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. 

"Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies."

pygmy possum

pygmy tarsier

African pygmy hedgehog

 Just when you think Olmsted can't get any sicker. Just when you think the next architect could possibly come up with something more outlandish. Just when you think Holmes won't find another woman, or one will finally figure him out. Just when you think the storms can't get any worse, a winter any colder, the rain any fiercer, the strikes more inopportune, the deaths more untimely, the fair better attended--or more poorly attended, for that matter--the Ferris wheel any more anticipated, the events any wilder...well, they do.

Nothing can be out done. The power of this book lies in its lists, with Larson's ability to never skimp, to never cut corners, to always--much like the events of the fair itself--go to the the extreme. This seems more a story about an era, the peak of the industrial revolution, of over-the-top opulence and of abject poverty, than it does a narrative of the fair or the story of Holmes. Through his see-sawing between story lines, and by exhaustively listing the absolute best and the absolute worst of everything, Larson captures the tumult of the time and place. This book is all about sense of place for me: The bleak shores of Lake Michigan, the vision (always from above, I picture it) of the river reversing and the black stream leaking out into the lake, the wind and storms and flatness, the "blackness," the absolute stench of the stockyards. I can't believe that this World Fair holds so many firsts. I think the era is best captured by this image on pages 284-85: "Chief Standing Bear rode the Ferris Wheel in full ceremonial headdress, his two hundred feathers unruffled." Or maybe this: "The significance of the moment escaped no one. Here was one of the greatest heroes of America's past saluting one of the foremost heroes of its future" (286). Like watching the Ferris wheel rain down loose bolts, we're looking on, wondering--will it hold?

By using lists, Larson is forced to be completely even-handed throughout. The book's tension begins immediately with the opening of Part I: "How easy it was to disappear" (11), and is suspended throughout. I keep thinking of the graph teachers used to draw when explaining storytelling, the rising action, climax, falling action...but this story feels like all climax, a thin tense line drawn across the length of the chalkboard. I think this very tension makes the braiding of the two stories important--when we leave one story we can take a quick breath, maybe become distracted from whatever ominous hint Larson has left us dangling with in order to feel its full effect pages later.

I must admit the foreshadowing did little to keep me engaged in the story. I was engaged--fully--but it was because of the details, because I hadn't realized just how absurd and unreal the fair really was (and the time period, too), not because of the plot. Even Holmes's plot (which I was quite drawn to--sometimes I just wanted to rush through the details of geraniums and bulrushes to see who his next victim would be (poor Olmsted, I know))--after his fifth or sixth victim the absurdity of his crimes stopped feeling so absurd. And therefore, Larson's little cliffhangers weren't so effective. I think it's interesting that the cliffhangers changed in tone throughout the book. The tone became lighter, and Larson steps in as a narrator here and there to comment on the events: "Of all people," he says on 285, to have missed the fair--Mark Twain. Here Larson's banking on his audience's knowledge, allowing us to speculate on what Twain might have written, giving a nudge to the king of the absurd.

Less jokingly, the cliffhangers served more as little commentary or punchlines throughout. At one point some of the sections sort of felt like sonnets (without the lyricism)--something's happening in the body of the paragraph, then the mood shifts in the last couple of lines. Often, the lines were even set off. For example, on the top of 226 when Olmsted gets what he wants, the paragraph ends with, "Even this flicker of optimism was about to disappear, however, for a powerful weather front was moving across the prairie, toward Chicago." I think it's interesting the way Larson moves us through the events like this. Sometimes it feels like we're just being hurried along, and other times I liked his subtle commentary, his narrative aid--they served to break up the lists of facts and details and allowed me to get my bearings before moving on. It gave the book a very episodic feeling, but more like a documentary and less like a crime piece.

