Newspapers are entitled to a worldview. If The Mail believes that only social conservatism and bad body image can save us, then it’s legitimate for their editorial to follow that line. What’s not legitimate is for them to misreport the facts to fit that editorial line. So new blog Don’t Get Mad, Get Accuracy is a pretty interesting proposition (and thanks to Anton Vowl for announcing its existence). It aims to get readers complaining to the PCC whenever The Mail publishes something demonstrably untrue – and while the PCC might not be especially awesome as watchdogs go, it’s still the best venue for organised objection as things are. Read, subscribe, follow their lead, hope that you end up with a better press for your letter-writing efforts.
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in May 2009 …
What happens next
I have been called a “professional writer” and a “freelance journalist”. Both these people are exaggerating. I’m actually a rarely-commissioned hack and a dilettante blogger who happens to be better with semi-colons than contraception and enjoys a terrifically retarded career path because of that. But people still sometimes disregard my colossal ignorance and ask me what I think the future of publishing will be. You know who they should be asking? David Simon, whose evidence to the Senate Commerce Committee is one of the most complete and most powerful summaries available of what’s gone wrong for print, and why bloggers can’t replace newspapers:
to read the claims that some new media voices are already making, you would think they need only bulldoze the carcasses of moribund newspapers aside and begin typing. They don’t know what they don’t know – which is a dangerous state for any class of folk — and to those of us who do understand how subtle and complex good reporting can be, their ignorance is as embarrassing as it is seemingly sincere. Indeed, the very phrase citizen journalist strikes my ear as nearly Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker. Just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.
There are several bloggers in my sidebar who do put in the shoe-leather (or whatever the equivalent is in ISP tracking), who go to the meetings, have the contacts, know their terrain. But the costs in time and server space mean that only a few rare people can blog like that, and blog well. Then there are the people who specialise in commenting on the output of the rest of the media (and I’d count myself as a junior member of that group) – it’s an essential check on the mess that reporting has got into, but if all the newspapers in the land dropped dead, casual commentators like me won’t offer much to fill the gap.
What makes Simon’s opinion especially worth hearing is that he does nothing to obscure the newspapers’ part in their own demise:
When I was in journalism school in the 1970s, the threat was television and its immediacy. My professors claimed that in order to survive, newspapers were going to have to cede the ambulance chasing and reactive coverage to TV and instead become more like great magazines. Specialization and detailed beat reporting were the future. We were going to have to explain an increasingly complex world in ways that made us essential to an increasingly educated readership. The scope of coverage would have to go deeper, address more of the world not less. Those were our ambitions. Those were my ambitions.
In Baltimore at least, and I imagine in every other American city served by newspaper-chain journalism, those ambitions were not betrayed by the internet. We had trashed them on our own, years before. Incredibly, we did it for naked, short-term profits and a handful of trinkets to hang on the office wall. And now, having made ourselves less essential, less comprehensive and less able to offer a product that people might purchase online, we pretend to an undeserved martyrdom at the hands of new technology.
Like Clay Shirky, Simon recognises that the future of journalism could be one of many economic models under discussion, it could be something totally novel, or it could be nothing at all – just the long slide into bankruptcy. I’m convinced that there’s a future in paper. It’s a beautiful medium with exceptional creative potential, and a valuable tactile connection to an audience. But current affairs are too quick-moving to live off of design values. The news belongs to the internet, and if it can’t make a living online, it’s going to starve, struggle, and finally die.
Paperhouse reads: Rapture
Because it’s topical, what with her making laureate and all – and in no way because I’ve been too slammed with proper work to write a proper post – here’s a review of Rapture by Carol Anne Duffy from the Paperhouse archives, first published in 2006. (See? Topical.)
Shadows of love
The eponymous rapture of Carol Anne Duffy’s new, T.S. Eliot Award-winning sequence of poems is the extreme pleasure of love; it is also a reference to the strange process of attempting to revive that love through writing after the agonies of loss. This is the sound of love being lifted bodily out of its grave. In Rapture, the love poem is always shadowed by grief – “loves’s spinster twin”.
The tone throughout the 52 poems is strikingly, sometimes painfully, personal – given that Duffy has previously shown a strong allegiance to the dramatic monologue, it is a surprise to encounter her in the naked “I”. From a writer who has often cultivated a poetic voice of no gender (that is to say, for whom gender has always seemed more a property of the characters she writes than of the poet writing), these poems also seem to offer a subtle putting-on of sex.
