The first person in print

The Last Person in Print

2008-04-29T14:57:00.002+02:00

End of Blog.

News in Danish: Velkommen i taletanken

2008-03-12T14:08:00.006+01:00

A rhetoricians' think tank, a collaborative blog devoted to everyday rhetorical criticism, has opened at http://taletank.wordpress.com/. So - if your Danish skills allow it - please drop by and think aloud.

Challenge the Straw Man #1: Still more informants become narrators

2008-03-12T08:27:00.012+01:00

So is it really still controversial for reporters to make use of the first person or to get otherwise personal in their writing style?

In their recent article on image-evoking language constructions in written news (which appeared in Nordicom Review) Ebbe Grunwald and Jørgen Lauridsen have a pretty clear statistical answer to the 'otherwise' part of my question:

Parallel to [...] relatively rapid changes in the newspaper medium itself, new writing and narrative forms have appeared. The known genres, e.g. news journalism, constructed within the frames of the 'inverted pyramid' now often appear as hybrid forms. This means that personal styles of expression more frequently find their way into newspaper articles where they challenge the anonymous writing style of traditional journalism. (p. 93-94)

Grunwald and Lauridsen are mapping the use of exposures, a.k.a. linguistic image constructions, a.k.a. showing as opposed to telling, in five Danish national papers to discover how frequently such techniques are used.

It is a premise of their investigation that as soon as a reporter creates an image ("the faces of our creditors look more and more disbelieving") instead of making a general or abstract statement ("the credit-worthiness of the country has deteriorated"; this is Grunwald and Lauridsen's example), the reporter becomes an active narrator rather than simply an informant. When you invent an image like that you have obviously made an interpretation, selected and emphasised certain aspects of the material at the expense of others. As a consequence, the journalist's presence and her function as a rhetorical decision maker becomes visible, and readers begin to form an opinion about the journalist and her credibility.

Grunwald and Lauridsen conclude that exposures have in fact found their way into Danish news journalism, but the frequency varies from one paper to the next (the most image evoking news journalism is found in Politiken and Ekstra Bladet).

So the traditional paradigm of news journalism is still powerful - the straw man is not all straw - but our journalistic informants do seem to become still more willing to explicitly adopt the role of narrators.

As for the force and impact of these linguistic exposures as an indicator of increased narrator activity, Grunwald and Lauridsen have studied that too. I'll get back to that part in a later episode of Attack the Straw Man.

Men-of-Straw We Live By

2008-03-10T08:29:00.005+01:00

Many research projects take a conventional truth as their starting point: "It is often said that...", "It is widely believed that..."- and then the researcher goes ahead and challenges this truth. The approach makes sense, of course, but sometimes these truths that we're up against are presented in a somewhat distorted fashion. Our supposed opponents are shaped as a caricature suited to serve as a foil to our own claims.

(Note how I'm saying 'we', as I'm just about to challenge my very own straw man.)

Well, whenever I have introduced my PhD work I have been claiming that, surprisingly, it is still possible for print reporters to cause a stir by using the first person singular. Teachers and handbooks of journalism still advise against it; readers still react strongly to it as they write letters to the editor expressing their love or hate for reporters who make the rhetorical choice to enter the stage themselves at the expense of the story they were supposed to be covering; and the recent (afore-mentioned) debate at WriterL proves that the first person singular in reporting remains (again: somewhat surprisingly) a narrative form that quite a few people, even among feature journalists devoted to long narrative forms, still take a strong and general stand against: Don't do it! Don't say I! It's too hard to do it well, and remember, as another objection goes, that you're a reporter, not an artist.

But the times they are a-changin', of course, and as professor Martin Eide wrote in a review of my dissertation (Rhetorica Scandinavica 41/2007): Is it not a galopping norm these days that journalists must "put themselves on the line?"

In the coming posts, I'll make an effort to discover how much of a gallop we're talking about and how much straw should be pulled out of my straw man.

Input is welcome:
Do reporters (and note that we're not talking about columnists and commentators) get personal in the papers you're reading - and does it make you raise an eyebrow at all?

Facts are a dead horse

2008-02-25T12:22:00.000+01:00

According to this weekend's issue of Information, a number of historiographic passages in Åsne Seierstad's Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya were removed in the editing process. It is Seierstad herself who reports this during a debate meeting in Copenhagen last week, and she argues that such passages tend to lessen the emotional impact of the narrative.

This is not a controversial statement in itself, but apparently her opponent in the debate asks about a specific part of history which he finds highly relevant to the story and yet missing from her book.

It was covered in the original manuscript, says Seierstad and refers to her editor who read that particular passage and then stated that "facts are a dead horse".

Now this is a controversial statement in itself. The phrase is an expression of resignation which completely outmatches the journalistic notion of BBIs, boring but important passages or entire boring but important stories, by saying either

BNI, boring so nevermind the importance, or worse:

IBDH, important - but dead horse.

Return of the Toggle Switch

2008-02-21T23:04:00.001+01:00

So I presented Brian's legendary speech - and what was my point?

Well, I really like the speaker's blunt attempt to grant his audience rhetorical agency - which really, of course, he isn't, because he is not giving these people any directions or specific challenges to work with. He simply tells them that they need to think for themselves. Generally.

As a basic message listen to me, but think for yourselves is a fine principle to stick to for journalists and for rhetors in general. But there is no way to assert this freedom as a general principle. It must be done in specific relation to the given situation. Rhetorical agency must be granted from case to case by means of perhaps some more information, provocation, flattery, irony or fresh imagery.

Any rhetorical situation is heavily constrained by audience expectations that the rhetor must accept and then challenge. For "rhetorical agency is possible only within the communication practices of a given community of discourse", says a definition at Kairosnews which pops up in a google search for 'rhetorical agency'.

And now we're approaching the topic of the I's:

Somewhat surprisingly, the gesture of switching to the first person in a piece of news journalism still counts as a way of breaking the rules and thwart audience expectations (may I quote Nadja who expressed in a comment below how she "really - as in REALLY - never understood" why this is so). Saying "I" is a way of challenging the usual authoritative perspective of the press by reminding the reader that the reporter is a person with an individual sense of judgment.

But often the first person reporter not only draws attention to her own limited perspective, but also, by implication, to a false aura of authority and objectivity in the work of her colleagues. She distances herself from the rhetoric she herself is dealing in, as she decides to talk more plainly.

This is a very real dilemma - and readers may well join this brave and honest reporter in her adoption of the oppositional stance. Tell us! Tell us more!! And the first person narrative may become an appeal to free thinking and action which is really just as general and vague and paralysing as that of Brian. To distance yourself from the discourse you need to use is obviously paralysing. For it is not a question of either-or, honest or dishonest, subjective or objective, master or slave.

So what is it? What am I suggesting?

That we be specific in matter as we outline our situation.

And that we take manner seriously as part of the matter.

And, finally, that we try to change perspectives as we go along. Work the toggle switch and direct attention back and forth from manner to matter or from the fluff to the stuff (I've been told that this is Richard Lanham's latest popular rephrasing of this (his) concept of rhetorical toggling between depth and surface).

I.e. expose your rhetoric as rhetoric even as you are asserting what you consider to be an important truth. Because it is rhetoric, and most audiences need to be reminded of this, I believe, in order to be able to think for themselves.

I should exemplify and I will, but not tonight.

Now listen to me

2008-02-19T14:53:00.001+01:00

BRIAN:
No. No, please! Please! Please listen. I've got one or two things to say.

