Journalism
THE FOURTH ESTATE
What is known as the fourth estate now most commonly refers to the news media, especially print journalism, or "The Press". The British historian Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to the philosopher Edmund Burke who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of Press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain. Earlier writers have applied the term to lawyers, to the British queen, acting as a free agent, and to the proletariat. The term makes reference to the Three Estates of the Realm. In Burke's 1787 coining he would have been making reference to the traditional three estates of Parliament: The Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal and the Commons.
This 4th estate, the journalism industry, is changing at a rapid pace. Newspapers are failing from collapsing advertising support as people are finding free news online, and using search rather than brands as a route to information. Media have also become something different than it used to be: entertainment or infotainment. The media spend extensive time with coverage of things like celebrities and the rest of the entertainment world. The news has no longer become a source of information, but a world of fun, danger, and melodrama. Martin Kaplan, a Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California, recently spent time recording and studying local news in Los Angeles to see how much time was devoted to each type of news story. The results were found to be sports, weather, crime, and countless trivial stories.
For more details go to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
ONLINE JOURNALISM AND BLOGS
New communication technology, including accessible online publishing software and evolving mobile device technology, means that citizens like myself have the potential to observe and report more immediately than traditional media outlets do. I sent items of news and articles to newspapers and magazines for forty years(1965-2005) before I was able to work-out how the internet could provide me with access to a wide readership. Swarms of amateur online journalists are putting this technology, this world-wide-web to use, on what you might call, might refer to as, open publishing sites, weblogs and blogs among a wide variety of names. This adds a grassroots dimension to the media landscape. Bloggers and other amateur journalists are scooping mainstream news outlets as well as pointing out errors in mainstream articles, while people who’ve been made subjects of news articles are responding online, posting supplementary information to provide context and counterpoints. Increasingly, the public is turning to online sources for news, reflecting growing trust in alternative media. I now read everything online. Of course, this is not for everyone. We all have to work out our MO, to borrow a term from the who-dun-its.
While some traditional news outlets are reacting with fear and uncertainty, many are adopting open publishing features with their own online versions. The Guardian, The Washington Post, and literally hundreds of other newspapers and journals, magazines and specialist publications, as well as many other mainstream media outlets are now online. Many have added blogs to their sites, and engaged in more tactics and devices to get readers than I could possible summarize here without giving readers more information than they need.
The BBC’s website posts reader’s photos, and other sites solicit and use reader-contributed content. Mainstream news outlets are increasingly scanning blogs and other online sources for leads on news items, and some are hiring journalists from the blogging ranks. Journalists are blogging live from courtrooms, from Baghdad, and elsewhere, allowing them to post frequent updates in near real-time. I'm getting my slice of the action, much more than I ever got in those 40 years that I referred to above.
As the public turns toward participatory forms of online journalism, and as mainstream news outlets adopt more of those interactive features in their online versions, the media environment is shifting, slowly and incrementally, away from the broadcast model where the few communicate to the many, toward a more inclusive model in which publics and audiences also have voices. The result, of course, is an immense print and image-glut.
MORE ON MY BLOGGING
A blog, for those who don’t know, is a journal or log that appears on a website. It is written on line, read on line, and updated on line. It’s there for anyone with an Internet connection to see and, in many cases, to comment on. The entries, or posts, are organized in reverse chronological order, like a pile of unread mail, with the newest posts on top and the older stuff on the bottom. Sometimes the order is the other way around. Some blogs resemble on-line magazines, complete with graphics, sidebars, and captioned photos. Others just have the name of the blog at the top and the dated entries under it. You can find blogs by doing a regular Google search for the blog name, if you know it, or by doing a Google Blog search using keywords.
The word “blog” is a portmanteau term for Web log or Weblog. In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom, a website full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism coined the word “Weblog.” In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this—”We blog”—creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. “Blog” was born. 1997 was the first year of my own website and in 1999 I retired from FT work, the world of being jobbed. I had been jobbing as far back as the 1950s while a student in primary school who wanted more money to buy stuff than my parents could afford to give me. In the years 1997 to the first years of this 3rd millennium, I exchanged jobbing for blogging among other forms of writing. Blogs were just waiting for me. If you go to this link, you will find some of my online blogs:http://www.google.com.au=15=Ron+Price+blogs source=Ron+Price+blogs
My blogs are all in their early stage. In the last decade, as I have opened many a blog in cyberspace, I have taken what you might call a "wait and see" approach. I have set up many blogs on the world-wide-web at sites where I had registered. But I have written very little at these blogs in the first decade of their existence---at least in most cases. In many cases, at many blogs, I have written the same opening notes, opening posts. Blogging has really begun for the world, for people who use the internet, just the other day, as I say above just in the last decade. Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with about 15 million of them active. In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles. There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, and cartoon blogs, to name just a few. Some people blog alone and some in groups. Every self-respecting newspaper and magazine has some reporters and critics blogging. Some famous print media blogs are found at: The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. For an excellent critique of and comment on the world of blogs and its processes go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/feb/14/blogs/
THE BIG PICTURE
In came some readers here might come to think that, since I now have millions of readers, I am on my way to becoming famous or rich or both. Far from it. In the world of cyberspace there are, as of May 2012, some 9 billion pages of documents, 300 million websites and 2 billions internet participants. My site and my writing is but a needle in that proverbial haystack.
SOME OF MY INTEREST IN BLOGGING
If bloggers are paid a salary, a book contract, or a press credential; if bloggers are set up with a blog for a magazine, a company, or a newspaper; if these bloggers write for pay, then they worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. They worry about their boss, their publisher, their mother, and their superego looking over their shoulder. And that’s no way to blog. Many, indeed millions, have come to see the purposes of blogs in personal terms having nothing to do with making money or keeping the boss happy. Now, in these opening years of the second decade of the existence of blogs, it's a wide, wide, wonderful world for bloggers---and it's a dog's breakfast of stuff.
