Final Project Statement and Link

 Over the past year and a half, I have driven back and forth between Massachusetts and Pittsburgh almost ten times. It’s eight hours each way, so I’ve logged somewhere around 160 hours in the car. Feeling totally burnt out on music lately (I can’t take learning about another new wispy-voiced Indie-band) I’ve become addicted to This American Life, Radiolab, and The Moth. Especially Radiolab, and I don’t think it’s any wonder that the show’s producer, Jad Abumrad, received a MacArthur Genius Award this year. The show is absolutely brilliant—not only do they share the most peculiar science stories (origins of the AIDS virus, human/animal communication, HeLa cells…) but they relay them in such a way that the stories seem to…evolve. There’s something about an audio show that’s completely nonlinear—the various voices, ambient sounds, music, all the little tech-y editorial decisions like fading, phasing, looping, and amplifying are all a part of the narrative. Much like a soundtrack in a movie creates tension or heartache at just the right moment, all of the details in an audio show are working in similar manner to have an effect on the listener. The experience of listening to so many such stories over the past year and half have begun to make me feel like I haven’t been hearing these stories, rather I’ve been absorbing them. Sometimes I’ll even find myself suddenly remembering a clip of dialog or narration, and I’ll have the hardest time remembering why I know it. Eventually I’ll be able to trace it to another piece of dialog, and then back to the story. It’s something that doesn’t happen after reading a book—I usually remember a text as a whole.

Just as the experience of hearing a story is very different from reading it, adapting a story for audio is completely different than writing. Even more so than I thought before I began this project. The story I’ve produced for this class—my very first ever, so please be generous—ended up being much less of a story than I initially intended it to be. This piece evolved out of interviews with former steelworkers I collected for Peter Trachtenberg’s Structures and Techniques class this semester, and the essay I ended up writing for that class is an altogether different beast. Whereas there I could subtly draw a metaphor between the nonprofit Rivers of Steel’s mission to commemorate Pittsburgh’s industrial past with the idea of folklore vs. fakelore (essentially, the fabrication of folk heroes), there was no such room in this piece for such subtlety, and I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. In this piece you will find no fakelore and folklore. But you will hear more voices than I was able to incorporate into the essay. In the essay, I just couldn’t find a place to include Joe Karpieniak, but in the audio piece he fit in perfectly. Such decisions were actually easy to make—each choice came naturally to each medium.

The steel industry isn’t material that I’m naturally drawn to. But what I noticed about the interviews I had collected was the voices of these guys. There’s so much character in them. I can’t really express in an essay the way Ron Gault would raise his voice to talk over the din of the other restaurant patrons, or how the way he never paused in his speech said something about his character, about his military-man persona. Same with Manny when he speaks wistfully about his former blast-furnace employees. So in the end I’m completely grateful I collected this material.

With all the talk this semester of multimedia storytelling and how it’s not a bad idea, as Tim and Laura said in their presentation, to have one form to specialize in, I can really see audio becoming my medium. It is hard. Very hard. It’s so utterly particular. You have to be extremely patient and listen to little two-second clips over and over again to catch the place where it’s glitchy. But I never got bored doing this project. I realize that I still have a lot of rough transitions, that some of the levels are off, that I probably could have cut out portions of dialog that went on for too long (but it was hard to find a place to cut these guys off!). And then there’s the larger issues of the piece—it was really hard to make it a start to finish narrative. But revision is completely different when dealing with audio. I’m the sort or writer who writes on and on until I get it all out, and then I go back and rework it into something. I revise with fury. But that gets really complicated with audio, and I realize if I do this again (which I plan to) I’ll have to become much better at mapping everything out ahead of time. I did this to a certain extent, but I should have been much more exact with it. I really like to listen as I go, but I hope with practice that I’ll become better at envisioning what certain clips and transitions sound like together.

And then there’s the whole my-own-voice issue. I’ve always cringed hearing my own recorded voice. I’m getting used to it. I realize sometimes I get a little droney, or my voice is choppy, or I sound like a stiff-voiced NPR reporter or worse, like a high-schooler doing a school project and imitating a stiff-voiced NPR reporter. Again, practice. It’s really hard sounding natural, and nothing sounds more unnatural to me than practicing sounding natural. The voice is a funny thing. If only we could all sound as good as Ira Glass (who has shared some of his own awkward early interviews, so this gives me hope).

