Tricks of the Trade: Plus the Altercation Book Club

Altercation

I've got a new "Think Again" here called "Spun Dizzy"

I'm taking the semester off from teaching, but it's the first week of classes and I need to get a few things out of my system: One of the many, many problems with journalists' attack on bloggers for lacking professional ethics is not only that many journalists lack any professional ethics--see under "television news, cable, entire,"--but that even when journalists at the top of their profession do their job entirely professionally, their practices often lead us no closer to the truth, and often mislead us away. For instance:

The old "Ascribing Verifiable Opinions to Inanimate Objects," Trick:

• In a front-page Leisure Section story called, "New Shows for Old Stars," The Wall Street Journal's Brooks Barnes observes, "And some shows have hit the jackpot by casting veteran actors who just a few years ago were deemed unfit for anything but the retirement-home talent show. Who does ABC credit with giving "Boston Legal" buzz on the Web? Actress Betty White, 84." Here.

The old "There Are Only Two Options, Here, Mine and Some Idiot's" dodge:

• In a Washington Post chat, an emailer asked reporter, Jonathan Weisman, "Dick Cheney said he was stuck with the grave decision of whether to shoot down the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania or not. The recently released NORAD tapes confirm that the government first knew of the flight one minute before it went down. Is Cheney lying, again, or was he thinking very fast that day, with his drama unfolding within 60 seconds? I've yet to read anywhere that Cheney has been queried about his story. THANKS.Weisman replied: If I can get him on the phone, I will query him. Cheney's statements present a quandary for us reporters. Sometimes we write them up and are accused of being White House stenographers and stooges for repeating them. Then if we don't write them up, we are accused of being complicit for covering them up. So, all you folks on the left, what'll it be? Complicity or stenography?" Here.

The contempt dripping from Weisman's typist is evident but his logic is not. Why would it be impossible for Weisman, even without getting Cheney on the phone, and ha ha, what a riot, asking a politician an impolite question--publish what Cheney actually said alongside the evidence that the man is not telling the truth? That would not be "complicity." That would not be "stenography." (And by the way sir, in the case of this administration, "complicity" and "stenography" are synonymous.) It would be solid, sensible journalism. Has the Washington Post fallen so far from the ideal of actually trying to tell the public the truth when officials want it hidden that their reporters are actually unfamiliar with the practice?

The old "Fool Me Once, Fool Me A Thousand Times," Story:

• Continuing with the above theme, why, for instance in this story is there no room for even a mention of the fact that the Pentagon has a history of deliberately trying to fix these tests, over and over, in order to fool gullible reporters and keep the funding spigot on, and punishing those honorable whistleblowers who try to expose it? Would that be bias to point out the word of the people you are accepting has proven worthless in the past, over and over and over? See Frances Fitzgerald (2000), Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War for details.

The Use of the Word "Arguably" to Say Something Otherwise Indefensible as in "Paris Hilton is Arguably a Better Physicist than Albert Einstein Ever Was."

• In the New York Times Arts and Leisure Section, Alan Light writes, [Bob Seger's] "brand of lunch-bucket rock 'n' roll has struck a universal chord, arguably even more than the music of peers like Bruce Springsteen." Here.

Now, I really like Seger, but really, who in the world would sensibly argue...

Using a Single Anecdote to Make a Larger Point when the Anecdote Actually Proves Actually Nothing:

• In the first few paragraphs of a cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Lynn Hershberg writes, "But it says something about the changes in the industry that when Sissy Spacek won the Best Actress Oscar in 1981 for portraying the musician Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter," she was the lead in the film, while Witherspoon was playing a secondary character in "Walk the Line." Here.

Perhaps, Hershberg is right, but what it says to me is that one movie was about Loretta Lynn, a woman, while the other one was about Johnny Cash, a man. Call me sexist, but I too, would have shown "a growing reluctance" to cast a woman--even Meryl Streep--as the Man in Black. (And by the way, Mary Steenburgen won the Oscar back in 1981 for Best Supporting Actress in a movie about, you guessed it, not one but two men: "Melvin and Howard.")

