Digital Serials: "Punched Out" by John Branch

Here's a link to the first installment, "A Boy Learns to Brawl."

Writing Prompt: Description

In October we meet at the “O”, an on-campus restaurant of dubious cleanliness and another checkmark on her list of must-try Pittsburgh eateries, the same list I press on every out-of-towner I know. She’s from up north, just stopping in for a few years of grad school, but I’ve already coerced her into trying a sandwich piled with fries, coleslaw, and cheese, and divulged the secret ingredient of local salads.

Yes, it’s French fries. On everything. And though she seems like the healthy type—a vegetarian—with a much more refined palate than mine—that is, able to handle Indian food—she is open to giving a greasy basket of “O” fries a shot.

When we go to retrieve our food, the “O’s” high counter comes midway up to her shoulders. The main level is crowded, so in interest of hearing each of our quiet voices, we take our overflowing tray upstairs and find a seat by the window. We commiserate over classes between bites of ketchup-laden fries, and she talks about the courses she’s teaching, her boyfriend back home, and the challenges of owning a pit bull...

Response: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary”

As a person who has been moved to tears by Deadliest Catch, I totally dug the subject matter of this serial—as well as the structure, for that matter. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I like stories that “begin with the end,” and the story’s denouement is right there in the title: “The Wreck of the Lady Mary.”

We know from the beginning that this vessel is going to end up on the bottom of the ocean. It’s up to the writer to show us how it happened—and why.

And here’s my favorite feature of nonfiction at work: A writer taking a situation and drawing out its intricacies, making its full complexity apparent to the reader. In this case, Nutt presents the wreck of the Lady Mary and the loss of her crew as an accumulation of many factors. Some are human errors, while others are just matters of fate:

The EPIRB registration number being poorly transcribed, and then entered incorrectly into the system. The delay of the low-orbiting satellite. The ship’s back hatch being open. The UMIB operator only sending the alert out on one frequency instead of two.

For me, this “accumulation” of circumstances makes the situation all the more real and heart-wrenching to read about. (I literally groaned aloud when I read this about the UMIB operator’s mistake: “The radio message disappears some 40 miles short of the two dozen fishing boats working near the stricken Lady Mary.”) It makes the reader consider the “what-ifs” of the situation... What if the EPIRB had been functioning correctly? What if that low-orbiting satellite had been just overhead when it went off? What if—if the Cap Beatrice was indeed the culprit—the Lady Mary had been floating a few hundred feet further away, within the larger ship's line of sight?

An EPIRB. (Source.)

Choice of Detail

Something I hear of more frequently in fiction than nonfiction is the concept of “info-dumping”, or the excessive piling on of unnecessary information. In “The Wreck of the Lady Mary” there were a number of places where I was left wondering about the relevance of what I had just read.

Consider the part in Chapter 2 where the rescuer grabs a chocolate protein shake before he left. That totally tore me out of the story for some reason. I mean, what’s the relevance of the protein shake? Unless something happens like… I don’t know… he gets dropped into the ocean and the only thing keeping his muscles from seizing up is the fact that he DRANK THAT PROTEIN SHAKE, does that detail matter?

In the morgue, we are told: “The doorknob-less entry is key-card only.”

After the rescue: “When someone dies during transport, or a body is recovered at sea, the helicopter must be specially cleansed.”

At these moments, it felt like these details were included because they caught Nutt’s attention, not because they especially added to the scene or pushed the narrative forward. On the other hand, I didn’t mind passages like these:

“The fastest way up into the helicopter is the harness, or lifting strop, since it’s secured under the arms and legs, but when someone has been in cold water for any length of time, it’s also more dangerous. […] Saved from hypothermia, the victim could easily go into cardiac arrest before reaching the helicopter door.”

And later: “Cadaveric spasm—the rigidity of the arms and legs—is a kind of flash-freezing that occurs almost instantaneously when a victim drowns this way. The more Bobo battled to breathe, the less likely he was to live.”

Immediate relevance is definitely the key here!


Graphics

I loved the inclusion of photos, videos, and other "functional" visuals in this piece. The image that offered a historical perspective of New Jersey shipwrecks in Chapter 3 did great work for the piece, as did “The Lady Mary’s Tragic End”, with its decription of the ship’s parts and the sailors' locations. Same goes for "A Detailed Look at Each Possible Cause" and the photocopy of the EPIRB registration form—it was just so great to actually see the "C" that was mistaken for a "0". I thought this essay was a great example of how media can extend and enhance a piece of writing.