Blogging at its freest is like going to a masked ball. You can say all the spiteful, infantile things you wouldn’t dream of saying if you were in print or face to face with another human being. You can flirt with anyone, or try to. You can tell the President exactly what you think of him. You can have political opinions your friends would despise you for. You can even libel people you don’t like and hide behind an alias. It’s very hard to get back at anonymous bloggers who defame you at least in the USA due to an act of Congress; anyway, website administrators aren’t liable for what’s written on their sites. And erasing anything on the Web is almost impossible, although that is not entirely the case. You can assume a new identity and see how it flies—no strings attached. If you want to read more about this sort of blog-freedom and the complexities of blogging go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/feb/14/blogs/
MY BLOGGING ROLE
My role, my stance, the way I play blogging at this masked ball--to use this same metaphor--is quite different from the above description. I go to the masked ball as myself and play my life and my personality in each situation as I find it. It is really not much different from real life. As I head for the age of 70, and on a new medication for my bipolar disorder, I am not able to handle interaction with others except for very brief periods of time. And so it is that the internet and blogging allows me to play, to participate, in the theatre that is life in a new medium: not real space but cyberspace. There are many ways of describing blogs and, if there is an essence to blogging and to blogs, it eludes description as so many essences in life do. Bloggers assume that if you’re reading them, you’re one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant, so to speak. They don’t care if they leave you in the dust. They’re not responsible for your education. Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. The unspoken message is: "Hey, I’m here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don’t. It’s up to you."
I used to study Plato in first year university and teach his ideas off-and-on in the 40 years after that philosophy class in 1964(1965-2005). I encourage you to read the beginning of Plato’s Republic. I play the blog world more gently. Some bloggers are gentle and some harsh. If you want to get some idea of my blog style in the early stage of the operation of my many blogs go to this somewhat long link:
http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&cp=11&gs_id=36&xhr=t&q=Ron+Price%27s+Blogs&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=Ron+Price%27s+Blogs&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=7ece50989aed7ca2&biw=960&bih=461
THE DECLINE OF THE NEWSPAPER
The press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured the press that its days are numbered; too many good newspapers are in ruins. It has lost too much public respect. Courts that once treated it like a sleeping tiger now taunt it with insolent subpoenas and put in jail reporters who refuse to play ball with prosecutors. It is abused relentlessly on talk radio and in Internet blogs. It is easily bullied into acquiescing in the designs of a presidential propaganda machine determined to dominate the news. Its advertising and circulation are being drained away by the Internet, and its owners seem stricken by a failure of the entrepreneurial imagination needed to prosper in the electronic age. Surveys showing that more and more young people get their news from television and computers breed a melancholy sense that the press is yesteryear’s thing, a horse-drawn buggy on an eight-lane interstate. For more on this increasingly complex topic go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/aug/16/goodbye-to-newspapers/
MY VOICE AS JOURNALIST
My voice is but one of millions now even with the millions of words I have on the internet and even with many blogs. The following paragraphs, entitled GOOGLE-MICROSOFT, tries to summarize the evolution of my involvement in cyberspace since the mid-1990s as the internet became increasingly the powerful force it has become in the last 15 years: 1996 to 2011. In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. With its introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine. In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as casual and most volunteer activity that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprize billions of users in the international marketplace. I was one.
Not only did Google have billions of users, but internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in Google’s growing index/library. The information revolution set off in the closing decade of the 20th century by the invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human activity. Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of study to amass, vastly enriched the intellectual life of anyone able to use it, as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of professional fields. It was a finer and more useful library than any of those in the small towns where I would spend my retirement in the years ahead. It was also a library with a myriad locations in which I could interact with others and engage in learning and teaching in ways I had never dreamt of in the first five decades of my life as a student and teacher: 1949-1999.
This electronic system of communication that is the internet has built a sense of shared community among its users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances. This description of the sense of shared community has proved to be an increasingly prescient insight into the nature and evolution of internet use worldwide in this last decade. It is interesting to note that Friendster began in 2001, Linkedin and Myspace in 2003, and Facebook in 2004--all deeply infused with this concept of shared community.
The internet is a cornucopia of accurate, well-argued and knowledgeable information. But it is also a place for specious and spurious, inaccurate and beguiling arguments. People who know little about an issue are often easily taken-in on the internet. Many often believe a u-tube post they can see to one that requires study and reading on their part. The internet, like many forms of technology before it, is both boon and beast, asset and debit, to the lives of its participants. Indeed, a quite separate section of this statement on my cyberspace experience could be devoted to the negative and positive impacts of the internet.
GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT
In 1994, at the age of fifty and as I was beginning to eye my retirement from FT work as a teacher and lecturer, Microsoft launched its public internet web domain with a home page. Website traffic climbed steadily and episodically in the years 1995 to 1999. Daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996 grew to 5.1 million visitors by 1999 when I had taken a sea-change and retired to Tasmania at the age of 55. Throughout 1997 and 1998 the site grew up and went from being the web equivalent of a start-up company to a world-class organization.
I retired from FT work, then, at just the right time in terms of the internet capacity to provide me with: (a) access to information by the truckload on virtually any topic; and (b) learning and teaching opportunities, both direct and indirect, far in excess of any I had had in my previous years as a student and teacher. My first website in 1997 was part of the initial flourish of web sites and search engines in the mid-1990s. The second edition of my site was in 2001. A world, a succession, of brand names have made electronic communication an everyday experience. Web browsers such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Safari, as well as search engines such as Yahoo and Google, the latter founded in 1998, all came on board just as I was retiring from 50 years in classrooms as a teacher and student.
This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time. From 1999 to 2005, as I say, I released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, and Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity for my work in a Cause that I had devoted my life to since my late teens and early twenties.
The Internet has become emblematic in many respects of globalisation. Its planetary system of fibre optic cables and instantaneous transfer of information are considered, by many accounts, one of the essential keys to understanding the transformation of the world into some degree of order and the ability to imagine the world as a single, global space. The Internet has widely been viewed as an essential catalyst of contemporary globalisation and it has been central to debates about what globalisation means and where it will lead.
