Brian Chasnoff

I look forward every weekend to a feature on Harper’s Magazine’s website called the Weekly Review.

Other than encapsulating the foregoing week’s major news, each review is a gem of narrative journalism in itself, written lucidly and with glints of irony and gallows humor. It is essentially a mix of major national news and local “news of the weird,” and each strain is often wound about the other in a twisted, jarring juxtaposition.

Take this sentence from last week’s review:

Bombay’s Oberoi hotel reopened, and the California Highway Patrol was forced to temporarily shut down its South Lake Tahoe office after they mistook an “anal vibrator” for a bomb.

It doesn’t necessarily make you laugh, but it does make your eyes bug out in horror and incredulity. And folks, in my book, that’s entertainment.

Photo by Xelina Flores

Two generous souls have started a website (goodnight forever “Web site”) that fills a hole in my life. As Slate’s Jack Shafer explains, the duo — Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer — recently began compiling gems of long-form journalism in one place: longform.org.

On their no-frills, reader-friendly page, they’ve included a link to a nifty Internet tool called Instapaper. Readers who set up an account can bookmark to the stories selected by Longform.org and then read them whenever they want in an ad- and navigation-free format, online or offline.

Kudos to Linksy and Lammer for curating a page that could reignite the world’s appreciation for well-crafted narrative journalism. I know I’ll be a regular.

UPDATE 4/25: In the past 48 hours, I have ingested pieces on gay Austrian Neo-Fascists, the orgy-child of Charles Manson, a cocaine-and-Grand-Theft-Auto-addicted travel writer, and a man who killed his entire family and assumed the name of a disgraced journalist. Thank you, Longform.org.

Old Main; originally opened in 1903

For anyone out there who hasn’t completely given up on this blog, let me assure you:

I’m alive. And I haven’t laid down my pen.

Yes, that’s “laid”: the past participle of “lay.” And why do I open my first blog in months with the potentially alienating parsing of an irregular verb?

Because I’m teaching copy editing now. At Texas State University. In the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. On Tuesday nights. For three hours. On the second floor of the campus’ first structure: a hoary, beautiful building in the Victorian Gothic style.

Those sentences were phrases. They lacked verbs. OK, I’ll stop now.

The larger point I’d like to make is that it’s a new year. No duh, right? But I mean this in the most symbolic sense. New things are happening this year. The wheel is turning; old hopes are dropping into the abyss and new ones are clinging to the spokes. (more…)

Zeitoun

“Zeitoun,” by Dave Eggers, is a swift, affecting work of literary nonfiction that also works as an essential piece of American journalism.

Count Mr. Eggers as another object of my overactive writer’s envy. This guy has penned screenplays (the fantastic, eerie “Where the Wild Things Are”), novels (“You Shall Know Our Velocity”) and an experimental memoir (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”).

He’s also the founder and editor of an independent publishing house (McSweeney’s). Oh, well, at least he’s not smooching Fiona Apple, like another writer I envy, er, admire.

Eggers, who has a degree in journalism, obviously flexed some investigative muscle for this book. It takes place in New Orleans immediately before and after Hurricane Katrina turned the city inside out. (more…)

David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was captured last year by scary Taliban militants and held for more than seven months in the tribal regions of Pakistan, used his own wiles to escape their clutches.

In a recent five-part series that recounts the ordeal, he also uses a wily literary technique: in medias res.

That’s Latin for “into the midst of things,” or beginning a narrative in the middle of the action. Rohde opens his story like this:

“THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.”

An interesting note: Rohde milks in media res to thrust us into the midst of his story, yet paradoxically he manages not to violate Aristotle’s rule of connectedness — the Greek philosopher’s appeal to make sure that everything that happens in a story is a natural consequence of what came before it.

His first paragraph is self-contained, yet it still deposits us right into the middle of the action.

What makes a story any good?

Two people I admire have taken a crack at that question: Ira Glass and Aristotle.

We’ll start with Ira:

Turns out Ira is cribbing from Aristotle in his first idea about a sequence of actions. I’ve checked; YouTube has no videos from 336 B.C., so you’ll have to read from here on out. (Thank you, Malcolm Heath, for your translation and introduction in the Penguin Classics edition of Poetics.)

(more…)

Here’s a fine description of that apparent oxymoron, “creative nonfiction,” as delineated by Lee Gutkind, editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction.

Gutkind says the creative nonfiction writer “presents or treats information using the tools of the fiction writer while maintaining allegiance to fact.”

He notes that creative nonfiction allows for the threading of parallel narratives in a story — a “private” narrative and a “public” narrative. That is, personal reflections are interwoven with reportage.

I’m glad to see that Gutkind also includes Gay Talese’s definitive description of the genre, one that argues for the writer’s unfettered consciousness as an essential ingredient.

Talese wrote, “Though often reading like fiction, [it] is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage, although it seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.”