By the end, though, I wonder what this article might have looked like outside of this rigid format . . . Perhaps on a site where more customization was allowed, and the images could have flowed more naturally with the text. Still, I give them props for the great visual aids.

Images like this one -- not a functional "visual aid", exactly -- worked well for the mood of the piece.

Random Notes

- Would it be right to call the plank a "Chekhov's gun" in this piece? Nutt introduces this seemingly innocuous object at the beginning, and later, it plays a big role in saving Arias' life.

- Nutt uses the helicopter's diminishing gas supply as a way to inject tension into the piece and push the narrative along. Not sure how effective this was, considering the structure—we kind of know they're going to make it back to shore, after all.

- While I really liked the "Coping" section of the fifth installment, I just didn't connect with the sailors' families very well otherwise. I don't think we spend quite enough time with them for me to really attach to their stories. I did find this line very powerful, though: “Most fishermen understand and accept [the loss of fellow sailors], but not their families, who for centuries have waited on shores for men who never came home.”

- I wish there had been a more persistent presence of the Cap Beatrice, which sort of disappears in the middle sections of the story. Then again, I suppose the ship wasn't sending out any location signals for a while there... But I still wish there had been some mention of it, even if it was to say that "the Cap Beatrice had not sent out a signal for [however many] hours by this point" or "at this moment, the Cap Beatrice reported its location [wherever]." Guess I kind of wanted a sense of this big ship lurking around in the background.

- Occasionally there were odd "blocks" of dates/measurements in this story that made me reread passages. Example: “On April 14, 2009, in heavy rain and fog, the 85-foot scalloper Dictator was hit by the 965-foot container Florida, 21 days after the Lady Mary went down and in the same fishing ground. On July 30 of this year the 72-foot Atlantic Queen, fishing 11 miles off Long Island, was hit by the 625-foot cargo ship Baldor, which sheered off 15 feet of the Atlantic Queen’s bow.”

- Interesting that the third and fourth installments of this piece were published on the same day. I wonder why they didn't continue with a day-to-day posting schedule... Installment length, perhaps?

Response: “Encounters with the Archdruid”

John McPhee

To put it too plainly: I have mixed feelings about this book.

First, the good. It goes without saying that McPhee is a master of describing nature in a precise, no-hassle sort of way. He doesn’t need to douse his prose in flowery metaphors for it to be memorable, and I admire that. By the end of the book, I was definitely agreeing with the sentiment from our last class: I want to go on a hike with this guy, and I don’t even like hiking!

I also appreciated how McPhee managed his presence in Encounters with the Archdruid and how he characterized certain figures through their signature activities. There was Brower eating his every meal out of a Sierra Club cup—even a steak!—and Dominy’s cigar-smoking and Jim Beam-drinking. (My favorite was Park and his pick-swinging, for sure.) He really chose unique, compelling characters to follow and pit against one another.

Other positives: The way he clustered unattributed quotes (like the snippets of dialogue about Brower from the Sierra Club crowd) was interesting. I loved the ironic moment with the Forest Service guy who grouped up Brower, Park, and the rest as “wilderness-lovers.” On the whole, I feel like this book further complicated my views of conservation and development (in a good way).

But Encounters with the Archdruid did drive me crazy sometimes. On page 61, when this exchange happened . . .

Brower: “Logging follows mining.”
Park: “You can control that.”
Brower: “That’s what I’m hoping.”
Park: “Your idea of control is to keep it out.”

. . . I literally leaned back and started thumping my head off the wall behind my chair. The bickering was often painfully repetitive, and even when the characters happened to agree about something, I knew that they’d be back to arguing in a few paragraphs. But, okay—maybe it’s just me. I have a low tolerance for listening to people squabble, especially when they are so deeply entrenched in their respective camps that they can barely give an inch to one another. The lack of progression irritated me.

The constant back-and-forth also made me pretty impatient with the narrative, unfortunately. More than once I picked up my phone and searched the names of the potential development sites, just to hurry up and learn how things turned out. (FYI: Fraser was eventually pressured into selling Cumberland Island to the National Park Foundation. As for the Hualapai Dam, it’s still stalled in the proposal stages.)

I guess it’s a credit to McPhee that I cared enough, as a reader, to look up those places and check their status. And I appreciated that McPhee addressed the “I’m-not-quite-sure” majority later in the book, because that’s definitely where I’m situated. The ending of part one kind of summed up my frustrations:

Brower: “I just feel sorry for all you people who don’t know what these mountains are good for.”
McPhee: “What are they good for?”
Brower: “Berries.”
Park: “Copper.”

