milk and putting on a fleece-lined cap, Mr Clutter carried his apple with him when he went outdoors to examine the morning. It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms.

"It was ideal apple-eating weather" - says who? Said perhaps Mr. Clutter on a previous occasion? And then probably thought so on this morning too? Personally I wouldn't ever want a reporter to ascribe an observation like that to me without asking.

More about Capote's writing style later. For now, here's a sample.

Not going native

So, I'm back from the family cottage up North where (access to) "the net" is advertised in inverted commas in order to clearly differentiate internet from fishing nets.

Or am I jumping to conclusions here in order to write a neat totem story and poke ever so gentle fun at the locals? Ever since I saw the poster I've been wanting to pass it on as a telling anecdote, and I'm not a reporter, but, well, my point is that the tempting totem story presents itself, even when you're just writing a post card. Or a blog post.

On Vacation

And good-looking too

Yes, from the CBC archives: An interview with Gloria Steinem from her New York apartment in Nov. 1968 about the New Journalism, about reporting with compassion and learning to say "I".

Being a female writer is controversial and very exotic at the time which is all too obvious from the way Steinem is being interviewed:

The topic of her journalistic undercover work as a Playboy Bunny gives rise to just one question from Moses Znaimer, the interviewer: "I thought Playboy Bunnies were supposed to be stacked - how did you get the job?" Also Znaimer is curious to know: "How many ladies' things do you like doing? Do you cook?" No, she doesn't cook, but she is ironing a shirt while they're talking, and Znaimer seems happy be able to announce that she does that exceptionally well.

Finally we're back in the studio where another host wraps up by characterising Gloria Steinem as "a heck of writer" - and "not a hateful looker".

Don't just do it

So how to use the first person singular in print? An article (in Danish) is now online in which I basically recommend that reporters introduce their personae at rare intervals - and then with explicit reluctance: Open the story first, set the stage and let events unfold until they call upon you as a responsible reporter to step in and publicly make up your mind about the material and the way you're framing it.

Two examples are presented: Åsne Seierstad at a book fair in Kabul in 2003, and Rome correspondent Lisbeth Davidsen in Tuscany with a grave robber in 2007. In Seierstad's case she's walking along and talking to book sellers when someone suddenly hands her an illegal book, stuffing it into her bag and thus compromising any wish on Seierstad's part to report on the events as if she were a fly on the city wall. A similar thing happens to Lisbeth Davidsen who is reporting for Politiken from a field trip with a guy who robs Etruscan graves for a living. Davidsen reports closely, but she doesn't use her personal pronoun until 'Luigi' hands her a wild asparagus which she accepts to chew on as an alibi for their suspicious walks in the area (should anyone ask, asparagus is what we're after).

So -- in both narratives the stage is set and other characters are introduced before the reporter directs our attention to her own person. The two reporters seem reluctant to take up space in their scenarios, so they wait for the situation to become critical, and then they say

1. first we (social dynamics are dictating my behaviour!),
2. then me (hey, somebody else is turning me into an accomplice!) and then
3. finally I (o.k., well, I did in fact consent to take part in this adventure myself).

It builds sympathy in a manner which gives priority to the actual news story. More importantly, the strategy implies that reporters should always be ready to reflect openly about their rhetorical choices, if the situation demands it. Fine. But still I can't help wondering what I'm doing recommending to reporters that they present themselves as victims of circumstance.

Reporters in Hiding, American Style

In his new book on narrative journalism Jo Bech-Karlsen celebrates (in Norwegian) the Nordic tradition of reporters exposing themselves in their writing (if not necessarily by introducing the "I"). And he questions the strong American influence which now makes reporters in the Nordic countries go into hiding in their texts and produce gripping stories which read like fiction.

The stories may be gripping, Bech-Karlsen says, and sometimes they just want to be, but come out like parodies. Much more importantly, though, the new narrative style tends to cover up the research process, to blur all the specifics concerning sources and other factors which helped the reporter shape her story. Readers may get a reading experience that they wouldn't otherwise have had at all, but the text doesn't allow these readers to estimate the relative value of various pieces of information on their own or try to judge whether or not any given conclusion or rhetorical move on the reporter's part seems justified. And a piece of journalism is supposed to allow that, argues Bech-Karlsen.

I'm convinced. I always liked Bech-Karlsen's definition (from his Reportasjen) of reportage as not just a piece of journalism based on the reporter's firsthand experience, but firsthand experience which is actually exposed in the text.

Reportage can give readers a sense of information and experience being processed. Reportage can give them occasion to ponder the tricky relationships between reality and rhetoric. And, yes, I do think that making use of the first person singular can help a reporter accomplish just that.

The Mountain in Labour

Attach file, alright then, and off it went - much later than originally promised. Writing can be ridiculously hard sometimes.

A Mountain was once greatly agitated. Loud groans and noises were heard, and crowds of people came from all parts to see what was the matter. While they were assembled in anxious expectation of some terrible calamity, out came a mouse.