And finally, the technology. I recorded everything on an Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder. Files were downloaded as MP3’s and dragged into Audacity (it's free!). This was my first time working with Audacity—okay, with any audio editing program—and it was fairly easy to figure out. It’s a little clunky, but the commands are more and less intuitive once the basics are figured out. The worst part is the size of the files. Audacity saves projects as .aup files, and they can be up to several gigs. The program crashed many times while I was working on this—mostly when I imported two-hour long interviews. The next time I interview I’ll be sure start new recording sessions every half hour or so, maybe even more frequently, because dealing with really long pieces (especially if only using five or ten minutes of it) becomes cumbersome, and even risky. I know there are other simple audio-editing software out there, like Fission, which could be helpful in the future for doing some of this preliminary splicing work. Once I had the piece where I wanted it, I exported it as an MP3 file. In this process all the tracks (I had somewhere between twelve and fifteen while working in Audacity) are merged into one. Once it’s re-imported back into Audacity they can’t be separated any more.

As we can’t upload MP3s to our blogs I’ve uploaded the piece to Mediafire. It’s about 35 MB. 

DOWNLOAD FILE HERE

All the Best,

Amanda

Breaking into Print Online: Six Publications and How to Get Your (Virtual) Foot in the Door (An Introduction)

This was supposed to be easy. To start, I was going to figure out Smithsonian magazine, and Sarah was going to tackle Outside. Our question was simple: what’s the relationship between online content and the print magazines? Who should we pitch, and should we tailor pitches for online content differently than for print?

So I headed to Smithsonian’s website, and as I was waiting for the page to load, the website’s description showed up in the gray bar above the page: “History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places: Smithsonian Magazine.” Great, I thought. Even broader than I realized. I recently thought that maybe one day I’d pitch them my idea for a story about the rise of blast furnace tourism in Pittsburgh’s post-industrial age, and if it wasn’t quite right for History, surely it would fit under People. Or Travel. Or Places, even. As the page loaded, essentially the same menu came up as a series of tabs under the website’s header, except this time a little more specific and sounding slightly more like a Jeopardy game: History & Archeology, People & Places, Science & Nature, Arts & Culture, Travel, Photos, Videos, Games & Puzzles, and finally, Blogs.

So I clicked on History & Archeology. More categories: Archaeology, Biography, Today in History, US History, and World History. Under People & Places, we’re given four distinct geographic regions: Africa & The Middleast, Asia Pacific, Europe, and The Americas; under Science and Nature there was Anthropology & Behavior, Dinosaurs, EcoCenter, Environment, Technology & Space, and Wildlife. Arts & Culture, Travel, and Photos each also had four to five subcategories. In Blogs, a more general category list came up: Art, History, Lifestyle, Science, and Travel and to click on any of those headings would show me the various blogs within the Smithsonian website related to that category, anywhere from one to four blogs per category.

And this whole time I was completely ignoring the other menus scattered throughout the pages—ones inviting me to see what was up at the Smithsonian Institute, or to see what was in the Air & Space Magazine (okay, I clicked on that one—let me just say, more tabs, more categories, and titles more alluring then anything I could ever write an article for, such as: “Block That Star! How can we find other Earths if their suns keep blinding us?”).

I was trying to be pragmatic. I wanted to find a section that my story would be appropriate for. I wanted to find the email or contact of the editor in charge of that section—the advice I’d always heard was appeal to editors directly. While I was having this battle, Sarah was having a similar battle with Outside Magazine. We sat at her kitchen table eating Cheezitz trying to figure out how to demystify the print/online relationship for you all, but becoming ever more mystified ourselves.

Where, oh where, to begin? What, exactly, of the content showing up was actually published in Smithsonian and Outside magazines—the ones you can still buy on a shelf and hold in your hand? And what amount of the content was for the web only? Would it be easier for me to appeal to a web content editor as opposed to a magazine editor? Would that be a way to get my foot in the door and to build a relationship with an editor, to eventually print something in the actual magazine? Or maybe the actual magazine wasn’t any better than the online content, and maybe they paid the same, too.

