Attention all journalists. Stop with the name-dropping

This recent article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, about a new food movement in France that wants to liven up that country's cuisine, reminded me of one of the more annoying tics of modern journalism. If the technique has a name I am not aware of it, but the best way to describe, it is as "description-through-allusion."

It happens a lot in reviews, particularly of work by newer artists or ones that could be expected to be unfamiliar to readers, in which case the writer will describe the music or plot or style with reference to some older, better-known artist (though not too well-known, for reasons that we'll get to in a second). So, some clever Midwestern wordsmith with a penchant for good hooks becomes "the Elvis Costello of Ames, Iowa," or a young postmodern male novelist is described as "Borges-meets-David Byrne," or "the love child of Italo Calvino and the Rolling Stones." In Gopnik's case, he's decided to characterize every Frenchwoman he meets in the story by reference to some French actress of the past. One reminds him of Brigitte Fossey, another of Bardot, yet another of a "young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani." Also, one of the cooks is compared to Danton, and then a whole host of them to various figures in the French New Wave. By the end you get the idea even Gopnik thinks it's a little silly, and is doing a bit of a self-parody.

It's easy to see why journalists do this. It's a reliable method for describing things or people without having to sit down and really think about what this person looks like, or what this song is trying to do. Also, its a quick and dirty way of establishing a certain level of sophistication: which is why the figures need to be known well enough to get the point across but not so well known that just anyone could have thought up the comparison. But it's still lazy, and no, Gopnik doesn't get any points for realizing that he's doing it. That's another really annoying aspect to modern journalism: trying to foreclose criticism by letting the reader know that you know what's going on, and then presenting this as some kind of postmodern self-irony. Don't tell me that you know it's wrong while you're busy doing it: just don't do it.