Larson treats his characters much like he treats the events--very evenhandedly. We get so many details about a person and a wonderful sense of character, yet they're still held at arms' length. I never feel any real attachment for Burnham or Holmes, yet I'm deeply attached to understanding how the characters connect with one another (not between those two, but between each and his respective group). I liked learning how cantankerous the architects could be with each other--that dynamic was really interesting. Perhaps that's what the book is about--dynamics. I guess he says it at the beginning: "In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black" (xi).  But I was puzzled as to why Larson is so keen on explaining that every quotation comes from "a letter, memoir, or other written document" (xi) because even if he's not inventing what was spoken, it seems to me he's inventing emotion, thoughts, and body language. It gave the characters a strange feel--again, like we're held at arms length. We're allowed to see them up close, but we're never allowed to really hear them. Just a few places where I noted the narrator blatantly giving us a character's emotion: "But this night he felt ill at ease, a choirboy among cardinals" (80), "Now and then he and Burnham caught each other's glances" (95); "She gripped his hand more tightly, which he found singularly engrossing" (148); and, of course, Anna in the chamber: "As she considered this, she became a bit frightened. The room had grown substantially warmer. Catching a clean breath was difficult. And she needed a bathroom" (295). I absolutely love this moment in the book because for once we ARE inside a character's head, right there with her, feeling what she's feeling. It's tense and gripping. But then there's that question: How could he possibly know what was going through her mind? And does he feel it's okay to speculate here because it's so obvious that he's speculating, because she dies in the next few minutes? The other moments could be said to have been extrapolated from his extensive research, but here is a truly impossible moment, which makes me believe that the other moments are equally invented on his part.

I personally don't have issue with this; to me he didn't really cross any line. But I think it's interesting that he seems a little hypocritical in his intro, breaking rules he seems to be such a stickler for. And as I continue on in my own journey of deciding when and if I should embellish, it's interesting to look at different examples of how people do it, and how they get away with it.

"Madame Curie's Passion" from Smithsonian

 

"When Marie Curie came to the United States for the first time, in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements radium and polonium, coined the term “radio-active” and won the Nobel Prize—twice. But the Polish-born scientist, almost pathologically shy and accustomed to spending most of her time in her Paris laboratory, was stunned by the fanfare that greeted her."

Read more HERE

The importance of being a book: creativity in Radioactive

Well, I hope it's not reductive to say I loved this book. Unashamedly, I did. After I started reading it, it taunted me from across the room as I tried to get other work done. Perhaps it was because this felt more like a child's picture book than a graphic nonfiction novel. Yeah, there was some dark and heavy shit in there, but it still felt like story time when I opened it up. Here is a good example of why a book needs to be a book. Whereas I could see some sort of animated film being made out of this, as was done with Persepolis, I don't think Radioactive could really work in digital form. It's a book that needs to be held and flipped through. Let me try to break down why.

Each page is a story:  Perhaps reflective of its subject matter, the book is cellular in structure. Text is never carried over to the next page mid sentence, or even mid paragraph. A thought is begun and finished within each page, making the book a series of mini-artworks, more like a series of prints compiled into a book. Like a line break in a poem, or white space in a lyric essay, turning the page in this book seems to be as much a part of the experience of reading as absorbing the words and images. It helps, of course, that the color scheme switches with almost every page turn, the mood shifting from an ethereal blue to chaotic red and oranges, or from black and white to color making each page something that happens to us.

The artist's process: Knowing the details of how cyanotype printing is done made me feel more connected to the work. The process is multi-layered, three dimensional. It seems as though such a tactile process deserves a tactile result. And I love her explanation on page 199 of why she chose cyanotype, how it "gives an impression of an internal light, a sense of glowing that I felt captured what Marie Curie called radium's 'spontaneous luminosity.'" And, of course, knowing how cyanotype ingredients became a treatment for radioactive contamination--fascinating. I wonder what it was like for Redniss to discover that fact as she was working on the book.

Art that goes beyond the page: I'm not much of a visual art person, in the sense that I'm pretty ignorant about it. But I've learned a little about the importance of the artist "thinking beyond the page." I know this sort of contradicts what I said before about each page being self-contained, but I also think that the artwork spreads out beyond the paper. We never see the edge of the drawings, no borders, no outlines. The colors go to the very edges (close the book and look at the spectrum between the covers), and it gives the effect of being in the picture rather than looking at it. Good examples are on pages 96-101, when Pierre dies. We get a grand-scope view of horse, carriage and city; then it zooms in to the person on horseback (I'm not sure who this is supposed to be though--wasn't Pierre walking since she refers to his limping?); then it zooms out again and we see two dark figures carrying away Pierre's glowing body. These three scenes give a play-by-play, and there's something very intimate about the way it's done despite the fact we never actually see Pierre being run over.