With a little bit of exploring, I eventually learned that the pieces listed under the tabs on the website were a mix: some were features that appear in the print magazine—in which case it would say Smithsonian Magazine under the author’s name. Some linked over to the blogs. Essentially, there were more category headings than articles, each piece being cross listed in several places on the site.

As it turns out, you can’t pitch directly to editors at Smithsonian anyway. Their magazine is 90 percent freelance based, but only two percent of pitches are accepted, and the only way to pitch for either the magazine or online content is via an online proposal form.

And, as it also turns out, Sarah and I found that there is no formula for how to navigate between any magazine and its online presence. Some magazines’ online versions show material only from editors. Some only list what’s in their magazine, selecting a few items to feature on the web. And some publications create online-only material in addition to their print material. Some magazines that come out every month, or every two months, are posting articles online daily

In this presentation Sarah and I will highlight 6 other magazines where you stand a better chance of publishing something in their online version versus their print version, and some instances where publishing on a magazine’s website will help you get your foot in the door with the editors, and can possibly lead to publishing something in print.  

News that isn't News = the Literature of Newspapers?

As I typed the title of this post, I realized that the "literature of newspapers" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as "newspapers as literature," which is our topic for this week's discussion. But in terms of this week's readings, I do think that the Wolfe and Shteyngart fall into the former category. All three readings have in common the fact that they're not your typical newspaper article, but I'd say the Nutt is closest to what I think about as traditional newspaper reporting, although of course she goes into great depth; it was a piece that easily could have worked as a longform journalism piece or even as a more narrative piece written for a magazine. But the Wolfe and the Shteyngart, of course, are opinion and op-ed pieces, from two sections of the newspaper (in this case "The" newspaper) where we're allowed to read something not so newspapery. Hail to opinions and lyricism! And so I wonder--is it the parts that aren't technically news that get labeled as literature? (Or maybe I'm thinking about this too much.)

What I loved about Wolfe's piece was that it wasn't really news at all. The connection that made it germane enough for printing was that it's been forty years since the moon landing, and Wolfe throws us his screed: "What NASA needs now is the power of the Word." What's newsworthy here is the fact that not much has changed in the past 40 years--without someone to act as a powerful spokesman, NASA has resorted to "killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects...But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston's Johnson Space Center--by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth." Or at least I'm reading Wolfe's "Word" to mean someone, besides Wernher von Braun, to act as NASA's philosopher, a person to invoke the beauty of the mission (building a bridge to the stars) to the public.

I found this, and the history of the "single combat," the details of NASA cutting back after Apollo 11 all incredibly fascinating. I think Wolfe's presentation of facts starting with the heat-shield-specialist-turned-tourist-guide to Wolfe's ideas on why the manned Mars mission hasn't happened yet is quite gripping. But I couldn't help wonder if this was just a fast forward through much of the information that's in his book The Right Stuff. I haven't read it, but according to Wikipedia the book is primarily about what kind of person it takes to want to do space missions, and focuses heavily on the men's personal lives. "The story is more about the space race than space exploration in general," focusing on the political aspects of US vs USSR.

If this is the case, than it seems like Wolfe perhaps just slapped on the ending about how for "40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress," and it almost makes this op-ed a plug for his book. I suppose this is perfectly legitimate--obviously it happens all the time--and probably I should just go read his book if I'm curious about the topic. I'm not against this idea at all of an author essentially using old research for a new piece, I just find it interesting that it happens. Mostly because I like to believe that an author's piece is always created with intention for a specific publication. (I spent some time as a volunteer in a magazine office about ten years ago and I remember the editors having a fit because the piece a famous writer was writing for them was essentially pulled directly from a few different books. They had expected to receive something freshly for them.) Of course, I could be totally wrong about this--perhaps none of this is in his book. But this piece does leave questions in my mind, such as: what overtures? I'd love to know some of these contemporary details Wolfe glosses over about sending up robots, etc.  And the snark. I don't hate it, but I could do without it. It feels like he or editors were compelled to dress up, well, old news and put a fresh spin on it. Or maybe fresh isn't the word for it--maybe it's more...Wolfe-ian. Sometimes I loved it--the first line grabbed me with the "knee in the groin" line, because I was curious. But the little asides, such as "And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! ... Who couldn't use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma ... made you think of re-election...." I think it just got a little over the top for me.

