A friend reminds me that you must not as a Substack journalist be oneself. Keep It Simple Stupid was an axiom of sales so I grok the point. In the case then of journalism, to build market share KISS makes it easier to get paying customers. Write at 9th grade level. Reference movies, TV, pop culture and if talking Covid -science. Avoid literature, law, philosophy, philosophers, writers, classics or quotations no one on Tobacco road has heard or cared to know.
Journalism like the good old days of Walter Cronkite. News like milk delivered fresh to the eye. No imagination needed, no wit wanted, just da facts man. Don’t confuse folks, keep it straight no chaser, not like some damn Dead show with improv in Dark Star going into U.S. Blues then Drums and Space and then bingo an exquisite rendition of Poncho and Lefty.
One must be a detective like Joe Friday squinting at the witness “Just The Facts Mam” and stating who, what, where, win, and why for the reader. I am closer in spirit to the New Journalism which I am surprised to find was pioneered by Eric Sevareid among others I am more familiar with like Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Joan Didion and Orianna Fallaci.
New Journalism is Literary in a way, autobiographical as well by the writer inserting their personality into the coverage, and bringing forward a way of seeing the facts as a story. I later discovered about age 50 Curzio Malaparte the Italian founder of New Journalism. His war coverage of the Russian front is collected in the Volga Rises in Europe. https://www.in-between.org.uk/books/the-volga-rises-in-europe/
It is also covered in his fictionalized version called Kaputt.
On the other hand let me not be misunderstood: I am not New or Old Journalism. I am not a journalist. Ich bin einer Surrealist. Like a responsible, honest, ethical Surrealist I report facts not just fabricate them wholesale. My third eye is 20/20. Imagination reveals much that fact covers up. And like a New Journalist I insert my personality into the “coverage” as my slant. In this wise only I agree to a resemblance. I am coming from a literary education not a journalistic one. I also come from radical anti-war political canvassing. A spirit of revolt induced by Vietnam. Nie wieder Kreig writ large. I write and clip articles to bring out the Rabelasian side of our mad hour. To be Rabelaisian, means to be totally outrageous, raunchy, crude in every way, absolutely stubborn in matters of truth, relentless against hypocrisy, and against all forms of popular opinion; but, also, in a more profound way, it means AXIOM BUSTING. So not raunchy or crude but with wit (now and then) written words will wend around and ultimately into the subject of Surrealist interest and disclose the submerged aspect of the ice berg if at the moment I work the hot iron to do so.
I doubt any purpose aside from movkery (the sublimest mockery, the highest spiritual form of mockery) is served. Someday my ship sinks but until then I am not contending with MSM but powers and principalities and so it goes, I am not expecting income from Stack anymore than I expected Contra Aid would be stopped or US funded death squads would go away because I put my Surrealist shoulder to the wheel. I was “accidentally banned” by the Stack for commentary that did not rise to praise of a post but did not argue “a outrance” the idiocy of having faith in a Genomic image out of China.
I am witnessing a long lingering frog Republic in name only boiling in living history and howling like a man in a wolf trap contemplating the amputation.
THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME POEM BY POEM
Storm Warnings
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky.
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
and set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
– Adrienne Rich
Very good analogy. Ishmael Reed used to say Writing is fighting. I think drumming captures the energy as well and likely in many respects better.