venerdì, 09 maggio 2008
JUDY MALTZ
By Riccardo M. Ghia
COMM 260 W – April 28, 2008
Professor John A. Dillon - Grade: A
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - A young reporter had been staring blankly for more than 20 minutes at a golden-rod door with a frosted glass carrying the number "305" written on the top. Under the glass, there was a small black nameplate, where the inscription "Judy Maltz" was carved in white block letters.
A student opened the door and left it half-closed. The reporter knocked at the door, but nobody responded. He asked, "May I enter?" but before he finished the sentence, he was already inside a tiny office where a black-haired woman was sitting behind the desk, right in front of him.
Maltz suddenly raised her eyes and froze him with a withering glance. "Who are you?" she asked curtly. "Go out!" Without drawing breath, he told her that he was a new student majoring in journalism. He wanted to learn about her life, the life of a reporter who crossed the ocean and had collected an abundance of experience overseas. Her stern look turned into an amused expression, and she agreed to an interview. "But not today. I'm waiting for people," she said before burying herself again in the papers piled on her desk.
Judy Maltz is tough, exactly like the young reporter expected. She is a black-or-white kind of person with apparently no shades of gray in between. You love her or you hate her.
On RateMyProfessors.com, a review site which allows university students to anonymously assign ratings to professors, her students are split in two factions. Some complain about her strictness. Others admire her knowledge and praise her teaching.
"I'm a very tough teacher. Many of the students don't like me," she told the reporter a few days later in the same office in Willard Building. "But the good ones like me, the ones who want to work hard out of the class." If you think you can just go to class, sleep and get a good grade, well, you'd better stay away from her courses.
Hard work is a legacy of her family. She was born 46 years ago in Newark and grew up in a tightly knit Orthodox community in Elizabeth, N.J., just 20 minutes away from New York City.
After Maltz graduated in economics from Columbia University in 1983, she went to Israel to pursue graduate work. She immediately grew fond of the openness, the ability to improvise and the honesty of the Israelis. "I felt really at home. I felt I had a lot more in common with people there. A kind of shared history," Maltz said.
Shortly after, Maltz realized she couldn't go further in economics. "That's when I started writing about business," she said. "I discovered that there was a big demand for people who can write about and understand how the economy works at the same time."
It's not easy to explain in simple words complex economic issues to the man in the street. "You have to find a way to explain to them how they will be affected at a personal level," Maltz said. Over the years, she developed a penchant for human interest stories. "In the end, most people are interested in money," she said. "They want to get more, how to save their money, how much will be left at the end of the month, how much other people are making."
Her journalistic career, spread over two decades, was a slow but steady move to the top. She wrote practically every kind of story - hard news, feature, magazine, op-ed. Maltz had been a freelancer until 1986, when she joined the Financial Times bureau in Jerusalem as assistant to the bureau chief. But she wanted to work for a local newspaper, where there was a real newsroom, instead of the tiny office of a foreign newspaper. Two years later at the Jerusalem Post, she found a job and her mentor, the managing editor David Landau, who taught her the ropes about reporting.
Landau is a controversial character. His long black beard makes him look like a rabbi, at least until he opens his mouth. He was fond of her. Yet, at the same time, he could lash out at Maltz and screaming "You Idiot!" in front of the entire newsroom. Years later, Landau, as editor in chief of Ha’aretz, approached her to start an English language version of the newspaper together with the International Herald Tribune.
Through the 1990s, Maltz worked at the Hebrew and English Ha'aretz. Between 1999 and her arrival in State College in 2004, she wrote for many magazines and financial newspapers.
The young reporter was wondering how she could reconcile a life split between a demanding job and a large family. She had met her husband, Amit Schejter, in 1992 on a blind date, introduced by a friend of hers. A year later, they got married.
Indeed, the journalistic arena is not a perfect field for a proud mother of four young children. "Amit helped me a lot, but it was really difficult, and eventually I had to get out of daily beat reporting because I couldn't handle anymore."
The Schejters still help each other. If one of them is out of town, the other takes over. During the morning, she usually leaves earlier than him because she has early classes. He prepares breakfast for all the kids - Matan, 14; Tamar; 12; Iddo, 9; and Ye'ela, 7. Mr. Schejter also makes lunch for everybody. Mrs. Schejter is in charge of the dinner.
“Judy is very hands-on and on top of things. She makes sure that everything takes place in the house is under control," Amit Schejter said. "She has a fully organized mind."
Amit Schejter, an expert in telecommunications who has worked between Israel and the United States, decided to return to academic life. When Schejter got "a very good opportunity" at Penn State University, his wife followed him.
Maltz's family left Israel at a time when terrorist attacks were a daily reality. She was always very anxious, looking behind her - who was there, who was next to her on the bus, what was going on. Dani Twersky, a colleague at Ha'aretz's economic staff desk, was killed in a terrorist attack 10 years ago. He was crossing a street. "I talked with him on the phone the night before. I was setting stories and he was editing them," Maltz recalled with impassive expression.
