goth kid update, fucked by the stable boy, james fenton

Remember that goth kid I wrote about a week ago?
Well, I saw him again yesterday. With his girlfriend. His stunning, life-affirmingly hot girlfriend.
Any pity/sympathy I may have felt toward him for his alleged social isolation is hereby retracted. Clearly, he’s doing all right on his own.
Apropos of nothing, two great writing quotes I’ve come across in recent days. First, Faulkner on editing:
“I get drunk, I get mad, I get thrown from horses, I get all sorts of things. But I don’t get edited. I’d rather see my wife get fucked by the stable boy!”
Must remember to pass that along to my bosses back in Dallas. And I’m sure that as soon as I pick up that Nobel Prize in Literature, I’ll be able to have the same attitude.
The second is from James Fenton’s All the Wrong Places. Fenton’s one of the most uniquely qualified foreign correspondents around, since his day job is being a poet. But he spent much of the ’70s and ’80s reporting for American and British newspapers in east Asia, and the book’s a collection of his longer-form writings from that time. (Fenton’s also the fellow who accompanied Redmond O’Hanlon on that trip to Borneo O’Hanlon later wrote a book about. Redmond O’Hanlon, who was later an executor of Bruce Chatwin‘s estate. See, all these British Granta writers are connected somehow.)
Anyway, the book’s introduction is about, among other things, why so much journalism is so dreadfully boring. He mentions the antecedents for modern foreign reporting: missionary society reports, adventurers’ nautical logs, wayfarers’ letters home to family, and other versions of what he calls “reporting in its natural state”:
“Journalism becomes unnatural when it strays too far from such origins. It is quite astonishing to me to see how much interesting material is jettisoned by newspaper reporters because they know they will not be able to write it up, because to do so would imply they had been present at the events they are describing. And not only present — alive, conscious, and with a point of view.
“On a trip through the sub-Sahara I shared a vehicle with an American reporter who wasn’t enjoying himself at all. It was a rough journey and at one point, alarmingly, we broke down. I remember my companion banging his head against the seat of the car and groaning: ‘We’re fucked, we’re fucked.’
“Weeks later I saw what he had written about the trip, and was amused to see that his only personal appearance in his narrative was under the rubric, ‘a Western Observer.’ Under the rules of his newspaper, he was not allowed to say: I saw this, or I did that, or even — at this moment I really believed we were all finished.
“But the rules under which he was working were invented, decades ago, by horrible old men obsessed with the idea of stamping out good writing. And the horrible old men passed on their skills to a series of young men who would never have become horrible without training, and these guys proceeded to attempt to make life as horrible as possible for us. Of the author of any of these American newspaper stylebooks, one could say, as Blake wrote of Reynolds: ‘This man was hired to depress Art.'”
A bit extreme, perhaps, but he’s on to something there.