The Effects of Zadie Smith's Changing Mind

            Previous to this week’s reading, what I knew of Zadie Smith extended no further than the knowledge that she inhabited the coveted world of the literary prodigy. She published her first book at 25—not only that, but the text was a critical success. Damn her, I’ve often thought. How many authors have what it takes to prove within their first published work that they are a writer of exceptional talent and insight?

            It was satisfying then, to actually read her writing and witness for myself her exceptional ability. She doesn’t merely have a way with words—she has considerable intelligence and has mastered its translation onto the page.  Though I haven’t yet read her fiction--her main medium—and am therefore unable to speak to her entire set of skills, I feel confident in writing that Smith has a special knack for exploring a topic with nuance and conviction while also employing fascinating elements of neutrality, confession and flexibility of opinion. NPR’s Heller McAlpin notes that “Whether writing about Foster Wallace, Forster or Zora Neale Hurston, Smith shows a deeply intellectual and continually evolving appreciation of literature,” while also reminding us that “a flexible mind is an open mind.” This emphasis on evolution and flexibility is the seed of Smith’s genius in Changing My Mind, I think.

            Typically, I have serious philosophical reservations about critical analysis or theory around a text. I feel this way for a variety of reasons but predominantly because I have a hard time buying the idea that any thinker is as sure of a theory or evaluation as authors tend to be in these types of writing. What is rarely evident is the process through which the thinker/writer had to muddle before reaching her or his conviction. There is a thesis, proof, and conclusion. As a compulsive muddler myself, I find this form difficult to understand and impossible to sympathize. I might be so bold as to say that Zadie Smith agrees with me here—and I find evidence for this in “Rereading Bathes and Nabokov.” She starts out this essay by unquestioningly agreeing with Nabokov’s theory (or belief) that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” (42) From these first two pages, however, Smith doesn’t go on to haughtily espouse upon her own theories or beliefs about writing, reading and the different stances on the subjects held by these two famous authors. Instead, she turns her essay into a vague map of the journey she took through Nabokov and Barthe’s ideas, confessing without embarrassment her ideological missteps and naïve misreading. She does all of this without ever losing authority or conviction within her narrative voice, which is quite extraordinary as I assume that many authors avoid forms like the one Smith is taking for fear of losing authority and conviction in the minds of readers. Instead, the fact that Smith invites us into her own intellectual evolution through engaging, sometimes funny prose, makes her ultimate conclusions that much more firm and believable. There don’t seem to be any pretenses. She says to us relatively straight forwardly—hey, I once read Barthes “badly,” but from that experience I know have gained a better understanding of how to read him well.

            What do I mean when I write that Zadie Smith’s narrative is engaging? As the assigned reviews we read suggest, I am surely not the only one to assess the author in this way. I think that the engaging nature of her prose lies in its confessional nature. She doesn’t seem to be holding back, to be putting on any falsities or exaggerations of her skills and intelligence. Perhaps her ability to avoid such things is rooted in her early success. Or perhaps she is a writer who simply feels comfortable with herself on the page, not allowing hesitation over including some element of her personal self (her British sense of humor, for example) amidst more formal, intellectual evaluations. She thus mixes a warm conversation with a hot academic debate. She pits two literary greats against each other and then injects her own grappling with their work in a way that both proves her ability to critically exchange with such nuanced texts and entities while asserting herself as a thinker with evolving, sometimes incorrect understandings. Ricky Opaterny writes in reference to an interview Smith gave that “Smith critiques with a seriousness that is funny rather than earnest, engaging rather than alienating.” I agree with him that her critiques are serious, funny and engaging—but I think he is wrong in saying that she is not earnest. Smith is indeed earnest in her thoughts and theories—even when she later divulges that she has since changed her mind—and in this earnest approach is an important part of why she can be so engaging. She isn’t afraid to say in a way, this is what I believe NOW, and I believe it fully, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t soon change my mind. Such is an admission of her humanness—the ultimate engaging quality of an author.

