Blergher + Daisey

I was reading something on my sister's blog about chocolate chips, and I realised that Blogger is rubbish. Not quite sure how that train of thought went. But blogger does seem to be a bit rubbish. I even found a blog elsewhere explaining why Blogger is so rubbish. Seems like Google retains the right to do what they like with your content, for example. Probably meaningless, but annoying in principle. My main complaint is that it is just a bit ugly. Everyone's wordpress blogs look so classy. So I'll be trying to move there sometime soon. Once the class this all goes towards is over perhaps. Start a new thing combined with my other old blogger blog.

Anyway, CNF! I've been meaning to write something about the whole Mike Daisey deal, though it isn't real timely anymore. I'll keep it brief. In case you haven't heard of Daisy: he's a New York performer with a stage show titled “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which is a pretty awful title if you ask me. The show is a monologue detailing, in part, Daisey’s visit to a Chinese factory responsible for manufacturing Apple products. In January, this section of his monologue was broadcast on This American Life (that is, on the world’s most downloaded podcast).

          

A few weeks ago, This American Life aired a retraction episode, saying that they had found significant departures from the truth in Daisey’s monologue. The entire episode was devoted to unpacking these, first with the China-based reporter who uncovered the inconsistencies, then in a tense interview between Ira Glass (the host) and Daisy himself. Glass seemed personally hurt by the deception, and Daisey was pretty glum. The Guardian has a nice summary, complete with their writer's own sense of betrayal.

The two podcasts are available here and here. Both fascinating listening, but don't do one without the other.

(Daisey's the toady one in the picture above, by the way. Glass is the scruffy intellectual.)

The issue raised by the Daisey affair is basically the different notions of truth attached to different media. Daisy insisted that, in the context of the theatre, his monologue was truthful in its essence, despite the substantial fabrications. He realised he had made a mistake in allowing it to be aired on TAL, where the expectations for veracity are rather higher. But Glass felt that even in the theatre, where he himself first heard the monologue, the audience was led to assume Daisey's words were literally true. Here's the relevant bit of transcript:

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.
Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says 'this happened to me,' I think it happened to them, unless it's clearly labeled as 'here's a work of fiction.'

I wanted to be all postmodern, and side with Daisey on the theatre issue. Because whatistruthanyway. But I think I got off that boat when it occurred to me that I didn't think his manipulations were actually in support of any greater truth at all. He wants to be opening people's eyes to something Apple is doing in secret, but actually, it really appears to be a problem Apple are genuinely tackling. As the retraction episode pointed out, it's all there in their own reports. Many of his distortions do not serve the truth, rather painting a damaging caricature of Chinese industry and serving only his own show.

A Dead European Darling

Kill your darlings, they're always saying. This one's still warm.

From my suburban Brisbane bedroom, I dive behind a Street View camera and into a Prague New Town alley. Retracing the path I trod in those early days is an uncanny experience, like discovering my memory preserved in a digital archive. The record isn’t perfect—checkerboard cobblestones have lost their icy skin and the sky holds a sun I never saw that February. But Google has kept countless details I have all but lost.

Next to my hostel door, the brown Antikvariát still displays its dusty stock of quiet brown books. Clicking forward, I pass a Triple-A Taxi, its more-trustworthy-than-average driver staring straight at me. On my right, the gate I never saw opened stands as impenetrable as ever, strewn with the same scrunched graffiti that unsteadied my newcomer’s confidence. The gate’s high wall decays back through its history, scraps of white paint hovering over plasters and concretes in assorted greys and browns, layers exposed like geological strata right down to the crumbly brick of who-knows-when. I remember running my fingers over those layers before I found gloves, and I’m starting to remember a lot more. As I pass the blurry images of some not quite anonymous Central Europeans, I can feel again what it’s like to be a teenager shivering in the middle of a continent of strangers. After two years and across thousands of kilometres, I am that hungry boy again, looking for a meal on his first real winter night.

At the end of the narrow street, I emerge from concrete and graffiti into postcard Europe. The Gothic loom of Jindřišská věž still hovers to my right, and I take the glance I took that night before turning left towards the centre. Two trams are frozen on their tracks, one heading towards me, one away. I can hear their bells trill. Despite the photographed sun, I see everything lit by the dense orange of Prague’s sodium street lamps. The Google images fade into my own accelerating memory as everything comes rushing back. Across the street, the chain bakery I’d thought charmingly local looks no less welcoming than it did. But I want something heartier, something more Czech. I click past a mobile phone shop, another bakery, and a dozen parked Škodas, until I come to the restaurant. Set in a plain yellow building, its green wooden front, stripy awnings and selection of window menus and signs leave it looking somewhere between imitation French bistro and Irish pub. But it must have looked Czech enough for me that night. One piece of advice I wish I could send back to myself, staring in that restaurant window: keep walking.

