Silly Stunt or Immersion Journalism?
You be the judge as Chicago Trib columnist Julia Keller, who already has a Ph.D. and a Pulitzer, goes back to college for 10 weeks. Check out her first dispatch about it here.
Immersion journalism may have started--or at least gained greater momentum--with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's chronicle of the Clutter family murders. How he got that story and how it affected him are portrayed exquisitely in the film Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I don't see that many mainstream films anymore, but this one... wow. My pulse quickened, my throat tightened. As the saga dragged on and on, keeping Capote from finishing the manuscript and getting it published, the dance between writer and subject began to change. Hoffman's performance will win him the Oscar. And screenwriter Dan Futterman's adaptation of Gerald Clarke's huge biography (also titled Capote) doesn't miss a lick. See it.
posted by writer @ 9:30 AM
2 Comments:
Well, OK,but didn't Professor Rebekah Nathan (pseud) already do that in *My Freshman Year*? And for a whole year? With a reasonable degree of compassion for students but some teacherly despair over the educational/intellectual results of the qualities she described in them? This seems like a nice anti-intellectual opportunity to make fun of graduate studies, literary criticism as an enterprise, and texts written before yesterday's blog. Too many easy potshots at an already beleaguered set of things. Why not enroll in MBA classes and see just what kind of s**t is shoveled there?
The recent experiment in immersion journalism that amazed me is 16-year-old Farris Hassan's wacky journey.
His father, Dr. Hassan, admitted that he arranged for his son's flight into Baghdad through "political connections" even though he knew foreigners like Farris were targeted for kidnappings and, potentially, beheadings.
His excuse for facilitating his son's trip into a war zone was that if he didn't let him go, it would have left an emotional scar. What the f**k?
Didn't someone just post on another thread of the blog that "overindulgence is the cruelest form of child abuse?" We just found our poster daddy.
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