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.