            On a somewhat related note, I was intrigued by Smith’s stance on memoir. She told NPR: "I think maybe with the rest of my family, they're much larger than life. My father was a little bit more elusive," she says. But "it's also a betrayal once you write about someone who's died: What remains is what you've written. And it begins to replace your memories the way that photographs replace real things. So I think it's a dangerous act. I don't think I'd ever write a full memoir for that reason — it seems to over-slick reality with something else."

            For an author so fearless about being wrong in her critical writing, I find it surprising that she would be so apprehensive about getting it “wrong” in memoir. I sympathize with her worries that “what remains is what you’ve written” about a person now dead, but I am struck by the fact that she doesn’t see the similarities between muddling through the facts or perceptions around a person’s life and muddling through literary theories. As her beliefs about Nabokov and Barthes evolved over time and therefore created further nuance to her interpretations, her beliefs about her father surely evolved as well, therefore creating new insight regarding his life and its impact upon hers.

Where in Hell is the Devil? Thoughts on Plot and Research in The Devil in the White City

Mr. H.H. Homes himself. (Source: catkinsdiet.tumblr.com)

I have to admit that I was pretty excited to read Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. The subtitle really snagged me: “Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.” I have a penchant for both historical nonfiction and factual crime writing. Call it a dark nerdiness. I was eager to explore a volume that juxtaposes a fleeting moment in history with one of human nature’s most constant, reoccurring elements: our ability to do gruesome harm to others. I was generally familiar with H.H. Holmes as a murderous entity. You don’t grow up in the Midwest with a fascination in the grim without hearing something about the serial killer doctor who made a name for himself in a hotel outfitted with homicidal secret rooms, levers, and corpse disposal devices. I was only a little aware of the marvels of the 1893 World’s Fair and was eager to learn more about the no-doubt fascinating elements that made it what it was. So, I sat down with Devil in the White City ready to dig in to a meaty piece of historical crime nonfiction that, like the reviews on the back outside cover promised, would be “engrossing,” “dazzling,” and “utterly fascinating.”

            Having completed the reading, I can’t say that this book lived up to even a fraction of the hype my own brain had generated. Yes, I expected something different than what the book truly is—and that is, in part, my own fault. After all, what published document ever included anything but glowing reviews on its covers? I have a certain angle to my interests and I made a mistake in expecting a book to conform to such particulars. However, beyond my own faulty expectations, I still must conclude that Larson’s work is quite inexcusably (and surely purposely) mis-titled. For a book marketed as a great work of fact crime writing, it sure concentrates its telling on a disproportionally small amount of writing about actual crime. Instead, this book details meticulously, at great length, nearly every aspect of putting together the World’s Fair of ’93. There are character profiles of the Chicago Gilded Age’s most influential men, meeting notes, dinner menus, pages detailing petty arguments between architects, paragraphs and paragraphs of narrative worry over whether or not the Fair will ever open its doors. (Spoiler Alert circa 1893: It does.)

            There is no doubt: Larson did an incredible amount of research for this book. His endnotes span to #390—one for each page written. His bibliography includes dozens upon dozens of books, periodicals, letters and diaries. There is no little value to the fact that he amassed so much information into the pages of one volume. Devil in the White City stands as an invaluable resource for anyone longing to know how, exactly, the Chicago World’s Fair was executed on the executive scale (we hear very little about the experience of the worker or employee). In general, he was able to translate these primary and secondary sources into the embodiment of several vivid characters—most notably Burnham and Olmstead—thus offering human softness to the pages of factual recollection. What Devil in the White City does not stand as, in my mind, is a great, or even all that good, work of crime writing.