Hypocrisy Upward

Irony is overrated, hypocrisy is underrated, notes Lars Pynt Andersen as a memorable motto (which evokes, by the way, a line from Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, a woman stating that irony, after all, "is just hypocrisy with style.") It seems that the late Wayne C. Booth shared Lars' concerns, as apparently Booth left an unpublished manuscript, "The Curse of Sincerity", which celebrates hypocrisy, or what Booth calls "hypocrisy upward". Robert Denham has read this manuscript, and I'll quote Denham (who quotes Booth) at some length to introduce this fine concept:

Many of the virtues we most honor are originally gained by practices that our enemies might call faking, our friends perhaps something like aspiring or emulating. We pretend to be scholars long before we can produce a piece of scholarship that is not visibly faked. Just now I played with a bit of Greek etymology, as if I knew Greek, which I do not. And yet I now know, because of the fakery-practice, a bit more Greek than I knew before. We must fake — must practice — the cello (say) long before we can really play it, and each stage of improvement requires new levels of faking. ([Booth, The Company We Keep] 253)

It is this productive form of hypocrisy that Booth calls “hypocrisy upward.” For hypocrisy to move upward it must be motivated by the aspiration to develop the “potentialities of a given virtue” (253). Hypocrisy downward is motivated only by the practice of deceit, the kind of false consciousness that imposters use intentionally to mislead. This is, of course, hypocrisy in its modern pejorative sense.

[...]

Booth’s overriding purpose [in The Curse of Sincerity] is to show us that in practicing hypocrisy upward the selves we create only occasionally debase life; most often they raise it, heightening our ethical perceptiveness and enhancing our awareness of how we should speak and act. Those who repress their masks, projecting instead a mask of total sincerity and absolute honesty at all times, are cursed indeed.Even if our various posings have little effect on our daily lives, the time we spend living with our hypocritical self, says Booth by way of conclusion,“represents a lot better form of life than most of the hours we spend in the too-often shit-bound world.”

Close reading, close writing

Close reading:
Joan Didion relates how one summer she and her husband John 'fell into a pattern of stopping work', i.e. writing,

at four in the afternoon and going out to the pool. He would stand in the water reading (he reread Sophie's Choice several times that summer, trying to see how it worked) while I worked in the garden.

The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005.

Close writing:
Kevin Kizer relates how Hunter S. Thompson

had an interesting way of studying the writers he loved. He would take and transcribe their works on his typewriter in an effort to discover each writer's particular rhythm and flow. He typed 'The Great Gatsby' and 'A Farewell To Arms' in their entirety.

(Academics might want to work in a similar vein, says Thomas Basbøll, in order to shift their focus into their fingers.)

What is the difference?

A special and especially happy announcement: I've gotten a grant! that'll fund a research project concerned with contemporary anglo-american undercoverjournalism of the booklength kind and definitely starring Polly Toynbee, Barbara Ehrenreich and Norah Vincent.

So - from July 1 I'll be a post doc. scholar at the Centre of Journalism, University of Southern Denmark, in Odense (where I grew up). This means that I’ll be leaving the Division of Rhetoric in Copenhagen where I’ve had my home as a BA, a master’s and a PhD student and lecturer for something like 14 years now. Such institutional immobility is not as controversial/unthinkable in Denmark as in countries with more people and more universities (with more rhetoric departments), but still – change does seem like a fine idea, doesn’t it.

I look very much forward to be studying journalism among journalism scholars (and journalists), and I wonder how much of a strange bird, I’ll be. Students in my composition class this year have been inquiring: What is the difference between a rhetorical and a journalistic approach to writing? And more than anything, I’m eager to find that out for myself now.

How to design the How to... text?

I handed in my article on reporters and star quality quite some time ago now, and it was accepted, but - I was then encouraged to hand in another article to complement or supplement the first. Star quality in reporters and how it shows on the textual level, fine, but---

What about reporters with less of an attitude? When and how do the average reporter make good use of her first person singular? Might I supply good-old pieces of good advice? Answer the how to- question?

I would love to, and I've been given a very good occasion to do it. The request makes perfect sense, but the article has not yet found its form. I like to do textual analyses and show what can be accomplished by showing what has actually been accomplished by particular writers on particular occasions, but I find it hard to move to the general level and be prescriptive.

So input is welcome: How to design a how to-article? What are good ways of grounding writers' rules of thumb? Who has done this well in the past---what pieces of advice have any of you accepted, maybe even adopted in your writing practice, and why?

Unbelievably well-written?

”Noone in Denmark throws a gonzo with such effortless ease and as true to Hunter himself as Henrik List does. (Sorry, Morten Sabroe!)”, writes Politiken’s reviewer Anette Dina Sørensen in her - otherwise very sceptical - review of List’s aforementioned essays, and I really wish she would specify that and give an example of such elegantly thrown gonzo (I know, maybe I'll just have to go see for myself after all).

A year ago Leonora Christina Skov did a similar thing in her - otherwise extremely disparaging - review of List's Bangkok Ladyboys. She admits that, "O.k. he writes well. He always has," but goes on to quote a misbegotten passage from the text which she characterizes with seething irony as her 'favourite' and which is picked to demonstrate how List's presentation of self tends to produce an unintentional comic effect.

How is it that a text can so clearly fail to be taken seriously by its reader and still be characterized (by the same reader) as being elegantly playful and downright well-written?

hunterthomsen.dk

A new brochure from UPDATE is introducing, in passing, my PhD work on personal reporting as being based on "the great journalistic icons Günter Walraff and Hunter S. Thomsen." That Danish variant of Thompson is a terrific typo, but it seems, at least, to capture my focus on Danish variants of gonzo journalism in a nutshell.