Maltz recalled the first time she walked into a supermarket in State College. "By instinct, I walked by the door and…"
She turned 90 degrees on her office chair and grabbed a maroon purse.
"… I got my bag open like this."
Maltz stretched the edges of the purse wide open, for the guards to look in. But in the supermarket there was no guard. There was nothing. In this little town, the possibility of dying in a supermarket never crosses the minds of the customers.
Judy Maltz is tough like her grandfather, Moshe, and her father, Chaim, who escaped the Holocaust. In Israel, people learn to be fatalistic, without losing their sense of humor.
Barbara Bird, a Penn State University professor and filmmaker, praised her openness and brightness. "Judy is very sharp, very quick. And she's also completely capable of laughing at herself," Bird said. "We have a great time together."
Currently, Maltz, Bird and Richie Sherman are making "On the Side of Angels," a documentary film about Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish woman who save three Jewish families from the Holocaust. Among the 15 Halamajowa sheltered between 1942 and 1944, was Maltz's family. Before the Nazi's "final solution," about 6,000 Jews lived in the town of Sokal, at that time in Poland (now in Ukraine). By the end of the war, only 30 had survived.
Maltz, Bird and Sherman started filming the movie in July 2006, when they interviewed the survivors and the grandchildren of the rescuers. "Judy saw the continuation of her family story . . . as the past talking to the present," Bird said.
The script also relies on a diary written by Moshe Maltz - Judy's grandfather - during the war. Last summer, the filmmakers spent two weeks in Israel doing interviews and going through archival material, and eight days in Ukraine where they did most of their shooting. They found the very house where the families were hidden.
The story of Judy Maltz began there.
domenica, 04 maggio 2008
EUROPEAN UNION: RISKS FACED BY JOURNALISTS
Investigation by Olivier Basille, Jean-François Julliard, Glyn Roberts and Elsa Vidal - With the help of Silvia Benedetti and Marta Molina
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/rapport_UE_en_bd.pdf
Extract from Reporters Without Borders release (May 3, 2008)
ITALY: Reprisals from the mafia
In Italy, threats emanate from the mafia, or rather the mafias who operate in the south of the country: the Camorra in Naples, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, Cosa Nostra in Sicily and Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia. At least ten journalists work under police protection. Calabria and Sicily are the two most dangerous regions for those who venture to criticize mafia chiefs. There have been hundreds of cases of threats, anonymous letters, slashed tyres, and scratched cars. All journalists who write about the mafia, have at one time or another received a message, a signal warning them they are being watched.
The case of Lirio Abbate, 38, correspondent in Palermo for the news agency Ansa, is typical. Police responsible for protecting him surprised two men in the process of placing a home-made car bomb under his vehicle on the night of 2 September 2007. This murder attempt came a few days after he returned to Palermo and after several months of threats following the publication of his book “I Complici” (The complicit) dealing with connivance between the political world and the mafia.
In his Palermo office, Abbate begins by switching on the television and setting the volume at a high level. Only then does he begin talking, in a soft voice. He is under permanent police protection, two bodyguards accompanying him everywhere he goes and posted outside his house at night. They protect him and his family, whom Abbate chooses not to talk about.“Of course, the presence of bodyguards makes my work more difficult. I have to find other ways of getting information. I can no longer go out in the street alone as I did before and meet people discretely. But I prefer to be protected,” he explains.
Abbate is very exposed, partly because he works for Ansa, a news agency, meaning that his work is picked up by all the country’s media. He is a journalist, but also a source of information for all his colleagues working on organized crime. Then, in October 2007, a mafia boss, Leoluca Bagarella, threatened him publicly during a trial. “I have been more worried since this case. Bagarella sent a message to his accomplices giving my name in open court. He has been in prison since 1995 and since I work for an agency,my articles are not by-lined. How did he know that it was me who had written any particular article? I don’t want to leave Sicily, but I may have to do so,” said Abbate.
For him, as well as the other journalists interviewed in Sicily, there has been no improvement in the situation. The tough period of political murders at the start of the 1990s seems to be over, but the mafia is taking ever greater interest in journalists. “In the past ten or 15 years, the mafia leaders have changed. They are no longer farmers, men of the land. Today they are doctors, politicians and they are well-educated. They know how important news is and how it can be manipulated. Violence is only one means of applying pressure. Journalists can also be corrupted and bought”, says Abbate.
The journalist in Palermo explains that the risk does not lie in solely talking about the mafia. “Giving someone’s name and saying that he is in the mafia is not dangerous. On the contrary, very often, it’s felt to be flattering. But if a journalist takes apart his activities, explains how the mafia member manages his business and gets rich, then he feels threatened.” Abbate is extremely careful about where he can go and the people to whom he talks. Even the cafés he patronises are not chosen by chance. When he leaves his office, always accompanied by his two bodyguards – one a few metres ahead of him, the other a few metres behind – he walks for several minutes before entering a café. He never sets foot in the one at the foot of his office. “It belongs to the mafia,” he says, smiling.
Writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, 28, author of the book “Gomorra” is in a similar situation. He has been under police protection since October 2006 as a result of threats he received since his investigation appeared into the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra.
Nino Amadore, who has also written a book about mafia activities “The Grey Zone”, has had his car scratched several times and his tyres slashed just after his book was launched.
“These are not very serious incidents, but they are signals as much as anything. When in 1990, I wrote about mafia activities within Messina University for the daily La Sicilia, I used to sleep with a knife next to my bed. Now I live in a working class neighbourhood of Palermo and sometimes I tell myself that something could happen to me,” he said.
The journalist, now Palermo correspondent for the financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore, says he does not go in for self-censorship, but the pressure is very acute. “One day, at the start of the 1990s,my father, who is a farmer, asked me,“When are you going to stop writing that? You can go to Milan or somewhere else but we have to stay here. A short time after that, people came and chopped down his new olive trees, to frighten us”. Amadore says the situation is even more serious in the countryside where the mafia is everywhere.
Giuseppe Maniaci is the director of a small local TV channel, Telejato, in Partinico (about 50 kms west of Palermo). The town is the fiefdom of the Vitale family, a well known mafia clan in Sicily. “We produce a lot of anti-mafia news. In just a few years, we have had 40 tyres slashed and cars scratched, we have been received intimidating letters and threatening phone calls”, says Maniaci.
More seriously, at the end of January 2008, the director of Telejato was physically attacked by a young member of the Vitale family, aged barely 16, and one of his henchmen.“We had been doing reports for several years on illegal building controlled by the mafia. Finally, the municipal council ordered these buildings to be pulled down. Soon afterwards, I crossed paths by chance with the Vitale son, Michele. He tried to strangle me with my tie, and then he jammed my leg in the door of my car. Then he and his friend beat me up”. Since then, Giuseppe Maniaci has had an escort of two police officers. When he wants to visit the neighbouring district of Corleone, he has to inform the local police, who accompany him. Maniaci smokes three packets of cigarettes a day – “if the mafia don’t kill me, the cigarettes will”, he says – and works with his family. His wife Patrizia helps him, as does his son aged 20, Giovanni, and his 23-year-old daughter, Letizia. The youngest, Simona, is only 14. “But she already knows how to handle a camera”, her father says. After the attack, we had a family meeting to discuss whether to continue.
The children told me it was their turn to deal with the television and that I should have a rest”.
But for Giuseppe Maniaci, there is no question of keeping quiet: “Yes we are afraid. Who said we were not afraid? But now it is more dangerous for me to stop than to continue. If I stop, I will no longer have any protection. And the mafia never forgets”.
At Corleone (60 kms south of Palermo), Dino Paternostro works in medical administration, but he is also a journalist, and contributes unpaid to various media in the region. “My work as a journalist springs from my civil commitment. I am exposed because I have no media office to protect me. But I want to inculcate the culture of speaking out in a region which is under the reign of silence and omerta”, Paternostro explains. Since 1991, when the offices of his newspaper Città Nuove were torched, he has done historical research about the mafia which culminated in the publication of a book entitled “I Corleonesi”. In it he explores how the city’s mafia bosses carry out internal “coups” to put themselves in power.
At 4am on 28 January 2006, police knocked on his door to tell him that his car was on fire. Since then he has received several silent phone calls in the middle of the night. His granddaughter, aged six, believes that the car caught fire on its own. Like her, the 11,500 residents of Corleone will not be looking for other explanations or asking for anyone to be made accountable. An investigation is officially under way. “Since the mafia is implicated, it won’t get anywhere. Everyone knows that,” says Paternostro, somewhat bitterly.
In Calabria, journalists are possibly even more vulnerable to pressure. The media is less powerful than in Sicily, less well structured and the 'ndrangheta, the local mafia, more low-key and more difficult to figure out. There are fewer books about it than the neighbouring Cosa Nostra. Concetta Guido, a contributor to the daily Calabria, says local journalists are sometimes forced to go in for self-censorship, often leaving it to the special correspondents of major national media to carry out investigations into organised crime. “Taking on the realities of the mafia of the 'ndrangheta is a dangerous luxury for local journalists”, she explains.
mercoledì, 23 aprile 2008
Norman Mailer’s
THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
Review by Riccardo M. Ghia
COMM 261 – BOOK ESSAY 3 – April 22, 2008
Instructor: Professor Russell Frank
THE MEDIA AND THE VIETNAM WAR:
FROM WATCHDOG TO LAPDOG JOURNALISM
Once upon a time, evil North Vietnamese boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against the USS Maddox destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Once upon a time, evil North Vietnamese boats attacked two destroyers, the USS Turner Joy and the USS Maddox, again.
Like every fairy tale, there are villains on one side and spotless knights in their shimmering armors on the other. Also, like every fairy tale, the story is made up.