The hints are slight (“thorns on my breasts” in Forest, a panegyric to her lover, or “the dark fruit of your nipple / ripe on your breast” in Venus) but nonetheless clear that these lyrics are addressed from a woman, to a woman. Rapture is Duffy’s most intimate avowal of same-sex desire. The confessional quality is strong, and lyric loveliness often proves less affecting than scenes of personal embarrassment.
The description in Quickdraw of anxiously awaiting the lover’s phone call with the handset hipslung like a cowboy’s pistol ends with the speaker on her knees, fumbling for the phone. The indignity of desire appears poignantly in moments like this, and makes keen claim on the reader’s own painful experience.
It is this ability to move through the personal to suggest a general experience beyond the page that makes sense of the blurb’s claim that, “nowhere has Duffy more eloquently articulated her belief that poetry should speak for us all,” despite the intensely personal experience that seems to be documented by the sequence. Rapture is bonded not just thematically, but also narratively. It tells a story; there is a chronology, mangled as it may be by pain and memory.
But as the sequence comes to its conclusion, and the relationship it describes also reaches its end, Duffy turns increasingly to thoughts of words. “Love’s language starts, stops, starts; / the right words flowing or clotting in the heart,” she writes in Syntax – but if love’s language is erratic, at least the poet has the consolation of knowing that her language is under control, and in couplets.
Paperhouse reads: Wetlands
Wetlands, Charlotte Roche (Fourth Estate, 2009)
You ought to feel good about your body. Everyone wants you to, from the women’s glossies who promise you an arbitrary number of amazing tips to boost your self-esteem, to the cosmetics companies who have braved the raw frontiers of science to find new ways of hydrating and smoothing you so you’ll disgust yourself a bit less. Helen, the heroine of Charlotte Roche’s body, feels just fine about her body. Her first-person narrative is freakishly appealing (and pretty repulsive) because of the pleasure she takes in every protrusion and emission of her body: the earwax, the discharge, the infected hairshafts. The novel relies on the same mismatch between the ideal and the reality of the female body as Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, only instead of being passively spied on in the act of shitting, this Celia is smashing her chamber pot in the street and daring you to complain.
Prematurely festooned with hemorrhoids at 18, she views her “cauliflower” as a test for the many, many men she fucks – “they have to really like me to get their nose in there,” she brags. It’s a test for the reader too, but in the end the rewards of the novel aren’t really enough to make up for the physical nastiness in which your face is rubbed. Set entirely in the proctology ward of a hospital where Helen is recovering from an operation on an infected anal fissure, caused in part by her idiosyncratic approach to hygiene and cleanliness (she seems to view herself as a one-woman germ-theory terror unit, dispersing blood and slime with a hideous zeal), this foray into the existential adolescent has some obvious antecedents. Helen is a perpetually wet Holden Caulfield and Wetlands is The Bell Jar with knobs (and vegetable matter, and ad-hoc tampons, and hospital furniture) in every orifice.
There’s a story of a fractured family peering from between the shock sections, but as Helen is the only character with any breath in her, it matters very little. And while the story diverts from its heroine’s aims for an attempt at an emotionally satisfying resolution, it essentially trades off one form of wish-fulfillment through self-mutilation for another. Wetlands has the same alarming streak as those fictions which star an anorexic as a self-sacrificing beacon of frail beauty: just because Helen has a smart mouth and eats her own pus doesn’t make her any less of a poster girl for self-harm.
Tell me how it feels
Growing up on the music press meant that from about the time I hit my teens until the time downloading replace CD buying, I was is a state of constant! almost unbearable! excitement! Tracking down hot fresh singles by sexy new bands takes a frightening degree of forward-planning when you live in a teeny-tiny village at the mercy of the nearest market town’s only record shop. My diary was full of release dates and upcoming TV appearances scribbled down from the NME and Evening Session. Being a music fan was serious business and it never really occurred to me that my friends wouldn’t share this burning need to flick through 25 dusty racks of promos in search of That Song That Got A Really Interesting Review.
The consumption and interpretation of reviews was key to my music acquiring success. Even with a dad who bought and sold records semi-professionally, friends to share tapes with, and a willingness to sacrifice sleep for radio shows, I could only hear a tiny fraction of the music that came out every month. Most of the time, reviews were what decided how I spent my pocket money, and David Hepworth’s post for Word magazine about reviewing sent me fluttering back to youthful days of furiously parsing numbers.