(Source: broadwayworld.com)

According to my calculations, there are but 132 pages written on Holmes and his crimes—as opposed to the remaining 258 pages left to detail Burnham’s every move along with a seemingly inconsequential (for the means of this book, that is) foray into the assassin, Prendergast. The lopsidedness of these two narrative strains raises questions in my mind beyond the choice in titling—if I were to be very diplomatic, I could see the “Devil” in the title as a reference to the complications and tragedies experienced in making and maintaining the fairgrounds, rather than only an allusion to Holmes. Rather, it makes me question the way that research clearly dictated the drive of this book. One of the reasons why the Gilded Age is so vivid in the minds of modern society is that it was an exceedingly well-documented era, as Larson himself details. Literacy was on the rise, meaning that letters describing all parts of daily life were long and frequent. Newspapers were gaining speed and readers, so that civic and other events were recorded and interpreted for future generations. Still and moving pictures were becoming exceedingly common, marking the first time in history where we are able to judge and assess an era not only on words, documents and subjective art work, but actual, factual images. From this flurry of sources, Larson was able to craft a three-dimensional world around Burnham and his colleagues—other that digging up such elements, he just had to read, study and turn them out with his narrative flair into chapters. In many ways, the writing appearing in those 258 pages was already half finished for Larson before he even sat down at his computer. The facts, the quotes—they were there already. (I don’t mean to minimize his effort here—this no doubt demanded an extreme amount of work and thought.)

What seems to have been much less pre-packaged is information on Holmes. Until his arrest, he was a nobody (an identity deeply connected to his ability to commit such murders) and therefore had a much smaller paper trail than the rest of the book’s subjects. What Larson did have was witness testimony and Holmes’ own memoir—all produced after the murders had been discovered. Drawing an authentic character out of such slanted and colored sources was a huge challenge—one I think Larson met by simply overwhelming the reader with the research he WAS able to rely upon: all those meticulously detailed (and, in my opinion, really quite boring) Fair facts. In some places, Larson seemed to take liberties with Holmes’ story, offering conjecture or narrative interpretation, as evidenced in the scene describing Anna’s final thoughts as she suffocated in the vault. In other places, though, it seemed like Larson was wary of stepping outside of the information his sources offered, making the chapters on Holmes brief and mounted in foreshadowing that never truly developed into the excitement it promised.

Why was Larson so hesitant to expand upon Holmes’ personality and crimes at times and not at others? What consequences accrue when a writer forms structure and plot around research that is readily available? In the case of this book, I would say that the major consequence is a lopsided plot and a number of boring pages leading nowhere. I think the disparity in focus between the two subjects might have been easier for me to take had the two story strains been working together towards an insightful, revolutionary theme. However, when I reached the final pages, I found nothing of the sort. It seems to me that the juxtaposition between murderer and creators was merely meant to highlight the irony and fallacies inherent in building a city meant to epitomize progress, culture and beauty amongst a setting of increasing filth and depravity. Sure, this is an interesting idea to consider, but one I found to be apparent within the first 20 pages—meaning that I did not need another 370 pages to drill the point home. After all, isn’t evil behind the face of success kind of the well-known theme of the Gilded Age as a whole? What then, does Larson offer us in this juxtaposition that we don’t already know well enough? What was billed as “a wonderfully unexpected book” that balances “grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World’s Fair” (from the back cover) is, in my opinion, not. It would be better classified as a book of historical documentation than a story of “Murder, Magic and Madness.”

The form and framing of this book did imbed in me some lingering questions, however: How does an author build suspense in the telling of a historical event, the ending of which many readers are already aware? Should suspense even be an attempted story-telling technique in historical nonfiction? I personally found Larson’s continued attempt to build suspense and speculation around whether or not the Fair would be completed or successful an annoying time waster. What made this device especially annoying was the uniformity in the way he attempted it: a line break and then a single, short sentence before a chapter or section’s end. Hey, Larson: the cover of your book is a picture of the Fair. We know it happened, so stop trying to make us worry that it might not. In my mind, Larson’s suspense attempts is tantamount to a writer crafting a book on the Titanic that works to get readers’ biting their nails over whether or not the ship really was “unsinkable.” On the other hand, the suspension elements did serve to show just how precarious the situation was, how contingent the Fair’s existence was on so many small factors. It highlighted the domino effect that dictates the failure or success of such massive undertakings. So then, when is it appropriate to use suspense in historical nonfiction, and how is it best used? I’ll try to consider this as I look back over other nonfiction works of history that I found more satisfying than Larson’s apparent masterpiece.