From time to time, governments and the press love to sell fairy tales as news stories to the public. The people grow more and more worried and outraged about the villains, and lawmakers wake up from their torpor to vote for bold resolutions, like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
Ten years after the Gulf of Tonkin fairy tale, the loss of millions of dead people and $ 120 billion were real.
The Washington Post, along with other newspapers, never retracted its Tonkin Gulf reporting. “I can assure you that there was never any retraction,” said Murray Marder, a reporter who wrote much of the Post’s coverage of the August 1964 Tonkin events. (Alper & Earp, 2006; Cohen & Solomon, 1994).
Marder remembers noting that the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese navy had been shelling North Vietnamese coastal islands just prior to the reported “unprovoked” attacks by North Vietnam on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf. But the Pentagon’s propaganda machinery was in high gear:
“‘Before I could do anything as a reporter, the Washington Post had endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.’ The former Post reporter commented: ‘If the American press had been doing its job and the Congress had been doing its job, we would never have been involved in the Vietnam War.’ As for the reporting on events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Marder said, ‘If you were making a retraction, you’d have to make a retraction of virtually everyone's entire coverage of the Vietnam War.’ ” (Cohen & Solomon, 1998).
Santayana said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Decades before the Vietnam War, the U.S. government and the press of William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) and Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) had formed a coalition to deceive the American public and declare an illegal war on Spain to pursue the same imperialistic dreams of the European countries (Sumpter, 1999).
Almost 40 years after the Vietnam War, the Washington Post and the American press unconditionally backed the government version on Iraqi WMD, and the Congress once again gave a blank check to the executive branch.
According to the advocates of “New Journalism,” the conventional press not only fails in objectivity, accuracy and honesty, but also misses feeling the pulse of the society and outlining its complex dynamics.
Norman Kingsley Mailer (1923-2007) seems to suggest that conventional journalism has inherent limits and tries to explore new ways of reporting on social and cultural unrest in “The Armies of the Night” (1968). According to critic Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), “Mailer’s intuition in the book is that the times demand a new form. He has found it.”
THE PLOT OF “THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT”
“The Armies of the Night” recounts Mailer’s participation in the anti-Vietnam War march on Oct. 21-23, 1967, when thousands of “New Left” demonstrators attempted to storm the Pentagon and block its activities for a couple of days.
The book is divided in two parts: Book One, “History as a novel: the steps of the Pentagon” (p.1-216), and the considerably shorter Book Two, “The novel as history: the battle of the Pentagon” (p.217- 288).
Book One “History as a novel: the steps of the Pentagon”
Mailer recalls his personal experience of the event, referring to himself in third-person.
Mailer accepted with reluctance a friend’s invitation to participate in an unprecedented march to the Pentagon. Thursday night, a day before the beginning of the demonstrations, Mailer found himself in a boring “liberal party” in Washington. He drank too much. A few hours later he commandeered the stage of the Ambassador Theater and, clinging to a mug filled with bourbon, he improvised as master of ceremonies. While introducing Paul Goodman, Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald, Mailer did not miss an opportunity to insult and shock (p.28-52).
The day after, he found that “revolutionaries-for-a-weekend should never get hangovers” (p.56). Nevertheless, he joined the demonstrators in front of the Department of Justice, where almost a thousand students turned in their draft cards. A delegation led by Rev. William Sloane Coffin defied the law that prohibits aiding or abetting any young man who wished to turn in their cards, but the assistant of the Attorney General refused to accept the cards (p.79).
On Saturday morning, Mailer, Lowell and Macdonald joined the peace march. The first leg of the walk ended in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where only half of the people of the Washington March in 1963 showed up – a number that Mailer estimated between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and different newspapers between 25,000 or 225,000 (p.100). Endless speeches bored Mailer to death. When the march was ready to go (p.106), almost all of the Blacks had left to make their own demonstration in another part of Washington, to Mailer’s great disappointment (p.102). A mumbo-jumbo of disorganized and multicolored people finally reached the Pentagon, dubbed by Mailer as the “eye of the oppressor.” Social and political activist Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) began a folkloric, magical rite with the intent to exorcise the evil contained within the Pentagon and levitate the building by means of meditation.
When the first group of people engaged the military policemen on the steps of the Pentagon, Mailer decided to join them, but they were routed by the soldiers. Later on, the writer adopted a softer approach to get himself arrested after crossing a police line (p.129-131).
Mailer had a quarrel with a Nazi who happened to share the same paddy wagon. The rest of the narration follows his detention in a post office (p.159-174) and, the following night, in the minimum security center of Occoquan, Va. (p.175-181). Mailer was released on Sunday thanks to the intervention of famous liberal lawyers Ed deGrazia and Philip Hirschkop (p.203-211).
Book Two, “The novel as history: the battle of the Pentagon”
Mailer leaves the stage as the main character but regains it as historian, sociologist, military strategist and political analyst, a role anticipated by long digressions in Book One (note 1). He used the second part of his book to narrate the events he did not witness (note 2). or to provide a larger context of the march, such as the preparations and the political bargaining between Dave Dellinger, Jerry Rubin and the government, as well as the political infighting between the Old Left and the New Left, moderates and radicals.
