Ah, now this article works in tandem with Jon Stewart’s nutritous takedown of Glenn Beck this week. Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, asks in the March 14, 2010 Washington Post, a fine question in an op-ed titled:

Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?”

Read the whole piece here, but here’s an excerpt:

… Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that (Rupert) Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher’s political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation’s airwaves to Murdoch’s cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post.

As for Fox’s campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting ABC’s Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist — audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse.

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation. (more…)

“AND NOW LISTEN: THE RULE OF THE FINAL INCH! The realm of the Final Inch! In the language of Maximum Clarity it is immediately clear what that is. The work has been almost completed, the goal almost attained, everything completely right and the difficulties overcome. But the quality of the thing is not quite right. Finishing touches are needed, maybe still more research. In that moment of fatigue and self-satisfaction it is especially tempting to leave the work without having attained the apex of quality. Work in the area of the Final Inch is very, very complex and also especially valuable, because it is executed by the most perfected means. In fact, the rule of the Final Inch consists in this: not to shirk this crucial work. Not to postpone it, for the thoughts of the person performing the task will then stray from the realm of the Final Inch. And not to mind the time spent on it, knowing that one’s purpose lies not in completing things faster but in the attainment of perfection.”

~ DMITRI SOLOGDIN, Chapter 24
from “The First Circle” by Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn (more…)

I’ve been blogging regularly for several weeks now after years of wondering whether and how to start. I still haven’t figured it out. Figured out what? The strange, neurotic landscape that comes with hanging out your blogging shingle. I’ve taken to obsessively checking my hit counts. Figuring out what bumps the count upward by a few dozen pageviews. Why the angular graph tracking the counts daily in my Wordpress.com Stats plug-in languishs or stalls out. What people react to. Whether I’ve become a cheap hit-count whore.

Part 2 in an ongoing, navel-reflecting, hit-count-hopeful, insomnia-driven reflection on the act of blogging. Part 1: ‘Blogging = Streaking.’

The bulk of bloggers, I suppose, command audiences that consist of handfuls of occasional readers and a sprinkle of devoted, faithful friends (Hi, Karan-a-go-go! Hey, Captain La La!). At this early stage and level of blogging it is perhaps presumptuous to call them ‘fans.’ Plus, a few pals or fellow travelers may be devoted as they are obscure bloggers, too, checking their own hit counts and wondering whether they are going to be epic fails like you as a blogger. So, it’s like a support group. Bloggers Anonymous.

That word, ‘anonymous,’ gets at some of the strangeness of trying to blog. The fact of the matter is that most bloggers are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous within the cavernous, cacophonous, 24-7 Wal-Mart of the Web. Really, when only 17 people check in with you all day on Feb. 28, 2010 (see graph below),  and one of them is your brother and the other is your fellow ‘epic fail-fearing fellow blogger,’ you can say any ridiculous old thing. It’s not like the world’s paying attention. But, see, that’s the rub. If you do go ahead and post something foolish, earnest and awful, the world or at least a colleague or your mother, (were she still on this mortal coil, God rest her soul), could be paying attention with just an e-mail or stray link (‘OMG, look at this...’). Foolishness and Ridicule are two louts always hanging around the corner in Blogland.

Of course, one’s hit counts, if they languish in numbers that reflect the candles on a teenager’s birthday cake, could have to do with the fact you publish a crushingly booo-o-ring blog. Or one that Doesn’t Speak to Me. Or that 65 visitors daily is better than the 32 when you first started and actually, quite a lot when you consider that that nice old lady, Myrtle, at the dry cleaners on the corner doesn’t have anybody reading her thoughts. Or that all of this is immaterial in the end, everything is an ever-dissolving mirage and that we are all really just ‘Dust in the Wind,’ yes, we are dust in the wind. I’m down with that; I get the whole annica thing.

But please, can more than 17 of you show up today? Thanks, man. (And good morning bro. And Karan. And Captain La La.)

Hit counts since the start of my illustrious blogging career. In my defense for today (which shows, like, 1 measly hit), I am writing this in the pre-dawn hours, stricken with insomnia. My friend(s) and whomever else will wander in today haven’t woken up yet. Though, if you live in France, you should be up already, having a croissant and jam and hot chocolate, and could be reading this blog were there anything about your world of interest in it. Perhaps there is!