I think the structure of the writing in the book is reflected in the tactility of the book. Redniss weaves story lines, moves around in time, and braids voices--in a sense, the storyline is also cellular, composed of various beads which are strung along the thread of the Curie lineage. It's by no means a comprehensive biography, although I was surprised by how much I didn't know about the Curies. Peter Trachtenberg loosely defines a lyric essay as a piece of writing that follows a thought process rather than a linear narrative, and I think this is somewhat along the lines of what Redniss is doing. Yes, there's obvious linearity, starting with Pierre and Marie, how they come together (nuclear fusion, could we say? Or nuclear fission?), but we are allowed the digressions to Three-Mile Island and the mutant roses, to Utah and the radium spa, to Nevada test sites, and to Stephen Howe's projection for the need for nuclear power "for electricity to support lunar outposts" (183). All of these other stories are the fallout, the repercussions of the joining of Marie and Pierre that are still rippling out and out.  I'm not sure if "thought process" is the way to describe what she's following here, but the writing is as much thematic as it is narrative.

The format and structure of the book also allows Redniss to get away with incorporating large chunks of quoted material. This might bug me in a more conventional book, but it allowed for a layering of voices that complimented the style rather than detracted from it. It makes Redniss more of a compiler or a collagist rather than a writer (although I guess it could be argued that writing nonfiction is really just a way of compiling other material).

The only complaint I have is that sometimes I wish she'd slowed down and dwelled on the science a little more. For the most part it's very metered, straightforward, and clear, but I'm still confused about some things. For example, on page 42 where Rontgen discovers X-rays, Redniss writes: "During his experiments he noticed that objects in his lab had begun to glow," and then she jumps to how X-rays were then used, but I'm still not entirely sure as to what it was that was glowing or how he knew how to capture it on paper. She doesn't have to give me a dissertation on high-voltage currents, just a little bit more. Same goes for when Marie gets kidney lesions and her death by "aplastic  pernicious anemia." Just a little bit more.

Thanks for introducing me to Redniss's work, Paige! I might consider using this if they ever let me teach creative writing...

______ to be an American.

It's seems appropriate to me to respond to these readings together this week. Fallows' article serves as an in-depth analytical look not so much at the "problem" with America, but the problem with how we perceive the problem. Fallows' article helped illuminate our nation's long obsession with the "jeremiad," how, at times, we've been a country whose leaders hold people rapt with with an overwrought list of things that are wrong, and uses the dramatization to evoke a sense of camaraderie. The trendy question seems to be (and we're in this trend now), "is America finally going to hell?" Fallows asks:

Are the fears of this moment our era’s version of the “missile gap”? Are they anything more than a combination of the two staple ingredients of doom-and-darkness statements through the whole course of our history?

What is obvious from outside the country is how exceptional it is in its powers of renewal: America is always in decline, and is always about to bounce back.

I saw these two statements as encapsulations of what Fallows is pointing out here: we have a long obsession with a fear of doom-and-darkness, our fear of decline can act as a motivator to bounce back.  Of course, Fallows points out that we often don't seize the opportunities to "bounce back" when we should, and he also points out that our "decline" doesn't need to be fearsome.

If Fallows' article is a long "telling" of how America perceives itself, then Whitehead and Miller  "show" some of those perceptions in action. The two pieces complement each other: Whitehead's snarky cynicism, very a la Hunter S.  Thompson, critiquing gambling suburban society, and Miller's sincere and emotional diary entries depicting his own personal trauma of 9/11.

Whitehead hits on the American obsession of trying to improve itself:

There is the multiplicity of diversion, sure, but more important is the idea that a sector of human endeavor was diligently trying to improve itself, and succeeding spectacularly. Consumer theorists, commercial architects, scientists of demography were working hard to make the Plex better, more efficient, more perfect, analyzing the traffic patterns and microscopic eye movements of shoppers, the implications of rest room and water fountain placement, and disseminating their innovations throughout the world for the universal good. Even if we fail ourselves in a thousand ways every day, we can depend on this one grace in our lives. We are in good hands.

But we can sense a disapproval in his voice. Perhaps its in the deadpan voice he starts out with. By calling himself dead inside, I began to read all of his descriptions as critiques, as though he was accusing all of American society to be dead inside. Shortly after the above statement, he writes this:

I found my degradation. You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people. I was among gamblers.