The observer (Mailer) and the object of the narration (the march on Pentagon) are the same, but the perspective on the events changes radically. The writer moves from a gallery of miniatures and details to a larger fresco. To explain the change, Mailer delivers the metaphor of microscope and telescope: you should use the microscope to explore the pond; “a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest” (p.219)
Using different ways, the writer comes to different but not conflicting conclusions.
Double Ending
At the end of Book One, Mailer expresses the idea that his compatriots are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam and in the United States itself. Therefore, they were destroying the very foundation of the Republic, “which is its love and trust in Christ” (p.214).
At the end of Book Two, the historian turns poetic and denounces the lies that imprison the will of the people, turning it from the will of God to the will of the Devil:
“America – the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of people – if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn – was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now where was what? Liars controlled the locks” (p.288)
MAILER AND THE PRESS: FIGHTING CONVENTIONAL JOURNALISM
The Armies of the Night openly mocks the mainstream press from the very beginning. Mailer singles out an article from Time magazine, which narrates the novelist’s “deeds” in the Ambassador Theater and his subsequent arrest during the Vietnam War protest and the march to the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. The article describes in a page what Mailer portrays in his “Book One: History as a novel…” stretching on more than 200 pages.
Mailer wants to stress the inadequacy of the conventional press in dealing with personal stories as well as framing great historical events, providing context or adhering to objectivity. The writer is clear in demolishing Time’s story:
“Now we may leave Time in order to find out what happened” (p.4)
As the narration goes on, the reader discovers that the Time journalist was undoubtedly right: his story reported accurately the basic facts and details. On the other hand, the article is not dispassionate – the journalist clearly feels contempt for Mailer – and does not provide the backdrop of the New Left movement and of the march. In other words, Mailer suggests that the press is unable to convey the complexity of the reality.
From the stage of the Ambassador Theater, Mailer zinged the American press for being too obsequious to the government, branding the mainstream journalists as lapdogs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He invites the reporters of the major newspapers and magazines to stand up and be counted, but nobody has the guts to do so:
“‘Yeah, people,’ [Mailer] said, “watch the reporting which follows. Yeah, these reporters will kiss Lyndon Johnson’s *ss and Dean Rusk’s *ss and Man Mountain McNamara’s *ss, they will rush to kiss it, but they will stand in public? No! Because they are the silent assassins of the Republic. They alone have done more to destroy this nation than any force in it’” (note 3) (p.51)
Political stance is not the only bane of the American press, according to Mailer. Sloppy reporting and poor writing beleaguers the newsmen. In particular, the writer lashes out at their quoting methods:
“One could not communicate the horror to anyone who did not write well. The papers distorted one’s actions, and that was painful enough, but they wrenched and garbled and twisted and broke one’s words and sentences until a good author always sounded like an incoherent overcharged idiot in newsprint – there was even a corollary: the more one might have to say in a sentence, the worse one would probably sound. Henry James would have come off in a modern interview like a hippie who had taken a correspondence course in forensics. It really did not matter what was said – dependably one was always elliptic, incomprehensible, asinine. So a great wall of total miscomprehension was built over the years between a writer, and the audience reached by a newspaper – which meant eventually most of America…” (p.65)
“Nuances were forever being munched like peanuts” (p.66)
Again, Mailer overtly mocks the reporters’ poor ability to contextualize:
“It was obvious the good novelist Norman Mailer had much to learn about newspapers, reporters and salience” (p.215)
The proverbial aversion of the journalists to numbers gives Mailer new lethal tools to scourge the press: the estimate of the march’s demonstrators (p.220; 245).
The writer, however, is harsh to the underground press, which would pride itself “on being even more inaccurate than their enemies” (p.250).
In the last part of the book, Mailer includes extracts or entire articles taken from both mainstream and underground press, not denying veracity to both, maybe in an attempt to reconstruct the complex reality of an event involving tens of thousands of people and bringing together different experiences and episodes. The mainstream press is well-represented by a Jimmy Breslin (note 4) and a Washington Star story (p.260-261; 282-284), while Gerald Long (p.261-262), Margie Stamberg (p.272-274), Thorne Dryer (p.274-276) are the standard-bearers of the alternative press.
MAILER’S “NEW JOURNALISM”
Mailer considered himself politically as a Left Conservative (p.180), but he rides the revolutionary momentum in arts and politics to find new, radical and artistic ways to portray his age. He adopted a radical style and structure in “The Armies of the Night” to revisit the entire concept of journalism.