Of Interest: Another Fictitous Piece of Nonfiction

This time, we're talking about a best seller from the 1970's: Sybil, by Flora Rheta Screiber. Turns out that this highly influential volume isn't marred by a few fact-checking problems. Rather, the entire work is being exposed as fabricated and false--invented purely for book sales:

Sally Field's 'Sybil' was a lie: Best-selling child abuse and split personality author exposed as a fake

Victim? Shirley Mason, who was revealed to be the basis for Sybil, said in a 1958 letter that she was lying

It was a best-selling 'true story' that planted the notion of repressed memory syndrome in the American consciousness.
The shocking account of Sybil, a girl with 16 separate personalities that developed as a result of horrendous childhood abuses, sold seven million copies, and even spawned a recognised syndrome, 'multiple personality disorder. 
The 1973 book told the story of Sybil Dorsett, later revealed to be Shirley Mason, whose personality had been splintered into more than a dozen distinct characters including a baby and two males.
But the titillating tale, serialised across the nation, has now been exposed as a fake, concocted by three women as a calculated money-making invention
A new book 'Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case' denounces the account as a fiction.
According to the author, Debbie Nathan, the memoir was cooked up by three individuals hungry for fame and fortune: Mason, her therapist Cornelia (Connie) Wilbur and journalist Flora Schreiber.

Read the rest here. 


As strange as it sounds, growing up this book was a hot button topic in my household. My parents, both forensic psychologists, were often called into court cases dealing with individuals claiming a so-called multiple personality disorder-- an "illness" they both found to be manufactured and improbable. In many ways, the multiple personality disorder phenomenon that has occurred in the mainstream was tripped off by this book, which claimed to be evidence of the existence and contributory causes of MPD. Following Sybil's popularity, reports of MPD skyrocketed, going from nonexistent to virtually commonplace. While many in the psychological/psychiatric community contested its authenticity, there were others that jumped on the bandwagon. It sickens me to think that the lies propagated in this book contributed to an entire generation of mislead, regressive strides in mental health. Of course, it would be naive to assume that this book is the only contributing factor to the emergence of a largely manufactured or mislabeled disorder (the mental health community themselves must take a good deal of credit) but the exposure of its fallacies is certainly an example of the far-reaching impacts of fiction marketed as fact.

On Words and Images: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

[In reference to Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout, by Lauren Redniss]

            I love graphic novels. There, I said it. I love graphic novels, but why does admitting it feel like I’m divulging some guilty pleasure? Perhaps my shame is rooted in the glorification of words, which most writers (including myself) build their entire creative worlds upon. Individually and collectively, words can do it all—paint pictures, relay facts, create dialogue, provoke emotion—and it is the inherent burden of the writer to take advantage of this versatility, to embrace the medium and concentrate all of our efforts upon it. The idea that a writer would turn to a different instrument to do what words could do alone suggests in some minds a deficiency on the writer’s part—as though, if the writer were a true master of language they wouldn’t have to lean on illustrations (read: picture books) to accomplish their creative goals.  

I saw this kind of condescension even in an article meant to celebrate new graphic writing: The Atlantic’s “Comic Books as Journalism.” At the article’s end, Kristin Butler writes, “These 10 books bring a childlike sense of wonder to their subjects, something that comes in part from the cross-disciplinary collaborations between artists, designers, and writers that yielded the work in the first place.” A “childlike sense of wonder”? Why? Because, since they are illustrated, the reader is returning to childhood when books were simple and spelled out through pictures? To so many in the literary community (myself included if I am honest about the reasoning behind my shame for loving graphic novels) images = easy = children’s books = simplicity.  Simple books are rarely good books so graphic novels and the like are often demoted to the second tier of literature: interesting, but not serious.