Part of me thought, “Ha, that’s a clever ending.” Another part thought, “75 pages later and you still completely disagree? I never would have guessed!”

Lava Falls

Themes, Messages, etc.

The most evident theme in this book was the pitting of beauty against utility. By wholeheartedly pursuing only one, you forfeit the other. There was a very interesting moment where Brower’s preoccupation with beauty was complicated by the fact that, in order to preserve it, not everyone could have access to it—is “ninety-nine-point-nine percent” enough?

In the end, though, what was the point of this book? There’s the exploration of very distinct, even divergent points of view and the dissonance they produce. There’s evidence in favor of conservation. There’s evidence in favor of (careful, environmentally-friendly) development. There's the idea of a man—in this case, multiple men—who live and breathe their subjects of interest. For me, there was no singular “message” to be found.

Also, I wondered which part of the narrative was really playing the supportive role. Were the descriptions of the hike and raft ride needed to hold up the debates? (Imagine if McPhee had invited them to sit down and chat over coffee, instead.) On the other hand, without the tension of those arguments, would the descriptions of the hike and raft ride stood on their own?

Process

Encounters with the Archdruid relies heavily on long, complicated quotations and highly detailed descriptions of the environment. McPhee mentions note-taking once, when he’s putting his papers away on the raft to keep them from getting soaked, so I suppose he did it all by hand. That’s just remarkable to me. I wouldn’t have the skill (or coordination) to keep solid notes while hiking along like that . . . Was anyone else impressed?

Response: “Mr. Lytle” and Writing the Profile

Andrew Lytle

“To the end of her long life this woman wore a velvet ribbon at her neck, fastened with a golden pin. That’s how close Lytle was to the Civil War. Close enough to reach up as a child, passing into sleep, and fondle the clasp of that pin.”

That was my favorite passage from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mister Lytle: An Essay.” It evokes a vivid image of literally reaching across time, a salient subject in a tale of an older artist and his protégé. Throughout, Sullivan does an excellent job of establishing Lytle as a relic, with his “extinct” accent and “extraterrestrial” body. (Describing the artist’s writing as “brilliantly senile” was another particularly strong turn of phrase, I think.) Something about this essay really gripped me; the theme of mortality, perhaps, but also the bits of writing wisdom sprinkled throughout.

Here are a few of the lines that most intrigued me, and my accompanying thoughts:

- “He told me I was a writer but that I had no idea what I was doing. ‘This is where the older artist comes in.’” (and later) “I tried to apply his criticisms, but they were sophisticated to a degree my efforts couldn’t repay. He was trying to show me how to solve problems I hadn’t learned existed.”

For me, this reinforces the idea of writing as a craft—something that is studied and honed over a lifetime. At the same time, there is an interesting conflict between these two passages. Though Lytle offers himself up as the knowledgeable “older artist,” he consequently confuses Sullivan by totally going over his head with his suggestions.

So, what aspects of writing are truly teachable, and which ones must be individually “discovered” as one’s craft develops? Seeing as I’m not a TA, I haven’t really had to ponder this subject. Instinctively, I’d say that “hard” rules like grammar and spelling are teachable, while personal style and voice are something an individual develops over time. (And of course, one’s style or voice might involve breaking the rules of grammar and spelling. I’m inclined to think you should know the rules before you break them, though.)

- “What he could still do, in his weakness, I couldn’t do.”

This possibly just resonated with me because I have so many aging relatives, but I thought that this line had a beautiful, poignant ring to it. I felt the same way about this selection: “I used to walk by his wedding picture, which hung next to the cupboard—the high forehead, the square jaw, the jug ears—and think, as I passed it, ‘If you wanted to contend with him, you’d have to contend with that man.’ Otherwise it was cheating.”

These passages really highlighted the differences between these two men—one at the beginning of his life and career, the other at the end of his own.

- “He wrote about the Muse, how she tests us when we’re young.”

OK, so this line really fascinated me . . . Can anyone guess what Lytle might have meant by this? I’ve heard other writers talk about their muses, but I can’t say that I have some particular figure in mind that inspires me to write. How are young artists “tested”?

-  “His toenails were of horn.” (and) “He knew how to adjust his formality by tenths of a degree, to let you know where you stood.”

Just awesome. Sullivan has a knack for choosing pitch-perfect descriptions.

The biggest disappointment for me in this piece was that, at the end, I felt that knowing so little of the Agrarian movement really cheated me out of Lytle’s intricacies. It was like having a certain pigment absent from a portrait; I got a rich-enough sense of who Lytle was, but there was still something important missing. Maybe that’s just a Critical Reader Failure on my part, as I wouldn’t say that it was Sullivan’s job to explain the Agrarian movement to me—particularly when you consider the venue for this piece. It's a subject that I'll definitely have to read up on in the future.