Obscenity
Mailer leaves neutral words to veer towards obscenity and insults. He does not limit himself attacking newspapers, but also the cradle and the bulwark of American literary journalism: the New Yorker. His dispute with Lillian Ross is a telling example of Mailer’s artistic choices:
“[Mailer] had once corresponded with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. “Because they would not let me use the word ‘shit,’” he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say shit in the New Yorker” (p.26)
Later on, the author wallows again in the mud of obscenities with delight and jeers at the censors:
“‘Fuck you,’ cried Mailer back with absolute delight . . . But let us use the asterisks for these obscenities to emphasize how happily he used the words, they went off like fireworks in his orator’s heart, and asterisks look like rocket-bursts and the orbs from Roman candles ***. F*ck you he said to the heckler but with such gusto the vowel was doubled. F*-*ck you! Was more like it …” (p.51)
Mailer tries to bring “high” and “low” language together. His vocabulary swings between “shit” and “hierophant,” mingling abuse and divine, triviality and highbrow poetry. His multi-style is by no means new. Gaius Valerius Catullus’ obscene poems could make Larry Flint blush with embarrassment. Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” mixed high poetry and the most obscene depravation; not to mention Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron,” known for its bawdy tales of love. The list of Latin and Italian authors could be endless, but also French and Anglo-Saxon literature had their own distinguished insults and insulters, like Molière, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare (Fo, 2007).
So, where is the innovation? Where is the radicalism?
Mailer wants to attack the neutral language of the newspapers because it’s the same language of the authority that the author wants to contest - the hypocrisy of the technologic, technocratic society that would tend towards political and media totalitarianism:
“The same newspaper story had quoted a Pentagon spokesman’s reaction to charges of brutality by Pentagon marches: ‘We feel,’ said the spokesman, ‘our action is consistent with objectives of security and control faced with varying levels of dissent.” Consistent with objectives of security and control! Levels of dissent! One is speaking of a government process – the removal of sediment – a natural by-product of the forces of freedom invoked by the process of government. The spokesman was speaking in totalitarianese, which is to say, technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds in stripping itself of any moral content. For if the spokesman had said, ‘We were trying to keep order against varying degrees of violence and insurrection,’ the speaker could have been asked, ‘What kind of violence? Insurrection in name of what? And against which order?’” (p.284)
Therefore, Mailer decides to say goodbye “to the old literary corset of good taste” (p.48) and use the rude insult as zest in the life of the American society bulldozed by neo-Puritan corporations:
“the American corporation executive, who was after all the foremost representative of Man in the world today, was perfectly capable of burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese jungles, yet felt a large displeasure and fairly final disapproval at the generous use of obscenity in literature and in public” (p.49)
Unspoken dialogue and quotes
Mailer decides to violate the First Commandment of modern journalism: Thou Shalt Not Make Up Quotes. The journalist is supposed to report only what people have really said and not trying to guess what is going on in their head. Mailer ignores this holy rule nonchalantly and goes forward: he even makes up an entire “unspoken dialogue.” The most toothsome examples of unspoken dialogues in the novel are the confrontation between a Nazi supporter and a marshal in the police wagon (p.145-146) and part of the legal battle in the courtroom between the defense attorney Philip Hirschkop and Commissioner Scaife (p.208-209).
Creative punctuation
Mailer adopted creative punctuation, a device to which Tom Wolfe had resorted a few years before in “The Girl of the Year” (Kerrane & Yagoda, 1998 : 469-479). Indeed, the use of creative punctuation in the English novel dates back to at least “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), but it was relatively new for journalism when Mailer wrote “The Armies of the Night” in 1968.
For example, the writer indulges in quotation marks to stress the exceptional nature of the Left intelligentsia, which “obviously” includes Mailer himself, at a moment when the probability of an arrest looms for all of them:
“If technology land had built Global Village, well shank it up technology land, let Global Village hear today that America’s best poet? and best novelist?? and best critic???? had been arrested in protest of Uncle Sam’s Whorehouse War. And if Paul Goodman had been here, Mailer supposed he could have been ranked as America’s best inspiration to the young??????” (p.97)
Mailer pleases the reader with another virtuoso display in punctuation to render the echo of a loudspeaker:
“you must FIGHT . . . fight . . . fight . . . fite . . . ite . . .” (p.102)
Subjectivity, hyper-personalization and complexity
Mailer flew off the handle when Robert Lowell dared to dub him as “the finest journalist in America” (p.21). This is not surprising for at least four reasons: Mailer has an overblown ego; he is childishly touchy; his journalistic pieces were praised while his novels were attacked by critics; and his apparent contempt for most of the American press. When an irritated Mailer said he thought of himself as the best writer in America, Lowell tried to apologize:
“Oh Norman, oh, certainly, I didn’t mean to imply, heavens no, it’s just I have such respect for good journalism” (p.22)
What kind of journalism does Mailer offer in “The Armies of the Night”?
Mailer intervenes in the narration at different levels in different parts of the novel. In Book One, Mailer plays the double role of narrator and of buffoonish participant-observer (Woo, 2007), while he carves out the “niche” of historian-analyst-poet in Book Two.