There are several problems with these assumptions: the first is that words are all-powerful. I have yet to meet a writer who hasn’t been frustrated at some point by the limitations of words. In fact, some of the greatest writers in history found the need to invent new words to fulfill some open space of meaning that the language’s current vocabulary didn’t yet possess. The second problem lies in the assumption that deviating from the happy home of language and text is some sort of failure, a reversion to kids’ books, a resolve to settle for lesser depth or lesser creativity. It is as though graphics are a cheat, a shortcut. For those of us obsessed with the written word, it is hard to admit that words are not the only way to relay deep and complicated meaning. (Of course, to musicians and visual artists, this revelation comes as no surprise). What may be even harder to admit is that words and images can coexist in harmony, complicating text rather than simplifying. Together, they evoke different meanings than they do separately. Where words manipulate one sense, and images another, combined they play a new game with our brains, blowing open wider spaces for varied interpretation and transcendent information. It is for this reason that I love graphic novels—not because they are an “easy” read but because they have the potential to complicate and deepen.

What better example of a work of images and text that complicates its subject matter than Lauren Redniss’ Radioactive? Here is a book operating on multiple levels that come together to create a new intensity and depth. I’ll attempt to parse these levels out—explaining how they work by themselves and together: 

1.)  Words: How they stand alone

a.     Informational Narrative. Redniss’ textual authorial presence is nestled mostly within these blocks of text that seem to be focused merely on relaying the facts. They are often descriptive, but simply so, in a way that does not distract from the (often complicated) information being provided. She uses this voice to provide context, but also to set up a section of authoritative quotations or testimony, which will paint in the nuances of the event in question. I find it quite remarkable that a book that reaches such emotional depth does so mostly through the author’s guidance towards primary sources, rather than her overt interpretations. Example: “As he crossed the busy intersection of Rue Dauphine near the Seine, in the gloom and the snarl of traffic, the physicist was struck by a horse-drawn carriage crossing the Pont Neuf. His daughter Eve later described the moment . . .” (96)

b.     Curie Quotes. These sections demonstrate the wisdom behind Redniss’ choice of subject. How excellent it is to have a biographical subject that is so articulate! By including Marie Curie’s own alternately poetic and scientific (and always insightful) words, the author brings the subject out from under the thumb of two dimensional research and allows Curie to tell her own story. The repetition of this tactic and its employment in describing the various stages of her life means that Curie is a three-dimensional character, alive and involved on the page. This is a goal I think most biographers aim for, but never before have I seen it done with such few words and so little authorial interpretation. Example: “My Pierre, I got up after having slept rather well, relatively calm. That was barely a quarter of an hour ago, and now I want to howl again—like a savage beast.” (106)

c.     Testimony. Here is where we are getting really interesting when it comes to the text department. Redniss interrupts the Curies’ story to introduce testimony from individuals somehow affected by Marie and Pierre’s research. Often, she provides no warning or introduction to these sections—they are stuck right between the pages of the Curie narrative, demonstrating that these stories are also their stories, just as the Curie story is now a part of the lives of those nuclear research affected. The testimony speaks for itself—Redniss’ own narrative is only injected as a means to create context. The testimony demonstrates the wide-reaching impact (both negative and positive) of the Curies’ life without Redniss expounding on it herself. She is allowing both facts (that the bombing of Hiroshima happened, for example,) and subjectivity (for example, that Daniel Fass can’t see his face in the radiation mask) to have its say and the effect is complicating and insightful.

2.)   Images: How they interact with the text

a.     Cyanotype prints. One look at these dreamy, impressionistic images and you know that Radioactive is no comic book. It is as much a work of art as it is of literature. Though I am no authority on art history, I find her prints to be expressionistic—which is a style intended to relay emotion or meaning rather than physical reality. Her images are atmospheric and provocative with a special attention to hands—which perhaps is a reference to the incredible power unleashed by the Curies’ own hands as they worked in the lab. The prints hold even deeper significance when one learns how they are made—that is, through chemistry and ultraviolet light. Consequently, Redniss uses science to explain or illuminate science, creating a lovely loop that turns method into meaning.