WHO READS WHAT I WRITE?
There are now several hundred thousand readers, as I say above, engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.
I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web. My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers. I have literally hundreds of thousands of readers, perhaps even millions, since it has become impossible to keep even a rough account of the numbers of those who come across what I write. There are now more than 8000 locations, websites, on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet. All of this is at places where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success.
As a final note I would like to add an element of my work which is important to me as a member of the Baha'i Faith. In the years 1996 to 2011, the years I am discussing in relation to the WWW, a new culture of learning and growth, a new paradigm, became part of the Baha'i international community's outreach and internal activity. My journalistic work on the net and this website I see as part of this new Baha'i culture, part of my own individual initiative in relation to my community responsibilities within this new culture, this new paradigm. For more on this subject readers can go to the following link for a book I have written on this subject, a book of over 400 pages.
http://bahai-library.com/price_culture_learning_paradigm
ADVOCACY JOURNALISM: Part I
Advocacy journalism can be defined as journalistic praxis, that is, reflective practice. There are many print media which, in focusing on evidence-based reporting coupled with a standpoint, engage in advocacy journalism. On the other hand, opinion journalism, exemplified by newspaper editorials and media punditry, is not always expected to involve the same degree of in-depth investigation. Nonetheless, the distance separating the two fields is murky, and the terms are sometimes employed interchangeably.
Various designations for advocacy journalism, or species of advocacy journalism, have been used throughout the years. These have included radical journalism, largely in the 19th and early 20th centuries, critical journalism, activist journalism, and social justice journalism. However, advocacy journalism appears to be most common term in contemporary discourse as we head through these first years of the second decade of this 21st century.
ADVOCACY JOURNALISM: Part II
The term advocacy journalism describes the use of journalism techniques to promote a specific political or social cause. The term is potentially meaningful only in opposition to a category of journalism that does not engage in advocacy, so-called objective journalism or, perhaps,Objectivity in Reporting. This distinction tends to be a focus of attention in the United States, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, rather than elsewhere in the world; use of these terms does not necessarily translate to other political landscapes, though US (and more generally western) models are becoming dominant. In western Europe, some newspapers have long identified openly with a political position, even though journalists from these papers are considered professionals not typically engaged in advocacy. For much more on this subject go to this link:http://markfoster.org/aj.html
Jensen, Robert, "Advocacy Journalism." Donsbach, Wolfgang, editor, The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Hoboken, NJ. Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Retrieved on June 21, 2009.
LITERARY CRITICISM: A SUB-SECTION OF JOURNALISM
When this 4th edition of my website is revamped into a 5th edition, probably some time in 2013-2014, I will place the following section on literary criticism in the literature section of my site. For now the most logical place for its home it seems to me is right here in this place in the journalism sub-section of my website. Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary thinking and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.
Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their criticism in broadly circulating periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker.
READY FOR JOURNALISM AND PUBLISHING by 1999
By the time I came to journalism and publishing, writing and editing, full time, I had had 18 years as a student and another 32 as a teacher. I guesstimate a minimum of 20,000 hours and a maximum of 40,000 over the fifty years from 1949 to 1999. Following the research of the psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues who wanted to know why some conservatory students went on to solo and orchestral careers while others ended up as workaday music teachers, Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Outliers: The Story of Success invokes “the 10,000 hour rule." Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. He is widely recognized as one of the world's leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise.
The striking thing about Ericcson’s study of music students was that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. And what’s more, the people at the very top didn't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. Researchers, as I indicate above, have settled on what they believe is the magic minimum number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. To put this in a phrase: 99 per cent perspiration and 1 per cent inspiration.
ALFRED KAZIN
October 1959 was a personally eventful month. I loved baseball and had just finished by 5th season in the Burlington baseball league. That month I watched the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox in the World Series. I also came to love The Twilight Zone which debuted on CBS TV. I joined the Baha’i Faith, my lifelong belief system. The literary critic and soon to be the most powerful reviewer in the USA, Alfred Kazin, published his The Alone Generation.(1) This was an incisive and brilliant essay about the failures of modern literature. Kazin would later describe himself as a ‘cultural conservative’ and, semi-seriously, a ‘literary reactionary.’ He uttered the following cri de coeur:
I am tired of reading for compassion instead of pleasure. In novel after novel, I am presented with people who are so soft, so wheedling, so importunate, that the actions in which they are involved are too indecisive to be interesting or too indecisive to develop those implications which are the life-blood of narrative. The age of ‘psychological man,’ of the herd of aloners, has finally proved the truth of Tocqueville’s observation that in modern times the average man is absorbed in a very puny object, himself, to the point of satiety.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1) Harper’s Magazine, October 1959; and (2)Michael Weiss, Alfred Kazin: A Biography by Richard Cook, Yale University Press, 2008.
Did you ever read David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd which said that(1)
our problem now is other people, the
immense heterogeneity, & people who
want/need to be loved, to be related-to ,
not esteemed, who live in a glass-house?
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst are full of passionate intensity in a
world where the centre has not held and
anarchy has been loosed upon the world.(2)
What did you make of it all, Alfred, in…
your 55 years of writing in which everything
you wrote was very personal; you embedded
your opinions in a deep knowledge of history,
politics and all kinds of culture low & high,
elite & popular. You were self-absorbed, with
a raging life-force, but you never talked about
your inner life in spite of your autobiographical
work, & infectious intellectual energy, & your
dozen books. I’ve written much about my inner-(3)
life with what I hope is an infectious intellectual
energy; I have my dozen books, self-absorption &
most importantly to me, Alfred, my deep beliefs.(4)
1 Yale UP, 1950; Riesman: sociologist, attorney and educator
2 W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War.
3 Kazin thought the responsibility of politics was similar to that of criticism, to traffic in a ‘histoire morale.’ Such a traffic should aim to sum-up the spirit of the age in which we live and then ask us to transcend it. The aim of writing, politics and literary criticism, Kazim emphasized, should enable people to see things in a grand perspective not only in the light of man’s history but of his whole striving. Finally, all of this should help human beings create a future in keeping with their imagination.’(Michael Weiss, Alfred Kazin: A Biography by Richard Cook, Yale University Press, 2008, 464 pp.)