  

This chunk I've just cut intact from my 800 word memoir. 500 words of introduction doesn't work so well there. But it remains a darling.

Obligatory Procrastination Post

I’m writing a (very) mini-memoir today, on my first few days in Prague two years ago. So far, it seems to be about Google Streetview (which is really the coolest) and eating a pork knee. Might not sound like the most interesting topic for a memoir, until you remember than a Czech pork knee looks like THIS:

Might still not sound so interesting actually. We’ll see. I’m struggling over the tone. So far it’s been what seems to me very Memoir in tone, sort of poetic and wistful, but I think lots of it could benefit from a much funnier approach. Sedarisey, self-caricaturing. Maybe I’ll manage to mix the two. Actually, that’s what I think Sedaris does so well. Not the wistful/poetic so much as just the moving and honest, mixed with his trademark hilariousness. See for example: Old Faithful.

Anyway, I guess I’ll get back to it. Wish me luck.

Profile

Patrick doesn’t love being interviewed. He greets my opening question with an uncomfortable silence, squinting at the pot-plant behind me as if it might somehow be to blame for getting him into this. 

            “Is this going to be anonymous?”

            He doesn’t relax until we get onto the French Foreign Legion.

“You go to France and you apply, you give them your passport, and they do psychological aptitude tests, physical fitness tests. And if they decide that you’re suitable you go through basic training which is, ah, hell on earth.”

            As Patrick talks me through the gruelling selection process for the elite, multi-national French army unit, you can see him forget that I’m recording, watch him relax into visions of military parades and camouflage tents. He starts talking with his hands—not to mention eyebrows.

            “You get yelled at, abused, punched. They break you down so they can build you back up.”

            He tells me about super-marathon hikes in ill-fitting boots, unforgiving standards for uniform folding, and continual verbal abuse. One recruit, he says, was ordered to “mow” 60 metres of grass using a pair of fingernail scissors.

            “And he’s like ‘sixty fucking metres!’ But it’s not about why you’re doing it, it’s about you do what you’re told. Because when you’re being shot at, if you don’t do what you’re told, instantly, somebody’s going to die.”

            Lines like this flow of Patrick’s tongue with the ease of experience, free of self-consciousness or irony. At times, I can almost forget that he has not, in fact, ever taken a life-or-death order.

            “I mean, they only take one in nine. It’s a pipe dream, but I have to try it. ‘What if’ is way worse than actual failure.”

“Um. And after that. I don’t know. I like the idea of being a tour guide.”

How to Draw a Banana

A couple of days ago, I interviewed a friend for a brief vignette. We chatted about his dream job—French foreign legionnaire—and his experience at an Amsterdam sex show, on a Contiki tour. (I didn’t end up using the sex show story, but I sure am glad to have it on tape.) The interview only lasted about ten minutes, and I was able to bang a fun little 300-word story out of it pretty quickly.

I was struck, though, with how difficult it was to write a portrait that felt accurate, honest. Every selection of details seemed warped, no characterisation totally fair. I felt a bit cheated; I’d managed to overcome my fiction-writer’s desire to warp things, only to find that they were warping themselves! I thought maybe it was a reflection on my writing abilities. After all, we think of really good fiction writers as producing really well-rounded, believable characters. CNF uses the techniques of fiction, so if you aren’t quite up to producing a breathing fictional character, maybe you aren’t quite up to being honest about a breathing human being either.

My girlfriend suggested something pretty insightful. She said she’d done still-life drawing for an art class at uni (or college—she’s not from round these parts) and they’d told everybody that in order to draw still life, you need to forget what you know a banana looks like, and instead just draw what you actually see of the banana in front of you. And that maybe this was a bit like that.

Bloody good advice, I reckon. Perhaps, instead of trying somehow to reproduce on paper the complex and probably inexpressible feeling I have about a person, I can be more faithful to my subject by simply sticking strictly to what I actually see in front of me. Maybe it’ll actually come out with more of the person intact that way. This way of thinking about things has the added bonus, at least for certain forms of CNF, of getting the writer out of the way of the subject. 

Hopefully I pulled it off.  I’ll post the story tomorrow—for now, I have first year maths assignments to mark.

Interviewing Idiots?

Neo-nazis in Queensland? Enough of them for a white supremacist music festival? Really?

