Salon.com > Joan Smith

Journalism fails its sobriety test

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 20:05:00 +0000

It makes you proud to be a journalist. Thanks to the First Amendment and the fourth estate -- with "Inside Edition," that distinguished purveyor of fine reporting, in the vanguard -- we will soon have the opportunity to see Diana Ross stumbling around in the middle of the night, trying to pass a sobriety test.

Arrested in Tucson, Ariz., at 12:30 a.m. on Dec. 30 for "extreme DUI" -- allegedly driving with a blood alcohol level over .15 -- the pop diva requested, and was granted, a temporary restraining order blocking release of a police videotape of the test.

Now a Tucson judge has dropped the restraining order and is authorizing release of the tape, albeit with the sound removed. It's hard to know what his reasoning might be -- the public has a right to see what happened that night in front of a local video store, but not to hear? It used to be that having your name in the paper or seeing your picture flashed on the TV news was punishment enough for being a VIP in trouble with the law. Now we have journalism as extreme humiliation. If you are famous and make a fool of yourself in public and someone -- even if they happen to be a police officer -- catches it on tape, the courts will support the public's right to quench its apparently insatiable thirst for lurid images of the people it otherwise professes to admire.

Shop-happy

Thu, 11 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

The other night, my 3-year-old nephew and I received an unexpected economics lesson in the form of a picture book called "Rainbow Fish." The plot is deceptively simple: Rainbow Fish is an underwater denizen distinguished by a set of unusually attractive silver scales. A small, blue fish asks R.F. to give him one of his scales and R.F. refuses. Shunned, as a result, by all of the other fish, R.F. consults a wise old octopus, who encourages him to reconsider. Give your scales away, the octopus advises. You won't be as pretty, but the other fish will like you and you'll be happy. So he does and he is. The end.

My nephew understood immediately that the book was about sharing, but he is also at the age of the perpetual "why?" and trying to answer his whys about R.F.'s epiphany, I felt queasy. It's important that children learn to share, but this clumsy little book's more prominent message is that people will like you if you give them your possessions, particularly the possessions they envy. The unwitting moral of "Rainbow Fish" is that you can buy love.

John Irving

Mon, 03 Mar 1997 20:00:00 +0000

it was John Irving's high-school wrestling coach, Ted Seabrooke, who told him that "talent is overrated. That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it." Seabrooke also told him: "An underdog is in a position to take a healthy bite." And Irving, who counted himself neither a born athlete nor a born writer -- he was dyslexic before that particular learning disability had been identified by name -- took Seabrooke's words as a kind of
mantra.

"I was an underdog," the bestselling novelist writes in "The Imaginary Girlfriend," a long, autobiographical essay in his new collection of short pieces, "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed." "Therefore, I had to control the pace of everything. This was more than I learned in English 4W, but the concept was applicable to Creative Writing -- and to all my schoolwork, too. If my classmates could read our history assignment in an hour, I allowed myself two or three. If I couldn't learn to spell, I would keep a list of my most frequently misspelled words -- and I kept the list with me; I had it handy even for unannounced quizzes. Most of all, I rewrote everything; first drafts were like the first time you tried a new takedown -- you needed to drill it, over and over again, before you even dreamed of trying it in a match. I began to take my lack of talent seriously."

Love and other illegal acts

Fri, 04 Oct 1996 19:00:00 +0000

high romance, spiced with a few traditional Mexican recipes, was the
ingredient that made Laura Esquivel's first novel, "Like Water for
Chocolate," an international phenomenon when it was simultaneously released as both a book and a movie in the U.S. in 1993. Her second novel might well be destined for a similar popularity.

Part New Age bodice ripper, part picture-book for adults, "The Law of Love,"
is a plot-driven novel designed to allow the reader short breaks
between chapters to look at illustrations by Miguelanxo Prado and listen to
Mexican love songs and popular opera arias, all incorporated by Esquivel into
the plot. The music is provided on a CD tucked into the back of the book.

Personal Best: The Sound and the Fury

Mon, 30 Sep 1996 12:24:00 +0000

how do you choose the best among the novels of William Faulkner, whose power is still unmatched in American literature, who turned storytelling inside out and made it seem an aspect of nature he alone had come to understand, who invented a version of the South that eclipsed all other versions, who showed us the true power of the dependent clause and made sentences that built and persisted and climaxed and landed, to a reader's delight, quite solidly on their feet?

But torn among "Light in August," "Absalom, Absalom," "As I Lay Dying," "Sanctuary" and "Sound and the Fury," I would finally choose the latter, because it was my introduction to Faulkner and because it changed forever the way I thought about the arc of a novel, the potential of a story, the rhythm of words.

Stories are themselves rather humble. We use them, simply, to organize our thoughts, especially our thoughts about who we are and how we're doing. Storytelling is an antidote to chaos.

The best defense is a bestseller

Sat, 30 Dec 1995 17:23:00 +0000

Of all the settings in which we have come to expect a good mystery -- the great English country house, the luxury train, the scientific laboratory -- there is none more popular than the courtroom.

But to Richard North Patterson, who since the publication of his 1993 bestseller "Degree of Guilt" has become known as one of the genre's finest practitioners, a court of law is more than a literary device. The former San Francisco attorney says -- with little irony -- that it is one of the best places to practice the art of fine fiction.
"Obviously not every lawyer has a knack for writing fiction or we'd have no lawyers left," quipped Patterson, who has happily given up his lucrative law practice with the San Francisco firm McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen to write full time at home in upscale Pacific Heights.

Robertson Davies

Sat, 16 Dec 1995 20:00:00 +0000

There was always something theatrical about the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who died two weeks ago at age 82. He began acting and writing plays as a child and was one of Canada's best-known playwrights long before his novels -- "The Deptford Trilogy,'' "The Rebel Angels,'' "What's Bred in the Bone'' -- brought him international literary acclaim.

But more than most celebrities, he always cut a figure, with his formal old-fashioned clothes, his courtly accent and his flowing God-the-father hair and beard -- out of place (despite his Canadian settings and themes) and out of time. In this fortuitously-timed biography, Judith Skelton Grant, who has made the explication of Davies her life's work, traces for the first time, in meticulous (and often tedious) detail, the origins of the Davies myth and mythos.

Davies was born in the tiny Ontario village of Thamesville (the model for Deptford) and raised by his well-read and relatively arty parents in the equally provincial town of Renfrew. His father published the local newspaper. Davies was unathletic and intellectually precocious; his schoolmates were contemptuous of his physical inadequacies and suspicious of his mental gifts. Like so many artists, he grew up feeling both superior and alone.