Other People's Trout

"We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. ('You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it,' Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

And so we do. But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I'."

(Joan Didion, 'On Keeping a Notebook', 1966)

Offense or No Offense

In a new collection of essays, in the stores tomorrow, Henrik List expresses his worries about a virtual “tsunami of new puritanism” in Denmark which “sets freedom of speech under pressure as far as sexually related subjects are concerned”. This point of view makes it hard to comment critically on his work at any level as you tend to come across as just that: a puritan.

Camilla Stockmann agreed to face that challenge this week through an e-mail correspondence with Henrik List which appeared in yesterday’s issue of Politiken. Stockmann immediately accepts Lists’ characterization of the nineties as roaring, at least as far as her own love life was concerned (thus getting it straight from the start that, hey, it’s not that I’m prudish), but asks him then: Is it really over – and is it really that bad?

List answers somewhat drunk after a long day of meeting the press and hanging out at night at the deep end of the streets (which he describes in some detail), if Stockmann isn’t becoming trapped in writing harmless journalism for trendy people like herself? In return Stockmann expresses doubt that ‘a ride in a leather swing with a ladyboy would make her a better journalist’ (List replies that it wouldn’t hurt her either just as a night out with some low life people every once in a while wouldn’t), and she goes on to ask him:

Where would you be without the angry feminists that you claim to be persecuted by? You seem to want to provoke aggression and yet you yearn for recognition from a wider public? Well, asks List, who doesn't? Who can stand playing the part of Jesus in the long run with people getting offended and judging you while never even reading you stuff?

Stockmann closes in on “the difference between you and me” saying that she doesn’t believe in the notion of sex without some emotional involvement or consequences – and asks List whether he really does. She points out that the dialogue always seem to break down right there with List’s romantic idea of prostitution. List replies that mainstream papers including Politiken tend to lose all sense of accuracy and critical edge when it comes to writing about sex, pornography and prostitution and that, by the way, he sees himself as more of a pro-sex person or perhaps a queer-feminist than anything. And by then they’ve crossed their deadline, and Stockmann wraps up by saying that ‘we better stop here before we agree so much that we’re invited to appear side by side in the sofa on national morning television – wouldn’t that be awfully bourgeois’.

The idea of an email correspondence seems a good choice in this case as it allows pause for thought on a regular basis in a dialogue which is bound to become somewhat personal and hostile. The debaters are cast stereotypically as combattants, as Stockmann seems to match List’s official concept of a predictable, politically correct enemy: a young female columnist in the left-of-the-middle mainstream media (he even jokingly addresses her as Nynne [the Danish equivalent of Bridget Jones] at one point). The tone of their exchange is more civil (and thus perhaps really much more sarcastic) than my summary indicates; the debaters address each other “Dear Henrik”, ”Dear Camilla” and uses an abbreviated ‘Love from…’ The brief, written form encourages them to pick their phrases with some care and ask specific questions which seems to help prevent each of them from flying off at a tangent.

Anyway---perhaps not surprisingly, I tend to side with Camilla Stockmann in this discussion (and I base my impression of List's work on my reading mainly his booklength essay Bangkok Ladyboys): The dialogue in my case does indeed break down first on Henrik List’s one-sided romantic celebration of the prostitutes and then on his positioning of his reader as either with him (liberal-minded and honest) or against him (prudish and hypocritical).

List’s rhetorical strategy makes an interesting contrast to Kristian Ditlev Jensen’s recent project that I have discussed earlier: Ditlev Jensen tries out a series of ‘colourful trades’ as an apprentice for a day, involving himself in his field work as a participant, but in his writing, peculiarly, he adopts the view of a detached, professional observer with a radically open mind that explores, but makes no judgments.

List, on the other hand, has his mind set on one particular colourful trade: the sex industry, and is not shy to get personally engaged in his field work or to display that same engagement in his writing. An open mind is his official trade mark too----

Yet List's version of an open mind is a liberal mind which is radically predisposed in favor of the sex business. As a professional reporter, Henrik List, in my (reading) experience, comes across as much more prejudiced and much less explorative than he asks his readers to give him credit for. On the basis of his reporter's essay from Bangkok I'm not at all convinced that a given ladyboy is really or mainly "living out her dream in the spotlight on stage at the Casanova Club". That idea still belongs to Henrik List, I'm not buying it, and no, I won't be buying the new essay collection either.

Oh, and by the way, I do actually find the book cover really offensive.

I'm terrible

As a student I used to live in a building where a somewhat mentally disturbed woman, a neighbour from another floor, used to take nightly walks down the hallway and enter any of our rooms if the door was open, looking for wine and/or company. One girl responded to this by making the following remark in the big notebook which had its place in one of the shared bathrooms: "On the one hand I feel sorry for her. On the other hand I think she's a terrible nuisance. Paradox!!" End of comment. And I remember thinking: Well? You wish you didn't have to deal with this and now you've officially stated that you won't - ?

Pointing out the paradox as such, simply having mixed feelings about the situation, seemed to legitimize the girl's complete resignation.