***

As a side note . . . Looking at this trio of profiles, I found that they also offered a glimpse into the interviewer’s writing life. The questions the writers ask and the subjects they focus upon often offer insight into their own processes, even as they are profiling others.

Schenkar is preoccupied with voice, for example, while Roiphe discusses her habit of not writing down location details when she’s interviewing.

Hope that makes sense. I was just intrigued by the way that the interviewers' characters colored these profiles.

Response: “Shipping Out” (+ comments on the Internet and writing)

Where Wallace did Supposedly Fun Things: The MV Zenith.

I first read "Shipping Out" as an undergrad, and turned to it again in the last year or so when I was writing about a county fair. Here, I've plucked out a few different features that I notice everytime I re-read this piece.


Opening Sequence

The first section of this piece functions as a sort of brochure, offering the reader a glimpse of what they’re about to encounter in the story. DFW creates rhythm through repetition, beginning most of the sentences with “I have” before selecting a verb. About half the time it’s a sensory one like “seen” or “heard,” suggesting more passive experiences, but DFW also hints at the active side of the cruise—he’s jumped at the sound of the ship’s horn, eaten all types of food, and acquired a crush on his steward.

There are the beautiful details that might have been promised by the cruise line itself: “sucrose beaches,” “sunsets that [look] computer-enhanced,” boats as “floating wedding cakes.”

But DFW balances this description with less savory details: “suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh,” “[smelling] all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway residence,” and a “flatulence-of-the-gods-like sound.” (Or my personal favorite: when he saw “a woman in silver lame projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator.” What an image.)

This is a pattern that continues throughout “Shipping Out,” with the pleasant, enjoyable aspects of the cruise meeting up against the creepy, strange, and discomforting. It's also an introduction to one of DFW's signature moves: piling image upon image and detail upon detail with nearly overwhelming effects.

Themes: Birth & Death

Early in the essay—in a section titled “Pampered to Death,” no less—DFW cites a recent suicide on a Megaship and his longtime association of the ocean with death. He characterizes the open sea as an “engine of decay” and a “primordial stew of death and decay,” populated by man-eating sharks. The image of the shark fin appears frequently in the story, a hint of darkness outside of the ship. (And in the wake of his suicide, DFW’s feelings of despair and “wanting to die” are pretty painful to read.)

On the other hand, the ship is described with a lot of birth-related vocabulary. You have the “uterine” temperatures, the “near-parental” attitude of the cruise program, and the “mother’s pulse” of the ship’s engines.

This theme not only plays up the pleasant vs. creepy dichotomy of the cruise, but also places the cruise-goers in an interesting position between life and death. (DFW alludes to this when he mentions that cruises are popular with older people or those who already feel near to death, like the pair who had spent time caring for a dying relative.) And in the end, to make it off the ship is to have "survived." It all hints to a larger psychological phenomenon beyond cruise-going.


Voice & Authorial Presence

Something I've always admired about this piece is how well it expresses DFW's authority as a writer. How many others could get away with chronicling the efficiency of their cabin's toilet and shower? Or an hour-by-hour account of what one is doing on the ship? This goes on for about 20k words, nearly 3k words of footnotes included.

For me, the success of "Shipping Out" lies in DFW's voice and visibility as an intelligent, eccentric narrator—and, as someone with a unique and necessarily cynical view on the situation. (Consider the difference between his cruise narrative and that of Frank Conroy.) His voice is consistent and dotted with Wallace-isms like "methamphetaminic" and "exfoliatingly," not to mention a healthy dose of dry wit:

[Mona's] real birthday, she informs me on Monday, is July 29, and when I quietly observe that July 29 is also the birthday of Benito Mussolini, Mona's grandmother shoots me kind of a death-look, although Mona herself is excited at the coincidence, apparently confusing the names Mussolini and Maserati.

***

Comments on the “Internet is a Disaster for Writers” Idea

In truth, I haven’t really paid much attention to this debate—mostly because I’m so deeply immersed in the pro-digital, pro-Internet camp. When I write, I like to have the TV on and music playing; for me, silence is distracting. Guess I'm part of that multitasking, digital-overload generation.

