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.”
Thursday, May 24, 2007
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 It seems that the late Wayne C. Booth shared Lars' concerns, as apparently Booth left an unpublished manuscript, "The Curse of Sincerity", which celebrates hypocrisy, or what Booth calls "hypocrisy upward".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:
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
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,
Kevin Kizer relates how Hunter S. Thompson
Joan Didion relates how one summer she and her husband John 'fell into a pattern of stopping work', i.e. writing,
Close 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.
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.)
Monday, May 21, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, May 14, 2007
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?
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?
Friday, May 11, 2007
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?
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?
Thursday, May 10, 2007
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.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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)
Monday, May 07, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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".
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".
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