The Phony Comparison With Someone or Something Insane to Make the Otherwise Outrageous Appear Sensible:

• In The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Rauch writhes: "This "party of death" -- "those who think that the inviolability of human life is an outdated or oppressive concept" -- is not perfectly congruent with the Democratic Party, but in Ponnuru's words, it has made the Democrats a "wholly owned subsidiary." That distinction may seem less meaningful to many readers than it does to Ponnuru, who has been accused by his critics of political partisanship, and whose title and subtitle do their commercialistic best to give that impression. He is, however, the soul of fair-mindedness compared with many of his fellow pundits. (For instance, the conservative writer Ann Coulter, in her new book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," distinguishes Republicans from Democrats this way: "We're the Blacks-Aren't-Property/Don't-Kill-Babies Party. They're the Hookup party." Now that's partisanship.) Here.

Now you see the service that Coulter provides to conservatives and that network brass provide to them by giving her a platform. It's impossible to be considered beyond the bounds of sensible discourse when your only standard is a screaming, hysterical dishonest lunatic, but that here, is what appears to be Rauch's only allowable standard.

That's all for today. Class dismissed.

Altercation gets results (Has Joe been forced to answer the question directly?)

The ABCs of lying about 9/11, continued:

Boehlert notes: ABC's docudrama "The Path to 9/11" continues to draw heat from Clinton officials who claim the mini-series misrepresents the facts about hunting down bin Laden during the 1990's. Now education publisher Scholastic is under fire for its online teaching guide to "The Path to 9/11"; a teaching guide that suggests to high school students that Iraq played a part in 9/11.

From the Benton Foundation:

THREE FROM CLINTON ADMINISTRATION URGE DISNEY TO CANCEL OR REVISE 9/11 MINI-SERIES

[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Jesse McKinley] (requires registration)

Three members of the Clinton administration -- former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger, and former White House aide Bruce R. Lindsey -- have written the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC's parent, to complain that the network's coming two-part miniseries "The Path to 9/11" is fraught with factual errors and fabrications. The letters ask that the five-hour movie, scheduled for broadcast Sunday and Monday, be either edited for accuracy or canceled, and ABC gave a small indication yesterday that some changes might be made. ABC, meanwhile, continued to explain that the mini-series, though largely drawn from the report of the Sept. 11 commission, was a dramatization, not a documentary. But the network appeared to be leaving the door open to last-minute changes in the film. The series, which cost almost $40 million, is to be broadcast without commercials, but a network spokesperson said this had been planned, as a public service, and had nothing to do with any pressure that might have been brought on prospective advertisers.

* Clinton Administration Officials Assail ABC's 'The Path to 9/11'

* ABC 9/11 Movie Slams 'Wash Post' for 'Wash Times' Report One of the most blatant factual errors in the ABC's miniseries next week on the 9/11 attacks is a claim that The Washington Post ruined a valuable form of surveillance of Osama bin Laden by disclosing that the U.S. was monitoring his cell phone calls. Indeed, that charge has been made -- but the alleged wrongdoer was a different paper, The Washington Times.

Here are some facts.

Tell ABC to tell the truth

And here's a website with a list of advertisers to contact regarding the ABC docu-drama B.S. We note that the Smart Boys at The Note relegate the news to the bottom of their Moby-Dick-like missive, ensuring that almost no one sees it. They attribute the controversy to "Disney" rather than to the folks for whom they work at ABC. Nice.

This just in: SONNY ROLLINS turns 76 today, September 7. To celebrate his birthday, and the first anniversary of his Web site --as well as his new Doxy label and CD Sonny, Please-- nine rare video performances will be posted on sonnyrollins.com for one week, beginning today.

The nine performances took place over the course of five decades on three continents, with sidemen ranging from Henry Grimes in the late 1950s to Don Cherry (1962), Kenny Drew (1968), Stanley Clarke (1981), Jack DeJohnette (1982), and his current band in April of this year.

After viewing the videos, visitors are invited to post birthday greetings for Sonny in his guestbook.

Altercation Book Club:

E.L. Doctorow, "Composing Moby Dick: What Might Have Happened."

I can claim a personal relationship to Melville and his works, having read MOBY-DICK three and a half times. The half time came at the age of ten when I found a copy in my grandfather's library --- it was one of a set of great sea novels all bound in green cloth--and it was fair sailing until the cetology stove me in. I first read the book in its entirety, (and TYPEE, OMOO, BILLLY BUDD and the ENCHANTADAS, and BENITO CERENO and BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER, for that matter) as an undergraduate at Kenyon College. Then, as a young editor at the New American Library a mass paperback publisher, I persuaded a Kenyon professor, Denham Sutcliffe to write an Afterword to the Signet Classic edition of MOBY-DICK, and so read the book again by way of editorial preparation. And now on the 150th anniversary of its publication (and after too many years) I have read it for the third time.