I came upon the same type of reasoning in a column today, an afterthought on May 1 in one of the surviving free news papers 24 timer:

YES TO WELFARE - NO TO POVERTY was an official May 1 slogan this year, and the columnist, the film director Søren Fauli, disapproves of the slogan. He finds the notion of poverty in present day Denmark outdated, and so he suggests an alternative slogan which goes something like 'NO to (buying) more stuff' and 'YES to attentiveness'. Fair enough. And who is Søren Fauli to suggest this?

Well, Fauli comments on his own dubious ethos as an advocate of anti-materialism and anti-consumption as he informs us that he works in advertising and stimulates consumption for a living. And that his personal level of consumption is beyond limits. [Ergo: Paradox!! End of column.]

So what am I saying? That I very much like a personal column to be explorative and say something more than:

"I'm terrible - what a paradox".

Cognitive growth begins with your jeans

In preparation for a seminar last Monday on the history of composition studies in the US, I was reading about cognitive and developmental research in this field from the 1970'es. And suddenly it became clear to me that a lot of the intuitive hostility towards first person reporting is based on exactly a developmental perspective on writing: If you make a self-centered presentation you tend to come across as somewhat primitive and immature.

The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing summarizes the developmental perspective as being concerned with "the writer's cognitive growth from egocentrism to outreach" (181), an idea which is based on Piaget's hypothesis that "because children cannot conceive of the listener's perspective, they do not adapt their message to their audience's needs."

Within journalism this notion of youthful, self-centered writing has turned into a commonplace. For isn't it always the young reporter, the intern, who decides to use the opening paragraph to comment on the state of his own jeans in the rain on the way to the press conference (as was jokingly noted by Jes Stein Pedersen during this debate on the state of Danish journalism within the area of arts and culture).

I guess it is, and therefore the cliché becomes an even tougher constraint for older reporters whose jeans-clad personae are easily perceived as pathetic attempts on the reporters' part to stay young and sensitive in their writing (while still not able to reach out to their readers).

Like any commonplace, of course, this one can be and should be challenged on a case to case basis.

How to reinflate your blogger persona

My blogspot has been quiet lately, not because of illness or easter, but because I've been online only at the office in stead of round the clock. We have cut ourselves off from emails and internet at home for a while which has mainly been great. It demands some planning, but evenings are back, and work days at home are totally different from those at the office. I get around to reading more and writing more, but - when I'm at the office I do not get around to blogging and hardly even visiting other people's blogs anymore (even if I'm more than free to as I'm not employed full-time at the moment). Stepping out at sundown came to mean stepping out altogether. Momentum seemed lost even if I'm actually still able to be around here most of my time.

And that's ridiculous, of course. So today I'm plugging myself back in, blogger persona somewhat deflated, but warming up. I'll go see who's been sharing their brainwaves over the last few weeks (and then find a good place to put these Fifty Writing Tools).

Field work and imagination

The nature of Danish gonzo journalism is up for discussion on Thursday night at Vartorv, Farvergade 27H, 1., Copenhagen, at 8 PM. I'll be presenting the paradox of imitating a demonstratively personal and American style like Thompson's in a Danish context: What postures and rhetorical strategies are adopted, and how are they adapted and developed?

I'll be discussing the cases of Mads Brügger, Morten Sabroe and Henrik List -- so yes, the M&M's are back indeed, and adding List to the list doesn't improve that situation at all, of course, (even if his name is Henrik). I permanently welcome names of female reporters that ought to be included too. Gritt Uldall-Jessen has been pointed out to me as having "all the right credentials, only she's interested in avantgarde drama rather than journalism,"

--which brings back the question of whether a provocative attitude in itself and/or 'putting yourself on the line' in your work in general will make you or your work gonzo - ?

Well, I do in fact insist on keeping the gonzo label within the sphere of journalism, because gonzo is basically conceived as a way of handling and challenging journalistic constraints. On Feb. 20th one guy in the audience made the remark that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might as well have been all fiction and written back home at Thompson's Colorado kitchen table. In my opinion though, no matter how much Thompson pushes the envelope for journalistic expression, it is exactly that particular envelope which determines the nature of the reading experience. Thinking of the book as a piece of professional reporting from the field (and not from the author's imagination alone) is what raises the interesting questions and enables us to appreciate or wonder about the social and rhetorical skills of the implied reporter as we go along.
The gonzo reporter persona should be viewed as a (linguistic) product of the actual field in which the reporter has actually been.

Who is genuine?

Does our rhetoric reflect our real selves and actual character? Are we virtuous prior to our fine performance, or do we create our voices, our selves and our virtues on the spot, by means of rhetoric, from one occasion to the next? In histories of rhetoric, Plato usually represents the first view and Aristotle the other. It's like,

"Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?"

as Tom Waits put it to Sean O'Hagan in The Observer Magazine in October (adding that "all the big questions come up when you get sober.")

Down by the brook

"It is less effective to tell the whole news at once than to recount it detail by detail," writes Quintilian in a passage about evidentia as a virtue of style (Institutio Oratoria, 8,6,69). So this is about evidence not as logical proof, but evidence in the form of vivid description which makes remote things present, draws them before the eyes of the listeners and appeals to our emotions. About graphic details which give us a strong sense of having seen things for ourselves which we haven't.