4 I became a Baha’i in October 1959, the same month and year that Kazin’s ‘The Alone Generation’ was published in Harper’s Magazine.
Ron Price
14 August 2011
MY STYLE OF JOURNALISM
My style of journalism does not use close argument nor precise analysis. It takes place entirely in cyberspace. I attempt an evocation of the feel and large-picture of the subject, together with a lyrical and almost mimicking response to the distinctive sensibility of the author, the topic as it is often popularly conceived, and some of what I hope is my distinctive voice. I seek to blend literary and political analysis, the sociological and the psychological. My internet essays try to tease out the delicate ties between art and politics, the personal and the social. Sometimes I strike off for a territory of reverence and rapture, of awestruck contemplation of the sheer mystery of being alive. Sometimes I seek to plumb the uniqueness of a writer or an event, an idea or a person. As a writer I work with many; I am a collaborator; I am cooperative; I try not to sacrifice the excruciating precision of my vision. I am passionately “personal,” passionately excessive; I see myself as a virtuoso of the art of integration and of going too far. The latter is partly due to my bipolar disorder. The former is the result of trying to find the middle way. You can see it in the titles of my essays and poems. The volume of excerpts from my journals, for example, could be called “A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment.”
There have been many revolutionaries, writers, scientists, painters, ‘new men,’ in the long religious history of the Baha'i Faith going back now over two centuries. The zeal with which they engaged themselves in the ‘historic’ task of the planetization of the globe, of the vast integration of the myriad traditions often came from their profound sense of history, a sensibility embedded in the Baha'i Faith itself. These ‘new men’ had a vision of history that, as their critics have often told them, was fanatically all of one piece, obstinately Baha'i and intellectual. It was a vision in which some subtle and not-so-subtle purposiveness to history always managed to reassert itself in the face of repeated horrors, horrors faced by the Baha'i community itself and horrors facing humankind. But what their critics could not recognize was that the obstinate quest for ‘meaning’ was less a matter of conscious thought than a personal necessity, a requirement for survival, the historic circumstance that reasserted itself in case after case among the Baha'is as they sought a unity in diversity in the face of the immense destruction, the great tempest that had faced humankind since at least 1914. Many of thse writers had good reason to believe that their lives were a triumph over ever possible negation. Yet there was in these men and women a modesty of people for whom life itself is understandably the greatest good. They found it an immense challenge to engage in the political and philosophic reasoning that assured them of the world's civic harmony, civic peace, and the life of the mind. They were keen, as well, to avoid the great middle-class world of daily self-satisfaction.
I aim at being something more than a chronicler of life in my society, in the past or the present. I have no fame in the world and am only known in the infinity of cyberspace.
WITHOUT MR VANCE PACKARD
By far the most significant writer who has written popular books about American society and found a niche outside the academy in the print media from the late 1950's to the late '80's was Vance Packard. He was famous for The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), Pyramid Climbers (1962) and a succession of books until his last in 1989. Through the publication of these books, Packard probably had more influence on the lay public regarding the social dimensions of American society than any other writer or sociologist. Packard's books frequently appeared on best seller lists and young scholars were routinely shocked to find that Packard's works were considered beneath respectable discussion in many classrooms and tended to be disparaged by professional sociologists and public intellectuals, perhaps because they displayed none of the more abstract theorizing that social scientists look for in sociological writings. His books were a type of popular journalism.
Packard was not fully trained in sociology but majored in English and then earned a Master's degree in journalism at Columbia, and from there embarked upon a career in journalism at the start of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937. Through the resourceful use of his talents as a writer and his unique insights into American society, he contributed significantly to public understanding of a whole range of topics typically studied by academic sociologists: family and childrearing, sexual patterns, the media, consumerism and wastefulness, isolation and loneliness, and the super rich. In the years immediately before and after I became a Baha’i in Canada, Packard was a very popular writer. My contact with his writings was limited because I had a massive reading list in the late fifties and early sixties in the humanities and my concentration was on just getting though and out into the marketplace.-Ron Price with thanks to “Internet Sites on Vance Packard,” Poetry Booklet Number 58, Ron Price, July 10th 2006.
I remember seeing your books
back in those years when I’d
first started hearing about birds
flying over Akka and martyrs
by the score in lounge rooms
on cold Canadian evenings
when I waited for the talks
to be over and the hot coffee
and cakes to arrive—they seem
like distant cousins, those years,
as distant as Packard himself
as I plowed through more books
than my little brain could stomach,
motivated as I was to make it in
the marketplace, get a job, marry
and raise a family ‘cause that was
what everyone did/everyone whom
I knew and Packard was never on
reading lists &, by-god, I had more
to read than I ever thought I could
get through, but get through I did
even without Packard's insights...
Ron Price
July 10th 2006
------------------------------------------
GORE VIDAL
master essayist of our age
Gore Vidal(b.1925-), who has been called the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson(1895-1972), began his writing career at nineteen, the year I was born. In 1962, the year I began to travel for the Canadian Baha’i community and begin my own serious literary and academic study, Vidal published his first book of essays entitled: Rocking the Boat. Books of his essays and interviews, novels and memoirs kept appearing as I entered the teaching profession in the 1960s and finally retired in the 1990s. He’s still going, although not as strong at 85 and often in a wheel-chair.-Ron Price with thanks to Harry Kloman, “Gore Vidal’s Essays, Interviews and Memoirs: 1963-Present,” 2005.