He then dissolves into the snarky stereotyping, delineating the "types" he's surrounded by, breaking each down into their components--habits, wants, dreams. He's got them nailed, and it gives the piece a sort of "I've seen it all" feeling, that there's nothing left to be surprised by and humans just keep falling into this limited subset of personalities.

Miller, on the other hand, illustrates how "through American history worry has always preceded reform." Of course, there is no obvious reform in the piece--he's merely sharing what he wrote in his diary ten years earlier, but we don't get a critique. Here, as a reader, I was moved to empathize, to partake in the sorrow that brings people together. It's subtle, and in no way saccharine, but I do see Miller's piece--contrary to Whitehead's--as a quiet, hopeful plea.

Both pieces are very personal, and I think each uses his relationship to evoke an overall feeling of pro-Americanness or anti-Americanness. In Whitehead's case, his recent divorce, his feelings of being half dead inside seem to reflect the way he views gambling society in particular, and perhaps American society at large. Miller's piece is about trauma, but it's really a love story. We start with the ring, and we get to witness this couple going through the trauma of 9/11 together. Throughout reading this, I remember consciously thinking "at least they have each other." And I think it's the love-story aspect in each piece that keeps them from being either a snarky critique or a sentimental remembrance. It's the heartbreak story and the burgeoning love story that make each universal, that allows each to transcend being just a jab at Americans, or a plea for strength and hope in the time of trauma.

All this talk about America and literature is rather timely. With the Swedish poet winning the Nobel, the whole American authors are 'insular and ignorant' debate is rekindled. Thursday on NPR there was an interview with Alexander Nazaryan, who wrote an article for Salon discussing the comment the Nobel judge made back in 2008 explaining why an American author hasn't won the Nobel in nearly a decade. In the original article, which Nazaryan references, author Aislinn Simpson writes: "Horace Engdahl said that writers from the country that produced Philip Roth, John Updike, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture," dragging down the quality of their work." This seems, to me, so similar to what Fallows is writing--that Americans are just too concerned about our own narrative to really see the bigger picture.

Nazaryan, albeit admitting that the 2008 remarks sparked a lot of unfair vitriol, finds valid criticism in Engdahl's remark:

America needs an Obama des letters, a writer for the 21st century, not the 20th -- or even the 19th. One who is not stuck in the Cold War or the gun-slinging West or the bygone Jewish precincts of Newark -- or mired in the claustrophobia of familial dramas. What relevance does our solipsism have to a reader in Bombay? For that matter, what relevance does it have in Brooklyn?

It almost feels as though Nazaryan is suggesting that American literature can't pull itself from the jeremiad tradition. We're stuck in this rut of self-observation, and even, possible, self-lament. He even criticizes Whitehead here:

The rising generation of writers behind Oates, Roth and DeLillo are dominated by Great Male Narcissists -- even the writers who aren't male (or white). ...Colson Whitehead started promisingly with "The Intuitionist" and "John Henry Days" but his last novel, "Sag Harbor," was little more than the bourgeoisie life made gently problematic by the issue of race.

His final word is that American literature has come to fear the idea of the universal. I find it interesting that I just used that word, not thinking of the end of Nazaryan's article at all, to describe how Whitehead and Miller transcend snark and sentiment, respectively. Neither piece is Nobel worthy. They're successful in their own rights, but do they transcend the American experience? Or are they just products of? I did enjoy reading both--but is that because I, too, want to dig into the people around me? Is it because I become jaded with Americans, with the the Big Mitches and the Methy Mikes? Did I emote while reading Miller's piece because I'm already so  aware of the 9/11 narrative, and I knew I was supposed to feel moved while reading it? (Actually, I don't think so because generally I'm critical of 9/11 narratives, but this one didn't bother me so much.) I'm not sure how much it's worth agonizing over, but should we be concerned with how universal our literature is? Or should we just keep "writing what we know," and adding to the jeremiad that is so ingrained in us--at least those of us who've grown up in the good old US of A?