“MOST OF LIFE IS SO DULL that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,” or, “I am horrified,” we are insincere. “As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror” — it’s no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.”

~ E.M. Forster from “A Passage to India”

Effective this very moment (it’s wonderful and terrifying being in charge), “The Footloose Flaneur,” a fictional memoir about a momentous year abroad, becomes “The TohuBohu Tales.” It may become something else later. My personal Unicycle Advisor, based in the nation’s capital, advised that he felt the old title was inadequate. I had to agree. He has spent much time unicycling (for a time having held a Guinness World unicycling record while juggling) so this is an esteemed, special individual. I had to take his feedback seriously.

“TohuBohu” you ask? An interesting word, from the Hebrew for a compound word “Tohuwabohu,” signifying  “formlessness” and “emptiness,” and  used in Genesis 1:2. The OED defines “tohu-bohu” as: “That which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion.” I will let you draw your own conclusions, my 7 or 8 readers so far of “The TohuBohu Tales,” as to what that might mean for the unspooling of this ball of narrative yarn. Auden (who as usual, gets it best) used the word in a poem which may become the work’s epigraph, from a piece from 1942, titled “Sickness and in Health.” I like that commanding voice, calling out of the confusion:

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command – Rejoice.”

Here’s more, for wordsmiths, and yet more on the word. Stay tuned to Hundred Mountain for additional “TohuBohu Tales.”And what, you make ask, is a fictional memoir? I borrowed the phrase from a Meridith Sue Willis review of a new book by “Crum” author Lee Maynard, titled “The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life.” As for my own fictional memoir? It may not altogether be factual, it may be fictional. It may also be true, or may try to be true. You can be the judge of that. To keep up, you could subscribe to the blog, you know, via e-mail or RSS. Just cursor up to the upper left-hand corner there, where it says  “subscribe: Posts | Comments | Email “ Or click it right here. Yep, that’s it. You may begin the “The TohuBohu Tales” at the beginning, or anywhere in between.

Le Basilique de Sacre Couer (from earthinpictures.com)

TohuBohu Tales
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~ Chapter 4: Sacre Coeur!

Chapter 4 ~ Sacre Coeur

There really is no hope of capturing Paris in words, though I will make some tiny, sorry attempts. The subject is too big, at least for me. Better to stay small. I will not be obligated or responsible for you somehow seeing the Paris of those years. This is a failure I concede up front. Go yourself. Look up pictures. Read Hemingway, whomever. I declare I am not responsible for Paris, although I am responsible for leaving some things behind there. That will be my tale, my story of Paris. That is all it will be. Better, I say, to stay small.

I saw before me a demitasse of chocolat chaud, a tiny spoon delivered by a Tunisian waiter at a Montmarte cafe along with our gleaming white porcelain cups and saucers. Back home, where gulping food and drink, then gulping more, was my norm, this French serving seemed an impossibly tiny amount of hot chocolate for such a freezing night. Abdullah and I had arrived in the City of Lights on Christmas Eve,  1987. We paced ourselves through our cups. With each teensy spoonful, the spoon’s metal tang came first, then the hit of syrupy, steaming chocolate went down like what chocolate must have first tasted like to a Mayan lord or whomever first served the cacao bean, warm and wet. We were ecstatic to be free young men in Paris for several days and nights, hot cups in cold hands, so our judgment was perhaps severely clouded. But I remember, twenty years later, how that chocolate tasted.

Our hands and faces were frigid from a walk up out of the Marcadet des Pouissoineers Metro stop to this café blocks away in Montmarte.  On our way along boulevards, up serpentine side streets, we passed bakeries, bookstores, groceries, candy shops, perfume stores. All the minutiae of French commerce, the slivers of shops you bounced among to compile your needs for the day and night. We strolled past an open butcher shop. On a hook above the window outside the shop hung head-down the body of an antlered deer. A sprig of mistletoe decorated its mouth

We each poured the last drops into our mouths. Left a few centimes behind, exited the café. The moment had come. Would this work? We rounded the corner to a seven-story building hunkered at a three-way intersection. The building commanded the corner. It looked as if it had been there since Napoleon, maybe well before. The way in was through two massive wooden doors, twice as high as  Abdullah or me. So, let’s see. (more…)