He always impressed me with
his remarkable wit and talent:
5 decades of scintillating words
in books & live whenever I saw
him in Australia on TV…He saw
the moral-intellectual hollowness
of American politics at the same I
did—in the early 1960s with those
Kennedys and so he spent the rest
of his life writing books and essays
& a lot of other stuff1---thinking on
paper for a world slowly captured by
electronic distractions. Still, we go on
talking about books and writing them
pretending not to notice that the church
is empty and people have gone over to
attend to other gods in silence or new
words. Surely it’s not that bad Gore?2
1 The Washington Post calls him “the master essayist of our age.” See David Barsamian, “Citizen Gore Vidal,” These Times, 3 November 2008
2 George Scialabba, “Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays,” The Nation, 8 October 2008.
Ron Price
3 August 2011
----------------------
MORE ON GORE
If I were planning to embark for a far place and stay for several years I would not take the forty-six volumes of the writings of Gore Vidal. There are so many fine essayists I read. Perhaps at a future time I will post a list of the now dozens of essayists who have emerged in the last two decades as the world-wide-web has made them more accessible than in previous decades. Vidal's 46 volumes do not include his pseudonymous work, which I could write about in another essay. Voltaire’s 46 volumes could give Voltaire a run for his money. Voltaire and Vidal seem to me to have several things in common. Both were brilliant talkers; likewise brilliant satirists. Both initially needed money and worked very hard to get it. Both also needed courts to place their well-sharpened darts. Fortunately, they both had courts: Voltaire the Versailles of Louis XV, as well as the Berlin of Frederick the Great and courts of lesser brilliance. Vidal had the Kennedy Camelot in Washington, D.C. back in the 1960s. Since then he has had the courts of the several emperors of the silver screen: Sam Spiegel, for example, and there is probably no better example. Vidal has also had an audience of millions. For more on Vidal go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/nov/30/the-lives-of-gore/
Some of MY INTERNET POSTS on journalism and journalism-related topics:
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RETIRED AND AGE 66
THE INIMITABLE JACK NICHOLSON
About Schmidt is a 2002 American drama film directed by Alexander Payne starring Jack Nicholson as Warren Schmidt and Hope Davis as his daughter Jeannie. In 2003 Payne received a Golden Globe for his screenplay About Schmidt which also won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film is loosely based on the 1996 novel with the same title by Louis Begley.
By 1996, as Begley was getting that novel published, I had my eye on an early retirement at age 55. By 2002 I had retired and taken a sea-change. When I saw this film on TV in 2010 I had been fully retired from FT and PT work as well as many of my casual-volunteer commitments in the Baha’i community for five years. I watch a little TV after a day of reading and writing, research and journalism, editing and independent scholarship. I do this watching after midnight while I have a late night snack. The soporific effects of TV, the alpha waves—so I am told—induced, help me turn off my brain and set up the conditions for a good night of sleep. Occasionally a tasty-movie comes on. About Schmidt was such a visual delight, but after an hour I had to go to bed. In the morning I read the rest of the story on the internet and decided to write this prose-poem.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 5 October 2010.
Thank you, Alexander, for your dark humour
and satirical depiction of American society. I
must, say, though, I could not help but laugh.
There’s a lot of dark humour in Australia and
I’ve lived Downunder for nearly forty years!!
I’m 66, too, just like Warren Schmidt. He & I
shared many things in-common which I won’t
go into here. But after a few laughs and some
reflection on this movie and my life, a prose--
poem seemed like a good thing to put down.
The evening of one’s life presents a new ball-
game: 60 to 100 has another set of challenges
to the 20 to 60 package if, of course, one lives
that long….At 66 my second package has just
begun and I thank the inimitable-famous Jack
Nicholson for his entertainment and delight!!
Ron Price
5 October 2010
THE LONDON SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
The following prose-poem came from reading some of the output of the London School of Journalism. The London School of Journalism(LSJ) provides journalism courses, freelance classes and creative writing courses by Distance Learning, and as evening classes, short day-time courses and postgraduate diploma courses. The LSJ's distance learning courses cover all aspects of journalism and creative writing. Their postgraduate courses cover news, features, freelance, media law, broadcast and internet journalism. They have a four week summer school every August, and a range of evening classes and daytime short courses which are held throughout the year. Postgraduate courses can be taken as online courses or as attendance courses in London. Our distance learning students come from all over the world, and many use our email course delivery so that all their work and assignments are delivered in this way. Distance learning, utilising modern communications, allows student and teacher to work closely together, regardless of physical location.
The LSJ has been teaching journalism and creative writing for nearly 90 years, and unlike most 'schools' who offer distance learning courses they are a real school, staffed by real journalists and writers who enjoy working with real students. This institution continues to lead the way in developing new and effective teaching methods. The result is demonstrated by the success of their students.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS
Some poets, writers and artists are famous or infamous for obtruding their authorial persona onto or into the business of their work. I am such an obtruder. I feel an expansiveness when I write; I am aware of both a simplicity as well as a complexity; I am aware of both a difficulty of personality and a simple ease. These dichotomies and others permeate everything I write; in the process I find, I obtain, some sense, some detail, of myself as a person in my work, sometimes more than others. This was also true of the writer Ben Jonson(1572-1637).(1) T. S. Eliot in his discussion of Johnson wrote that "Jonson behaved as the great creative mind that he was: he created his own world.” It was a world from which his readers and the dramatists of his time, who were trying to do something wholly different than Jonson, were excluded.(2) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)L.A. Beaurline, "Moralists, Scoundrels and Ninnies." Modern Language Quarterly, 46.3, 1985, pp. 316-325; and (2) T.S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama, Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., NY, 1932, p.78.
I, too, created my own world,
not to exclude others, but to be
as inclusive as the air and sky.
Authors are ideas, historical
developments that become
attached gradually to their
writing, their ethos and lives.(1)
The masks, personae, facts,
situations, philosophies and
environments I have chosen
to live in and behind are not
so opaque and the increasing
number of scenes I describe
are mouthpieces, mise en scene.
Some of my story is of an isolated,
elevated, autonomous person.