b.     Photos/primary sources. Though the author has a clear creative vision for this book, she does not lean only on her own artwork, instead lending her pages to photos, print outs, testimonial art, scientific renditions and maps. In my mind, these inclusions are what ground this “Images” section in the nonfiction form. Redniss is linking her own interpretive artwork to factual sources, demonstrating the reality of the topics at hand. She also allows these sources to deliver information that the narrative would otherwise need to—for example, the picture on pages 110-111 of Marie teaching at the Sorbonne in front of a room of neck-tied men demonstrates powerfully the weight behind such an appointment to a woman, while Redniss writes only one sentence on the topic. The author chooses images already laden with visual significance—or if they aren’t, she alters them in some way to provoke a response.  These sources work in conjunction with her own artwork, adding an extra, illuminative layer.

c.     Layout of text. I have to include this layer under the “Images” category because it is more physical than it is literary. Unlike more books that include imagery, Redniss lays her text around images, rather than her images around text. She manipulates spacing to create an eye-pleasing physical appearance. She does not shy away from long open space among short lines of words. She frames blocks of text by parts of images or forms it into shadows of her illustrations. She turns the layout of her text into an avenue for authorial presence—subtly, she is telling us how to read each block of text, what context to think of it in, what emotion might be involved. Take, for example, page 128, where the text is shoehorned into the image of a long, claustrophobic corridor. The exit at the end of the hall looks to be so far away as the walls and its violent paintings close in on the reader and the text. The words on the page mirror the emotions invoked in the image—the walls of Marie and Paul Langevin’s love affair are now caving in as Madame Langevin launches an attack to end the tryst. The words on the opposite page, 129, are shoved between the images of a man and a woman with their backs to each other, demonstrating visually the emerging division described within the text.

       

       As I think I’ve demonstrated here, Radioactive attains its thematic significances through a symphonic interplay between words and pictures. As the words work to illuminate the images, the images in turn illuminate the text, ultimately resulting in more depth and nuance than one might be able to obtain by sticking to a single medium. Is this book perfect? No—I look forward to hearing about the limitations my classmates might have found in this volume. However, this biography stands to me as solid evidence that graphic literature need not be simple literature, that not all picture books are childlike and one-dimensional.

       So, am I still ashamed to say that I love graphic novels and other works of pictorial literature? Not with a work as nuanced as Radioactive to point to as evidence that the written word can find productive company amongst visual art.

P.S. Any book that glows in the dark has a special place in my heart.

Across The Atlantic: Some Thoughts on Effective Articles and Ineffective Multi-media Applications

Source: pentagram.com

The Atlantic magazine has always been on my reading radar, but I can’t honestly say that I am an avid reader. No—I don’t subscribe or even check the site out on a monthly basis, but I do find myself turning to The Atlantic when I want to read an article on a news story that I find utterly befuddling. I find that the magazine tends to publish articles that present comprehensive, even-keeled analysis of complicated topics that save me the burden of combing through a multitude of articles from other news outlets before gaining enough background and foreground on a subject to form my own opinion. Even better, in my experience The Atlantic stays well away from the zone of mere summary by publishing authors that are uniquely qualified or otherwise able to shed unexplored insight on a subject. Pair such revelations with excellent writing and topic comprehension and you’ve got, in my opinion, an article that is the perfect package deal.

James Fallows’ “How America Can Rise Again” seems to me to be a great example of The Atlantic’s ability to provide the whole package with its articles. Fallows begins by outlining, in case you’ve missed it, the basics tenets of the argument that America is newly on a slippery slope to hell. He includes a personalized narrative, excerpts of interviews and commentary informed, he tells us, from his own experience in politics—which all assist in ensuring that, though we are reading a summary of a topic, we don’t feel like we are reviewing old news. With the stage set and the arguments against America’s continuing prosperity clear, he moves on to critically evaluating these assumptions with the help of a wide array of other informed voices gleaned from a large number of interviews and research into applicable literature and history. Finally, refusing to leave us with all problem and no solution, he finishes the article by exploring our options, both through the authority of his personal narrative and continued consultations from expert sources.

