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NNJ Dispatch from 12:51

I'm 17 pages in, and I already need to post from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism, in an interview with Ted Conover: Do you have any reporting routines you follow when you arrive in a new town?
Conover: I pay a lot of attention to place in my writing, so when I arrive in a new town I try to do what Lawrence Durrell recommended in his essay "Spirit of Place," which is to get still as a needle, as he puts it.
["It is a pit indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you--are you watching yourself through me?' Most travelers hurry too much ... the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly--but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling ... you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there."]
Think about what you hear, what you see, what you smell, what you feel. I try to remember that.

Comments

Re: Sense of Place

All of which is just a long-winded, highfalutin-soundin’ way of saying this:

Be still when you report.

That does NOT mean be slow. On the contrary. The quicker things are moving, the more important this becomes – to be STILL.

I was most aware of this, I think, when I was doing a lot of the Yankees coverage for the Times Herald-Record. The rhythm of the baseball beat has a tendency to be loiter, loiter, loiter (in the clubhouse), go, go, go (writing “earlies” before the game), loiter, loiter, loiter (in the press box while actually watching the game), go, go, go (making deadline on the “gamer”). It’s a challenge to compartmentalize.

When things got quick, though, I really did – consciously, purposefully – make myself physically still.

When everyone else was crowding around someone’s locker stretching to get their little Dictaphones close to his face ...

Still.

When everyone started hammering away at their laptops in the eighth and ninth innings ...

Still.

Sports is my example here. But I do it in all my reporting. Because it’s all the same shit, anyway, right?

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