With the Shteyngart, obviously something a little more sentimental going on here. Again, nothing new. Famous writer writing about how the latest technology is keeping us from really seeing the world around us, is forcing us into our little bubbles and making us less human. We've heard that before. Yet, it works. I love it. It's sweet and funny. And I wonder if part of what makes it work is the venue--it's the sort of (I hesitate to use this word) light piece that we expect to find in the Sunday Book Review. Perhaps from several sections of the Sunday New York Times--there's a lot of fluff in there. Yet in these various sections of paper--and this could go for any paper--we have our expectations. In a piece labeled "Essay," we expect a certain level of personal narrative tied to a perusal of broad ideas. Here, Shteyngart gives us his vision of traveling upstate, leaving the city behind, and remembering how to lose himself in literature, book style:

Slowly, and surely, just as the sun begins to swoon over the Hudson River and another Amtrak honks its way past Rhinebeck, delivering its digital refugees upstream, I begin to sense the world between the covers, much as I sense the world around me, a world corporeal and complete, a world that doesn’t need the press of my thumb, because here beneath the weeping willow tree my input is meaningless.

 Not only is this lyrically pleasing, but he arrives at a little climatic punch. We receive that sweet little change in the narrator, punctuated by the epiphany. Exactly the sort of reading I'd expect from the Sunday Times.

"Hell, yes." On McPhee's moves

Well, I came of intellectual age dissecting the exact sort of confrontation McPhee sets up Archdruid and in many of his other books. The conservationist vs. the commissioner (or insert any other, generally federal--or worse, state (especially if a western state)--gov't official) trope is one I've studied, recreated, stumbled into unknowingly while studying wolves on the New Mexico/Arizona border, counting birds in Wyoming, and--god forbid--looking at alpine flowers in Alaska. I knew of Brower before I did McPhee, but that's sort of my former life, so to see McPhee make caricatures of both sides made me smile. He does so sweetly, endearing us to Brower and each of the three "villains." I love seeing Brower presented as this sort of dopey, butterfly-catching, statistic-inventing, perhaps slightly unaware "druid," but McPhee does us the favor of complicating his character by juxtaposing Brower's staunch conservationism with his befuddling acceptance of some of Fraser's plans.

I've started slightly off topic, but let me transition by saying that I found some of the conversation happening between Brower and Park up in the Cascades a little forced. It felt transcribed, as though McPhee was dubbing all the lines from the conservationist's or prospector's handbook over the generally mundane conversations people tend to have while hiking. Granted, Park and Brower aren't your everyday Joe and maybe they do wax idealistic up in the mountains, but it felt unnatural to see each sermonizing endlessly, saying all the things we need to know in order to understand where each is coming from. My favorite scene from that first section is when they're all tired and pulling copper-laced pebbles from the stream bed. Even the blueberry scene towards the end felt a little forced--of course, Brower's the type to load up his cup and save his berries for "the future," whereas Park's just going to get it while the eating's good.

But. I suppose this is done for a reason, to initiate the reader into the simplest of scenarios where we can get Brower in full blast, his most iconic personality, that can later be broken down into a more nuanced and complicated persona. What's not predictable about Archdruid is its three-part form. It feel strange to leave Park and then Fraser behind, but in the end I'm grateful to do so because for each scenario to go on would become exhausting, or come to an I-get-it-already point. Through Brower's three different excursions, we get a slightly different scenario, and therefore an incrementally more complicated look at environmental and development issues in the United States in the era of the birth of the Earth Day movement (which started the year before this book was first published).

Writerly speaking, I see McPhee making moves in the second and third sections that are much more wow than what I saw in the first part:


WAITING FOR HIS SUBJECTS TO FALL ASLEEP: McPhee takes advantage of this pause in the events to shift into a flashback or to philosophize for a minute. After Brower, McPhee and Fraser retire to their 1500 dollar tents, we have a space break on page 126 where McPhee talks about how "sleep was not all that easy" because of how the bunks rolled up and down. Then we sort of get a McPhee lying awake in bed thinking about the day sort of scenario. He reflects on what Fraser had said--"A beach is for children," how Brower is also "reverent toward the young" (127). We drift into the background of Fraser for 2-3 pages, which shifts into some anecdotes from his wife. Then we get Brower's wife (131), then we are lead back into the theme of the book--this time regarding the issue of the Valley of the Mineral King. On 134 we are left with a Browerism: "Told he was being almost poetically impractical [regarding how Disney should build a tunnel or fly people to the proposed ski resort], Brower responded that the Disney people were going to change something forever, so they could amortize the changes over a thousand years." And then McPhee brings us swiftly back to the moment: "Fraser rolled over and sighed in his sleep. I wondered if in the day to follow he would find that Brower's apparent tolerance for the development of Cumberland Island was equally tied in string" (134). It seems almost gimmicky, but the territory that McPhee's able to cover in those few pages make the move swift and fluid. He wanders with purpose, and he brings us back with purpose.

