Dear Joe,
I came across your site via Counterpunch and now come here daily, either to read the latest post or browse older essays. I find your writing breathtaking and, as a youngish writer myself, inspirational. "Audacity of Depression" bowled me over. After I read it, I had to stand up from my desk and pace the room. I wanted to write a response directly to that piece, but I found in the following days that the responses posted to your site pretty much echoed my thinking.
On later reflection, one thing I noticed was that the more I read news, the more depressed I became. If I totally ignore it, I feel pretty happy and optimistic about things in my life. I'm less apt to play with my dog or phone a friend if I've spent a couple of hours reading the news. As a journalist, do you find news easier to deal with, or do you find you have a similar reaction? Does writing and being heard help to exorcise the helplessness which I think is a key part of that depression?
A big reason I'm asking is that I'm at a point in college where I can throw my classes into a journalism degree or focus more on screenwriting. Fiction writing is my first love, and I'd love to see my fictional worlds brought to life either on the screen or on stage.
I was moved by your comments to the National Conference on Media Reform as posted on your site. What's frustrating about "alternative" media, whether its websites, books, magazines, documentaries, movies, music, theater, or art, is that it largely preaches to the choir. I want to be part of the effort to bridge the gaps between us and help rally the working poor. That's easy enough to write, but even as I do, it feels empty. It's like writing, "I want to work for world peace". I have a knee-jerk reaction of hopelessness at the very thought. But I can't sit idly by either. To that end, is it worthwhile to study journalism in a college setting? I believe in your "Three nights in Philly" essay you describe meeting journalists from a time when journalists didn't have degrees. Is it something you simply must apprentice into?
Finally, could you suggest some perhaps lesser known books or authors that shaped your writing style and your social outlook, or anything that really blew your mind?
Thanks for your time.
Jason
------
Jason,
Thank you for such kind words. I certainly do not deserve them. All I do is watch, listen, and reflect on what I've seen, and then write.
Your letter so well defines the dilemma of journalism in general. So much so that I would like to answer point for point, if I may:
Jason: On later reflection, one thing I noticed was that the more I read news, the more depressed I became. If I totally ignore it, I feel pretty happy and optimistic about things in my life. I'm less apt to play with my dog or phone a friend if I've spent a couple of hours reading the news.
Well, I try to remain aware that "the news" is firstly a consumer product and secondly the expression of a given culture. In our case, a capitalist culture, with its attending emphasis on hierarchy and material production. For instance, with six billion people on the planet, why do we mostly read about the same handful of powerful elites day in and day out?
Answer: because they own the information producing machinery of the culture. The antidote for this is "reading people." Consequently, I find myself reading less and less "news" every year. And when you focus on human beings and their actual on the ground lives, you find that there is a certain human cohesiveness that is not all that depressing, but is stifled or simply ignored and discouraged by our state produced media -- except when it suits their goals of course.
For example, no ordinary human being likes war. Really. It takes a lot of conditioning to make them believe they do, and thus participate. But try and think of a war in which a group of ordinary citizens decided, "Hey, let's get together and kill the fuck out of those people we've never met way over there in the desert we've never seen!" The nearest examples I can come up with are the Crusades, and even then they were never the idea of the European peasantry, who made up the armies. Anyway, reading people is much more heartening than reading the news, though one must do both to keep a bearing in the world. The gift of literacy is both an affliction and our best hope.
Jason: Does writing and being heard help to exorcise the helplessness which I think is a key part of that depression?
In a word: No. Being heard is no big deal. People just think it is because it implies celebrity of some sort, through mass acknowledgment of one's existence. It mostly exacerbates the sense of helplessness because when we write about the current American condition, examine it and define it, we suffer it all the more for understanding it better. However, I am finding that what we experience as a sense of helplessness is actually more of a true understanding of our situation on this planet as individuals. Americans are very self-important people, generally speaking. But the thinking people among us soon come to realize that they never were in control of their lives in the largest sense, and in that rests the opportunity for universal understanding. True growth. Personally speaking however, I cannot see how any real sense of understanding or insight can come to the typical western world mind without depression. It's sort of a form ego death.
Jason: A big reason I'm asking is that I'm at a point in college where I can throw my classes into a journalism degree or focus more on screenwriting. Fiction writing is my first love, and I'd love to see my fictional worlds brought to life either on the screen or on stage.
Well, I dunno. Journalism is its own kind of hell. Fiction is another. And screenwriting strikes me as a sub-hell in its own category. One in which a thousand mediocre devils get a poke at you instead of merely Old Scratch himself. But, as they say, every man carries his own hide to the tanner. And one of the few compensations of the writing life is that we get to choose which tanner. Personally speaking, I am completely weary of American fiction, and have been since it became chiefly entertainment (even the darker stuff, such as Cormac McCarthy). I liked it better when the goal was the great American novel, you know, the one that spoke for the times through elegant imagination coupled with insight and endless craft. The kind of stuff you thought about for years after reading it.