FOLLOWERS:
Tell us. Tell us both of them.

BRIAN:
Look. You've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals!

FOLLOWERS:
Yes, we're all individuals!

BRIAN:
You're all different!

FOLLOWERS:
Yes, we are all different!

DENNIS:
I'm not.

ARTHUR:
Shhhh.

FOLLOWERS:
Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.

BRIAN:
You've all got to work it out for yourselves!

FOLLOWERS:
Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!

BRIAN:
Exactly!

FOLLOWERS:
Tell us more!

The presidential pronoun

2008-02-08T09:25:00.000+01:00

In a current discussion at WriterL about writing in the first person, one member suggests that you avoid "I" alright, but still allow yourself to use "me". If you follow this rule of thumb you avoid placing yourself at the very beginning of your articles and sentences and avoid looking blatantly self-centered. This is a fine piece of advice, comparable with the old and quite challenging convention of never opening a personal letter by saying: I...

Still, of course, your rhetoric may well be centered completely on yourself and address your personal supporters exclusively, if only perhaps in more of an elegant manner. Mind the following analysis. It is Joe Klein at Time who takes a look at Barack Obama's use of personal pronouns, and I quote at length:

"We are the ones we've been waiting for," Barack Obama said in yet another memorable election-night speech on Super-Confusing Tuesday. "We are the change that we seek." Waiting to hear what Obama has to say — win, lose or tie — has become the most anticipated event of any given primary night. The man's use of pronouns (never I), of inspirational language and of poetic meter — "WE are the CHANGE that we SEEK" — is unprecedented in recent memory. Yes, Ronald Reagan could give great set-piece speeches on grand occasions, and so could John F. Kennedy, but Obama's ability to toss one off, different each week, is simply breathtaking. His New Hampshire concession speech, with the refrain "Yes, We Can," was turned into a brilliant music video featuring an array of young, hip, talented and beautiful celebrities. The video, stark in black-and-white, raised an existential question for Democrats: How can you not be moved by this? How can you vote against the future?

And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — "We are the ones we've been waiting for" — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you." That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.
Read the rest of the article at http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1710721,00.html.

The overall strategy described here seems somehow related to the step-by-step introduction of self - first "they", then "we", then "me" and then, finally, "I" - that I have been pointing out in Lisbeth Davidsen and Åsne Seierstad's reporting. In this political context it might work well as a buildup of expectations to the elections; an approach based on pure formal identification (in Kenneth Burke's sense) on a macro (campaign) level:

Use "you", "we" and the occasional "me" on the campaign trail, but keep your "I" on hold until you're finally in a position to say: "I, the president of the United States..." Voters may swing along with the verbal gradation and decide to help their candidate release the ultimate personal pronoun.

That's me in the corner

2008-01-15T13:47:00.001+01:00

One of the first person singular users at Rumspringa Magazine, David Jacobsen Turner, is presently (was recently?) a trainee at Weekendavisen, a Danish weekly which sports the slogan "Personlighedernes avis", i.e. the paper for personalities, strong characters.

And David Jacobsen Turner reports back to the student magazine Lixen how the atmosphere at the editorial offices is nothing like that of the notorious hectic and buzzing news room. Staff members tend to be quietly absorbed in their con amore projects, no stories are obligatory, no trips are simple duty calls. The staff consists of an equal mix of trained journalists and academics who are often able to rely on each other's expertise rather than the usual suspect experts used in other media.

It sounds like a caricature, and David Turner knows that it does: He has been assigned a snug office of his own just down the hall from these people, and the risk of developing self-obesity is immediate!

Yet he can't believe his luck: "I fucking freaking love Weekendavisen," declares the trainee and relates how he is free to dispose of the standard news pyramid structure in his articles, how he has said "perhaps" in three subheadings already and, of course, how he says "I":

I write 'I'. You bet that I do. I-I-I-I-I.

Read all about it (in Danish) at Lixen; use the search word: "egoboost".

More media, more messages

2007-12-21T10:48:00.000+01:00

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

2007-12-06T15:56:00.000+01:00

Veranda revisited:

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

How to point your fingers at people

2007-11-20T14:41:00.000+01:00

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

2007-11-09T14:07:00.001+01:00

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...

2007-11-09T13:03:00.000+01:00

...then what?

Close Writing by Sontag

2007-11-08T15:54:00.000+01:00

“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

2007-10-24T09:34:00.001+02:00

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

2007-09-14T13:13:00.001+02:00

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"

2007-09-05T15:21:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-09-05T10:26:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-31T09:07:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-08-27T14:08:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-13T14:26:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-08-09T13:35:00.000+02:00

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

2007-08-08T15:55:00.000+02:00

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

2007-07-12T13:03:00.001+02:00

And good-looking too

2007-07-02T11:55:00.000+02:00

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

2007-06-29T17:12:00.000+02:00

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

first we (social dynamics are dictating my behaviour!),
then me (hey, somebody else is turning me into an accomplice!) and then
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

2007-06-13T10:53:00.000+02:00

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

2007-06-06T10:47:00.001+02:00

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

2007-05-24T20:45:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-23T14:37:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-05-21T10:54:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-05-14T14:51:00.000+02:00

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?

2007-05-11T13:39:00.000+02:00

”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

2007-05-10T11:48:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-08T15:27:00.000+02:00

"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

2007-05-07T11:43:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-02T12:00:00.000+02:00

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

2007-04-25T13:30:00.000+02:00

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

2007-04-24T09:59:00.000+02:00

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

2007-03-21T14:28:00.000+01:00

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?

2007-03-14T14:17:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-08T23:13:00.000+01:00

"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?

2007-03-07T13:58:00.000+01:00

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

2007-02-20T00:22:00.000+01:00

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

2007-02-19T10:05:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-02-15T21:58:00.000+01:00

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

2007-02-15T09:30:00.000+01:00

[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

2007-02-01T21:59:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-28T13:01:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-25T11:44:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-23T21:37:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-18T09:50:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-16T12:16:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-15T22:02:00.000+01:00

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...

2007-01-13T22:23:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-10T22:34:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-08T14:56:00.000+01:00

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

2007-01-02T21:49:00.000+01:00

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.

Yule-tide and Star Quality

2006-12-11T09:42:00.000+01:00

I'm taking a break and will be returning to my blogspot in January. Meanwhile, I'll be working on an article concerned with the question of star quality in reporters. What gives a reporter his or her license to use the first person singular in print? How is such star quality manifest in the text; how is it being justified, maintained and reinforced in the actual writing? Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Merry Christmas.

I'm o.k. and you're some sort of doormat?

2006-12-04T21:16:00.000+01:00

Recently I missed a chance to publicly discuss a Danish women's magazine called Nova which is addressed to grown women ("We don't care if you're 35 or 65. If you feel welcome you are welcome"). Here comes a blogpost in stead.

The new magazine which came out on November 23 has adopted the first person singular a lot, as members of the writing staff share their personal experience with readers (the editor in chief, Mette Holbæk, writes a lot of the copy and serves as a permanent cover girl too.) What struck me, however, on reading the magazine wasn't the first person singular as much as the second: "Are you the office doormat? Why you die from being nice." In this fashion, the would be invitational "I" is subverted and one's reading of the stories constantly constrained by heavy-handed guidance.