Mailer is never an invisible narrator, “but one who is intrusive, who insists on his view of the world” (Banks, 1992). Mailer’s literary journalism is characterized not just by a third-person point of view, but by a shifting point of view in which the author conveys an attitude of tacking back and forth between an insider's passionate perspective and an outsider's dispassionate one. In other words, the author-narrator of Mailer's literary journalism moves between the roles of fictional hero and detached journalist, each with its own literary functions to perform.
Ben Yagoda (1998 : 290) suggests two reasons for Mailer’s choice to refer to himself in the third person: (1) to tune down the volume of his egocentrism, that would probably become unbearable had he referred to himself as “I,” as Tom Wolfe conjectured; (2) to present himself as a figure representative of his times, like Henry Adams’ similar narrative strategy in his classic “The education of Henry Adams.”
Mailer himself seems to confirm the latter hypothesis when he justifies his choice to focus on himself rather than on the founders or the designers of the march. The march on the Pentagon was an ambiguous event, while the position of the central figures was not and consequently cannot resolve anything of the ambiguity.
“For that, an eyewitness who is participant but not a vested partisan is required, further must not only be involved, but ambiguous in his own propositions, a comic hero . . . to recapture the precise feel of the ambiguity of the event and its monumental disproportion. Mailer is a figure of monumental disproportion …” (p.53)
Mailer deems himself as the appropriate character to hold the spotlight because he thinks of himself as a complex personality, therefore suitable to embody a complex reality. He conveys his convinction with a brilliant simile(note 5):
“They were brusque to the world of manners, they had built their hope of heaven on the binary system and the computer, 1 and 0, Yes and No (…) Now Mailer was often brusque himself . . . but the architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy” (note 6) (p.17)
Metaphor & Allegory
Mailer looks to pursue a truth that transcends mere facts. The facts still constitute the building blocks to form his opinion, but the author tries to see through the single episodes to draw a larger picture. From the down-to-earth reality, Mailer tries to get metaphysical meanings; from metaphysics, he tries to figure out the design of God.
For example, the allegorical connection between the bleeding heart of Christ to portray the sanity of the nation is rooted in people’s mentality and, therefore, highly evocative (p.188; p.213-215).
The metaphor of the Pentagon as the evil eye of the oppressor is equally powerful:
“They were going to face the symbol, the embodiment, no, call it the true and high church of the military-industrial complex, blind five-sided eye of a subtle oppression which had come to America . . . greedy stingy dumb valve of the worst of the Wasp heart, chalice and anus of corporation land, smug, enclosed, morally blind Pentagon . . .” (p.113-114)
Other narrative devices
Mailer’s narrative style is combined with the more clearly distinguishable techniques of realistic writing described by Wolfe: scene by scene construction, fully recorded dialogue, and detailing incidentals.
CONCLUSIONS
“The Armies of the Night” revived Mailer’s declining fortune as novelist and ushered him into his most prolific and brilliant decade. His nonfiction novel became a bestseller. Mailer was hailed both as a great novelist and a great journalist: he won not only the Pulitzer and a National Book Award but also journalism’s prestigious George Polk Award (Woo, 2007). His work was recognized as an innovation in literary and journalistic form. Alfred Kanzin (1968), a longtime Mailer’s admirer, wrote that “Armies” is
“the work of personal and political reportage that brings to the inner and developing crisis of the United States at this moment admirable sensibilities, candid intelligence, the most moving concern for America itself.”
Time magazine, which at the time did not feel much sympathy for Mailer nor for the New Left, published in 1968 a review that criticized the obsessive focus of the writer on himself, his view on sex, his snobbism and the choice of covering “a minor news event,” but admitted that
this book was “a bravura performance” and that “Mailer does indeed cover all the accepted journalistic steps, from the ceremonial handing-in of draft cards at the Department of Justice to the activists’ vain roughhouse attempt to storm the Pentagon.”
Mailer depicts a self-portrait and, at the same time, a great fresco of the pacifist movement that consists of (1) the members of the high-class, “technologist” society who are aware of their own decadence (p.13-27); (2) the idealists, to which “Mailer could feel no sense of belonging” because they were too nice and too principled for him (p.68); (3) the hippies, “bombed by the use of LSD as the toll of Eniwetok, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the scorched foliage of Vietnam” (p.93). Mailer is in and out of the Old Left and the New Left, attracted and repelled by them; using the third person, he observes himself and his surroundings from inside and from outside.
His “multitasking” writing style is from time to time impressively powerful and his honesty about himself is remarkable.
But I have to admit that I grew more and more fed up with this book. Mailer’s presence is too invasive, too irritating. Whatever perspective is adopted, Mailer’s ego holds firmly in the spotlight, in the same way he commandeered the stage at the Ambassador Hotel. He thinks of himself as the best writer in the Unites States (note 7), the best man to be President since World War II except, maybe, Kennedy (note 8), and a great military strategist (note 9). Mailer rarely stops brooding about himself (p.83); he cannot help but candidly admit he has “an egotism of curious disproportions” (p.119); he jokes on quoting himself over and over again (p.194). Enough is enough!
