One Day at a Time

It occurred to me only in reading the post of 8.13.09 that "journalism," etymologically, is a daily practice. Stephanie writes, "I wonder whether it is possible to practice journalism that is not so much about hunting down stories as about knowing a place and community and cultural reality deeply, so that one can speak intelligently and even wisely about it even if nothing ‘news-worthy’ is happening there." I am inclined to reply, "Yes! Journalism can be precisely itself by knowing and noting the daily life of a people or a place. Journalism isn’t the same as news, and it can go on productively (fruitfully? more on that another time) when there is no news at all.”

But this reply is too simple, or maybe just wrong. It seems to me that “journalism,” used colloquially, includes all of the following: the news, what we call features, human interest, exposé, and opinion. There are probably other subgenres I’m not thinking of. If this is right, then my idea that journalism can be “precisely itself” looks misleading and absurd. At the same time, I think I’ve stumbled on one of the valuable features of the journal, which of course has the same etymology.

For all the difficulty I have defining journalism, it still seems opposed to the journal in one clear way. While the news elements of journalism can operate on the very limited time scale of the day, as in “day after day” – while they should consist primarily of reportage – the other kinds of journalism I’ve mentioned all strive to build coherent and compelling narratives from events that follow one after another without, in fact, being part of a story. It is the news that resembles the journal, while the other forms of journalism represent the powerful human impulse to impose a story pattern (beginning, middle, and end, say) on unpatterned, unauthored occurences. Journals can be compelling because when we reread them, they force us out of the narratives we’ve constructed. They drop us back into what I’ll call the diurnal mode. They call our attention to the facts of a day, and simultaneously they remind us of the fact that we’ve incorporated those facts, fictionally, into a story of a life.

To return to Stephanie's question: we can practice journalism both by hunting down stories that other people have already shaped or rough-hewn, or we can rely on our own immersion in a place, community, or cultural-reality – and write stories that are therefore more totally our own. They may be wiser, but they also may be no more true.

Berlin Wall

Berlin Revisited: Photographs by Brian Harris

Berlin, 1989 to 2009

The Economist has a sister magazine called Intelligent Life. In their web publication, I just found this brief photo essay. Seeing pieces like this makes me want to be a journalist: to have been there in 1989, photographing, and to be back in 2009, following up, with an eyewitness sense of what has happened on the ground under my feet. It also makes me realize, though, that while there's luck involved in being in the right place at the right time, good journalism is a serious commitment involving just being there for a long time, in lots of different theres or in one, patiently, with one's eyes open and often very little payoff. In fact, I wonder whether it is possible to practice journalism that is not so much about hunting down stories as about knowing a place and community and cultural reality deeply, so that one can speak intelligently and even wisely about it even if nothing "news-worthy" is happening there.

Which would make journalism much like writing in general: inspiration can't often be scheduled, but "showing up" (whether at a writing desk or camera, or in front of a book, or just by being present to your surroundings with your eyes and brain and pores open) is like maintaining an address where inspiration will know how to reach you. (This is my re-statement of an observation given by so many writers in so many versions that I don't know whom to cite. Somerset Maugham's: "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.")

Salem, 1989

I am in the middle of the small living room. It has pale blue carpet and the walls are cluttered with pictures and shelves. In the corner there is a small TV, and the adults are clustered around it. The TV’s colors are like the colors of the room: bland, slightly bluish. It is a crowd: blurred crowd noise, blurred crowd colors. There are so many faces I can’t even make out separate heads and shoulders in the glimpses I get of the TV between the heads of my parents and my aunt and uncle. Something, I know, is happening, a category of thing that has not happened before in my memory. They are riveted, but they are not cheering. They are talking in low voices. My parents watch sports, but not with this kind of attention, and not this quietly. And there is no little yellow ball on this screen; nothing, in fact, seems to be happening.

“And to imagine this is happening now, the first time in years we’ve been out of the country for more than two months…” my dad’s voice is wry, half laughing, but also half embarrassed at the thought. And his tone is abstracted, as though he’s not actually present with the words, as though they are drawn out of him while he’s not paying attention—as though his mind needs his voice to make a foundation of sound, to give it something to stand on.