Because, like Hepworth says, there’s a technique to reading reviews as much as there is to writing them. With Q reviews, I knew that three and four stars were my patch: anything that got a five was likely to be a bit too polished and mature for me to love, not poppy or scratchy enough – so I’d only be interested in a five star review if it was of a band I already liked. Then I’d take the byline into account – there were plenty of writers I enjoyed reading, but couldn’t get my align my taste with, so I’d knaw off the prose and leave the opinion.
And the best moments of review reading would be when sheer force of text knocked me out of my assumptions. Someone, I forget who, described a Sharkboy single as sounding “like an iceberg”. And it did, too. The album was shit, but this one gleaming song was vast and glitteringly cool, and I’d never have listened to it if the reviewer hadn’t pinned down its loveliness in one phrase. Or maybe I heard the loveliness because of the phrase. Either way, the review made the record for me. Whoever that reviewer was, they didn’t tell me what the music sounded like so much as why I should care what it sounded like.
Now, obviously, if I want to know what music to buy, I find a way to listen to it and think about whether to pay for it later – but I’m still totally dependent on the people who can tell me why I should care what something sounds like before I go looking for new tracks. Fair reviews are rubbish. Tell me how it makes you feel.
The stripped-down documentary
Kirsten’s Topless Ambition sounds like the sort of programme BBC3 doesn’t want to be associated with anymore: a prurient exploito-doc about a children’s TV presenter agonising over whether to take the career changing decision to do a sexy lads’ mag shoot, whose research involves shaking her tits around a lot and meeting women with really nice tits who shake them around for a living.
This is your standard mission documentary, alright. Starting out with a leering to-camera piece in which Kirsten demands if we want to “see these puppies in print”, it’s immediately awkward. When it lurches into scene of Kirsten looking at photos of Mark Speight (her late co-host on SMart) and explaining that his death convinced her that she needed to move into mainstream TV, it’s suddenly horrible: she’s obviously genuinely grieved by the death of a colleague and friend, but presenting it as a motivating factor in a quest to strip off feels opportunistic.
Other stuff feels not-quite-right too. For one thing, Kirsten’s got a secondary career on the go already – she does stand-up comedy. For another, she raises lots of questions about whether kids’ TV presenters set a bad example by doing glamour shoots, and doesn’t answer any of them before heading out to try on bikinis and learn poledancing. And critically, she doesn’t project sexiness. She goofs off charmingly when trying out page 3 poses, and she puts on a game show in the Carry On-environs of a branch of Hooters, but she doesn’t have a steamy lads mag cover look – she just isn’t that committed to going all Gail Porter and showing off and showing off a “scrawny Kentucky Fried Chicken bargain bucket breasts airbrushed bum newly-hatched raptor-foetus body“.
So it’s a stacked documentatary moving to a preconceived conclusion every bit as much as if Kirsten had been intending to flash her nipples all along, and like any mission documentary, the narrative tramples moronically all over the factual content. Do young girls really see Jordan as the pinnacle of success? Can CBBC presenters influence the aspirations of their audience? Does the transition from kids to adult telly really depend on clinching that bikini shoot? Are women in the media coerced into objectifying themselves? I don’t know, because everytime Kirsten starts googling something she’s concerned about she gets herded along to another instructive encounter like a confused sheep trailing through the gates on the way to the abatoir.
It’s the fictional structure that makes the truthful moments so hard to grasp. When the climactic trip to the FHM offices comes around, Kirsten sits in an office with the editor and has him tell her that she’s got an “adequate” face and an “adequate” body and wouldn’t cut it as an FHM girl. He’s right. The audience never expected him to say anything anything else. I’m pretty sure that Kirsten knows she’s not FHM material and never expected or intended to go into the shoot (if a shoot was what she wanted, dirty little Front magazine had already made her an offer).
But it’s still massively bruising to be told you’re not hot enough and Kirsten cries, miserably, for ages before deciding to stick to the stand-up. Which is what she was going to do anyway. You know what? I didn’t want to see Kirsten’s boobs that much but all of a sudden I feel like I’ve been played. That wasn’t a documentary, it was Kirsten O’Brien’s career relaunching on a sea of self-deprecation. Godspeed, little Kirsten. Godspeed.
