The Coarse Grind: Part 12

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Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV—which is nice, but it won’t pay the rent, and people who can’t pay their rent in the ‘80s are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time for free-lancers.

Indeed. The time has come to write books—or even movies, for those who can keep a straight face. Because there is money in these things and there is no money in journalism.

But there is action, and action is an easy thing to get hooked on. It is a nice thing to know that you can pick up a phone and be off to anywhere in the world that interests you—on twenty-four hours’ notice, and especially on somebody else’s tab.
—Hunter S. Thompson

What is Personal Journalism? That’s a question I don’t feel eminently qualified to describe. I’m a practitioner, and a purveyor, but any succinct definition of a burgeoning genre could only stifle its growth. As the spirit wanes the form appears. Indeed. That’s from one of Personal Journalism’s progenitors, Charles Bukowski. I suppose I could delve in, a little deeper anyway, explain by example and at least continue to practice the form, whether or not you buy. Which is my motivation for this post—the market for it, if you will, but as you’ll see, Personal Journalism doesn’t exactly cater to its audience. I’m in my apartment, with my legs up. It’s a lazy way to write but writing nonetheless. I can hear the rain out there, coming down in a sheet on a brutish grey day, early in the year. My heat kicks on and with a cup of dark roast beside me, I won’t have to move for hours. These are the facts in Personal Journalism and the story is the inner works. I’m the main character here and my reporting is as, if not more, important than what I’m reporting on. In this case it’s trying to come to grips with what this form is and anyway what’s going on in my head against the backdrop of what I’m actually doing. (Musing on my heroes and line of work while sipping coffee with my legs up, writing and passing some long, lithe hours without a word to anyone.) Take “Antiguan Blues,” for example—it was less about the kind people and God’s own arms length of sky over a 500-year-old cobblestoned village resting beneath two active volcanoes below the Tropic of Cancer, and more about the fact I was travel-logged, fagged and coming down with the flu or recovering from it and anyway suffering with a raging case of IBS. I was in a foreign country. The operative subject is the “I” and not “foreign country.”

Hard news concerns itself with the facts. But the New Century has dragged us through the looking glass. When the leader of the free world is proven to have told thousands of lies, and his claims of “fake news” are fake news, Personal Journalism is of great and crucial value. The podcast format, and real talk from real people, has put the final nails to the coffin of the stoic and out of touch, coat-and-tie newscaster. News media has gone soft and the fourth estate is only entertainment now. As human beings we tend to believe what people say anyway and now the fourth wall is gone. We can get the word out on the street from anywhere in the world and virtually hang with neighbors and friends like Joe Rogan and Tim Heidecker to listen to what they have to say. They’re not giving us facts, although they can, the point is we’re not listening for facts but a personalized, experientially verified truth. The truth is slippery and the objective authority of hard news is neither. The New Century has taken us through the looking glass and authenticity is a hall of mirrors. The internet changed everything and news media has stooped too low to compete to be of any lasting value.

I report on me. It’s the only thing my ADD-rattled mind can hold onto. Blogging can be about putting out fires and writing, for me, is a psychological release valve. I should be doing 600 words every day, instead of every week, and covering something besides myself, that’s fact-driven, every night—if I want to be as great as my writing heroes. Hunter Thompson might’ve come into the world fully-formed and egregiously angry but the hours upon hours and days upon days he spent typing on a Selectric II are what made his wit intractable and biting and his work completely singular and untouchable. That’s exactly what I got into this business for, Good Reader. The power I want to yield comes from here—within walls, behind a locked door, solitary and alone—the writing desk, my armory and throne. Point is I took Thompson’s lead and put myself in the middle of the action. The action, though, for an introverted poet largely in my own head and overwhelmed by the masses and utterly alien to the things they work their whole lives for, goes down on the inner landscape, in the Night Kitchen and in an arena of Self. I can’t tell if it’s good for me or if I’m only carving another line on my own tombstone but, I like it. I suppose I have to go through my own looking glass to come to what Thompson called the Wisdom, and reach the truth on my own and in my own way. Thompson’s been credited as “the least factual, most accurate” reporter on the Campaign Trail in ’72 and I think that’s a worthy endeavor and a valiant goal besides. In a world mired and lost or heated in chase for things that won’t matter from things that really should, to take counsel with one’s self and know your own circus grounds is the only game in town. I became a Personal Journalist and the beat is me. I always wanted to be a writer and find inexhaustible inspiration writing about being one or trying to get there. It’s good work if you can find it and I most certainly have.

I hit pay dirt. The proof is in the over 62k words I’ve posted at Going For The Throat since I decided that weekly was doable and wise. There are 5 years of posts before that, too—but it should be said that the real proof is my work here, at Into the Void. The Coarse Grind, and my essay in the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review that spawned it, better reflect the weeks I spent reporting on me pithily in blog form. I’d of done wise to sharpen my knives all those Thursdays writing about The Trouble with Grim Jim. Which is a shit way to wrap this treatise on Personal Journalism but anyway a great explanation of my raison d’être and credo. A writer writes, you’ve heard me say it before. I wish I could be out there in the territory more or even report on the things that matter to the People. It seems like journalism and Art are the only way folks down home can throw stones, really rally and roar. I’ve been out and I’ll be out again but in the meantime ain’t it good to be workin’? I know I can come through, with varying success, sure—I sometimes wonder what the fuck I’m writing about and can only imagine what the fuck you think, Good Reader. I’m sometimes happy to be obtuse though, too, and have found a great way to waste time. Your readership is astounding—I’m dealing with 50+ of you beautiful hooligans on the weekly, and in 2019 I’ll be parlaying. Bet. What’s so surprising about y’all being with me, Good Reader—I didn’t expect anyone to understand what I was going through, hating myself and hard on myself while sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way and otherwise coming through with Art, at any and every great and grisly cost. Richard Hell was right. Writing is my why. Fuck the how. We'll figure it out. May the Year of the Brown Pig bring you great fortune and happiness and in the meantime, remember—you either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall.

Ab irato,
Trainer
AUSTIN TX


Jim Trainer Author
Jim Trainer’s The Coarse Grind, a column on the creative life, has been published monthly at Into the Void. Jim was curator of Going For The Throat—a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance—and publishes one collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, per year through Yellow Lark Press. “KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM” is his 7th.
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