As for "my fictional worlds brought to life," I tend to think that bringing our life to life in the real world does more to inform fiction than fiction does to inform life. As it is right now, most published fiction is escape literature, not the literature of confrontation with the world in its various aspects. And I blame that on the rise of big publishing corporations -- lowest common denominator, etc. Oh, I'm not such a sourpuss that I don't realize the rightful place for fiction that is funny, delightful, mysterious for mystery's sake. But most of it bores the piss out of me these days. It's practically a full time job to find the good stuff amid the crap. And though I suppose writers are supposed to, I do not spend languid, thoughtful days perusing the vast array of schlock looking for gems. Hell, cruising the porn sites on the web is more informative (though not much). I guess I'm getting old.
Jason: I was moved by your comments to the National Conference on Media Reform as posted on your site. What's frustrating about 'alternative' media, whether its websites, books, magazines, documentaries, movies, music, theater, or art, is that it largely preaches to the choir. I want to be part of the effort to bridge the gaps between us and help rally the working poor.
If I may be candid, I think the idea of rally "the poor" is rather arrogant. It carries the assumption that you understand their plight and the cosmology of poverty, material, spiritual or otherwise. Please do not take this as a chiding; I felt the same way at your age. It would be more convincing if you opted for a life of genuine poverty from the outset. The poor do not rally. They survive. They endure. If things get miserable enough, and we are talking hellish miserable here, they react. Remember, they do not have real political options, just the choice between which political puppet, Punch or Judy, they pretend to believe in.
Personally, I believe there could be a viable socialism whose core aesthetic is beer and sports. But good "educated" liberals would never support that. Now you can laugh at then idea if you want. But it is not my idea. It was George Orwell's. And he was serious. Interesting how liberals pick and choose among the quotes among their own heroes, much the same as neo-conservatives pick and choose among the thoughts of, say, Adam Smith (who also believed in the periodic redistribution of wealth.)
Jason: It's like writing, "I want to work for world peace". I have a knee-jerk reaction of hopelessness at the very thought.
Overcoming the hopelessness in a genuine way through art and painful experience is certainly the first step, in my humble opinion. It is by seeing and accepting the enormity of a task that we become humble enough to attempt it realistically.
Jason: But I can't sit idly by either.
Amen! All I can say is: Risk everything. From the outset.
Jason: To that end, is it worthwhile to study journalism in a college setting? I believe in your "Three nights in Philly" essay you describe meeting journalists from a time when journalists didn't have degrees. Is it something you simply must apprentice into?
Hell, almost nobody in journalism had a degree when I started in the late sixties. At least not the older journalists at the average American publication, although the degreed ones were rapidly coming on the scene. You could either do the job or you couldn't. Watergate caused a lot of people in my generation to believe journalism could be important. Naturally, like most children of the middle class, they assumed it was about college and being certified through some sort of degree. Like having permission to talk to the public. Soon these middle class children were editors and publishers and producers and tended to hire their own kind -- not a fault, just the natural human tendency to prefer the familiar. But personally, I think most journalism schools indoctrinate more than they teach. I'd take Studs Terkel or Mike Royko over a hundred standard issue journalists. Passion and insight is what they had. Not because they were gifted or special, but because they accepted life in the community of ordinary men. So they could write about it and certainly they reached more people because of having made that choice.
There is, as I am sure you have figured out, no such thing as objectivity. And even of there were, it would merely be a stack of facts. Apprenticeship would be an outstanding option. But it would be dangerous to our present system. And I'm sure the waiting list would be as long as hell. But here in the new information gulag, who can afford to serve an apprenticeship? Or offer one?
Finally, could you suggest some perhaps lesser known books or authors that shaped your writing style and/or your social outlook, or anything that really blew your mind?
Thomas Merton influenced me greatly, made me understand the value of reflection. And of course Hunter S. Thompson, mostly because he broke the style mold, despite that he became a parody of himself in the later years. Style-wise the young Tom Wolfe was a mothefucker on wheels. Read his Sports Illustrated piece on stock car driver Junior Johnson. Brilliant stuff, a real breakthrough at the time. But in the end I come back to Merton. And Lewis Thompson's "Mirror to the Light," a book of aphorisms. And Shaw, and Allen Ginsberg, and Henry Miller because who says the twin brides of journalism cannot be insight and the wild and jeweled craftsmanship of poetry? All these blew my mind at the time.
As to social outlook, mine is obviously a rather political cake, with a spiritual icing. So I was naturally attracted to Howard Zinn, Emma Goldman and the rest of the commies drinking the heady wine of possibility in America's literary basement at a time when it was not only unfashionable, but downright dangerous. Now all these writers, Ginsberg, Miller, Merton and the rest, they are dear old friends whose best works remain as steadying walking sticks, or lights along this perilous path we now tread.
To choose journalism or not? Journalism, in my opinion, has never been more meaningless amid the stupefying noise machine called America, or more difficult to practice with integrity, or more glorious in its promise.
In art and labor,
Joe