The understanding and direction
of my authorial, literary career
is a slowly evolving one
and my attitude to my gifts
and toward the world from
which and on which I work
is partly related to my vitality
and the creativity where it grows.
I trust I am a poet finding himself,
not a perverted artist who can only
be made worse if he persists in a
failure to recognize his limitations.
I know only too well that if I trouble
my readers I will also trouble myself.
Control is no easy thing in writing
since, in many ways, a writer is a
historical development as well as
present reality. Any serious artist
must be prepared for the dirt which,
justly or unjustly, he has and he will
receive, perhaps, more than his fair
share along with his piece of praise.
(1) Kathleen A. Prendergast, “Ben Johnson Unmasked,” London School of Journalism Homepage, January 2006. In this essay Bruce Thomas Boehrer writes that "Jonson is famous for obtruding his authorial persona onto the business of his plays." L.A. Beaurline also notes that "Jonson's expansive, difficult personality so permeates everything he did that it is possible to find the man in his work at nearly every turn." Bruce Thomas Boehrer, "Epicoene, Charivari, Skimmington." English Studies 75.1, 1994, pp. 17-33.
Ron Price
January 3rd 2006 to 15 June 2011
BETTINA ARNDT
I watched Bettina Arndt on Big Ideas last night.(1) Big Ideas broadcast a talk at the National Press Club on 2 September 2010 by Bettina Arndt. Arndt is an Australian sex therapist, journalist and clinical psychologist. She is also an entertaining and articulate speaker for whom the words roll off the tongue with a garrulousness that is engaging. She talked about why sex matters so much to men; and she also launched a campaign to end the discrimination against male cancer victims. Her latest book is another one of her diary projects looking at male sexuality. The book is entitled What Men Want—In Bed and was published 1 September 2010. Arndt's previous book The Sex Diaries was published in 2009 and was built on a foundation of diaries kept by 98 couples, plus a survey of the relevant research on the subject. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC24 TV, 21 January 2011.
I’ll let you—dear reader—check-out
Sheehan’s article yourself----his very
excellent overview of Arndt’s views.(1)
This delightful, engaging writer has(2)
been on my agenda since the 1970s
when I, too, got into teaching about
relationships. She was born 5 years
after me and graduated 4 years after
I did…She was appointed editor of
an adult sex magazine in 1974 that(3)
was the same year I was appointed
as the senior tutor human relations.
I worked at the Tasmanian College
of Advanced Education & involved
myself in the embryonic phases of
community-building for the Baha’i
Faith. She remained there as editor
until July 1982 as I worked at a tin
mine and then all over Australia: an
expert in nothing teaching a variety
of subjects--and by 1999 I was ready
to go solo, retire to a world of writing,
editing, research, publishing, poetry, &
journalism as well as some scholarship.
Bettina, you have made a name for yourself
and it was a pleasure listening to you at the
National Press Club tonight. “Goodonyer,”
as they say Downunder. “Goodonyer!!!”
(1) Paul Sheehan, “The secret desires of men, and why they go unfulfilled,” Sydney Morning Herald Online, 2 September 2010.
(2) Bettina Arndt
(3) Forum was the name of the magazine
Ron Price
21 January 2011
CLIVE JAMES AND HIS JOURNALISM
I would like to say a few things about Clive James’ new book Cultural Amnesia. James’s book is prompted, to some extent, by the suspicion that a new age of barbarism is indeed descending. He has lots of company in this view. My recent memoir(5 volumes in 2500 pages) is also prompted by a similar intuition. But like the barbarism of the late Roman Empire in the West in the second and third century A.D., I take the view that a new religion is growing in our midst. Like Christianity which crept, half-hidden, along the foundations and against the background of an Augustan empire, the Baha’i Faith seems, thusfar, too insignificant to be noticed by history for it, too, is growing slowly, obscurely, insensibly in our modern and postmodern world.
In his book James also offers a steady stream of advice on how to go about the business of self-education. I offer advice, for the most part indirectly, or such is my hope, for I am all too conscious of the limitations of direct advice-giving; I do not advise any must-reads or how-to's. There are, as in James’s work, many anecdotes. Like James in his Cultural Amnesia I launch a symphony of voices; I hope it is not a cacophony.
My life, like James's, has been richly social, but not in the world of celebrities and media. I have read a great deal, but nothing like the quantity that James has consumed. James says that most of his listening was to the authors behind the books he read; in my case, until I retired in 1999, most of my listening was to people in the raw: individuals, groups, communities. For a host of reasons--the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three--the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that was exemplified in coteries in the past, and that flourished in various twentieth-century cities, notably Paris, before WW1, simply no longer exist--or so James sees it. I agree, but not all the way. I feel as if I’ve done an awful lot of face-to-face stuff in my life: in cities, towns, classrooms, lounge rooms, my own home, rental halls, inter alia.
James's answer to what he sees as a diminution of venues for intellectual-artistic activity, this bereavement, is the book itself--as is my own memoir, partly. Here in James's book is the café, the former place of the intellectual-artist; he has created it in his mind; it is a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time.
MY MOE JOURNALISTIC WRITING
Over the decades and beginning after I got my BA and B.Ed. degrees in 1966 & 1967, respectively, I was driven away from academic institutions of higher learning and toward a more journalistic approach, to a plain speech and a style of writing that was not as esoteric as an MA thesis or a PhD dissertation. Direct observation and the necessity to entertain was absolutely crucial for James and for me. I would never have survived in classrooms had these qualities not surfaced insensibly over the first half-a-dozen years of my teaching experience from 1967 to 1973. When I did get near institutions of higher learning it was on the periphery and for brief periods and so the esoteric did not have a chance to bloom.
Not in the mass media eye, as James was and with his immense success, I settled for a more modest achievement in the world of “the school” and “the college.” Like James, I wrote essays, reviews, sketches and squibs for students; I also wrote in longer and more conventionally prestigious forms, but always in styles that had been honed by the whetstone of conversation, but without the accruing prestige that James accumulated.
