Thursday, June 25, 2009

Michelle Hewitson on Phil Goff

In the 20 June Weekend Herald Michelle Hewitson interviewed Labour leader Phil Goff. Dim-Post isn’t impressed. He complains that the interview was “inane gibberish”:
bafflingly conducted by the newspaper’s TV reviewer instead of someone on the political desk. The article is so poorly written it is virtually incomprehensible.
Dim-Post lives in Wellington and probably isn’t a regular reader of the Weekend Herald, so doesn’t realise that Hewitson’s interviews are there every Saturday on the back page of the A section. Lucky him, he gets the Post-Dominion so is spared her weekly, weakly unsuccessful attempts at writing like Lynn Barber.

Barber uses the first person a lot, but that’s OK because she is interesting. Hewitson also uses the first person a lot.

In her 1730-word interview with Goff she uses the first-person pronoun 142 times (56 instances of I, 31 of I’m/I’d, 44 of me and 11 of my).

I did the maths: 8.2% of the words in this interview are about Michelle Hewitson.

Solipsist, moi?

2 comments:

  1. Ah, it makes sense to learn she's writing 'in the manner of' some other, more successful writer. I wondered if it was an homage to Brett Easton Ellis, or maybe ever James Joyce. I kept expecting her interview to end:

    'and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

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  2. Yes, she could conceivably have been channelling Molly Bloom. Or possibly George Harrison's (not quite as good as Ulysses) song "I Me Mine". Except she does it every week.

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