Pierce on Obama

Is the "Norman Mailer" in "Armies of the Night" a device, a character? Or is it the author himself? Does it matter? If so, how? All legitimate questions. But it's also a legitimate narrative strategy.

 

Absolutely.

Just as "R-Dub" had conversations with people in Ralph Wiley's work, and "Slats Grobnik" was someone whose wisdom we were often treated to.

And self-indulgent does not necessarily mean bad. There's a difference between self-indulgent journalism, which I would identify as long, well-written pieces starring the writer or a character standing in for him or her, and "Look at ME!!!!!!!!" journalism.

Which is the bulk of the sports columnists at major newspapers.

 

I guess, maybe I will when I get to a functional printer - I can't read for that long on screen. I was commenting on your logic which I was perfectly able to do having read your post.

 

I'd never heard of the guy. After reading that long-winded piece of gasbaggery, I now know why.

 

Well, as hard as it may be to believe, never really heard of him. Been in the business 30 years and at my current shop 24. He was never on any of the beats I've covered.

I see by Googling him that he's more an NPR/magazine guy. I'm a newspaper guy. Maybe that's why.

 

I don't get the claims of self-indulgence. It reads like Mailer to me (and that's a high compliment). For me, though, the beauty of the piece is in its sentences. No one writes an English-language sentence as well as Pierce does, and in the first section in particular, it just seemed like he was on a run, like he sat down and hit the bowl and just let it flow like music. That's joy for me.

I mean, this will make me sound like an asshole, but oh well: Most of the time when I read a story, I think on my good days I could have written something like it. This is one of those stories where I know I couldn't have written anything like it. I don't have the necessary depth of knowledge (or even thought) or the ability to put words together like that. It's just beyond my reach. I think very, very few writers have a piece like this in them. That's what made me swear about it.

 

"The notion of a political commonwealth fell into a desuetude so profound that even Bill Clinton said, “The era of Big Government is over” and was cheered across the political spectrum, so that when an American city drowned and the president didn’t care enough to leave a birthday party, and the disgraced former luxury-horse executive who’d been placed in charge of disaster relief behaved pretty much the way a disgraced former luxury-horse executive could be expected to behave in that situation, it could not have come as any kind of surprise to anyone honest enough to have watched the country steadily abandon self-government over the previous four decades."

In writing, a 111-word sentence is as much an example of self-indulgence as there can be. When a writer writes a sentence that long, there is no way he has the reader in mind. It's diarrhea of the keyboard in an egotistical attempt to say "Look at me and how smart I am."

You may beg to differ, and that's your choice. But the only people who weren't exhausted after reading that sentence are in elite marathon-runner shape. It really wouldn't be that hard to chop that sucker up into three or four sentences and do the reader a favor. But that would have taken some effort. Instead, he took the lazy way out and said, "Fuck the reader."

This kind of goes back to a thread on the J-topics board titled -- I believe -- "Who do you write for?" or something along those lines. Pierce obviously was writing for himself, not the reader. And when readers bail on the story short of the midway point, he shouldn't be surprised. Nor should the editors of Esquire.

 

You're a funny guy, Tony. And I'm guessing you're a big Bill Plaschke fan.

 

If you're a writer, tony, and I'm assuming you are, and you've never so much of heard of Charlie Pierce, one of the best we have, one of the best we've ever had, really, then I'd say you're the one who does not get it. Sometimes really good writing requires investing more than just a third of your attention. I like long sentences when they're done well. I love the cadence and rhythms of Pierce's voice. Really good journalism can share many of the qualities with really good literature. This is not a newspaper story. The "reader" can have different expectations than "geez, get to the point."

 

Wow.

"A 111-word sentence is as much an example of self-indulgence as there can be. When a writer writes a sentence that long, there is no way he has the reader in mind"

Sorry, which reader are you talking about?

The reader who thinks USA Today is a tough read?

Or, maybe, someone who can process a 5,000 word article without getting an aneurism.

You should try and keep up