THE RANT PUNCTUATED BY THE QUICK QUESTION: Pages 172-174, when McPhee meets Dominy. We get Dominy's 2-page long self-aggrandizing rant about "The unregulated Colorado [being] a son of a bitch." Then we can sense McPhee mousily jumping into the first opening he can to cut to the chase and ask if Dominy would go down the Colorado in a rubber raft with Brower, and we get Dominy, never missing a beat, replying, "Hell, yes." The long rant, which could have been cut, compressed, or summarized, serves to 1. let us know about Dominy, 2. let us know his/their side of the debate, and 3. allow McPhee to move the plot forward.

THE FAST CUT TO SPEED UP TIME: In the rafting section the tense is switched to present, and we get what I think is a much more lyrical rendition of events. I get the sense McPhee is trying to illustrate how "There is a sense of acceleration in the last fifty yards," and that, "There is something quite deceptive in the sense of acceleration that comes just before a rapid." We spend much more time seeing nature and the river (I love this description: "Tents of water form overhead, to break apart in rags" [182].). It's much more about the experience, and even, I think, about McPhee's experience. He does this weird thing throughout this section where he moves back and forth in time. For instance, from 185 to 186, at one moment we are wandering through a canyon with Brower, McPhee, and Dominy, Brower picking up an old beer can. Then suddenly in the next paragraph we're catapulted to dinnertime, "Inside Dominy's big leather briefcase is a bottle of Jim Beam, and now, at the campsite, in the twilight..." that little "now" being the orienting clincher. On 183 we get a similar leap forward: "The river is a shadow, and we have stopped for the night where a waterfall arcs out from a sandstone cliff." The three are now assessing the waterfall, and although we have just leaped forward in time, McPhee still pauses to give us a little flashback: "With the raft as a ferry, we crossed the river an hour or so ago and stood in the cool mist where the waterfall whips the air into wind. We went on to climb to the top of the fall..." (184). I'm not sure what to make of these little leaps forward in time. It gives the narrative a much more slipstream feel, no pun--I don't think, anyway--intended.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL EXAMPLE OF USING A JOURNEY THROUGH A LANDSCAPE TO EXPLAIN VAST SWEEPS OF HISTORY IN ORDER TO LEAVE THE READER WITH THE OVERWHELMING FEELING OF HAVING WITNESSED THE PASSAGE OF TIME BACK TO THE VERY ORIGINS: Easiest to do, I guess, when talking about geology. Especially in the Grand Canyon. For example, starting on p. 176 with "This is isolation wilderness...Having seen the canyon from this perspective, I would not much want to experience it any other way. ... The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time" (177).

Writers on Writers Writing, in Various Writerly Ways

A good piece, for me, makes me feel nostalgic for something I didn't even know I could be nostalgic for. Makes me miss something I've never really known, where writers writer about writers make me nostalgic. The south makes me nostalgic. As does fantasizing about a writer's life, a sort of yearning for an artistic community a la the "Twelve Southerners," or for an off-the-grid cabin with damp floors and a narrow bed piled up with quilts where people talk in airy abstractions ("He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, 'Breath of My Nostrils.'). In this week's pieces we get writers as the subjects in all their (wonderful) writerly cliches: promiscuous, rebellious, reclusive, peculiar, stubborn, elusive, lovable, unlovable, forgivable.

I love how these three pieces work on a meta level. As not just profiles of great (or I suppose, according to Sullivan, almost-great) writers, but as pieces where the authors are sharing their first-hand experiences with these writers. Janet Malcolm's words rang clear for me: "The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job." In these pieces we get to see writers attempting both, openly admitting their personal connection to what they're writing about, and in Rolphie's case hearing her talk about her interactions with Malcolm, but we get the added benefit of hearing how Malcolm tests the boundaries journalism. As Rolphie puts it: "One of the most challenging or controversial elements of her work is her persistent and mesmerizing analysis of the relationship between the writer and her subject."