Of course, one can’t forget the multi-media options that go along with this article on The Atlantic’s site: charts, video interviews and a link to a related article. These extras help to expand upon the analysis that Fallows offers, building new insight or perspective on the larger themes of the print article. The way the magazine uses these extra sources is my preferred practice when it comes to multi-media add-ons: they treat them as supplementary, completely non-mandatory but completely enlightening nonetheless. These digital offerings provide the reader with the option to expand their thinking on the subject but the article on the remains completely self-sustained—meaning that, whether you choose to clink on the “Interactive Graph” or not, you’ll still be getting a full, comprehensive read.

By the end of the article you’ve got a tight little package of information and insight—no need to look elsewhere for background info, perhaps inspired to keep reading on the topic elsewhere on the site. I finished this article feeling as though I had a much better grip on the reality of America’s standings as global, social and economic entities along with some new ideas and solutions to mull over.

It was interesting to follow up Fallows’ extensive article with Rhett Miller’s “About That Day.” I have never before read an article in The Atlantic (or on its website) that consists solely of a personal account of a significant event. The individual insight Miller delivers in this article is quite enlightening—after gaining all my information about 9/11 from generally analytic news articles and books, it is fascinating to read an eye-witness report of Manhattan in the minutes before and after the towers fell. This piece is highly intimate. Miller doesn’t attempt to link his experience to anyone else’s and (rightly, I think) avoids the inclination to attach his experience to a larger message about that day. Reading Fallows’ piece just before, by the time I finished “About That Day,” I found it refreshing to find that The Atlantic is a venue willingly harboring two such different kinds of writing. Rather than attempting to stay with one genre (either personal accounts or investigative articles), the magazine seems to be embracing the value of each form as informative, enlightening works of writing. 

In case you couldn't tell from his haircut and leather jacket, Rhett Miller wants you to know that he is a musician. Source: dedica.la   

 

            However, I am not so sold on the multi-media inclusions in “About That Day” as I am with “How America Can Rise Again.” When I saw that Miller is a musician, I assumed that we were provided with this information because his profession would deliver further insight into the topic on which he wrote, just as Fallows’ history of political involvement offered a valuable perspective to his article. But then I listened to Miller’s linked music video and by the time the 3.30 minute clip was over, I found myself deeply questioning the relevancy of the writers’ music to the testimony provided in the article. Whereas the multi-media options attached to Fallows’ piece offers further insight, Miller’s video offered . . . well, I really can’t come up with any valuable element it brought to the table, outside of a hefty dose of self-promotion. In regards to his article, what does it matter that Miller is a musician (outside of the fact that he lost his guitar in the disaster—just one personal item among millions gone that day)? What information are we given by watching a video of a song whose 3^rd verse may or may not have been influenced by 9/11? And what about the hokey disaster montages played over this acoustic tune? What does that sentimentalism offer us other than a forced reminder that the song is somehow connected to the destruction of the World Trade Towers? If the Fallows piece sums up effective multi-media usage, then, in my mind, Miller’s piece sums up that which is most ineffective. It is expository and irrelevant, an add-on with little other purpose than to provide a face to the text on the page. In my opinion, this piece would be just as strong without the music video—perhaps stronger if you are one to get offended by self-promotion placed under the guise of relevant reporting. My thought is typically that if an element of an article doesn’t provide a relevant purpose, either creative or informative, your only choice is to toss it. One benefit of these sorts of multi-media options, of course, is that it is the readers’ choice as to whether or not he or she takes the time to explore them. Yet, with a publication that clearly knows how to put such features to good use, I would expect a level of consistency in the value of the media they choose to include.