Writing for the student and for the popular press, even at a much less successful and prestigious level of everyday journalism than James, demands both simplicity and compression, and compression, if it is of good quality, makes language glow, even if the glow is only little and slightly warming. I felt, as the years went on, that some light was finally being emitted from the marks on the page that I was putting down even if I was the only one who saw it and a few coteries of votaries in cyberspace for nanoseconds.
The stylistic models that James and I emulated were much different. However different, they each could "pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs." James highest hero, "the voice behind the book’s voices" and one of several exceptions to his rule of writing only about twentieth-century figures, was Tacitus. I was surprised at this in some ways, but not entirely so, for James is primarily a serious bloke with a patina of humour which he will never get rid of. It's part of his cultural schizophrenia.
It was Tacitus who wrote the sentence, says James, out of which his entire volume Cultural Amnesia grew: "They make a desert and they call it peace." James heard this line quoted as a young man and "saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it."
My Tacitus, was Gibbon and Gibbon saw his history as a continuation of Tacitus’ work. I felt, therefore, James and I were on a similar track. I've been reading Gibbon for decades. I would like to think that my memoirs are what James’ book Cultural Amnesia was to the reviewer in The Nation; namely, “less a collection of great figures than of great sentences.” But, alas and alack, I write in the minor leagues; not that I mind, for I love the art, the act itself.
MORE ON CLIVE JAMES
That same reviewer, William Deresiewicz, went on to say, “reading Cultural Amnesia feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway.” Well, I’m not sure if I have had such a conversation in years as a talker or a listener expect in books. On the other hand, I sometimes feel as if I have had al too many such conversations of the deep and the meaningful. But as fas as print is concerned, James is, for me, one of my many, one of my crucial, mentors.
The reason James is such a good talker is that he's such a good listener- or so that reviewer in The Nation said in his fine review, a review on James's website along with a number of other statements of encomium and only a little opprobrium. James means it literally when he says that the book took forty years to write, because its quotations are the harvest of the notebooks he has kept for all that time, and the notebooks are the harvest of his insatiable reading.
Forty years of talking tired me out as did forty years of listening. Gore Vidal once said listening was one of the most demanding arts. I did not fin d it so for decades but I do now. In recent years I’ve gone on shutdown. Forty years of my note-taking has resulted in a small study filled with files that annoy my wife who has a penchant for the tidy and the clean, the orderly and the useful. It is a penchant I share with her but in a different modus operandi, modus vivendi. I like a tidy desk, but am not too concerned about the efflorescence of my files. Forty years of reading and note-taking gave me an even greater appetite for print after I retired from full-time, part-time and casual-work and all that talking and listening in the years 1999 to 2005.
Ever since running into Tacitus, says James, he has been a connoisseur of aphorisms and aphorists--of writing that is both conversational and compressed and of the kinds of minds that produce it. It's no coincidence that he is also a connoisseur of music. "Echoes of a predecessor's rhythm, pace and melody are rarely accidental": That sentence contains four terms that sound like they refer to music, but it's about writing. Rhythm is central to James's understanding of style, and so are "echoes"--that is, memory. He is himself, at least for me, an incandescent and virtually habitual aphorist.
I, too, went down this road but not quite as passionately as James, for I was not in the media spotlight that he was, a spotlight where the aphorism is one of the kings of the sound-bite and the clever turns of phrase. I did collect quotations in my many notebooks, but clever turns of phrase and jokes always slightly eluded me when I went to translate them into verbal matter. As I approached my sixtieth year, I found there was just too much to copy into notebooks; there was too much that was useful. By then my computer directory began to come in handy.
The love of the beautifully turned phrase goes far deeper than mere appreciation. James knows this better than most. The identifiable tone of voice, a tone which is a synthesis of all the voices one has ever heard, is at the core of the term “voice.” A lot of things make up voice. The most individual style in the world is the product of a collective effort. In gathering the voices that inhabit our own, the echoes we hear in our head, are produced by the growth of our mind; it is the song of self, as Walt Whitman might have put it--and did. I have discussed this notion of the individual voice, its song, its life, in connection with Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude and my own poetry which is a sort of prelude two hundred years later. But that is in another essay.
To fully participate in community life in the sense that is at the heart of James's s work requires an exemplification of liberal values. We must engage, in James' s view--in the work, the community enterprize in our own individual way and with a broad liberalism, both are essential. We each can do some things that others do, that other community members do, but we must see our own work as a part of a larger enterprise. We must strive in the context of this larger, this non-utilitarian liberal enterprise and its myriad smaller components.
Being a part of the community, then, is not simply a matter of learning new skills, new attitudes and new values, but also of fielding new calls for identity construction. This understanding of identity suggests that people enact and negotiate identities in the world over time. For identity is dynamic and it is something that is presented and re-presented, constructed and reconstructed in interaction. And like the tension in violin strings which are the basis of musical harmony, life in community also possess a tension with which we must deal with in harmony. Of course, this can not always be done. James has been more successful than most. He produces little noise Often only noise. He has done a good deal of connecting. This is true when one writes, when one talks and when one lives and works in community, if one can bring humour to the table. Humour is a wonderful oil in this whole exercise. James knows this, again, for he has done it better than most writers.
The individual experience of power derives from belonging, but it also derives from exercising control over what we belong to, what we participate in, what we read, indeed, an entire panoply and pageantry of activity. Each individual is heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, often conflicted and virtually always possessed of contradictory scripts. Our consciousness is anything but unified. In many ways wholeness or integration is not so much a goal as a battle, at least some kind of perpetual balancing act of dealing with unstable forces, forces which we must try to reconcile or they will tear at our psyches. These unstable forces may also cause us to withdraw and, like a planet slipping from orbit and following the dictates of its own centrifugal momentum, become ultimately so remote from the magnetic attraction of the sun that it flies irretrievably into remoteness. This can happen to both individuals and societies. Inner conflict is not so much a disorder as it is the first law of human psychic life and is part of that principle of polarity at the centre of life.
