The 1993 film Silverlake Life: The View From Here, by Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, is a documentary classic. It began when Joslin started keeping a video diary of his lover Mark Massi's struggle with AIDS. Then Joslin began dying of AIDS. Massi, in better shape, took over the camera. When he died, a former student of Joslin's, Peter Friedman, edited the film. The result, according to Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly,  is

a glory of documentary-making and an important addition to the defiant stockpile of AIDS-inspired art being created in these modern Plague Years: Silverlake Life: The View From Here is intimate and dry-eyed, charming and powerful, idiosyncratic and wrenching. It's also, at times, blessedly comic and light. The grace of the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is in its ability to mix dying with living-deftly, wittily, superbly--so that we come to know these men as full individuals.

Now some students of filmmaker Abraham Ravett, a professor at Hampshire College, have carried on that legacy, editing 10 hours of footage for a film left incomplete when Joslin died. The result this time is called Architecture of Mountains. Reports the Valley Advocate: 

"This came about because I was teaching a class on recycled material in visual arts and writing as well,” explains Ravett. “I called [Hampshire alum] Ken Levin and asked whatever happened to the footage. He said, ‘It’s been sitting in my garage in L.A.—I didn’t know what to do with it.’ I told him about this course and asked if he would consider letting us take a look at it.”
...
For Ravett, working with the footage provided another surprising resonance with Joslin’s later work. In Silverlake Life, Joslin films himself in bed late at night. The roots of that idea can be seen in Architecture. In that film, Joslin explains that he wants to get at his own dreams, so he installs a camera and a light, all set to go on at random intervals in the night, in hopes that he could convey his dreams. Since Joslin blurs the lines between fact and fiction in Architecture, it’s not immediately apparent whether he actually created that setup.

Ravett says that Joslin really did. “He was truly awakened—he had an alarm that turned on the camera. There’s a mixture of truth and non-truth [in the film], but ultimately he’s very self-concious—he was, always. He was interested in the power of dreams, the subconscious. He wanted that in the film. What strikes me is how prescient he was in terms of how he looked in that footage [and how he looked in Silverlake Life]. For us it was really startling.”

Read more in The Valley Advocate.

Even though I wasn't an English major, I agree with almost everything Mark Edmundson writes in this essay, "The Ideal English Major." Ignore the awful title; this is a passionate argument for becoming human. Yes, becoming. It takes work. Reading helps. "Real reading," writes Edmundson, "is reincarnation."

"I proposed a similar regional CNF magazine to my dept heads as soon as I finished reading the interview. Thanks for the inspiration."
        --Susan Kushner Resnick (Brown University), author of You Saved Me, Too, in response to an interview about 40 Towns on Harvard's Nieman Storyboard.

I recently read Katherine Boo’s 2012 National Book Award–winning portrait of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, with my students in a creative nonfiction class at Dartmouth College. Boo spent a little more than three years in the slum, Annawadi, practicing what’s sometimes known as immersion journalism. It’s a term she may have taken too literally: “To Annawadians,” she writes in an author’s note, “I was a reliably ridiculous spectacle, given to toppling into the sewage lake while videotaping.” That’s close to all we know of her adventures, though, becauseBehind the Beautiful Forevers is written in a voice that might be called “strictly third person.” Besides that note, there’s no hint of Boo’s presence in the lives of the slum dwellers.

“Dickens,” observed one of my students—as in Charles, as in fiction. The word “paternalism” arose, though more as a question than a charge: Did Boo, in assuming the role of an omniscient narrator, inadvertently set herself up to look down on Mumbai from on high? Another student wondered why one of the blurbs on the back was from David Sedaris. “Isn’t he, like, funny?” Behind the Beautiful Forevers is not a funny book, but it wasn’t the blurb-presence of a humorist that caught my student’s eye. It was what Sedaris wrote: “It might surprise you how completely enjoyable this book is, as rich and beautifully written as a novel.”

Emphasis mine...

Read more of "Like a Novel: The Marketing of Literary Nonfiction" in the Summer issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.