For instance, a prominent story by Winnie Haarløv written in the first person singular on how I learned that no love can be wrong (as I decided to date a 15-year old pupil of mine) is accompanied by a sidebar giving you 5 good reasons that you would want to pick a younger (!) man too. What seems to begin in a humourous tone turns into very specific recommendations of the sort that "it becomes natural for you to take good care of your skin, eat sensibly and avoid [wearing your comfortable] track suit pants on Saturdays."

And "a diet do-gooder's confessions" about how I learned to listen to my body is accompanied by another sidebar containing categorical pieces of expertise including, for instance, the fact that white bread, white rice and pasta can be counted as "one of the greatest health and nutritional catastrophes of modern food" (so maybe I'm ready to listen to my body, but maybe you had better not listen to yours after all).

Basically, the imperative you-form mocks the readers' ability to process the stories on their own. At least that's how it sounds to me. So just for the record: I'm 33 and I did not feel welcome.

What is journalism anyway?

2006-11-29T22:57:00.000+01:00

What makes Bridget Jones's Diary count as journalism? Apparently Helen Fielding refused to write a column for the Independent about her own life and invented Bridget Jones's instead. One of these explicitly fictive and satirical diary entries - Bridget's record of a dinner party with a number of 'smug marrieds' - has been included in Eleanor Mills' Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs: 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women, and by way of introduction Fielding is quoted as saying that

everyone else was writing about politics, and I was writing about why you can't find a pair of tights in the morning and losing weight.

The editors add nothing but a vague comment that "the columns struck a chord with a generation of women" which obviously they did, but I still wonder in what sense the texts are journalistic----so the title of this post is not posed as a rhetorical question.

What does make columns in general journalistic (what would have made a column about Fielding's own life journalistic)? And what makes a fictive diary journalistic?

Not to be

2006-11-17T13:51:00.000+01:00

No, photographic immediacy is hard to achieve in writing - so here is how Thompson expanded his ideal idea of gonzo journalism (and this is the purple passage that I had in mind on Monday night; it is located along with the Cartier-Bresson passage in The Great Shark Hunt around page 115):

True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.

To be or not to be a fly on the wall

2006-11-15T14:17:00.000+01:00

Morten Sabroe paid a visit to the Division of Rhetoric on Monday night and was telling a group of students how he is currently doing research for a story, a portrait piece, and is going on a trip the coming weekend with the man he is portraying:

"I'll try to be a fly on wall... ha, it's a shame that we're such damned big flies."

Elaborating this thought Sabroe then referred to Hunter S. Thompon's jacket copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and related how Thompson had attempted to work as a cool observer in the photographic style of Henri Cartier-Bresson -- and I couldn't believe how he was able to remember that certain passage so wrongly - I even protested from my seat, but, erhh... it turns out that there was no reason to protest. Sabroe's memory was quite accurate. Thompson writes:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in gonzo journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication - without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera . The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive - but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting...no editing.

The passage that I had taken note of - and assumed that Sabroe had in mind as well - follows hard upon, I'll get back to it. For now I just stand corrected and will leave you with Cartier-Bresson who was concerned with

the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.

The sorry truth

2006-11-12T22:37:00.000+01:00

"Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit," said Edward R. Murrow.

Quantify your optimism

2006-11-09T13:34:00.000+01:00

So if you want to change anything you have to confirm something too (this was one conclusion to the exchange on totem journalism below). You have to establish some common ground and speak in a familiar language in order to (then) introduce some more provocative thinking and make an attempt to move your audience in new directions.

Norman Mailer makes a categorical estimate as to how much "urgent, passionate expression" is usually allowed in relation and in proportion to what he terms "the resistant mechanical network of past social ideas, platitudes and lies":

One must accept the sluggish fictions of society for at least nine-tenths of one's expression in order to present deceptively the remaining tenth which may be new. Social communication is the doom of every truly felt thought.

Making a clean distinction like this between empty and truly original rhetoric (and thought) is definitely problematic, and personally I'm not sure that I even recognize the notion of communication which is not social - ? (except that opening my blog was a striking experience in terms of being only very vaguely social in a public forum.)

It's still interesting, though, to see how Mailer is ready to quantify his personal communicative pessimism, and I dare anyone to do the same. Perhaps Mailer is really rather optimistic in seeing his glass as one tenth full?

Gentle fun, ratty hair

2006-11-07T22:47:00.000+01:00

Here is the passage from Tom Wolfe which is echoing in my post on Camilla Stockmann's reporting from the Copenhagen art scene last Saturday. In his introduction to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Wolfe is discussing totem stories in totem news papers, the latter being defined like this:

A totem news paper is the kind people don't really buy to read but just to have, physically, because they know it supports their own outlook on life. They're just like the buffalo tongues the Omaha Indians used to carry around or the dog ears the Mahili clan carried around in Bengal.

The totem story is the type of story Wolfe himself wrote on his first visit to the Hot Rod & Custom Car Show in New York in the early 1960'es,

a story that would have suited any of the totem newspapers. All the totem newspapers would regard one of these shows as a sideshow, a panopticon, for creeps and kooks; not even wealthy, eccentric creeps and kooks, which would be all right, but lower class creeps and nutballs with dermatitic skin and ratty hair. The totem story usually makes what is known as "gentle fun" of this, which is a way of saying, don't worry, these people are nothing.

(Wolfe's story doesn't end there by the totem pole, of course. Some other new journalism grew from it.)

Debut Blurb

2006-11-02T15:08:00.000+01:00

I've been blurbed? I have blurbed? I blurbed? Well... I am being quoted (from the interview by Susanne Nielsen in August) on the cover - or the flap [is that really the proper English term?] - of Morten Sabroe's Rejsen til Amerika [The Journey to America] which has just come out. The one which came out the other day was a novel; this title is a new anthology of Sabroe's (quite recent) journalism, introduced and commented on by Sabroe.

I've just read the first part, and I really like the tone of the newly written material. His commentary style is quite brief and understated, and even if he is indeed telling the story of his encounter with Hunter S. Thompson once again, he does it well. This occasion is different and, accordingly, so is the story. In my opinion. So I stand by my blurb: Sabroe has been remarkably consistent - other blurbed adjectives include 'ambitious' and 'imaginative' - in his exploration of his own reporter persona and its potential. From one occasion to the next he has given some thought to his peculiar manners and what they are good for in journalism and in criticism of journalism. And I'll try and get more specific on these matters before long...

Nothing to worry about

2006-10-30T22:26:00.000+01:00

Saturday, reporter Camilla Stockmann wrote (and documented with her own photographic snapshots) quite a dramatic story in Politiken concerned with a couple of activists, two foreigners, a man and a woman, who have been making a scene in Copenhagen art galleries lately, masturbating in front of art works, shouting insults, peeing, bringing along excrements and the like. Stockmann sets out in the first person singular to find out who they are and what they are up to.

It is a remarkable adventure which still strikes me as an epideictic piece of reporting --- epideictic as in confirmative epideictic oratory made on special occasions like national holidays, birthdays or funerals. Traditionally, the epideictic speaker is seen to represent the community. The epideictic rhetor knows what values and ideals the auditors basically agree on, and in and by the speech these values must be enacted and consolidated. By the rhetor for the audience and on behalf of the audience which means that the epideictic speaker is constituted as some sort of cultural hero (Dale Sullivan’s term). So back to Camilla Stockmann as an investigator on the art scene – what is she then?