A good detailed report comes from an eye witness whose ethos adds an air of documentation to the moving descriptions and assures us that in some sense they are factual. They may be highly selective, perhaps, but they're factual.

Sometimes, however, we may need and enjoy a detailed account so much that even if we know it's partly or wholly fabricated we still want to keep it. And we do keep it, if only because striking images tend to stay on our mind.

Queen Gertrude tells Laertes the whole news at once:

One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow; your sister's drown'd, Laertes.

But Laertes asks for details - Drown'd! O, where? - and then follows a gently spun account of Ophelia's suicide. Accurate facts are either unavailable or useless to live on by, and/so still we're allowed to see this for ourselves:

Queen: There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

We know that noone witnessed this and that we've witnessed it nonetheless.

First Person Significantly Feminine?

When a woman journalist is invited to use the first person or inject some more 'attitude' into a piece, it is often a coded entreaty to beef up a specifically female perspective. The request may seem inocuous enough, but in taking such an invitation a woman takes her first step away from the neutrality and freedom of being simply a writer, towards the ghetto of writing 'as a woman',

writes Zoe Heller---quoted by Chambers, Steiner and Fleming in the volume below from 2004.

This book treats the topic of personalized journalism under the heading Confessional journalism and 'therapy news' and challenges anyone's intuitive and/or research based :-) appreciation of the personal perspective in journalism

1) by connecting it partly to intimate, personal columns, partly to Daily Mail style news stories which "frame the facts in emotive language and foreground... emergency workers' feelings over their tasks" (219); and

2) by attributing the trend to a history of journalism which holds female journalists responsible for bringing out the human interest factor - well, emotion as such - in news stories.

Zoe Heller's point seems fair and important (and supports a point made in another part of the book called (quoting Liz Trotta) 'But I don't do weddings': women's entry into the profession).

But - the general story strikes me as a very negative one to pass on: They let the women in and from then on it's been one long slippery slope to life style magazine type broad sheets and vulgar sensationalist tabloids?

Two Years' Eve

I will be giving a talk tonight (in Copenhagen, in Danish) under the title: What's the meaning of gonzo? When writing an abstract for this event a few months back I decided that I wanted to discuss the curious fact that Hunter S. Thompson's suicide is often discussed as a more or less appropriate or consistent rhetorical choice ('was or wasn't this self-inflicted gunshot truly gonzo?'). And I am almost certain that neither I nor the organizers realized at the time that the date for the talk is in fact the anniversary of Hunter Thompson's death on Feb. 20, 2005. But that's what it is, and I'm glad we happened to seize the day.

I had some faith in my own ability as an actress

Here's Nellie Bly again, because, well, today is Shrove Monday and my son assumed the characteristics of an apple tree before walking off to kindergarten. I wonder what the mission will demand of him and what stories he'll bring back from the field. And I wonder which will be the more interesting - less limiting - role: that of apple tree or that of princess (my daughter's choice for Friday). It is not, of course, a matter of what you are, but what you do. And it's not what you are that holds you back, it's what you think you're not. Try googling phrases like that and they erode themselves. And nothing is but what is not?

The expression could indicate confusion between the world we think of as real and the world of dreams, a neat summary of a confused mind. But how confused is Macbeth at this point?

I said I believed I could.

ON the 22d of September I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management, etc. Did I think I had the courage to go through such an ordeal as the mission would demand? Could I assume the characteristics of insanity to such a degree that I could pass the doctors, live for a week among the insane without the authorities there finding out that I was only a "chiel amang 'em takin' notes?" I said I believed I could. I had some faith in my own ability as an actress and thought I could assume insanity long enough to accomplish any mission intrusted to me. Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

Read Nellie Bly's full story of her Ten Days in a Mad-House here (and save the original price of twenty-five cents for the publication which also includes "Trying to be a Servant: My strange experience at two employment agencies" and "Nellie Bly as a White Slave: Her experience in the role of a New York shop-girl making paper boxes").

Accidental Ethnography

[Arguments against introspective writing, continued]

Tony Dokoupil in the New Partisan is commenting on a negative review of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man. The review is written by memoirist Ann Marlowe who asks for more introspection in Norah Vincent's pages and encourages Vincent to write more about her own world than about that of the men she's investigating.

This makes Dokoupil rail against "Me Books" in general and the memoir - "arguably the most unambitious genre" - in particular:

Me Books are distinguished by the fact that the first-person voice is the only voice in the text, and “I-I-I” is tacitly believed to be the only seat of authority from which to report the world. [...] They want to pretend that what they publish is more than eloquent journal writing; that it’s cultural commentary; that their accidental adventures in addiction, divorce, death, and disease can be activated into episodes of accidental ethnography. Because, after all, we’re all cultural observers, we all have a story to tell, and all our personal opinions are valid by virtue of being lived. This, plainly enough, is buncombe.

Harsh words about the first person perspective (and not uncommon) - but what is it, then, that qualifies some first person accounts to count as valuable pieces of cultural commentary? How to avoid this 'ethnographic fallacy'?

Tony Dokoupil's own praise of Norah Vincent provides some answers, as Vincent is recognized for her way of making room for other voices in her text (which I too really appreciate about it) and for basing her story on actual field investigations ---in stead of, say, opening her heart at a given point in history, personal column (or personal blog) style, and writing a memoir based exclusively on her own particular personal history. But it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between genres like this and harder to define what's appropriate, valid and valuable in terms of giving a personal account of events.