The surprise to me, at my age now, is how familiar the voice of that book is, and not merely the voice, but the technical effrontery, and not merely the technical effrontery, but the character and rhythm of the sentences...and so with some surprise, I've realized, how much of my own work, at its own level, hears Melville, responds to his perverse romanticism, endorses his double dipping into the accounts of realism and allegory, as well as the large risk he takes speaking so frankly of the crisis of human consciousness, that great embarrassment to us all that makes a tiresome prophet of anyone who would speak of it.

...

Literary history finds a few great novelists who achieved their greatness from an impatience with the conventions of narrative. Virginia Woolf composed Mrs. Dalloway from the determination to write a novel without a plot or indeed a subject. And then Joyce, of course: Like Picasso who was an expert draftsman before he blew his art out of the water, James Joyce proved himself in the art of narrative writing before he committed his assaults upon it.

The author of the sterling narratives TYPEE and OMOO precedes Joyce with his own blatant subversion of the narrative compact he calls MOBY-DICK. Yet I suspect that, in this case, the subversion may have been if not inadvertent, then only worked out tactically given the problem of its conception. I would guess that what Melville does in MOBY-DICK is not from a grand preconceived aesthetic (Joyce: I will pun my way into the brain's dreamwork; I will respect the protocols of grammar and syntax but otherwise blast the English language all to hell.) but from the necessity of dealing with the problem inherent in constructing an entire 19th century novel around a single life and death encounter with a whale. The encounter clearly having to come as the climax of his book, Melville's writing problem was how to pass the time until then --- until he got the Pequod to the Southern Whale fisheries and brought the white whale from the depths, Ahab crying "There she blows --- there she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby-Dick!" She blows, I note, not until page 537 of a 566 page book - in my old paperback Rhinehart edition.

A writer lacking Melville's genius might conceive of a shorter novel, its entry point being possibly closer in time to the deadly encounter. And with maybe a flashback or two thrown in. A novelist of today, certainly, would eschew exposition as far as possible, let the reader work out for herself what is going on, which is a contemporary way of maintaining narrative tension. Melville's entry point, I remind myself, is not at sea aboard the Pequod, not even in Nantucket: he locates Ishmael in Manhattan, and staying in scene every step of the way, takes him to New Bedford, has him meet Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, listen to a sermon, contrives to get them both to Nantucket, meet the owners of the Pequod, endure the ancient hoary device of a mysterious prophecy.... and it isn't until Chapter 20 which begins "A day or two passed" that he elides time. Until that point, some ninety-four pages into the book, the writing has all been, a succession of unbroken real time incidents. Another ten pages elapse before the Pequod in Chapter 22 "thrusts her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves."

I wouldn't wonder if Melville at this point, the Pequod finally underway, stopped to read what he had written to see what his book was bidding him to do.

This is sheer guesswork of course. I don't know what Melville himself may have said about the writing of MOBY-DICK beyond characterizing it as a "wicked book." Besides, whatever any author says of his novel is of course another form of the fiction he practices and is never, never, to be taken on faith.

Perhaps Melville had everything comfortably worked out before he began, though I doubt it. Perhaps he had a draft completed of something quite conventional before his writer's sense of crisis set in. The point to remember is the same that Faulkner made to literary critics: they see a finished work and do not dream of the chaos of trial and error and torment from which it has somehow emerged.

No matter what your plan for a novel --- and we know Herman was inspired by the account of an actual whaling disaster (the destruction of the ship Essex in 1819) and we know how this was a subject, whaling, he could speak of with authority of personal experience abetted by research, and we know he understood as well as the most commercial practitioner of the craft, that a writer begins with an advantage who can report on a kind of life or profession out of the ken of the ordinary reader --- nevertheless I say that no matter what your plan or inspiration, or trembling recognition for an idea that you know belongs to you, the strange endowment you set loose by the act of writing is never entirely under your control. It cannot be a matter solely of willed expression. Somewhere, from the depths of your being you find a voice: it is the first and most mysterious moment of the creative act. There is no book without it. If it takes off, it appears to you to be self-governed. To some degree you will write to find out what you are writing. And you feel no sense of possession for what comes onto the pages ---- what you experience is a sense of discovery.

"Excerpted from CREATIONISTS by E.L. Doctorow. Copyright © 2006 by E.L. Doctorow. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group." More here.