His obsession with aesthetics tests my patience too hard. Overused digressions on the most hallow topics, along with a byzantine purple prose and endless paranoia, fragments the flow of the narration, which ends to drawl like the speeches of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Mailer also shoves here and there poetry, but he did not pull at my heartstrings. The writer often seems to show off his writing skills rather than say something deeply felt – he is interested in the container, not in the contents. You can think that his hypocrisy mirrors the hypocrisy of his society; or you can agree with Kazin, who wrote, “Overwritten? Overwrought? It doesn’t read so in the context.” But I venture to dissent.
“The Armies of the Night” is undoubtedly an interesting novel and presents an alternative form of journalism. But I’ve decided to follow Hemingway’s lesson: “If it made you feel good, it was good” (p.90). This novel didn’t; therefore, I don’t think it is great literature or great journalism.
NOTES
(1) For example, Mailer engaged in Book One a long political analysis on the military and political reasons of the conflict (“Why are we in Vietnam?” – Book One, Part IV, chapter 7, p.181-189).
(2) For example, in Book Two Mailer wrote what happened to Lowell and Macdonald (p.264-265), or the brief but bloody skirmishes between demonstrators and the armed guards (p.271-278).
(3) Mailer’s voice seems to echo the famous Joseph Pulitzer’s words: “Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.” But, as Mailer points out, the American press has failed to be an affordable check on the government.
(4) Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin were close friends and the ran together in the New York City elections in 1969. Mailer ran for mayor, Breslin for city council president. Breslin wrote an article in the New York magazine, where he announced that he ran to win (Breslin 1969). Their program called for New York City to secede from the state of New York. Political power was to devolve to the city's neighborhoods. The Mailer-Breslin slogan was “The Other Guys are the Joke,” but they were soundly beaten.
(5) This passage is highly evocative. You can appreciate the antinomy between “flatness” and “complexity,” where flatness is portrayed by the icon of the computer and associated to modern times, while ancient cathedrals evoke complexity. The image of the provincial cathedral really struck me – since it reminds me of my hometown cathedral, whose different styles from different ages remind me of the complexity of civilization and human beings.
(6) Other passages in the novel also reveal (or pretend to reveal) Mailer’s complexity and controversy: for example, he doesn’t approve drugs but he takes them (p.5); he suddenly decides to join the march even if he sees it as useless (p.9); he takes a clear liberal stance but he is marred by snobbism (p.13).
(7) “‘Well, Cal,’ said Mailer, using Lowell’s nickname for the first time, “There are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America” (p.22)
(8) “With the possible exception of John F. Kennedy, there had not been a President of the United States nor even a candidate since the Second World War whom Mailer secretly considered more suitable than himself” (p.119)
(9) “Mailer, General Mailer, now had a vision of another battle…” (p.114). Later on, Mailer discusses the disastrous military strategy of the demonstrators (p.254-260).
REFERENCES (APA STANDARD)
Video
Alper, L. (Producer); Alper, L. & Earp J. (Directors) (2006). War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death. Canada : Mundovision Ltd.
Books
Banks, A. (1992). Norman Mailer. From Connery, T. B. (ed.) (1992) A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre, 297-306. New York : Greenwood Press
Kerrane K., & Yagoda, B. (1998). The Art of Fact. Fairfield : Touchstone
Mailer, N. (1968). The Armies of the Night. History As A Novel – The Novel As History. New York : Penguin
Journals, Newspapers, Magazines
Breslin, J. (May 5, 1969). I run to win. New York (magazine), p. 42- 44. Retrieved on April 12, 2008 from http://media.nymag.com/docs/07/11/mailerbreslin.pdf
Cohen, J., & Solomon, N. (July 27, 1994). 30-year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). Retrieved on April 14, 2008, from http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2261
Cohen, J., & Solomon, N. (August 1998). CNN's "Tailwind" and Selective Media Retractions.
Extra! Retrieved on April 14, 2008 from http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1429
Fo, D. (Dec. 28, 2007). Le parolacce autobiografia di una nazione. La scienza e la cultura degli insulti. La Stampa. Retrieved on April 13, 2008 from
http://www.lastampa.it/redazione/cmsSezioni/cultura/200712articoli/28790girata.asp
Kazin, A. (May 5, 1968). The Trouble He’s Seen. The New York Times. Retrieved on April 15, 2008 from
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-armies.html
Sumpter, R. (1999). “Censorship liberally administered”: Press, U.S. military relations in the Spanish-American war. Communication Law & Policy, 5(4), 465-483.
Woo, E. (Nov. 11, 2007). Norman Mailer, 84; provocative, prolific novelist and essayist. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved on April 15, 2008, from
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/
la-me-mailer11nov11,0,6488020.story?page=1&coll=la-home-center
[Unknown] (May 10, 1968). The Weekend Revolution. Time magazine. Retrieved on April 14, 2008 from
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902233-1,00.html
