Journalism vs. Literature Word from: Jake

Last week I picked up a copy of Guy de Maupassant's collection of short stories, translated (from French) by none other than Joachim Neugroschel, who also recently translated Dovid Bergelson's Shadows of Berlin (from Yiddish). In the intro, Neugroschel mentions that many of Maupassant's (as well as Flaubert's) stories first appeared in the newspapers, and that in the contemporary U.S., no newspapers have really done such a thing, except for the Yiddish Forward that put out some full-length novels of I.B. Singer.

Journalism and literature share audiences, authors, themes. Yet I personally always had a hard time reconciling the two: journalism ends up being the "easy", quick, and fleeting version its sophisticated brother. At the same time, journalism carries the immidiate relevance in time that literature may only wish to possess. Whitman, Poe, Hemingway, hell even Robert Desnos have gone through it - though probably for the wrong reasons ($).

I'm thinking about Alieza's post from Sunday. There's a news-item, but what follows is a meditation of completely literary kind. The two elements melt together very subtly, and in a way I haven't imagined before. It's reminiscent of the New Yorker approach, but obviously different because of the media-dictated logistics. There're other examples of that here on the site, but I think Alieza's thing is just most paradigmatic that way.

The blog is now a little over a month old (mazltov). I think it's a very important question, for both the audience and contributors to define the terms of the two genres' conflict here: are we a bunch of poets philosophizing about other artists? Is it an art discussion of semi-qualified kitchen-table-critics? Social commentary spunkier-than-"Commentary"? Creative writing meets gossip? What style are we looking to create and who are we, anyway?

Always with the existentialist dilemmas...