--Jeff Sharlet

We asked via Twitter for suggestions of documentary art websites to include on our virtual newsstand (left). V.V. Ganeshananthan, a novelist (Love Marriage) and journalist, suggests two great sites combining photo, text, and in some cases, audio: Cowbird, a platform open to everybody and all the better for that; and i am, "portraits of Sri Lanka's elders in sound and image." Don't know much about Sri Lanka? You don't have to. i am is a simple but superb example of the democratic documentary possibilities opened up by the internet. Check it out.

"A 'beautiful image' can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene."

49 more rules for filmmakers, many of them applicable to writers and editors, from the great Wim Wenders, here.

Here's a common response I get from friends and fellow writers who read 40 Towns: "Well, to be honest, I thought it was going to be, you know, 'Look at the poors.' But it's not!" 

Of course, in some cases, it is. There are poor people depicted on 40 Towns because there are poor people in these 40 towns. They're neither more noble nor more abased. The main difference between these poor people and other people is that they have less money and fewer resources. That's about it. They're not out of Charles Dickens, they're in the Upper Valley.

What many readers expected -- or feared -- is poverty porn. Cheap thrills and empty indignation stoked by decontextualized images of poor people. Poor people as exotics. Poor people as either saintlier or more sordid than other people. That is, poor people as props for the privileged viewer.

Here's an excellent example: Jalopnik's excellent guide turning Detroit's bankruptcy crisis into your very own poverty porn documentary, "Batten Down the Hatches, The Next Storm of Detroit Documentaries is Night."

--Jeff Sharlet

It's nice to be appreciated at home.

Dartmouth Now, an official publication of the college, gives 40 Towns lots of ink in "New Website is Showcase for Literary Journalism Students", along with a terrific photo of our staff poring over maps of the Upper Valley.

Dartbeat, the blog of The Dartmouth, provides another take, by student writer Margarette Nelson.

And Dartblog, a widely-read independent daily publication, sings our praises, too.

Last but not least, Dan Fagin, a Dartmouth alumn and parent -- and a professor of science journalism at NYU as well as author of the recent Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation -- gives us a little twitter love:  "Congratulations to @JeffSharlet and all the writers at @40Towns. Some really fine work here, worth your attention. http://www.40towns.com/" 

Literary nonfiction is an art of collage and has been ever since the earliest essays, collections of fragments. Which is what Twitter is all about. Some writers -- and some students, emulating their elders -- dismiss Twitter as trivial, but the truth is there are more interesting (and more democratic) conversations about writing occurring there than at the National Arts Club and the Yaddo dinner table combined. Sometimes they're dialogues, sometimes they're arguments, and sometimes they're what follows, Twitter's special form -- the rant, in intervals. This one's from a veteran sports writer, another kind of literary journalist. (click on the link to follow his Twitterings.) To read the rant, start at the bottom and scroll up.
--Jeff Sharlet

I've pointed out before that 12 of the 14 contributors to the first issue of 40 Towns are women -- a ratio almost exactly opposite to that of mainstream magazines that publish reported essays. That's not evidence of affirmative action on our part. It's simply a reflection of who's writing great literary journalism at the college level. So what happens to these talented writers? Why don't we see more of them publishing? Rising star literary journalist Sarah Menkedick, a cofounder of Vela -- literary journalism by women -- provides some clues:

"This past fall, I went with seven other third-year nonfiction MFA students from the University of Pittsburgh to New York to pitch editors and agents. Incidentally, we are all women. All young women. Not a single one of us was pitching a memoir or personal essay: one of us was writing a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, one a true crime story about a coal town murder, one immersion journalism about gay square dancing, one narrative nonfiction about a highway in Peru and its impacts, one a profile of a small-town filmmaker, and finally, in my case, literary journalism about Mexican migrants returning to Mexico after years in the U.S.

"We would sit around a table in a Midtown office with a generous view, and we’d each give our prepared pitch–Peru; Mexico; Alexander Graham Bell; Henry Ford and square dancing; Braddock, PA. And then the listener would sit back, digest, and say,: 'So, this is a story about a young girl…''

Read more of "It's Not Personal." If you're a woman writing literary journalism, this is required reading. If you're a man writing literary journalism, this is doubly required reading. And if you're an editor, memorize it.

--Jeff Sharlet