I insist, of course, that the quality of the personal accounts remains more than a question of individual taste among readers, so---- I'll leave the blog for now and go work on my proposal to the research council. More about the latter matter later.

Show some attitude too

I've been looking around for more detailed arguments concerning the writers' rule of thumb to show and not tell, and I came across Darren Barefoot who is arguing against introspective writing in a blogpost which makes for a very sobering reading experience for a first person proponent like myself. For I've been encouraging introspection, haven't I, but that, says Barefoot,

advocates a “tell, don’t show” model of writing.

"Show, don’t tell” is, in my estimation, the number one rule of writing. As Mark Twain put it, “don’t say the old lady screamed…bring her on and let her scream.”

There's nothing new here (even if that quote is still fun, very evocative in sort of an Alfred Hitchcock manner), but then Barefoot makes a point of turning the showing into an actual show, a performance, which makes a writer's introspection valuable after all:

In this context, don’t say “I went out walking and felt sad”, say “I went out walking and saw a crazy lady” and let your description of her demonstrate your sadness. There are few ways of writing the former, but infinite ways of writing the latter.

Let your description of the old lady demonstrate your sadness, he says, and that, I think, is what I'm after in Ditlev Jensen who somehow seems eager not to demonstrate an attitude except, perhaps, from that of a radically open mind.

Concerns about Coffee

In a new series of articles in Politiken, Kristian Ditlev Jensen performs the act of Apprentice for a Day "in a number of colourful branches of trade", as the sidebar puts it. He has tried his luck as a cook (covered on Jan. 7), as a garbage collector (Jan. 14) and then in today's article which takes place in Nicaragua: as a coffee picker. (The concept does have an air of odd jobs performed during sabbatical years about it). In the coming weeks he'll be a halal butcher and an advertising agent too, and readers are encouraged to suggest other jobs for him to explore.

If I were to characterise Ditlev Jensen's approach in today's article (I haven't seen the first two) I'd call it exactly that: explorative. The reporter has been wondering what it's like to work as a coffee picker and goes on to try it out. "He wants to be treated like any other coffee picker. Don't show him special consideration or do anything out of the ordinary", says the representative for the coffee cooperative when she drops the reporter off at the edge of the rain forest in the mountains and leaves him to the care of Pedro, his new boss-for-a-day.

The reporter is an inexperienced, unskilled worker who does however have the talent to describe his experience in vivid detail: The wooden shacks in the forest, the meals of red beans and rice, cow's cheese and tortillas, heavily sugared cups of coffee, the rough wooden furniture and green plastic chairs. A yellow rain coat on a peg. And then, of course, the work: the dirt, the cob webs, the wind, the coffee berries, beans in baskets and sore fingers.

His approach is explorative, I said - but still it stays descriptive. Ditlev Jensen never seems to form an opinion about his material or decide on an angle on his story. The article has a subject and is quite informative, but it doesn't have a thesis since Ditlev Jensen makes no claims about his subject.

No guidance is provided concerning (his or our) view on the scenario which may seem justified in so far as the text is simply written as a diary/notebook and structured chronologically: "8.05 - half a basket later", "9.07 - automatically", "10.04 - straw hat", an so forth. What is more, the text is published in the life style section of the paper and is not supposed to be argumentative or to qualify as news worthy. Still it seems to me that there is a misunderstanding at play concerning the classical reporter's principle of showing and not telling. I do appreciate to have the scenario described to me, to have specific details brought forth that makes me able to draw conclusions on my own. But I like the reporter - especially a first hand witness and participant observer who includes his "I" in his story - to give the reader a sense of direction and of focus in the show: Why is this detail significant? You picked it out to be included in the presentation - and what are you trying to say? What is it all adding up to?

The only sense of conclusion and evaluation of the experience (except for Pedro's final estimate of Ditlev Jensen's efficiency as a worker as being way below average) is added as a note at the end and is concerned with what turns out to be the excuisite quality of coffee from Pedro's particular piece of land. Ditlev Jensen reports that in cooperation with a Danish coffee importer he will do his best to buy Pedro some more land in order to finally, perhaps, make this fine coffee available to Danish consumers. This, however, is presented as more of an accidental twist to the story.

Kristian Ditlev Jensen manages to communicate a general sense of empathy with the workers and a genuine interest in their "colourful trade" by stepping into their shoes and making careful notes for his readers in the process. But as the reader's guide in the scenario, he comes across as being at once passionate and vague; a rhetorical agent without an agenda.

Gonzo ere long done do does did

Critics tend to be charmed and even corrupted by reflexive reporters, because these reporters take such an explicit interest in the rhetorical functions of their own work (or so I have been arguing). Basically, these reporters seem to care about rhetoric, and their celebration of individual rhetorical agency (especially their own) can be contagious.

Obviously, however, some critics are harder to charm than others, and when it comes to being charmed by Hunter Thompson, my aforementioned colleague can be counted among the tougher cookies and so can Wayne C. Booth who once made the following estimate of Thompson's persuasive powers as a political reporter:

The only reason Thompson gives us to believe what he says is what we professors of rhetoric call his ethos; he works very hard to establish his character as the main proof of what he has to say. But shit, man, his ethos ain't no fucking good [...] I will believe nothing Thompson tells me, unless I have corroboration.