Well, she is a determined reporter who actually finds out who the two unwelcome guests are: Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz who have a history of making aggressive opposition to commercial and institutional art and who published Anti-Technologies of Resistance back in 1999. And Stockmann puts herself on the line in her story insofar as she tries to confront the two in order to be allowed to ask some questions and has a glass of water thrown in her face. Later on, by means of a determined look and a well-chosen line, she successfully wards off a glass of urine.

Camilla Stockmann never gets a chance to speak to the couple though. And after having identified them she doesn't fill the readers in about their artistic ambitions, at least not in any detail. And she never attempts her own answer to the question which is posed on the front page of Politiken on this occasion: "Is it art to piss on art?" - or actually: She does imply a reassuring no. Stockmann keeps herself detached along with the people she is talking to along the way. People who feel at home on the art scene and whom the readers of Politiken can happily identify with:

The people who are bothered by the activists include "the actor Ulrich Thomsen".

It is an artist (who "is originally Swedish-French") who eventually recalls having seen the two before: "Slowly he recalls their names: 'I believe the woman's name is Barbara ... Barbara Schultz... no Shurz.' ...

A gallery owner characterizes Shurz as "berliner-cafe latte-punk" which Stockmann confirms.

And a German visiting professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art who is witnessing Shurz peeing in a plastic cup still keeps his conversation with Stockmann going and remarks with cool detachment that

"this reminds me a bit of fluxus artist Carolee Schneeman back in the 1970'es who read aloud from a strip of paper which she pulled from her vagina. Something was at stake then. But the woman there is not good - you can tell how she doesn't feel good about herself after doing this."

Journalistic handbooks speak of the reporter's role as that of acting as a substitute for the reader and my point is: this is exactly what Stockmann is doing all too carefully. She seems to presume timidity in the readers so she offers us comfort. She keeps us classy company all along and assures us through arguments of authority not to worry: These people are harmless. They pose no threat to our community.

The Fall of M(&M's)

2006-10-26T09:13:00.000+02:00

May the reign of Michael, Mads and Morten soon come to an end, was Leonora Christina Skov's wish as she was pointing out how guys like (Michael) Jeppesen, (Mads) Brügger and (Morten) Sabroe are dominating the discussion of personal reporting in Denmark these days.

The latest issue of Danish KOM Magazine (published by communications trade union Kommunikation og Sprog) is a theme issue on rhetoric, and I have contributed an article about the reasons that journalists would want to play with the old topos of modesty "I'm not a public speaker, and yet I will now have a go..." Through a few examples I am trying to show how the explicit hesitation and explicit search for words in a piece of journalism may raise readers' awareness of various rhetorical mechanisms at play in the text and, by implication, in journalism in general.

Writing this piece and looking for illustrative textual material I turned to my stock of examples which, of course, is currently dominated by the M's already dominating my dissertation, and sure enough:

An M was flashing. Mads' this time.

So yes, well, I picked out two texts by Mads, both of them from Euroman in which Mads on one occasion is reporting from a weapon's fair and on another occasion from the festival Burning Man...

They are both good examples, and/but as sure as eggs is eggs: the sound of M&M's falling to the floor won't be provoked by me. Not this fall.

Back where it belongs

2006-10-24T23:14:00.000+02:00

About the dog and its origins, well, people close to me suggested simply looking it up in Dictionary of the Danish Language. And I simply did... which makes me able to announce that the dog phrase can be located in the literary work of Jens Baggesen and Sophus Schandorf and makes a first media appearance in Politiken in 1906.

Details in Danish:

// sagde hunden, (dagl., l. br.) anv. som en slags undskyldning for, at man nævner sig selv (jf. sagde drengen u. Dreng 4.1). *den Fjerde er jeg selv, sa'e Hunden. Bagges. III.355. smst.204. Hakon Jarl siger til Ejnar Tambeskælver: Jeg elsker dig fast som du var en Kvinde: jeg (sa' Hunden) vilde sige til Amalie Skram: Jeg elsker dig, som om du var en Mand. Schand.O. II.134. (vi) kommer trækkende med vognen – La's og mig, sa' Hunden. Pol. 19/2 1906.6.sp.1. FlensbA. 10/4 1910.1.sp.3. //

And about the boy who is mentioned alongside the dog:

Krist.Ordsprog og mundheld.(1890).423. (jf.636ff.). jf.: “Vi” var Operasanger N. N. . . den unge Forfatter P. W. og jeg selv, sagde Drengen. Pol. 18/6 1913.8.

And I guess this is it then...

Journalist meets novelist

2006-10-23T22:56:00.000+02:00

Journalist and novelist Morten Sabroe was interviewing himself in Weekendavisen last week on the subject of writing his latest novel Evig troskab (Eternal Fidelity), and at one point the self-conversation turns on his ambiguous or ambivalent role as a writer. It goes something like this (in my English):

"To begin with I had to get away from the language I use as a journalist. Which takes its time. And I didn't have the patience to distance myself from it, so I started writing the story in a very literary language. And precisely because I did that, I was still bound by journalism."
- Not understood.
"I fought hard not to sound like a journalist, and that was because I was still bound by journalism. It was a counterreaction. And you don't counterreact t if you're free from the one you're counterreacting to."
- Is this some sort of wisdom you're expressing?
"You're not done with you're wife as long as you're standing in front of her screaming: 'I'm done with you.'"

What Women

2006-10-13T22:37:00.000+02:00

Mmhh, I'm actually on my way on holiday, but before I go... in today's issue of Weekendavisen Leonora Christina Skov is praising a collection of 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women and calls it "a flying brick which must hit any lame excuse for ignoring women's journalism at two hundred kilometers an hour". And it does sound like a really good book --- flying my way at two hundred kilometers an hour. Thus Leonora Christina Skov opens her review by discussing my dissertation and approvingly so, but still pointing out, as she did on radio too, the absence of women reporters in my study.

What I'm still wondering is: Who would they be? To me it seems that spectacular, personal reporting by women is missing in contemporary Danish journalism - and therefore in my dissertation too. Female reporters that work undercover, for instance, usually just do their thing without creating a striking persona for themselves in their texts; they tend not to pose in any elaborate literary fashion. Women may do so as columnists, essayists or critics, but not often as reporters.

I'm grateful for any suggestions and willing to loosen up on the genre categories a bit. Suzanne Brøgger has been brought up before as she's definitely a self-fashioning writer and a daring one. And, well, I remember Lea Korsgaard on one occasion during her trainee period at Politiken was infiltrating some exclusive night club in Copenhagen and reporting from this adventure in the first person singular... but there must be others? Perhaps other examples from Weekendavisen? Or from magazines that I've overlooked?

Kill your dogs

2006-10-11T23:21:00.000+02:00

Yes, it's about that dog again. In the foreword to my phd dissertation I use that same Danish formula of modesty myself - "...me, said the dog" - mainly because I found it, well, ironically topical and illuminating in a dissertation concerned with the use of the first person singular. The phrase is a good example in a nutshell of the necessity (or annoying habit) to excuse yourself for attracting attention to your own person when you speak.

Anyway, I had (have) grown still more fond of the dog-phrase, because a reader of a draft of my text was totally confused by it. She'd never encountered the phrase before and left a big question mark in the margin. What dog?? And that incident made the somewhat stale phrase even more appealing to me. It was potentially strange and funny, even exclusive.

Which, however, it really isn't. And tonight a reader of the actual dissertation confessed that he found it totally uncool of me to use it. Not that he wasn't familiar with it, he just found it really trite and out of place. And I have to agree. That dog is a darling of the kind that I teach other people to kill. And now tonight my dog was killed - but it's still there, and I guess it won't go away until I get down to rewriting the dissertation and make my attempt to have it turned into a book.

