10:10 I get sidetracked by the music. Statra Records leads to Mateo and Matos leads to Crazy Penis leads on back to Thievery Corporation leads to Jazzhole and then off to good ol' Hotel Costes 5, which I have heard so many times in unpleasant office situations I imagine I won't want to download it. I'm really peeved I can't find clips from Crazy Penis's album "A Nice Hot Bath With..."
10:15 Still fooling with music. I tap the touchpad instead of clicking, then remember I'm not at work when it doesn't do anything. I could set it up the other way but a clamshell iBook is set up so that doing so makes for a number of catastrophic errors. grr.
10:19 I'm still procrastinating. My 11:00 sleepiness is starting to kick in early.
10:33 Still working on the studios piece. Can't wrap my head around the problem of how to mention that the biggest studio in the piece has made neighborhood activists angry and received a questionable subsidy from the Giuliani administration. This is a pro-studio, pro-Brooklyn article. Still haven't started on Coney.
10:57 Aggravation at how *not* close to done I am sets in. I am still wrestling with the studios piece. The problem with big media people is they give better soundbite. This guy delivered better than the tiny documentary studios I interviewed earlier.
11:00 None of you get to read this horrible piece of claptrap, agreed? I'm doing what on my part amounts to delirious raving: I am leaving in whatever cliche and fluff comes to me.
11:11 Tea time.
12:17 If I manage to get anything more done on the studios article -- and I'd better; the lead is creaky and the quotes are strung together like damp Froot Loops on a shoelace -- it will have to be tomorrow. It is currently twice as long as it ought to be. I need to give Coney the last of my attention and artificially-caffeine-enhanced alertness now.
12:30 Fantastic! The Coney Island lede and nut graf wrote themselves! (We love to misspell our jargon, because it doesn't actually appear in print to reveal us as the philistines we are.) And I'm not embarrassed of them! At all! No labor pains at all -- it just popped out, whoosh! It's even compelling! And it has flippers and fangs! And I think my editor will like it! She better.
12:33 Do I really know what "vicissitudes" means?
12:38 Mind's wandering. Read yet another review of Capturing the Whatstheirnames today -- that family from Long Island which was accused of child molestation... the Voice's piece on it was quite good... While I believe that children should be listened to and believed when it comes to sexual abuse, I needed to hear the things the Voice writer said about studies which show most pedophiles are gentle and many young children think nothing of being fondled until an adult tells them it's wrong -- though pondering these ideas feels like almost unmanageable blasphemy at times, I think it's worth deconstructing the media coverage of stories like these... I think I was permanently damaged by the satanic-nursery-school-and-child-prostitution hysteria of the early 80s... fostered an exceedingly negative concept about sexuality... Also inhibited my ability to get into relationships with men older than I am... past about six years or so I start to feel creeped out by anyone gettin' amorous towards me...
1:01 "It's a wonder that the Wonder Wheel survived." I am the motherfscking Cole Porter of budget freelance journalism, yo.
1:33 Another diversion: Coney Island film festival to Insane Films. The primrose path to procrastination is paved with... primroses. and people playing the guitar with their penis.
1:37 New ergonomic problems are posed by laptop: My knees hurt from supporting the damned thing.
2:02 Should be done by now, but I'm not dead yet, why mess with momentum.
2:09 I type "seat otters" by mistake, correct the error, then consider changing it back. It could be my only chance to get published in the New Yorker.
2:11 From penis guitars to walruses. Distraction is so easy. Why is this educational puff piece so much more klutzy than this one? (Heads up, Sylvie, that last one's an otter link. It will totally make you cry.)
2:14 Time to turn in. I'm losing feeling in my fingers.
Posted by Gus at May 29, 2003 02:24 AM | TrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.twistedmatrix.com/~gus.twistd/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/61
FIRST POST!!!!!!!!
ok, I really suck.
So what I was saying yesterday was I had this one internship with a Hampshire alumn (and since I greatly respect him I won't mention his name, I don't know if he'd want it tied to a discussion of the gray areas of journalistic ethics) who had me do a long-interview based piece for the magazine he was editing. When I turned it in I was kind of surprised that not only did he want me to edit out the ums and uhs and clean up sloppy-sounding speech patterns, he wanted me to rearrange the interview -- as if the subject had said it. I've never been sure if this is just ok for literary journalism, or whether it's permissible in some measure of, um, non-literary journalism, or whatnow. Like I said, I got my license from a cereal box. And now I'm going to bed, for reals.
Posted by: gus at May 29, 2003 2:34 AM
For what it's worth, I think that's Standard Practice - it's recognizable in the Onion's interviews sometimes. The whole point of a written interview for me is that you can ask tons and tons of questions and only tell me the interesting answers. Also, you can make the interviewee sound more articulate than they are.
I mean, written speech is an approximation at best, not an accurate representation. It's missing all kinds of shading that spoken speech has, timing, intonation, etc.. As long as the writer doesn't change the essence of what someone says, I have no problem with quote-manipulation.
Posted by: fuz at May 29, 2003 9:09 AM
um, the Onion?
You didn't perhaps mean the Omen? They at least use quotes from real people, sometimes ;)
I should clarify that the article I was writing was going to be presented as a long narrative from the interviewee, punctuated by a small number (maybe three) questions or possibly none.
Posted by: gus at May 29, 2003 10:26 AM