"The Death of a Pig," and a pig resurrected

It's difficult to ascertain where the success of "The Death of a Pig" would be without the success of Charlotte's Web. To answer the question: "What do they [these articles] teach us about what lasts in literary nonfiction, and about what truly connects with readers," it's possible to say that without the pervasive success of sweet Charlotte's Web, how it's become an iconic classic of the 20th century, that the essay may not have survived this long. It's possible to say that Charlotte's Web gave us a way of reading and understanding the "Death of the Pig":

The design of "Charlotte's Web" is more intricate, a fact that would surely please Charlotte. In 1948, White wrote "Death of a Pig" which appeared in Atlantic Monthly, an oddly affecting account of how he failed to save the life of a sick pig, made ironic by the fact that the pig had been bought to act its part in the "tragedy" of the spring pig fattened for winter butchering. Since literature is not life, White set out in "Charlotte's Web" to save his pig in retrospect, this time not from an unexpected illness but from its presumably fated "tragedy." The main plot, then, is that staple of adventure literature--the rescue of the innocent.

This is from a 1970's New York Times review by Gerald Weales, and it gives us an easy motive for the book that became famous--that he's seeking to save the pig that he couldn't save in real life; if this is the case, then the essay loses its nuance and becomes a mere narrative that served as a stepping stone to something greater and more lasting.

But, of course, we're talking about the EB White who was one of the "greatest essayists of this century," and we know "The Death of the Pig" has merit beyond its connection to the children's book. It's a piece I find oddly alluring, and it's irony goes further than the irony Weales suggests. Yes, it's not lost on the reader that White is trying to save a pig that in the end will just become ham and smoked bacon, killed ceremonially, a premeditated murder that is "in the first degree but is quick and skillful." But what I find peculiar about the essay is White's attention to details, details he seemingly has no need to admit here, that are irrelevant outside of the experience of the pig.

For starters, we know he's writing because he "feels driven" to account for the last nights spent with the pig because, "the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting." He can't remember the number of nights even, and we're presented with his more pressing worry: his own deteriorating health.

Only in the second paragraph do we get White's attachment to the pig: "The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world." Even here I don't get the sense that White has loved this pig like maybe he loves Fred, but that the story he is about to tell has more to do with the nature of suffering and how the pig's death illuminated some of those universally plaguing issues for White.

Once we get into the story of the pig's suffering, we know that White doesn't immediately attend to the pig once he learns he should give it oil: he sits and thinks about his troubles; he tinkers around for awhile. We learn he "dined well and at someone else's expense," before he checks on the pig at midnight of the first night of its illness. We have the details about the vet's pretty companion, how White notices she has an engagement ring flashing on her hand. We have the most overtly callous moment in the essay right after the pig dies: "I knelt, saw that he was dead, and left him there." He doesn't even dig the pig's own grave, and he doesn't rush out to help in the morning, instead eating breakfast slowly, because he knew "Fred [his dog] ... was supervising the work of digging."

We're constantly reminded of White's pressing, selfish needs. The essay resists sentimentality, and whereas we don't know the cause of White's deteriorating health at the time of writing (could he perhaps have contracted erysipelas after all?), I'm left with the feeling that he's confronting his moment of witnessing suffering more out of guilt, an after-the-fact homage to the pig, borne out of the grander realization that "Once in a while something slips - one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts."

So...is this what makes it lasting? What could we possibly learn from a story told during the outdated practice of "buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives," a practice that we'd likely file away into pastoral cliche were it written by a contemporary? I'd say it lasts because in the end it has little to do country nostalgia, farmyard antics, anthropomorphizing (although there is some), or even love for an animal. Rather it's an exploration of suffering, our own callous attitudes, the juxtaposition of the vibrancy of living and the finality of death--and what's more lasting than that?

White's method, with essays, was about "writing a thing first and thinking about it afterward." And perhaps that what made him so appealing. He gave us a new way (or possibly refreshed a very old way) of considering the world. I could see there being something so American, so casual and idyllic, so appealingly back-to-the-land-ish about this approach; what a notion that such meditations can actually be something.

And, of course, who can't love a guy who wrote a column called "One Man's Meat"?

And the role of Byliner in all this? I see Byliner as a storage place for a compendium of quality nonfiction. By giving the site an almost social-media feel, by allowing the readers to interact by "following," having favorites, creating reading lists, it represents itself almost as a collaborative collection of readers' favorites rather than a "best of" list being handed down from on high, or from some cranky editor. 