How can that dog be barkin' in the backyard? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be runnin' by the backfence? We ran over him years ago Ghost of a dog Barkin' in the backyard How can that dog be scratchin' at the back door? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be lying under the shady tree Where we buried him years ago? Ghost of a dog Flyin' through the backyard.

So Gonzo equals Provo?

2006-10-09T22:33:00.000+02:00

"The Gonzo journalist is out to expose things, and no politician ought to feel safe," writes Martin Eide in a discussion of Norwegian writer Herman Willis' election campaign diary Kvalmende og hjerterått from 1997, but adds that Willis was never really a menace, if surely sometimes he was annoying:

His provocations became harmless, had to become harmless. For it is by no means easy to live out the part of the jester these days. The potential to expose by construing politics as a drama seems exhausted too. In a time when the mediafication and aesthetization of what journalists must cover is in your face and obvious, there is little exposé potential in construing something as stage managed and media adapted. [transl. from the essay "Den journalistiske hoffnarr"/The Journalistic Jester]

So how to be genuinely provocative in your gonzo writings these days?

Well, it seems that a journalist may earn the gonzo label through provocation - and that provocation tends to become the one single criterion for possessing that gonzo quality.

And provocation becomes a sad end in itself.

But who's being sad about it? Well, the other night I watched Mads Brügger on web tv discussing Hunter S. Thompson as a journalistic icon with host Sune Aagaard (which I paid for a one-year membership of Club dk4 to be able to). Aagaard was asking Brügger about the conditions for writing gonzo journalism in Denmark nowadays, and at one point Brügger was pinning down "the essence of gonzo" by introducing the story of journalist and former chief editor Claes Kastholm Hansen who is said to have defecated on the desk of a colleague at Ekstra-Bladet, used the curtains to wipe his bum and left the building. And thereby lost/quit his job. As far as I know, Kastholm didn't even write about the event, and I can't believe that Mads Brügger (who has written some of my favourite examples of contemporary Danish gonzo journalism) presents gonzo as just a matter of causing outrage and not giving a damn. 'The Gonzo journalist is out to defecate on your desk, and noone ought to feel safe' - ?

No Not the One You Heard About

2006-10-05T08:29:00.000+02:00

I saw Simone Kærn's exhibition Open Sky in Malmö, Sweden, in July when actually I had crossed Öresund courtesy of my brother to attend a music festival, Accelerator - the Big One. Kærn took me by surprise as I arrived at the exhibition hall not only unintendedly, but holding her project in low esteem. I'd just read about it in a newspaper, and Kærn's whole idea of flying to Kabul to make (or not to make) a dream of flying come true on behalf of a young Afghan girl in a story by Carsten Jensen seemed sort of old and sentimental hat.

In stead, the music festival was a disappointment (to me) and for all the opposite reasons. I had expected to be listening to fresh, cutting edge versions of all the bands I used to like... and I do see the attitude problem now, but I felt up to it all.

All ears, yet earplugs ready at hand.

And Regina Spektor was fantastic to begin with, singing and being a band on her own, playing the piano and drumming away with her drum sticks on a wooden chair, but her show and her lyrics became more and more curious and yes, well, self-indulgent by the song, and I felt as if I were visiting the weblog of a perfect stranger and grew tired of it. Silver Jews seemed hostile, and I felt only momentarily heartened when they reached the legendary line (of a song-in-character) that up until then I'd only heard my brother recite:

There is a house in New Orleans, no not the one you heard about, I'm talking about another house...

Anyway, we decided to leave the site for a few hours to go for a walk around Malmö. And happened to pass by Kunsthallen where Simone Aaberg Kærn's actual (and actually very little) airplane and her portraits of female pilots in World War II, paintings, videos and more, were on display.

When the exhibition hall was closing for the day, a guy had to pull my sleeve to make me put down the ear phones at a video of Kærn's visit to the States in the homes of some of the pilots who are still alive today. Basically I was caught up in a film of how Simone Kærn was drinking tea with an elderly lady and then getting up to go fly a plane with her. What old interesting and very absorbing hat. And nevermind the music festival and The Raconteurs who closed it for the day.

Simone in a War Zone

2006-10-01T14:07:00.000+02:00

Performance artist Simone Aaberg Kærn has told a spectacular personal docutale (in everything but print) of how she flew from Denmark to Afghanistan in an old and very small airplane. Kærn and her partner Magnus Bejmar's way of describing the project reminds me of various opening statements in texts by wallraffers and other concept-conscious reporters: "You can be upset about the war in Afghanistan", thus Magnus Bejmar, "or women's rights and write a letter to the editor and sit in a café and mope for three months, but come on, do something..." Like Günter Wallraff, Jakob Boeskov, Norah Vincent and others, Kærn had nothing but a basically useless indignation and a very abstract idea of things which nonetheless - like Wallraff, Boeskov, Vincent - she decides to act upon by assigning herself a very concrete task. Magnus Bejmar again:

We coined the term docutale. Reality told as a fairytale. Which fits the performance concept well, too: if you prod reality a bit by adding a new element to it, it shifts, which forces you to look at it differently. So it is with Simone, the flyer. She is the object we add to the world, that people have to relate to as we go along.

I'll get back to Simone Aaberg Kærn's story when I've had a chance to see the movie. I'm looking forward to it, even if I was never very fond of The Little Prince.

Intimacy and Gonzo Conservatism

2006-09-27T12:46:00.000+02:00

In the Agenda radio show on Saturday Suzanne Brøgger too was mentioned as a possible example of a Danish female gonzo journalist -- I quote the remark from memory that 'She wrote about being raped and that seems pretty gonzo to me'.

Suzanne Brøgger is a novelist and essayist and not a reporter, but she has been nominated in the gonzo category before (to me per e-mail, that is), as I've been encouraged to take a look at her autobiographical novel Creme Fraiche from 1978 which is very personal and very explicitly sexual. And very gonzo - ?

It seems to me that gonzo quality in this sense becomes a matter of the writer/reporter not only putting him- or herself 'on the line'. It seems to become implied that putting yourself on the line as a writer involves making intimate confessions, ultimately of a sexual sort. Hunter S. Thompson didn't do that though (or did he? I still have quite a few pages left to go). Besides from passages from his Rum Diary which to my mind is quite an atypical piece of juvenalia, I don't associate Thompson's writings with sexual (or romantic) confessions or stories of any kind.

Thompson is definitely putting himself on the line in terms of transcending social norms and standards as he confronts himself with the material and people he is supposed to be covering. And of course there's a lot of irony in his hallucinatory remark from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about being a professional and thus determined to "cover the story, for good or ill", but still -

he really is professional in his ways of adapting his written persona to the circumstances from one text to the next. It is done in a weird literary and experimental fashion, but it somehow remains journalism. And I definitely read him as being playfully semi-fictionally professional rather than intimately sincere or confessional.

My point is not that Gonzo Journalism should remain what it was in Thompson's day (even if I've been writing a lot about 'my category' and 'my sense of the words'). I'm curious about the ways that imitation/interpretation becomes creative and is adapted to peculiar local circumstances, and contemporary reporters definitely identify with the gonzo paradigm for different reasons. Now it seems to me that the abovementioned difference is an important one. In a Danish setting Henrik List seems to pull in the direction of confessional intimacy as proof of a reporter's integrity, and Morten Sabroe in the somehow more conservative direction of professionally playful literary journalism. They both expose their mixed motives and celebrate subjectivity in their writings, but one does it primarily on behalf of himself as a troubled man, the other primarily on behalf of himself as a troubled reporter. Eh?

Me in the Media (among others)

2006-09-23T20:47:00.000+02:00

The title of the programme Agenda earlier tonight on Danish FM-station P1 was Me in the Media ("Well, not ME in the media," as host Jacob Rosenkrands took the opportunity to point out). I was there on tape - interviewed by reporter Pernille Bach in my office last Friday - and in the studio with Rosenkrands were Camilla Stockmann from Politiken and Leonora Christina Skov from Weekendavisen, both of them writers and columnists and well-known users of the first person singular.

It was a good setup, and I was listenening carefully, especially when they too discussed the curious fact that there are no women represented in the textual material that I've been studying. Stockmann and Skov were reproachful on this account, and they brought up names like Martha Gellhorn and Åsne Seierstad, both good examples of bold female reporters appearing in the first person. Norah Vincent came up too, and she's an even better example in terms of being personal and spectacular in my sense of the words. None of those are Danish reporters though, and that's what I've been looking for: Danish reporters - in recent years - who carry out their somehow spectacularly conceptualized reporting on their own and consistently report from the process in the first person singular. Their rhetoric must be striking - on the level of invention and/or on the level of style - and not simply personal which means, for instance, that Anne Knudsen's report from Iraq doesn't really belong in the category.

Of course, questioning the category as such is still legitimate (and appreciated).

Leonora Christina Skov pointed to confessional literature as a highly feminine text format related to the one that I've designated as masculine, and generally the discussion took a broad scope as regards genres and rhetorical functions of self-centered media appearances.

At one point Stockmann and Skov readily agreed that appearing in the media in the first person has a price in terms of never knowing when you'll be called names in furious letters to the editor next - or when you'll be receiving excrements in your mail next: 'You too? It may be the same guy ---- '

Just another lost dog?

2006-09-19T22:53:00.000+02:00

"And me, said the dog" - I wonder where this phrase came from? When Danes include themselves in a story they're telling, they may choose to add it and thus attribute the very mentioning of their first person singular to some dog. Please don't hesitate to post a comment if you happen to know which dog and why.

(Og mig, sagde hunden? Torben Sangild (dk) has posted this same question more than a year ago, but to no avail.)

How about your elf?

2006-09-13T23:05:00.000+02:00

I have been reading Peter Elbow's Writing With Power on different occasions without ever noticing the typo which has caught my eye now and which by mistake is introducing a sprite or little creature; a mythological being, esp. one that is small and mischievous into the writing process.

The mistake is really quite insignificant: Elbow is summing up what he hopes to achieve with his book, and in stead of saying that the reader in the second person - and that's you! all through the book which quite a few students have found tiresome, but rarely without recognizing how much valuable advice is actually handed over in this undisguised friendly fashion - anyway, back to my original sentence: in stead of expressing the hope that you should become able to take charge of yourself in the writing process Elbow is actually expressing the hope that you should "take charge of yourelf".

And why is this significant after all? Well, Elbow is a sympathetic writing instructor who knows all about painstaking production of text that ties people in knots and makes them incoherent, and he is not afraid to discuss the somewhat magical aspect about (good) writing. Accordingly, a writers' elf is not really that strange a creature to come across in his pages. Actually Elbow is already explicitly speaking of both demons, snakes and steers to be dealt with:

To write is to overcome a certain resistance ... [But] somehow the force that is fighting you is also the force that gives life to your words. You must overpower that steer or snake or demon. But not kill it. (p 18)

I agree. A component of mysterious resistance and unpredictable challenge is a given when you're writing and it's okay like that. Especially in the self-indulgent types of writing that I'm exploring in this self-indulgent blog form. Over a solitary process of just me meeting myself and my own familiar phrases around every corner, I'd always choose collaborative writing performed by an unstable constellation of me, my elf and I.

A Rule of Thumb (on the other hand)

2006-09-10T09:49:00.000+02:00

Perhaps the notion of a power struggle between rhetor and critic (a question of who's under whose thumb) is a crude one to introduce, as in a certain sense I do believe the critic should always be operating on the rhetor's terms. So to balance the picture I'll cite a passage which has for a while been my favourite description of rhetorical criticism as I'd like to practice it:

Interpretive criticism emphasizes the particular object of inquiry, and instead of seeking to rise above particulars, it adheres to the rough ground covered by the material of the discipline. From this perspective, since the genius of rhetorical activity consists in adaptation to constantly changing circumstances, rhetorical scholarship should not lead to and from static generalizations. Abstract principles can never govern the variety and mutability of rhetorical practice, and so they have limited utility when viewed in isolation or arranged within self-contained theoretical structures. The goal of criticism is not to generate governing laws that subsume critical observations but to offer what anthropologists call a thick description of the case at hand. Principles are not regarded as autonomous entities but as flexible tools that change configuration whenever they are asked to do rhetorical work, and they become intelligible only as they are instantiated in concrete cases.

Thus Michael Leff on Rhetorical Criticism in the Interpretive Mode (2003).

One should adhere to the rough ground and pay attention to the text, yes - of course? - but without simply reproducing points already made by the rhetor right there on the page ("Norman Mailer seems to be almost advertising himself here...")

And more importantly, one should adhere to the rough ground and pay attention to the text without letting the rhetor's assumed intentions limit the scope of inquiry. A study of the notion of polysemy, democracy, Italy, or irony in a given text may become fruitful even if the rhetor himherself didn't see that coming.

But this is beginning to sound banal, isn't it, and that may well be because I'm not discussing any texts in particular. There's no rough ground to adhere to in this post. I'll end it right away.

On Who's Under Whose Thumb

2006-09-07T13:34:00.000+02:00

Last December at the Division of Rhetoric we did a seminar called something like "Where Does the Critic Stand? Norms and Values in Rhetorical Criticism". There was a morning of public presentations (Christian Kock, Hanne Roer, Lisa Storm Villadsen and Marie Lund Klujeff all took a stand), there was a student discussion panel and generally lots of students attending. As I recall it, Lisa Villadsen wrapped up the discussion that morning by saying something along the lines of:

"Where does the critic stand? Well, we seem at least to be able to agree that she shouldn't be under the rhetor's thumb (i lommen på retor)."

So what was pointed out as the bottom line was the fact that the rhetorical critic must set her own agenda and cannot let the speakers/writers prompt the norms or the conclusions! of her readings. This is certainly a sound principle which can still be rather hard to follow, especially when you're studying self-aware reporters like I've been doing (and I've been blogging about this issue before).

So for the Rhetoric in Society conference in Aalborg the coming November, I decided to take Lisa's cue and submit a paper about approaches to rhetorical criticism of self-aware reporters and calling my abstract Under Their Thumb? And I'll be returning to this when we get closer to November and as this semester's BA seminar on the Presentation of Self in Writing evolves.

Doctoral blogging

2006-09-04T21:02:00.000+02:00

So hi there, I'm back with a PhD degree! As for blogging all about the event, I'm afraid that I gave up on immediacy on this occasion too. And the defense (including the celebration) seems to have taken place at the expense of my immune defense, but still - it's a thrill.

I used my newly adopted power point skills to show a few pictures, book covers and text examples - no key words or bullet points, but during the reception afterwards, my graphic illustration (see above) of rhetorician Richard Lanham's notion of a toggle switch was classified as "downright consultant chique" (konsulentlækker). There's a blurb for you - and a cliffhanger, since I won't be getting into Lanham and his 'toggling attitude towards utterance' and the 'at/through oscillations' tonight. But it's all about the rhetor's ability to toggle from depth to surface; from serious to playful; from being absorbed to being analytical - a quality and an ability that I argue can be especially well realized in spectacular personal reporting.

None of the three official opponents mounted a wild hobbyhorse of their own (as other opponents on these occasions have been known to do), but discussed my work more or less on the terms laid out in my dissertation. Not that they didn't question everything - the possibility of establishing a stable genre based on two such diverging figures at all, my way of analyzing, my way of interpreting and being sometimes too implicit, my somewhat essayistic writing style, my way of being normative, the immanent ideology of the texts under scrutiny - but it seemed to me that they questioned it for all the right reasons. For clarification or to make me develop a thought that hadn't been presented or treated with proper care. So they didn't just pass judgment, but were all pointing forward. And I really appreciate that.

There may have been about a hundred people there to listen, including my family and otherwise familiar faces, but none of them posed a question ex auditorio when the opportunity was there, so one out of five half hours was left unspent. I had expected to perhaps be confronted by visiting reporters - or readers - with first hand experience and strong opinions of personal and spectacular writing, but that didn't happen on this occasion. Looking in my mailbox though, it seems that there will be other such occasions in the coming months. So see you later, says Dr. I

All set

2006-09-01T08:14:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was a mess, but today is Friday, and I'm fine. A benevolent audience of one volunteered for my rehearsal in the authentic (if empty!) auditorium that I'd booked for four o'clock on Thursday afternoon. At the last minute I had to skip that arrangement and go grind my teeth in my office in stead. So - I'll be going straight to the authentic auditorium at one o'clock today and see who's there. May the first person in print prevail.

I'll be returning to my blogspot with a report some time after the weekend.

Watch me now

2006-08-31T08:37:00.000+02:00

Three people called this morning to make sure that I'd seen Politiken. I haven't yet (it'll be here any minute), but apparently the interview by Susanne Nielsen is prominently placed in today's paper with a fine drawing and a title which goes something like: "Watch me now, I'll be making a scene". And, mind you, this is what the spectacular personal reporters ask of their readers. It's a good little speech-in-character which (through the drawing) is attributed to Morten Sabroe and addressed to the average reader of Politiken.

Well, 'any minute' is up now.

Not my tattoo

2006-08-30T11:20:00.000+02:00

It belongs to someone called Kristina who posted it at this unofficial gallery for the hopelessly devoted.

A friend was introducing me to power point last night (yes I know, this is 2006; and true, it doesn't seem terrifically complicated), and we were scanning some book pages and looking around for pictures for Friday's presentation. It is striking (as well as great) to see how many good ones of Hunter S. Thompson have been produced over the years, drawings as well as photos, even embroidered portraits (and tattoos) as a proof of the graphic and contagiously playful style of the late Doctor of Journalism.

And of Ralph Steadman.

The Gunter-Hunter Connection

2006-08-27T22:48:00.000+02:00

Working on my presentation for the public defense of my phd on Friday and one thing is certain: I'll have to make clear how the rhetoric of these two men differs in a way that makes it valuable to study them side by side.

A cycle of one's own

2006-08-24T22:20:00.000+02:00

Self-fatness will lead to self-fatigue. And then! to a reinvention of self... on to indulgence... groove... to self-fatness... and to self-fatigue...

The fat of the self

2006-08-23T15:21:00.000+02:00

A harsh, if also slightly humorous neologism in the Danish language is the term selvfed which literally designates people as being 'self-fat' or 'self-fattish'. There's a prehistory to this as 'fat' as an adjective in Danish can mean 'cool, fine, groovy'. So if we're 'self-fattish' we feel groovy while unfortunately we appear vainglorious, self-indulgent and all too full of ourselves.

I wonder where selvfed came from (?), but it is a slang term which has now been adopted on a broad scale and is often used to add some street credibility to a text. The effect is questionable though, and I'm glad to have deleted the word from a draft of my own this afternoon - on good advice from a street credible colleague.

Well, TV anchorman Jes Dorph-Petersen had his picture on the cover of a free newspaper (one of the still more free newspapers) the other day with a headline saying: "People call me self-fattish" - the story being that 'I'm really not, so I don't mind'.

And literary critic Leonora Christina Skov in Weekendavisen bluntly names writer Jens Chr. Grøndahl (cf. the ravioli in nut sauce affair) "King Self-Fattish himself" in a debate over what qualifies a man or a woman to be called "a Big White Man" (as yet another term of abuse). Actually this was a debate which came down to the question of being self-fattish or not.

The term seems to become useful when people are exposing their personal aesthetics without questioning its superiority (and this is basically what I ask of the texts that I have studied too). Exposing yourself in your work requires a strong sense of proportion which is bound to fail from time to time. And before you know it, you're a pretentious rascal.

No wonder that teachers of journalism tell their students to keep clear of the first person singular. Use can lead to abuse and to fatal self-fatness in no time.

Founding fathers and a Norwegian daugther

2006-08-22T20:06:00.000+02:00

I had the unaccustomed pleasure of giving an interview today (nothing will ever be the same after August 4). The journalist stayed for an hour and a half and seemed a very professional interviewer. She was rather quietly making me talk... and what a peculiar experience to be discussing things like controversial reporters who usually provoke rather strong emotional reactions, without ever knowing the other person's opinions about it all.

Along the way she actually raised the question of the missing women, not just in my dissertation, but in the paradigm of spectacular, personal reportage as such. Given the fact that the paradigm has modelled itself on the work of two men, Wallraff and Thompson, it's really not that strange. So there's one explanation. But still - women do write essays even if the essay genre is traditionally considered to be shaped by a man, another founding father.

Female wallraffers exist, but they don't seem to get as obtrusively personal and gonzolike as their male colleagues.

Actually the Norwegians have a female gonzo journalist by the pen name of Syphilia Morgenstierne who has been canonized by Kjetil Wiedswang in his fine book on Fear and Loathing in Norwegian (Angst og bæven. Gonzo på norsk). I haven't yet read what she's written, but just now I found her SPHLOGG.

On vacation

2006-08-12T01:42:00.000+02:00

Back in a couple of weeks.

First person live!

2006-08-12T01:39:00.000+02:00

The first persons on stage in Tivoli's Concert Hall tonight were four puppeteers manuevering a small Beck + small band members around on strings on a little stage on stage, performing to a playback version of - yes, there I go, another song-in-character! - I'm a Loser, baby... so why dont you kill me.

The puppets didn't just serve to get an obligatory hit song out the way. They were imitating the band all through the concert and getting filmed and projected up on to the large screen at the back of the stage. They were dressed the same as their live people, and we got nice closeups of Beck puppet singing away and playing guitar while Beck sung some ballads and played his guitar, and one puppet was even taking over the camera at one point, walking up to the musicians one by one, filming them and projecting them up on to the screen. The musicians were carefully professional, but casually playing around, dancing, changing instruments, enjoying a meal by a wooden table and drumming away on the plates and glasses. Not a bad evening at all.

During an encore, Beck entered the stage in a full bear costume, microphone down its throat for him to be able to sing. Theatrical seemed back in style, big time.

Tell it in passing and don't even think of showing it

2006-08-11T08:43:00.000+02:00

First person reporter (and connoisseur of wines) at 'paper for personalities' takes popular controversial writer/poet to Northern jetset seaside resort where they hook up with well-known photographer friend, and they are all invited to have dinner with bestselling novelist and his wife in summer residence.

A few years ago, this novelist host put out a book on painter residing in Rome, and I recall one reviewer making fun of novelist's somewhat pretentious descriptions of novelist and painter enjoying a fine dish of ravioli and nut sauce along with delicious frascati somewhere humble along the Via San Martino (yes, I looked it up now to get the details straight; the reviewer was Klaus Rothstein). A passage like that may at best have had an ambivalent appeal to readers by evoking also some envy of such a stereotypical meal on a stereotypical day in the lives of artists hanging out in Rome outside of holiday season, but the title of the review included the ravioli in nut sauce and the dish stole the picture.

My point (part I) is: textual showing in the first person was being read and ridiculed as showing off.

Back to our first person reporter who includes abovementioned Northern dinner event in prominently exposed story in 'paper for personalities' two weeks ago and who is obviously running the same risk of exposing himself to ridicule. And here comes my point (part II): The stage is set for pretentious specific details concerning the meal. Readers are ready to scorn the reporter and his friends, AND they are probably somewhat curious too to be informed of what are in fact the appropriate pretentions to have foodwise this year up North. And readers are reading it, aren't they? And I was reading it, wasn't I?

And what happens?

We are just told in passing that "the food was good and the wine was good". There's no showing it, and the lacuna in the story made me remember this really quite brief and insignificant passage two weeks later. Which is well done by reporter, and/but really annoying. The experience of having my expectations thwarted stays with me, and what is more: it even feels like all the pretentions now stick to me rather than to the reporter. And this, of course, is an especially annoying thing about it.

I like to celebrate first person journalism for making readers aware of rhetorical mechanisms at play in their reading. This is an example of it, and I did learn a lesson. And there's certainly no use crying over figures of speech (like this... proslepsis?)

Still, what namedropping as such is doing to readers on a global level and on a daily basis remains a dire thought. And one thing is certain: My dropping Jamie O's name on my blog about a week ago immediately directed an unknown visitor from Bath and one from Slough to The First Person in Print, but they only stayed here for a few seconds.

Elderly new journalist blogging

2006-08-09T09:53:00.000+02:00

Hunter S. Thompson would have made a fine blogger, or so I was saying when Peter Svarre mentioned HST in passing. Besides from artfully-spontaneous literary reportage, HST readily published parts of his apparently many, many personal letters and served as an online sports columnist -- so why not a blogger too.

Well, Norman Mailer who is a canonized new journalist from the same generation and who hasn't been shy to put books like "Advertisements for Myself" in print, has in fact tried his luck as a guest blogger a year ago at Huffington Post. As far as I can tell, he wrote two posts in two months - and got lots of response (it's been closed down for comments now).

Like I was saying in a comment below, it may be that to print personalities like Mailer there's not enough to be achieved by getting personal in the blogosphere. It's not a spectacular gesture in itself, so you don't really feel anything...

Just for the record: I'm a supporter

2006-08-06T21:04:00.000+02:00

Don't get me wrong here. My dissertation is not written in order to brand spectacular personal reporting as "self-indulgent scribblings" in any crude negative sense. On the contrary, I've been trying to twist these negative labels and show what good can be achieved through self-indulgent scribbling. And Rasmus Ø. Madsen doesn't do negative branding of the material either. The title of his article, just like the title of my dissertation, is quoting a label, a standard viewpoint, which my work is supposed to challenge.

Who me?

2006-08-06T13:10:00.000+02:00

It's official! My dissertation gets a full page in the Ideas/Media-section of Weekendavisen this week. A photo of Hunter S. in a tuxedo, his hand raised in salute, leads you to the right page.

"Self-indulgent scribblings" says the headline, and I'm really happy to tell you that it's not my work, but my object of study which gets branded like that. My dissertation has been in good hands and is both well represented and contextualized by Rasmus Øhlenschlæger Madsen. He introduces the subject as such by reminding the readers of Weekendavisens own slogan and profile as "a paper for personalities/strong characters" which is 'not only meant to flatter the readers', but alludes to the high percentage of high profiles among the journalists and the exceptionally high frequence of the first person singular in their pages.

Rasmus Ø. Madsen writes freelance for Weekendavisen and yes, he's a phd student at the University of Copenhagen, but not an old buddy of mine. Surely, though, from now on he is.

Lost dogs on close inspection

2006-08-05T20:55:00.000+02:00

All stories look the same from a distance, and the ambition of narrative journalists is to make readers realize that a given story is 'not like all other lost dog or love stories'. This is how Nancy Graham Holm phrases it as she explains why subjectivity is No Longer a Dirty Word:

Narrative journalists have a social conscience and they claim their mission is to remind us what it means to be human. Information alone, they say, does not inform. In the postmodern age, journalists must assign meaning. Participation in events and subsequent interpretation are required to break down the psychological barriers of apathy and cynicism.

To me there's a remarkable echo of passages from my own dissertation here (except that I avoid using the term 'postmodern' all along). At one point I sum up the ambition of personal and spectacular journalism as that of 'making the world seem interesting and workable' which might as well have been phrased in Graham Holm's way as 'breaking down the psychological barriers of apathy and cynicism'. And this is why close readings as well as field work (taking close looks and making close descriptions) are important in journalism studies. They supply the details which prevent our work from being just one more lost dog story after the other.

End of masquerade

2006-08-04T13:50:00.000+02:00

That we're all wearing masks 8-) in our daily lives is a notion which has gone somewhat out of fashion, at least in academic discourse. The theatrical metaphor is a rigid one, as it implies that we play our roles consistently, that we follow a script and that we are somehow more authentic behind our masks. Our real selves would show when every once in a while we put the masks down (and when would that be?)

I'm done reading Norah Vincent's story now, and she has, of course, been wearing a mask in quite a literal sense. She was Ned. But what she concludes after 18 months as this self-invented man - going to bars, bowling, working etc. among other men - is not just that her masquerade was a frustrating experience in itself. Her great distress came, she says, [and don't read on now, if you're planning to read the book],

from the way the world greeted me in my disguise, a disguise which was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was such a masked ball. (273)

There's no mistaking the theatrical terminology here. And what is more, in Norah Vincent's experience her men's group of all places was where masks were let down:

Only in my men's group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every other guy in the room. (273)

Pulling off everybody's masks at the end seems an overly simplistic way of wrapping the story up, and it came as such a disappointment after reading Vincent's close and carefully prepared descriptions up until then. Discharging the idea of social masquerades as such may be hasty, but these lines that I've quoted do sound crude, don't they (especially when read out of context). Still Vincent presents this as a true and extraordinary experience which eventually made her suffer a mental breakdown and puts an end to her investigations.

It is always striking how undercover reporting turns questions of appearances and social interaction into very practical matters. Social mechanisms become obstacles to be instantly dealt with by the reporters in order to keep their cover intact, so social mechanisms in these texts tend to be described in terms of exactly that: mechanisms. And masquerades. It all becomes very literal and heavy-handed which might explain why many of these adventures - despite their playful setup - seem predetermined and, end of post now, become quite depressing stories to read.

I'm hearing too much hand movement

2006-08-03T09:43:00.000+02:00

Some wallraffers set their example closer to Wallraff's than others. Fabrizio Gatti at Lampedusa is a close one.

[læs også her.dk]