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Sublime or overwritten?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Alma, Mar 24, 2011.

  1. Dave Kindred

    Dave Kindred Member

    Only time I stayed at the Alongquin, a hooker chatted me up during check-in...the ghost of Dorothy Parker she was not....
     
  2. 21

    21 Well-Known Member

    And? Sublime or overwritten?
     
  3. Dave Kindred

    Dave Kindred Member

    A rainy night in the city, and sublime she was, dark and beautiful, and I smiled all the while, remembering Parker's line on how to use "horticulture" in a sentence: "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think"...
     
  4. Johnny Dangerously

    Johnny Dangerously Well-Known Member

    I'm enjoying this thread far more than the piece that inspired it.
     
  5. shockey

    shockey Active Member

    for true newspaper guys like me, it was always runyon's, then the lion's head, and then p.j. clarke's. man, could young reporters learn a thing or 200 by just shutting up and letting icons like pete hamill and jimmy breslin... elaine's? sure, all uptown. star-effing wannabes gravitated there (no names), but it was more for the gossip-mongering, liz smith types; hamill eventually hung out there during his jackie kennedy period, which was when caroline was briefly a copykid at the snooze (just before my time, dammit!)
     
  6. WriteThinking

    WriteThinking Well-Known Member

    MacGregor is one of those writers who is sublime, at times, because, frankly, he is allowed to be so and to write like this.

    That is often the difference between one writer and another.

    I actually liked most of this story, and thought it put me there well. It gave me a good sense of things as they went on in an artistic and good way. I got the picture of it all, even though I wasn't there, and that's good.

    If, however, I had ever written a paragraph like this one, for example:

    This is around the corner from Washington Square Park. And on the first pagan day of spring that famous place is overwhelmed with daffodils and film students, with mendicants and acrobats and lunatics, with melancholy cellists and trust fund bongo artists, with druids and chess sharks and yoga zealots, with evangelical nuts and junkies on the nod, with Mom and Pop and the Slovak guidebook, with the family fanny pack and the baby sling and the drooling, beaming jablko of their eye. There are nine kinds of music in the breeze, of pomp and flourish and dirty low down, and two dozen smells, the best of which walks straight up MacDougal from that new pizza place. Cherry blossoms over here and the ghosts of Pollock and Ginsberg over there, and the whole ringing thing as Beat and ecstatic as Kerouac's hatband."...

    Well, let's just say that it would have been deleted.
     
  7. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Think Natalie Merchant had best discription of NYC street scene:

    I've walked these streets
    A virtual stage
    It seemed to me
    Make up on their faces
    Actors took their
    Places next to me

    I've walked these streets
    In a carnival
    Of sights to see
    All the cheap thrill seekers
    The vendors & the dealers
    They crowded around me

    Have I been blind
    Have I been lost
    Inside myself and
    My own mind
    Hypnotized
    Mesmerized
    By what my eyes have seen?

    I've walked these streets
    In a spectacle of wealth & poverty
    In the diamond market
    The scarlet welcome carpet
    That they just rolled out for me

    I've walked these streets
    In the mad house asylum
    They can be
    Where a wild eyed misfit prophet
    On a traffic island stopped
    And he raved of saving me

    Have I been blind
    Have I been lost
    Inside myself and
    My own mind
    Hypnotized
    Mesmerized
    By what my eyes have seen?
     
  8. 21

    21 Well-Known Member

    Natalie Merchant seems more like an Elaine's type.
     
  9. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Poor Elaine. She has become a code word much like "athletic" or "upper west sider"
     
  10. clintrichardson

    clintrichardson Active Member

    I am a big fan of macgregor's, but I didn't like this. Not a great topic for him, and I almost feel like he realized it partway in, but instead of pulling out he just kept going.
     
  11. Small Town Guy

    Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

    I actually love that graf, one of my favorites in the piece.

    A few thoughts:
    - Dick had concern about how young writers might read this and, horrors, try to emulate it. This sounds way too much like, "Won't someone please think of the children." As Carlin said, "Fuck the children." Or, in this case, fuck the young writers. As DD said, young writers who want to improve or one day be great will read a wide-range of things, from newspapers and novels, to magazine pieces and blogs. They'll eventually learn what works and what doesn't and they'll learn by writing and by continuing to read. And if they read this piece - and, weirdly, don't read anything else all week - and think, "That's how I'm going to write when I get big," it will be okay. They'll probably be terrible. Most would be terrible. But there'd be someone who could pull it off, whose eyes will have been opened to new possibilities with their writing. And maybe someday they'll write a book as good as Sunday Money and the writing world will be a better place for it and I'll really look forward to reading their work and I'd be really happy that this piece influenced them.

    -The audience. For countless sportswriters, Sports Illustrated of the 1970s-80s was the most influential magazine, the magazine that wrote the most memorable stories, the magazine most writers dreamed of working for, the place that produced stories we quoted. And it also happened to be the most successful sports magazine in the country, one of the most influential sports outlets in any medium. Regular sports fans - the ESPN.com audience of the day - relied on SI for the actual sports news of the day. Yet there was still room for dozens of writers and dozens of types of voices, whether literary or straightforward.

    There was room for Deford, Kirkpatrick, Jenkins, Kram, Smith, Reilly, Nack, Swift, Zimmerman, Price, and on and on. And that was in a weekly magazine, with tight space. This is ESPN.com, with unlimited resources and space. There's room for Simmons and Hollinger. There's room for True Hoop's Kobe Bryant obsession. There's straightforward Xs and Os talk. And there's sure as hell room for pieces that are a bit more lyrical, that are outside the box. Outside the cage, if you will. No one's going to read this story and think, "God damn it, I don't come to ESPN.com for this. I'm here for talk about who the Seahawks will take in the fourth round." And if they do think that and do get upset, it's obviously someone who is completely incapable of operating a mouse or navigating the espn.com homepage.

    - Was rereading Michael McCambridge's superb history of SI, The Franchise. A section on William Nack, after Tyson's guilty verdict:
    I'm guessing a lot of people here would think it was excessive too. Overwritten. Yeats? In a sports magazine? About a rape conviction? Roll of the eyes. Yet that anecdote is used in the section when McCambridge is writing about SI's deterioration, when the magazine was losing its way as the editing became too heavy-handed and dictatorial. Now maybe a young writer would have read the piece and thought it was cool to work some Yeats into his 10-inch story in the weekly gazette. So what? Some writers can pull these things off. Nack could. MacGregor can. Was this column as good as his "Let Us Now Raze Famous Men"? No. But I really liked it because I think it perfectly described the scene and setting, yet wasn't the cliched NYC playground piece. It did have a different angle and, thankfully, as always with MacGregor, a different style.

    So to answer the original question: sublime. Unlike this post, which is certainly overwritten.
     
  12. Double Down

    Double Down Well-Known Member

    Of all the posts in all the gin joints in the world, that is definitely one of my favorites, STG.
     
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