I love that these three pieces dance around this relationship in such different ways. I'm most interested in talking about Sullivan's piece, though, simply because I loved the writing the most. (And as I write this I become--unnecessarily, I know--disappointed in myself for being drawn to the one male writer in the bunch, who is nonetheless writing about an uber-male writer. But his writing was just the best.) I found Schenkar's piece to gush too much about Keogh, and Rolphie's was just the opposite--a little too cold and calculating. Although I really love how she allows Malcolm to call her out on that in this piece:

Earlier you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant and writers for whom it scarcely exists, who live in the world of ideas. You are clearly one of the latter. You obediently took out a notebook, and gave me a rather stricken look, as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing.

 I really like what Rolphie's doing in this piece, the way she allows her experiences with Malcolm to reflect what makes Malcolm's work "controversial," that relationship between writer and subject. But I'm just a sucker for a good story, and on that front Sullivan delivers.

I admit I felt disoriented at the beginning of this piece--trying to figure out where we were, what time period we were in, what country even. I'm glad Sullivan admits that "Middle Tennessee at the crack of the twentieth century [had] more in common with Europe in the Middle Ages than with the South he lived to see." This scene of coffin building--the green cedar, the beeswax, the harried and anxious coffin-builder, the scrollwork--all seems too quaint to be true. And what stunning details to characterize a person right off the bat--the formality of his name (Mister Lytle) vs. the strange familiarity/formality of what Lytle's sister calls him (and perhaps here is our first clue of a geographic setting within the pronunciation of "brutha."). The "mon vieux," "breath of my nostrils," and "beloved;" they're all so strange yet endearing and funny at the same time. We get a good sense of what this person immediately via names/naming, even though we technically haven't even "met" him in the essay yet. I suppose death always provides a good scenario to reflect on a person's character with such poignant precision.

I appreciate the sentimentality of this essay, because I admit I'm a sucker for sentiment as long as it's in the right hands. And of course Sullivan defies being gratuitously so by being completely honest at the same time. I found myself wishing I could have had that experience, that I could have spent those months in that house with the peculiar writer who had for some reason taken a liking to me. I love how Sullivan admits that he was totally aware of the objectification going on--the chopping wood, etc., and that he just didn't seem to mind. It isn't until he's groped and nibbled by Mister Lytle that my charm for the man is broken, despite previous misgivings about his fascism, racism, annoying habits, etc. Because Sullivan gave him the benefit of the doubt and still found him remarkable in his own way, I'm compelled to do the same.

Continuing further in the nostalgia vein, there's a certain level of yearning that's evoked when people write about certain time periods in their lives, or when I'm reminded of a certain time period in my own. Sullivan was twenty when he lived with Lytle. He was young enough to afford such an open-mindedness towards this man who easily could come across as a tyrant if I were to come across him now. Reading this piece and wanting to have been Sullivan in that experience (of living in the house not the groping, that is!) I had the profound sense that I'm simply too old for such an experience any more. My time for quirky and cantankerous mentors is over; I simply wouldn't put up with it now. But ten, twelve years ago, sure. And reminiscing about such time periods--when I could be so moved by a person--is mixed up with this romanticized South--the misty Tennessee back woods with its enclaves of eccentric artists.

I became a little disappointed when we meet the girlfriend in the essay, simply because she broke the spell of the relationship that had been developed so far in the writing. But clearly she broke the spell in reality, too, as we get to witness Lytle's infantile reactions to her. So where that was a noticeable shift in the essay, the scratching of the  needle across the record, it was for good reason. The era, like Lytle himself, was simply coming to an end.

Jungle Fever

It was April or May in 2006. I can't remember which month. It was the dry season, that much I know, because the mealy parrots weren't nesting, and I no longer had to slog through knee-deep slop along the path each morning on my way to the bird blind. There was no longer any chance of being rained out, and I remember missing those mornings where rain came down like sheets, so hard it was nothing but white through the screens of the sleeping quarters, making a rasping sound across the palapa-style roofs so loud that it hushed everybody--the researchers, the guides, the tourists, the mouthy kitchen workers with their Amanda Portales wailing from the grainy TVs in the back rooms, the men always huddled around watching the women, always with exceptional cleavage, dressed in traditional peasant clothing dance across mountaintops to Incan pan-pipe style pop--into a subdued, blank silence.