I've been looking hard for a good story for my final CNF piece for this course, and this seemed like an interesting possibility. Apparently there is a festival of "racialist music," Hammered Festival, that has been happening for the past few years on the Gold Coast. This year, it's moving to a secret location in Brisbane. One must, I suppose, convince the organisers of one's genuine and outspoken racism before being given the address. That might cause some difficulties in writing an article about the thing--I couldn't actually pretend to be on their side, even if that was what it took to gain admission. The appearance of neutrality, I could manage, but I've got a little too much hair to pull off skinhead. Even if I couldn't attend the festival itself, I imagine I could probably get interviews with some related people. The existence of Queensland locals proud of their racial hatred is an intriguing, as well as horrifying, issue--even without the added colour of the music festival.

My angle for such an article would have to involve something a bit broader than just profiling the people involved--you can't build a good story out of pure revulsion. The immediate question that comes to mind is: how did they come to think like this? How does that happen to someone in Queensland, today? However, the idea of me getting a bunch of skinheads to open up in interviews about their childhoods, their fears, their insecurities--well, it seems a leeetle optimistic. It's the sort of thing I could talk to a psychologist about, but I think the article would be a bit dry if that sort of source became to central. Maybe I could get more out of them than I think; maybe I'm just a bit frightened of the idea--although, I suppose I am pretty white. Maybe I could learn to love death metal, forge a connection that way...

Another angle I could attack the story from might be the difficulties of free speech. It's not a new idea to talk about, but I can't remember ever reading a substantial piece of CNF on the topic. I could speak to those protesting against the festival, and those regretfully allowing it to go ahead. Other groups testing the boundaries of free speech could come into it. The exact nature of the relevant Australian laws would be important, as would the reasons for their existence. I could contrast Australia with much of Europe, where public neo-nazism is illegal, or with the U.S, where free speech seems to be held even more dearly than here. The Hammered Festival would then becoming the hook for this broader issue.

The whole idea though, has illustrated a couple of problems that I've been having in my search for article concepts. The biggy is that all my ideas so far--I had another about conspiracy theory groups--have implied writing stories where I considered everyone involved a bit stupider--or nastier, or just in some way inferior--to myself. And that does not seem like a good starting point. The free speech angle does seem to avoid that problem though, in that it would involve multiple conflicting, legitimate points of view. The white-supremacists would be more of a prop. So I'll keep thinking about that possibility. I should think quickly though: the festival is on (assuming it does go ahead) in just under a month.

The Human without A Human

In what must have been the greatest present ever, I received a New Yorker subscription for Christmas. Since then, the stylish pages have been arriving in my letterbox (physical, for snail-mail and possibly even the occasional snail) once a week. But the quantity of terrific writing in each has proved slightly more than I can easily get through in a week--especially as I insist on reading the small-print theatre and gallery reviews for shows I will never see, on the other side of the world. So I'm a little behind. This is usually fine, seeing as the New Yorker isn't the world's newsiest publication, but I would like to catch up. So I've put down the novels for a moment, and have been reading New Yorker all the time. This means at least two hours a day on trains and buses, most days. Anyway, this might all translate into a fair few NY article discussions over the next few weeks.

Yesterday, I read a great article about the U.S. prison system: The Caging of America, by Adam Gopnik (NY staff writer--dream job anybody?). It addressed the weirdly, worryingly large number of people America keeps imprisoned--something like 6 million under some kind of 'correctional supervision.' The article was everything I think good CNF should be: informative, moving, challenging, and highly readable. But it lacked an ingredient that I've been thinking of as essential to these factors: an individual story. It has seemed pretty obvious to me that the key factor lifting the best CNF above journalism was a tangible human focus, the closely observed story of (at least) one specific person, even if as part of a broader social narrative. "The Caging of America" featured no such thing--no characteristic individual story to structure the social comment around, no real narrative anecdotes, not even any interviews. It's all 'she writes', and no 'she told me'. And yet I found the article to be a great success. How can this be?

I suspect part of the answer lies in the prevalence of the author's own ideas in the piece. It is not a human interest feature, but an essay. And it may be that cogent, well-researched thoughts on a profound human problem can be as engaging, thought-provoking, and even moving as a narrative account of one person's story. Another part, I think, is Gopnik's powerful activation of the reader's imagination. It is here that it becomes possible for us to connect with his topic on a level other than the intellectual. Consider his opening passage:

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

By engaging the reader's imagination, Gopnik manages to make a story of generalities, of an anonymous 6 million, as personal and affecting as memoir.

It's an excellent article, and a fascinating topic--again, I hope I'll inspire someone to read it (luckily it's open to non-subscribers). I don't know how close I've come to the real core of it's strengths; I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts. My CNF class looks at essays in about a month's time, hopefully that'll bring clearer insights. I know I loved it, anyway.