I think it's interesting that Byliner sometimes only works as a connection between the reader and the original source. I like that they do this, because it invites all the various publications into the collection as well, rather than seeing itself as isolating single pieces in Byliner-land. It shares the love, rather than claiming ownership of. It serves as a network and illuminates the interconnectedness of contemporary nonfiction. Where would Krakauer be without EB White and Hunter S Thompson? 

I also like that they do originals, and, as one of the articles posted awhile back on the course blog said, they do a very in-depth editing process, as much as any print magazine would.

 

Malcolm Gladwell explores the connection between social media and social change

It's last year's New Yorker article, but still pertinent, I think.

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. ...In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Read the full article here:  

Risky moves: On Bazelon

I really admire what Emily Bazelon is doing in this article. She is looking deeply into this case and making risky moves as a writer to come to what, in the end, I find to not be such a risky point of view: Is it at all reasonable to prosecute these teenagers and essentially ruin their futures all for the sake of teaching them a lesson which they've probably already learned. "They have been the focus of intense, public rage. They've been blamed for the suicide of a vulnerable, troubled girl. They will live with this always. Maybe that is already enough," Bazelon finishes her article with. It was interesting to skim over the comments section (I can't really bear to read most comments in depth)--clearly many readers were outraged wither the articles; in particular commentators seemed to attack Bazelon's reputation as a journalist. But I think those commentators failed to realize that Bazelon wasn't simply "taking a side" and attempting to further victimize Phoebe Prince, she was turning our attention to how complicated the situation really is and highlighting potential motives behind the DA's and the school board's decisions. In a sense, she's doing what previous writers had failed to do (or hadn't done yet) as outlined by her extensive link-works-cited throughout the articles--digging deeper into the story.

This article reminded me of Janet Malcolm's May 2010 article, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills", where Malcolm openly involves herself with the case she has been assigned to write about and proceeds to write about how her own involvement may/may not have affected the case. (On a side note, this article ended up being in the Best Articles of the 2010s, a fascinating list that takes on the typical pattern manmanmanmanmanmanwomanmanmanmanmanmanwomanmanmanmanman...   I loved this article before I came across that list, and it's still a favorite within that list.) Part of the reason I love it is Malcolm's blatant involvement. I'm not sure what it says about man writing courtroom drama vs. woman writing courtroom drama, if I'm drawn to these articles because the women are taking sides and somehow coming to a defense. It would be too easy to say that I love these articles because I can identify with a woman becoming emotionally involved with her subject material, yet it might not be too easy to say that people reacted strongly to these articles, at least Bazelon's, because she was a woman, and therefore prompted comments like: "i sincerely hope that you, as a journalist, feel the slightest bit of guilt knowing that you gave a voice to kids who already seemed to speak too much," and "you should learn how to write a story," and "this is one of the coldest reactions to case I have ever seen," and "Shame on you!"and, finally, "You're saying that Phoebe Prince ASKED for what she got? And you're a woman?"

Okay, I went back and read those comments more thoroughly. 


Anyway, I'm not sure it's entirely appropriate to compare Malcolm's article with Bazelon's three-part series, but each do something risky, likely knowing that people are bound to react. 


It was an interesting move on Bazelon's part to compare this story with that of Max and Martin. A similar case where the teen faced potential jail time layers the way we read Phoebe Prince's case. I appreciated the broader scope of her research and the ways we are allowed to draw comparisons between the two cases. If she were writing more about this case, I wonder if she would have gotten into the issues surrounding sex offender registration, how even urinating in public can warrant such registration in some states. 


Similarly, I wanted her to delve more into why Carl Walker-Hoover's case didn't receive the same amount of attention Prince's did. What was the motivation behind choosing a case that has already garnered so much attention? (I tried to read the Bergman article she linked to, but it's no longer available.) But then, her point seemed more to be about looking at how Phoebe's pre-existing mental state really should have been taken into consideration. I think in Walker-Hoover's case, his bullies' anti-gay hate (whether or not Carl was gay, or whether he was even old enough to know it) seemed much more odious. I wonder if she would feel the same way though if his perpetrators were sentenced to prison sentences, or time in juvenile hall. She does get herself into tricky territory by suggesting these bullies needn't be punished so harshly. 