I had loved the rain. It was the rainforest, after all. It had made everything difficult. A challenge. Clothes never dried. Backpacks molded. Everyday was a rain day during the rainy season, except you were never let off the hook because the skies might clear momentarily and then you had to be there, you had to be ready, because that hour, two hours if you were lucky, was your time. That's when the birds would come down to feed, down from the trees and gone again, so you had to be on even as you watched the sheets descend from the safety of your mosquito net.

But that was all over by March, and perhaps that's why Simon, Tylor, and I went up to the bowl after dark. It was a few miles hike from the research center; the bowl was a low scoop in the ground that collected months worth of rain that never quite evaporated completely during the dry season. It would have been impassible during any other month; the water would have been too deep at the place where we waded in. And it still was deep, colder than I would have liked. There was that moment where I remember wading up to my knees, the first of the water spilling up over the top of my boots and down inside, each step heavier as we slogged on. There was that resistance, the way we all--yes, even the guy who called himself an amateur herpetologist--tried to keep the water from going over the top, and then that moment where we just give in, let ourselves get soaked. Once we stopped being pussies and just acted as though we were walking into a lake rather than an Amazonian swamp, we moved forth at a faster clip, the water up over our waists, then up to our chests, as we navigated awkwardly around buttressed tree roots, ducking so our headlamps wouldn't get snagged by a vine or a branch and plunge into the murky water, god forbid leaving us at the mercy of each other in order to get back.

It always ended up like this for me. Always me and two guys. Always (generally) a platonic, intrepid threesome. It was never about the guys, but the experience, although being being one of the guys was an integral part to the experience. Of being able to tough it out. There were the nights in the Huachuca Mountains with Zac and Wes, tripping on acid at the old miner's ruins, the way the desert can fuck you up, leave you stranded as every ravine becomes less like something you recognize and just more of the same--pin oaks and granite, pin oaks and granite, even when you're stone sober in the middle of the day. Flying through through BLM land with Jim and Colin in Colin's hippie white-trash Blazer aiming for the place where the flat expanse of sage brush gives it up to the Wind River Mountains. Chris and Petter at Invercargill, New Zealand, and jut a few months ago me, Simon and Sergio sleeping out in the observation tower in the middle of the rainforest, tipsy and not caring about the bugs. In the morning Sergio woke up with his arms all bitten up muttering fuck, fuck, fuck because this area of the Amazon was a hotspot for Leishmaniasis--a disease that's carried by a little white fly that only comes out at night. It passes the parasite into your bloodstream and if not stopped it starts to eat away at your flesh, traveling across your whole body.

What I worshipped first was always the job description. Must be physically fit. Able to carry a heavy load over tough terrain. Willing to deal with extreme heat, extreme cold, high winds, heavy rain. Must work well with others. Must work well alone, for days on end, in remote and rustic lodgings with no amenities, no phone, no internet. Intermittent face-to-face contact with outsiders. There will be biting insects and poisonous snakes and possible chance encounters with charismatic megafauna: peccaries, javelinas, jaguars, mountain lions, grizzlies, cattle on the loose, ranchers, locals, caiman.

We'd actually gone up to the bowl in hopes of seeing caimans. Not the small ones that we could find in the vernal swamps, now nearly dried up, down by the lodge. Not the ones that were maybe two or three feet in length, cute little lizards really, that lurked in minty-green algae-scummed waters and sank silently from sight if you got too close. We were looking for the big ones. The ones that grew to be six feet long. The big caimans that ate the little caimans for breakfast, that were easy to spot at night because if we could stop all the sloshing through the chest-high water and be still for a minute we could turn off our lights, grow very quiet and wait for something to cross our path. The plan was, when that happened we'd turn our headlamps on and catch a glimpse of the animal's eyeshine before it turned and retreated back the way we came. We wouldn't really get to see the animal much at all. The thrill was really in knowing that we'd been that close, in knowing that a few feet away an animal pulsed in the same water we stood in, that for a moment we'd come so very near to touching it.