Now this isn't any old rhetorical critic making a mindless critique (and a pathetic parody) of Hunter S. Thompson (and neither is my colleague). This is Booth, quite a connoisseur of ethical appeals - and of irony - who is reviewing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 for the Columbia Journalism Review back in 1973. I'll leave his words seething like this for now and return with a comment when I get hold of a copy of the article and I'm able to read his argument in full.

*

I know it's not a competition, but Wayne's on your side! and I can't help humming The Smiths' Cemetery Gates and wondering who's on mine.

You say: "ere long done do does did" / words which could only be your own / you then produce the text / from whence was ripped / (some dizzy whore, 1804) / A dreaded sunny day / so let's go where we're happy / and I meet you at the cemetery gates / Keats and Yeats are on your side / a dreaded sunny day / so let's go where we're wanted / and I meet you at the cemetery gates / Keats and Yeats are on your side / but you lose / because Wilde is on mine.

Mind the Wave

Last week I was discussing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with a close colleague who had read the book a few years back and remembered it as unimpressive or simply tiresome with its Ooh-I'm-such-a-madman-ain't-I!? first person narrative.

I see her point, of course. And the movies, the promotion and all the heyhogonzo quotations and images circling around have supported that very impression.

I beg to differ though and want to draw attention to the contrasts in the narrative, the way the tone shifts from hectic to level-headed, from frantic to pensive. And encouraged this week to SHARE A BRAINWAVE I took the opportunity to quote one of the memorable non-frantic passages at length. (As a rhetorician by training, I was happy to see that passage branded by wikipedians as simply the Wave Speech.)

Down with Diabetes

My story from this third scenario would have had the feel of an undercover story.

3.
I was 25, and from one day in July to the next I assumed the identity of a full-time, insuline-demanding diabetic. From a casual student life I stepped into the shoes of someone with obvious reasons to eat properly and at regular intervals all day, every day, for the rest of her days, and who actually injected that insuline and handled the bloodsugar measuring devices. One who knew how to distinguish between hyper- and hypoglycemia and instructed her family and friends how to deal with her in case of either.

The shoes were mine, of course. An endless amount of new words found their way into my vocabulary, there were the hyper and hypo kinds as well as all those words that designated the contents of my food and their impact on my body.

It was all a blow to my immune defense as well as to my general aesthetics: I had gone undercover as this dull patient and I wanted to call it off. Perhaps my resentment was somewhat similar to that of many old people when they get the offer to go live in a rest home: Thank you, this is all fine and perfectly sensible, but no thanks, it is really not my thing.

And just like Norah Vincent eventually had a nervous breakdown, a serious identity crisis towards the end of her undercover adventure as a man, I had my crisis and made my most spectacular scene upon entering a supermarket for the first time after leaving the hospital as a newly-appointed Type 1 diabetic. I had hardly stepped into the store and taken a glance down the aisles when I panicked and just about fainted when every single item on the shelves seemed to disintegrate in front of my eyes into potentially harmful particles, hydrates:-0 that I would never be able to identify and never dare consume.

I'm fine now though. A daring consumer like the rest of you.

Clueless at the Qumran

Here's a second scenario in which a skilled reporter might have found material for a really neat story:

2.
I was 18 then, and as chance would have it (it is indeed striking how much chance had to say in those days) I found myself working in a cafeteria by the Qumran Caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were originally discovered. I was selling ice cream, soft drinks and tacky postcards showing guys with broad smiles, their bodies smeared in (mineral-rich) Dead Sea mud and their hands busy leaving dirty finger prints on girls in pink bikinis.

I was also cleaning rooms in the guest house where a group of scroll scholars from California were staying for a while. Sometimes they left their boxes of chocolate chip cookies open in their rooms as a treat - or perhaps as a test of the room maids; we were never quite sure. It seems likely, though, that no kind of intentions were involved at all. Their scholarly work, however, seemed surrounded by controversy to say the least, mainly concerning the publication of the scrolls, i.e. questions of who got access to the material and when. There was this Indiana Jones style mystery simmering quietly in their conversations (one book on the topic, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh's The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, came out around that time), and two names I still remember: Eisenman, because he seemed to actually somehow play the part of Indiana Jones in this setup by the Dead Sea, and Battenfield, because he was kind enough to show me and a couple of my co-workers around the Masada on one of our days off.

Their stories, and we heard most of them from students in the group, were solemn and intriguing and ridiculously hard to follow, and I promised myself to look into these scroll matters upon my return to Denmark - which obviously I never got around to. So ultimately my coverage of the scenario limited itself to enthusiastic, undetailed eye-witness accounts in the tacky postcard format.

State of the Art of Danish Journalism

Is there even such a thing as journalistic langauge, asked associate professor (+ literary editor and reviewer at Ekstra-Bladet) John Christian Jørgensen in a lecture given at the University of Copenhagen today on the occasion of his retirement - and yes, he offered his own answer too.