Yet, I have a hard time seeing that as a really bad thing for writers. After all, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs allow us to network with others in our field and share connections. Sites like AgentQuery and forums like AbsoluteWrite make it possible for writers to look up agent preferences, avoid publishing scams, etc. In terms of research alone, think of all the time that online databases and search engine have saved writers, and how those resources have offered inspiration. So when someone says that the Internet is oh-so-distracting and wastes our valuable time, I can’t help but feel totally unconvinced. Everyone—not only writers—has to deal with these distractions and manage their time. Why do we feel particularly wronged by it?

Response: "The Devil in the White City"

In case you haven’t heard, there are murmurs that Leonardo DiCaprio will be starring as H.H. Holmes in a film adaptation of The Devil in the White City. IMDb has the movie listed as “in pre-production” and estimates that it’ll be out in 2013. So, a fictional adaptation of a nonfiction book that uses fiction-inspired techniques.

And Leo, with a mustache that—if it’s as magnificent as Holmes’—will probably get its own billing in the credits. Awesome.

Character development

Despite the vast number of characters in The Devil in the White City, I rarely had trouble remembering who was who. Larson is talented at painting portraits of his cast with just the right amount of detail: more for primary characters like Holmes and Burnham, less for those like Pitezel. I imagine that it was tempting to follow some of those people’s stories further, but to do so would have been “going down the rabbit hole,” as we say in class. I admire Larson’s restraint in choosing the sharpest, most relevant information in building his characters.

One section in particular caught my attention. On page 79, Larson describes the meeting of “the eastern architects” with Burnham. He uses this great, sweeping line to quickly establish the groups’ shared experience:

All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones.

He goes on with this shared description to say:

They wore dark suits and crisp white collars. All had mustaches, some dark some gray.

Then the narrative splits off to look more closely at two particularly important characters:

Post was huge, the largest man in the room. Hunt was fierce, a frown in a suit, with a client list that included most of America’s richest families. Every other mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and along Fifth Avenue in New York seemed to have been designed by him…

Larson then swings back into describing the shared attributes of the group—namely, their similar backgrounds in education. This becomes a roundabout way of characterizing Burnham, who appears as an outsider:

For Burnham, with his failed attempts at getting into Harvard and Yale and his lack of formal architectural training, sitting down to dinner with these men was like being a stranger at someone else’s Thanksgiving.

All of this adds up to a quick, useful introduction to this mass of characters. And an artful one, no less—I just love that “frown in a suit” line.

That said, I did feel like there was one secondary character who got too much attention: the assassin Prendergast. I understand his function as a character, but every time the narrative jumped to him, I was pulled right out of the story.  I suppose I’d prefer to see him presented as a more mysterious figure . . . At the moment, he’s only a distraction from the main story—and the main murderer—for me.

Use of primary sources

Larson used an interesting assortment of primary sources to offer a snapshot of the White City's time and culture, ranging from:

- An inventory of the ailments treated by the fair’s hospital, from constipation to headaches to . . . “extreme flatulence.”  (See page 284.)

- A few different event menus that are kind of incomprehensible if your aren’t into French cuisine, but offer some cultural cues: time set aside for cigarettes and cigars, etc. (See pages 98 and 219).

- A reprint of how Burnham addressed his letter to Millet. (See page 389.):

Hon. F.D. Millet

To arrive on

Steamship Titanic

New York

Larson lets these sorts of sources stand on their own as part of the White City's world. They are more effective this way; for instance, wouldn't it have been far less powerful if Larson had simply said, "Millet was due to arrive on the Titanic"? I think there are some good lessons to take from The Devil in the White City in this regard.

Visual elements

When I saw the gorgeous cover of this book—with its old-timey font, sepia coloring, and lovely photo of The White City—I was excited to see how Larson worked images into his narrative. However, aside from the maps and architectural renderings at the beginning of the book, I only counted six other pictures in The Devil in the White City. None of them really interacted with the text in any way; rather, they only appeared as ornamentation for the title pages of each part. Part 1 offers a picture of Chicago circa 1889, Part 2 features the Manufactures and Liberal Arts building after a storm, etc.

I wonder if this was a choice by Larson or a choice by his publisher. Given the focus on architecture in this book, shouldn’t we have at least seen a picture of Holmes’ “Castle?” Or better yet, the blue prints?

(Source. Lots of pictures and videos here.)

How about pictures of Holmes’ victims, especially the children whom he murders at the end? (When I watched a documentary on Holmes, they showed drawings from 19th century magazines that illustrated how he went about killing the kids. Talk about an interesting comment on the time period.) Or more pictures of the White City and its architects over time? Maybe it's just my love of pre-1930s photography, but I feel that the absence of pictures—ones that contribute to the narrative, not just act as decoration—is a significant flaw in this book.