On "Shipping Out"

Every time I read this essay, I think I'm going to be annoyed, or over it, or exhausted by DFW's exhaustive style, annoyed by his ripping on everybody. But I'm not. I never am. I'm always lured in, amazed at how he not only creates a sense of place--the plush blue carpets, the wet/dry vacs sucking up vomit, bodies in various stages of sagginess slathered with lotion, toilets that "hurl" contents away from you, the wondercloset, the workers, the basket of fruit with its blue saran wrap, etc. etc.--but a sense of experience. He's not just explaining what the cruise was like and the absurd levels of luxury and the ridiculously dogged urge of the crew to please, but he's explaining the experience of realizing that what his experience was. The meta-moments of this essay are my favorite--when he realizes that his experience actually isn't his experience, but has been co-opted by Frank Conroy's essay-mercial, that he can't look at the sky without thinking of it as the "vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky." And then of course, the epiphany of the piece when the Dreamward sidles up next to the Nadir, where we get to experience a sort of mirror-stage along with DFW, where he wakes up out of a pampered delirium like a baby realizing they are not the center of the universe into the harsh realization that:

For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that the promise will be kept but that such a promise isn’t keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. ...In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable-infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction (51-52).

 (All the uterine imagery I could probably give or take, but I really like what he does in that moment, how even though he's moment-by-moment reflecting what he's seeing all around him, we still need that other ship to roll in and reflect back the greed and absurdity. Dreamward gives him something to WANT, and subsequently the grand realization of wanting-ness.)

I keep thinking about the (very brief) conversation we had in class the other day about DFW in relation to Colson Whitehead, and I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly how DFW "gets away with it," how he gets away with calling out Americans on their Americanness, calling out the absurdity of these particular subcultures (or just cultures, I guess), the way he does with tourists in "Consider the Lobster," and probably anybody in anything he writes. I know he doesn't get away with it for some people--teaching DFW always reminds me that some people are just going to hate it and remind themselves to never read anything else by him as soon as they're out of my class. Yet for many of us he succeeds brilliantly, and I keep wondering: is it  1. that he's genius as long as you already agree with all his critiques?  and/or 2. Is it because he implicates himself? I feel like it must be so much more complicated than either of those or a combination of those, and I guess it's also in part because 3. He actually provides a really in depth report of ship; he provides the straight narrative that you'd expect from a journalistic article. I think it's easy to forget this aspect of his writing because I keep looking for the bigger ideas, the criticisms of society, the postmodern techniques, that I forget that it's also just really good reporting. I get a better sense of this cruise--from trapshooting to dining experience to entertainment to dimensions--that I do of Chicago's World Fair in all 400 pages of Larson's book. Yes, perhaps I like it because I'll probably never go on a luxury cruise and I therefore enjoy seeing DFW jab the people who are so gung-ho about it, but I actually get a perverse enjoyment from learning about everything from the dimensions of his room to the vastness of the boat. I kind of want to try trapshooting off the back of a cruise ship some time.

But going back to how he gets away with it--he's directly harsh on people like Mona and Mr. Dermatitis, but what seems like it's potentially crueler is how he pokes fun at people like Captain Video on page 49, one of the eccentrics on the boat. But then he turns around and says how this guy sort of reminds him of himself. (And it's true, I probably would be sketched out by DFW if I ran into him on a cruise ship.) So there's the self-deprecation thing going on. But he's also genuinely loving with some of the characters in the piece. There's Trudy, who despite the fact he describes her as “Jackie Gleason in drag,” he says she has a “particularly loud pre-laugh scream that is a real arrhythmia-producer, and is the one who coerces me into Wednesday night’s conga line, and gets me strung out on Snowball Jackpot Bingo” (40). He paints her and Esther's exchanges with precision and compares their discernment over the meals with Mona's flat-out complaining. I come away from this piece liking her. Same with Tibor:  “There was no hauteur or pedantry or even anger as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe-naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again” (48). And then later: “I’d just about die if Tibor got into any trouble on my account” (49). I don't get as simply cold and calculating critique here; I get a complex and nuanced look at a group of people. And on top of it I get the satisfaction of a good hard look at American culture and the peculiarities of human desire, and the phenomenon of wanting to be pampered to death.