In Denmark, he said, there is indeed such a thing as news language in journalism, a style of presentation which was imported from America in the 1920'es and was still dominant when journalism appeared as a subject in Danish university courses in the late 1940'es. From then on the style was officially taught. Today it is still well known, based as it is on principles of brevity and simplicity with one piece of information per short sentence. A typical text consists of a summary lead plus a textual body and is built according to the inverted pyramid style which means putting any important information first, thus making editors able to abbreviate news articles by chopping the last sentence, the last paragraph, the second-to-last paragraph, or if need be: the whole body of the text and keeping nothing but the lead, without losing the essentials of the story.

This main current is of course challenged by counter-currents, and Jørgensen presented three of these alternative styles which he found to have been significant in Danish journalism over the years: the New Journalism (as conceptualized in 1973 by Tom Wolfe in 4 bullet points), literary journalism (as conceptualized in 1995 by Mark Kramer - but in 8 bullet points which to Jørgensen's experience is at least four too many for them to be remembered by anyone) and finally narrative journalism which seems to have caught on in a serious way, firstly by being intensively studied and theorized and secondly, more importantly, by actually being used by reporters in (at least openings of) news features where reporters present a scene or use a style indirect libre to create narrative suspense in stead of simply revealing the main points of their story from the start. This happens frequently on the front page of a big daily paper like Politiken and had, according to Jørgensen, been unthinkable just five years ago.

After his lecture came speech upon speech (upon a mock exam of graduation) upon speech from colleagues as well as students which recognized Jørgensen's immense ability to get an immense amount of good work done. Basically, he has worked hard as a researcher, teacher, supervisor, writer, journalist, reviewer in a careful, generous and enthusiastic manner. No wonder that he has chosen to retire early, that is: on his 63th birthday.

I want to thank him too for excellent support during my three years as a PhD student. Thanks a lot.

Five things? Here's one...

Nadja has tagged me to tell you five things you didn’t know about me. Let’s make it five things that I would have covered in the first person singular if I’d been an awesome reporter and not just a plain style diarist at the time. Here comes the first one - four more will follow before long:

1.
When I was 17 and had decided to drop out of high school for a while, I got to work as a witness for tax collectors in my home town. This was basically a cheap way for the city administration to observe the rule that at least two persons had to be present when citizens were confronted with their depts on their own doorstep. In this very dubious capacity of teenage monitor, I visited various parts of Odense and tried to keep a low profile, looking at people’s knick-knacks or bookshelves and patting their dogs while the tax collector did his thing, i.e. made arrangements for payment. I was supposed to somehow guarantee that everything was done in accordance with the rules, and the only rule I still remember being aware of is this one: No matter how much money you owe them, they can’t take your TV.

I've been reading this multimillion-copy bestseller

And it's an absolutely fantastic book. In 1959 Griffin darkens his skin (through the use of medication as well as a sun lamp), shaves his head and then spends six weeks getting firsthand experience of what it's like to live as a black man in the Deep South.

When seeing his new self in the mirror for the first time,

the transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. ...

I had gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man, when the black won't rub off. The black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me. ... For a few weeks I must be this aging, bald Negro; I must walk through a land hostile to my colour, hostile to my skin.

How did one start? ... I was a man born old at midnight into a new life. How does such a man act?

Doormat II

I made a promise to give Nova a second chance and, well, the second issue of the magazine appears just as dominated by the you-form as the first one: "Here's why your surroundings don't love your new self".

The direct address is quite a standard convention in this type of magazine, I suppose, and it's meant to be friendly-but-firm with you. I really don't like it. And it seems ironic that five different women, including Leonora Christina Skov, 30, as the youngest among them, have been asked to write a letter to their younger selves, that is: they've been asked to use the first person singular to address themselves in the second person singular, and they do so mainly with encouragement and comfort (don't worry, you'll be fine!), but also with reproval. In fact, journalist and writer Lone Kühlmann, 61, brings out the topos of the doormat again as she tells her younger self in a friendly-but-firm tone:

If you lie down and make like a doormat, don't be surprised if someone comes and wipe their feet on the back of your neck.

It's just a hackneyed phrase, I know, but with so many phrases to choose from---isn't it striking and somewhat appalling that a woman will address another woman by the title of doormat in two out of two issues of a brand new women's magazine?

Business and Pleasure

A Happy New Year to all passers-by, and thanks to Levende for the comment below about reporters who explicitly draw on their personal and professional background when they write:

Writers who do this [i.e. use their (familiy) backgrounds as material for their writing] have a lot of self-confidence, and because they have the courage to show themselves as whole beings, they cannot not use the first person singular. And because of this openness and courage, they appear somewhat fearless.

I like the sense of dealing with whole beings too. I appreciate it when reviewers and other first person writers commit to their own rhetorical record; when they appear to take responsibility for their work by actively and explicitly integrating their professional subjects and tasks into their personal aesthetics from one case to the next. (And when I say aesthetics it is meant to include ethics.)

We're closing in on a formal definition of integrity now. Wholeness; soundness. The ability to integrate business and pleasure?

And speaking of integrity: In the 2004 issue of Reflexioner (and that's the one reflecting on stars) Nadja Pass has pointed out that just as a star is held together by opposite forces: gravity and radiation, human star quality is all about striking a balance between integrity and charisma. A really keen observation which brings me back to my aforementioned article-in-progress in high spirits.