In terms of digital formatting: this article does bring up a frustration--namely that when there are dead links that I really want to read and I can't I get annoyed. (How to keep up with this? Whose responsibility is it to go through a bijillion articles and make sure links are actually linking to something? If the article's a year old, is it okay to let those links sit dead?) In terms of the little plus signs for footnotes, I liked that. What a great idea. I hate scrolling to the end of something, and even when it's the kind you click that brings you to the footnote, there's always a moment of discombobulation when returning to the article. I don't know why, but the little plus sign was more attractive than a footnote--Oh, there's more, it seemed to say, and I was always curious, whereas footnotes sometimes seem pesky or distracting. 


On a related note, here's a recent case about a teen suicide related to bullying.

Structure in Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

"Figuring out the structure of the book was maddening, and it took me a very long time." --Rebecca Skloot

Braided Narratives: The book has three sections, but they don't directly correspond to the three narratives threaded throughout the book: Henrietta's story, Deborah's story, and the cells' story. When she was beginning the book, Skloot envisioned her structure as similar to the one Fannie Flagg used in Fried Green Tomatoes: she pictured having Henrietta's story told alongside her (Skloot's) and Deborah's story, with news clippings explaining the science interspersed throughout. She says she at first "couldn't imagine how I could possibly put the science into some kind of narrative." 

The book begins in the middle of it all. Henrietta knows she has a tumor, or something of the sort, and goes to the hospital. This works as the beginning because this is the moment where the three narratives that will be shared throughout the book all converge: Henrietta's still alive, Deborah is a baby, the doctors meet Henrietta's cells for the first time. Only once these three balls have been tossed into the air does Skloot go back to the beginning beginning, starting with Henrietta's childhood.

Story Arc: On p. 49 Skloot inserts herself as a character into the book. A few pages later we then meet, albeit over the phone, Deborah for the first time. This is where the main tension of the book begins, at least for me. With the introduction of Henrietta's cells in the first fifty pages, of I want to know what happened to them, but upon meeting Deborah a new suspense enters the book--now I'm curious to know what will happen. Will Deborah speak to Rebecca? Will there be some sort of reconciliation between the families and the doctors/scientists/journalists?

Skloot says that the storyline of the book/the narrative arc (for her) is the storyline of Deborah. She says she's (Skloot's) only in the book as a vehicle to get to Deborah. About writing in general, Skloot says: "Within a big sweep of history there's usually a story that can hold it all together--then some of the history can be told in flashbacks. ... I'm always looking for narrative with every story I write."

Balance of Scene and Summary: I think it's interesting that from essentially chapter 29 in Part 3 (page 232), when Skloot and Deborah finally meet, the book is essentially one long scene right to the end. From then on we're with Skloot and Deborah and other family members, on the journey with Deborah so she can uncover the past, right up to the end. Why, for example, didn't Skloot meet Deborah earlier in the book and thread those scenes where we're right there with the two of them more evenly throughout the book? I understand Skloot's reasoning behind unfurling the story of the cells, of Henrietta's past, and of the families frustrations alongside one another ("What happened to the cells and Henrietta take on such a different weight if you learn about them at the same time as the science, the scientists, and her family," Skloot says), but something about one long continuous scene at for the last 100 pages feels unbalanced to me. The story is captivating enough so it doesn't bother me, but I'm wondering if anybody else felt that way. 

How Skloot Does Structure: "I spent several days pressing play and pause, play and pause and I storyboarded the whole movie of Hurricane on the same three colored index card system I had with my book, and then I literally just laid my book on top of it to see what would happen in the same color coding. And through that I realized I was taking too long and I had these long chapters, and really part of what worked with the structure of the movie was that it happened really fast.  So I had written all three of the narratives and then went with my Hurricane/Fried Green Tomatoes structure idea, and actually braided them on the computer and then just sat down and printed it out and read it beginning to end ... so then a lot of rearranging happened in the various drafts. I rewrote the book completely from beginning to end probably five times before I even turned it in, then another many times after that, to my editor's dismay."

Sources: 

From the nieman storyboard: "Rebecca Skloot on narrating history: 'looking for that one family, that one person, that one moment that will help hold everything together' "

Rebecca Skoot talks about how Fried Green Tomatoes and the movie Hurricane influenced how she structured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: