Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock
Can a fortnight’s worth of writer topics fit together, and should they? Why, it depends on the size of your tent.
Preferrers of small tents closely define their parameters. A writer must have New York-based publications to his credit. A journalist must be a full-time employee of a news factory. Fair enough, but then why do the flap-holders then raise the canvas skirts to let someone in, only to kick them out again? David Sedaris a journalist?
I like big tents. You want to be writer just because you tap out e-mails? Come on in. You may be a lousy writer, and small potatoes, but why not. Is blogger Josh Wolf a journalist? He video’d a protest and posted it, then got busted. Sure, why not.
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Don Imus may not be a writer or journalist, but many commentators have been guests on his program. Imus has been popular in part because of his outrageousness. Borderline humor expands and contracts every so often, in what is acceptable or even funny. It’s a shtick, and any broadcast personality, from caustic Howard Stern to sweet Arthur Godfrey (on the air, that is), were hired and fired throughout their careers. It’s in the job description. Writers have been publishing their thoughts about Imus far out of proportion to his importance or that of his most recent racist remark. How few million listen to Imus on CBS radio and how few million see Imus on MSNBC.
I mean, outside of New York and D.C.
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A writer for CBS anchor Katie Couric uses a Jeff Zaslow column from The Wall Street Journal. Broadcast takes copy from print all the time. No one should complain here, any more than radio talents about getting fired. The borrowing is nearing its century mark. The horse left the barn, the horse and generations of foals have lived and died, and high wind took out the rotting, vacant barn in 1974.
Rip-and-read is an accepted practice. But how many seconds would it take for Katie’s kommentary to state, “according to a piece in The Wall Street Journal.” That’s sufficient attribution for a brief broadcast/blog anecdote. Timed, the clause takes two seconds.
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Do we let Imus in the writers’ tent, the journalists’ tent? How about Couric as well as her staff? Big tents are better, as they set current events in a circus atmosphere, which most of them deserve.
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Dinitia Smith of The New York Times is not a journalist. How could he write in his obituary of my first literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, “Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were … prone to one-sentence paragraphs.”
We cut that paragraph from our paper for being factually incorrect. The only punctuation Vonnegut eschewed was the semi-colon, I read in an interview. I said to fellow copy editors that Vonnegut wrote like Hemingway, just in the sense of preferring direct, usually short sentences. Both spent part of their early adulthood in Midwestern urban newsrooms, which shows in their later writing.
Smith says Vonnegut mixed fiction and autobiography, used exclamation points and italics. That’s neither unique nor wrong in today’s “narrative journalism” shtick. You can’t even claim that Vonnegut was ahead of his time on any of these counts. Norman Mailer comes to mind. (I’m a big-tentist: C’mon back, Dinitia.)
Kurt was of his time. He expressed his time! What better praise can be given to an artist? Uneven? Heck, yeah!
Let’s bring Kurt into the journalists’ tent. 1969’s Slaughterhouse 5 after all was dominated by his eye-witness account of the Allied firebombing of Dresden 25 years earlier. OK, small-tentists, Kurt was a P.O.W. in the basement of the slaughterhouse and did not directly witness the bombs, which would have killed him. You probably don’t believe planet Tralfamadore exists, either. “So it goes.”
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