Hello, “Goodbye”: On the Relevancy of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”

New York in the 1960's. Source berlincheesecake.blogspot.com

          When I left New York after four years spent in the shadow of the city, I was unable to find the words to explain why I felt the urgent need to escape. At the time, all of my friends were moving into the hipster-haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn and spoke about New York City as the only sensible place in the entire world in which to live. “Everything is here,” one of them told me, and I couldn’t disagree. After all, it wasn’t long ago that I had arrived in Yonkers from Michigan, where life seemed small and provincial in contrast to the big world of the Big Apple. I had refused to apply to college anywhere outside of New York City’s tri-state area, confident that the city was the best and only option for an aspiring writer looking to learn the world. Over those four years, I spent weekends on Canal Street, in SoHo, DUMBO and the museum district; I spent summers living on Christopher Street in the West Village. Everything seemed to be there, in New York. Yet, by May of my last year in college, I was packing my bags for Georgia, bound for a life that promised to be the exact opposite of what was there in the city. My friends acted like I had chosen to move to a third-world country. “What the hell are you going to do out there?” a friend worriedly asked me. “Become a peanut farmer?” The truth was that I had no idea what I was going to do in Georgia, but I knew I couldn’t stay in New York—I just didn’t know how to explain why. But, in 1967, Joan Didion did.

            Isn’t it thrilling to find a piece of writing that captures so perfectly an experience or emotion with which you are so familiar? Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” is that kind of essay for me, though her prose and analysis is surely more elegant than mine might ever be. What was surprising to me was that, while my experience emerged from the early years of the 21^st century, Didion wrote her essay in 1967, exactly 40 years before I made my exodus South. A lot of things happened in and around New York City in those 40 years—from a rise in population of over 280,000 people, to the substitution of the iconic if bulky medallion cabs for Crown Vics, to the rise and fall of the World Trade Center towers—yet still, Didion’s experience seemed to speak directly to my own with few obvious exceptions. In my mind, this connection illustrates how and why “Goodbye to All That” has such staying power. The author is writing not about a time in New York or in her own life, but rather she was defining the entity New York has become within the collective consciousness of young Americans growing up in small towns. It is about the emotion connected to a location—and, as far as I know, emotion does not expire with a new decade. 

Source: nnbd.com

In this piece, Didion doesn’t write about what New York was as a place, she writes about what the city felt like to her. She helps to open her experience to her readers by repeatedly using the pronouns “us” and “we”: “I suppose a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens.” In doing so in 1967, she acknowledged and asserted the universality of her experience within her generation; now, two generations later, this tactic succeeds at the same goal. Yet, though accepting that she is not alone in her interpretations of New York, she concentrates most of her prose around her own personal sentiments and life events in a way that is so precise and so impassioned that it is easy for a reader to empathize with the humanity of her experience, rather than the mere specifics. Reading this essay, I am reminded of the importance of writing beyond just a time in history and instead turning nonfiction prose towards deeper, more universal concepts about meaning and emotion. After all, isn’t that precisely why Shakespeare remains so popular, because he was able to capture human emotions that remain as authentic today as they did first performed on the dirty stage of the Globe?

Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” was first published in The Saturday Evening Post under the title “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” It was published within her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I am a little ashamed to say that, despite that Slouching sits on my bookshelf while I write, and despite the fact I have read most of its essays, I have never before read “Goodbye to All That.” In reading the essay on its own through Byliner, it was removed from the context of Didion’s previous work and was allowed to stand on its own. It wasn’t bookended by other essays that are far more illustrative of the time in which the author wrote, nor influenced by other cultural or personal assessments she made throughout her volume. It made me feel like I was given an opportunity to read it as it was first published, in a magazine, stuck amidst nonrelated text, insisting to be taken on its own. Beyond the fact that Byliner and sites like it have the ability to turn the spotlight on classic though potentially forgotten works, it seems to permit and encourage the kind of reading experience that I had here, where the essay stands alone and for itself. But it isn’t as if we are reading such resurrected works within a vacuum. Once I finished “Goodbye to All That,” I returned to Byliner to peruse the other Didion works they had on file—works that spanned from the early ‘60s to 2008. Some of these pieces were hard-to-obtain magazine exclusives; others had been published within her many volumes of essays. Either way, viewing her work throughout the different stages of her career allowed me to explore “Goodbye” also as a cog in the workings of the author’s long and prolific career. In my mind, that is the greatest benefit Byliner and other sites maintaining classic works offer to modern readers: the ability to read a work both and separately as an isolated essay standing on its own, and as a piece that speaks to the larger assemblage of an author’s career.