This Australian critic and raconteur, this retired journalist, Clive James made a pertinent point in this connection when he compered an ABC FM Radio program about Australian orchestras in concert. He said that large countries like Australia and the USA don't have identities. They are too diverse. I think the same is true about individuals. They are also diverse over a lifetime to have a single identity.
There is now a great wealth of literature available to the Baha’i community, both in-house literature and the burgeoning material now available in the marketplace. My book occupies a small place, possesses no particular authority and competes for a place, for space, with a print and electronic media industry of massive proportions. In order to survive and do well in most of the print and electronic media a writer must develop the ability to put things simply and effectively, in a manner that everyone can understand. Such a writer has maybe a minute and a half to two minutes if he is talking on the TV to explain a complex subject or a series of short verbal expositions if he is involved in an interview; even a book, if it is to find a large readership in the mass circulation market, must be as simple as possible.
Many academics and intellectuals are so steeped in academic jargon that they are unable to simplify their material. I hope my book is not an example of this academic problem, the problem of someone who could not pull off the simplification process. I’m afraid simplicity and brevity are not marks of my literary style. James's fat books, however liberal in philosophy, will not penetrate the minds of the new barbarians. James knows this. He has realistic expectations. His book will fail with that increasingly large crowd. But the crowd at this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival will devour his new book.
I knew of a senior academic who was asked to appear on a local TV station. She showed up with six or seven books and they had little pieces of paper stuck in the books for purposes of quotation. The whole interview was over in less than two minutes; she never read any of her quotations and she was frustrated that she just couldn’t make her points. She didn’t understand that if you’re going to play in the media ballpark, you have to play by their rules, not your own. I like to think that this book, this autobiography of mine, has allowed me to have my six books and their quotations and that the role of this book does not include a two minute TV summary or an interview of ten minutes on an arts program. On the other hand, I could probably write a ten second autobiographical-ad grab, summarize what I’m all about in one or two minutes and be interviewed for any appropriate length of time. It will probably never happen before I die. Perhaps there is hope in the posthumous literary world.
There are many different kinds of self-referential writing. I have incorporated some of them in what is for me a surprisingly large work invoking Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes,” as an appropriate presiding spirit for the genre. Whatever largeness I claim to possess, it is the same largeness we all possess in relation to ourselves. And some are larger than others. James is a big chap--in more ways than one. We all must live in our own skins for all our days and the sense of our largeness--or our smallness for that matter--is a result of our bodily manifestation, our physical proximity to self. In the multitude of methods and genres of studies of Baha’i history and experience, teachings and organization, autobiography is either tentatively acknowledged, invoked by negation or simply passed over in silence. It is one genre that is, for the most part, conspicuous by its absence from any bibliography. This has begun to change in the last decade or two. This piece of writing is part of that change.
Enough!
Ron Price
George Town
Tasmania
11/8/07
MARCEL PROUST
I open this sub-section of my website on journalism with a quotation from Marcel Proust: “That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don’t even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.” — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
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Marcel Proust(1871-1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). It was published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. In that work "remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier." In my work, in this memoir, memory progresses from large to largest detail, from the largest to the infinite, while that which it encounters in this macrocosm grows even mightier. And there is some of Proust's style as well. There is also some of that intellectual liberty which Orwell says comprises "the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."
Many books, of which Proust's is but one, have drawn on life-stories in order to describe what some sociologists call "the social construction of reality." This sociological term is used to argue that the personal/private zone is impacted upon and formed by social relations. To theorise from experience, as I have done in my memoir, it is difficult to insist on a separation between the public sphere and life in the more private realm where one thinks and acts, believes and feels. My own approach, my own way of integrating public and private spheres of life in my autobiography, has been to draw on interviews, letters, essays and poems, inter alia. In this way I have been able to investigate the daily relations of religion and belief and the dailiness of religious experience, mine and others in my community. I have placed these comments here under the sub-section of my website 'journalism' because this writing is a type of journalism in relation to self and society.
I have been interested in demonstrating, in particular, not only how my religious experience was lived, but also how it was seen and, more often, in my immediate social and political networks, how it was not seen. I have always liked Hannah Arendt's view of modern political thought; namely, that it was "the endless effort of human beings to make sense of what they experience, to get their minds round the things that confronted them, the activities they engaged in, and above all the events that happened among them." Arendt was an influential German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world". Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism. Her work is pre-eminently political thought, not in the sense of being the application of some partisan position to political material, but in the sense of representing the free play of an individual mind round politics, making sense of political events and placing them within an unfolding understanding of all that comes within the mind’s range.
Personalised embodied narratives, like my memoir, foreground the particularity of the everyday and the struggle, as Arendt describes it here, to make sense of experience and to engage in the particularities of life. More Baha’is have begun to write their storties, their personal histories, writing of their engagement with society, in recent decades, in the second century of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Faith(1921-2021). One of the main reasons was that there were more Baha'is. At the beginning of the first epoch in 1944, the first in the series of five that concern me in my memoir, there were some one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand members of the international Baha'i community. As I write these words in 2011 there are between 5 and 8 million adherents. Given that writing one's life narrative is not that common an experience, there are still not many in the last 7 decades who did write their stories. But there have always been a few throughout Bahá’í history who did right back to the 1840s.
I have identified a lack of what might be called a literary, an autobiographical particularism, in Bahá’í literature, a lack, a deficiency, I saw my project as addressing to some extent. I am not the first to identify this lack, a lack that was also present in the heroic age(1844-1921) and then in the first epoch of the Formative Age(1921-1944). There has been a significant increase in memoir and autobiographical writing by Baha'is in the epochs beginning in 1944 when I was born; there has also been a greater articulation of the life and community processes by which Baha’is came to understand the social forces that made them who they were. There would be much more done in memoir writing in the epochs ahead. Another epoch looms, such is my view, on the horizon in 2021. I will be 77 then and my guess is that another epoch will follow in 2044. If I live that long this story will be called Pioneering Over Six Epochs.
