The Boy Who Wouldn't Die... Amazing piece in SI about Rae Carruth's son

I would have preferred if Lake wrote "That is the sound of forgiveness. Screaming and then silence."

 

In many ways the story is vague about Carruth wanting to kill Chancellor which is the real story. Perhaps Lake did this on purpose to carry the story line of Chancellor's G Mom.

 

Agreed, but those first five paragraphs are no small thing. They frame the whole story with not a little bit of hubris.

 

I find it hilarious that this minimalist, just-the-facts-ma'am, get out of the way approach you're championing is categorized as "old school."

Frank Deford, Mark Kram, Dan Jenkins and countless others from the 60s, 70s and 80s must have missed the memo.

I guess I can be grateful you didn't edit Kram's Thrilla in Manilla piece, Gee.

 

I wasn't going to bother with that turn of phrase because it was so rooted in false history. You left out the most obvious choice, A.J. Liebling.

 

Every one of the journalists cited in the above posts wrote ledes that were ledes. They didn't go in for lengthy musing on the nature of life followed by a segue into their story. Look, if you edit out the lede, Lake wrote amazingly well. But I couldn't get past the lede except I had to for work. He hurt himself by overwriting.
Let me put it this way. My parents have a painting that's just a poster that says "Painterly painting is ugly." That's how I feel about writerly writing.

 

I'm not sure what you're saying here, V.

Liebling wasn't purple, or even elaborate. Or are we just talking about the use of the first person?

 

"When, during some recent peregrinations in Europe, I read newspaper items about Moore's decisioning a large, playful porpoise of a Cuban heavyweight named Nino Valdes and scoop-netting a minnow like Bobo Olson, the middleweight champion, for practice, I thought of him as a lonely Ahab, rehearsing to buck Herman Melville, Pierce Egan, and teh betting odds. I did not think he could bring it off, but I wanted to be there when he tried. What would Moby-Dick be if Ahab had succeeded? Just another fish story. The thing that is eternally diverting is the struggle of man against history—or what Albert Camus, who used to be an amateur middleweight, has called the Myth of Sisyphus. (Camus would have been a great man to cover the fight, but none of the syndicates thought of it.) When I heard that the boys had been made for September 20, at the Yankee Stadium, I shortened my stay abroad in order not to miss the Encounter of the Two Heroes, as Egan would have styled the rendezvous."

— A.J. Liebling, "Ahab and Nemesis," The New Yorker, 1955.

 

We've had this exact debate before and you also cited that tacky painting. The reality of art is that everyone isn't Edward Hopper, thank god. Some of you guys like to talk about this like it's a question of absolutes. It's not. Not every writer should just "get out of the way and tell the story" because that would be boring as fuck. I love the New Yorker. Ben McGrath writes some great sports stories that are told in the magazine's minimalist style. That sure as hell doesn't mean Pierce or Lake or Thompson or whomever should tamp down their approach to fit your tastes. But that's what you choose to imply every time we have this debate. That stylists are "ego-driven" and doing it wrong.

Nope. Just doing it differently than how you prefer. That's ok! I don't love Springsteen the way some people do. I like Jeff Tweedy, who is a weirdo. I don't want Sringsteen to try to be Tweedy. Nor would I have wanted David Foster Wallace to try to write like David Remnick.

 

No. I admire Lake's writing a lot. In this case, I feel some of his writing served the rest of it very poorly. That's an editor's mistake, not his. Writers of necessity all have their own voices. But the idea is to use the voice to tell the story. In this case, I don't feel that was done as successfully as it could've been.

 

One more point. In SI, which has really big photographs with every article, your table has been set by the (almost always really good) execution of an entirely different craft. Delay in getting to the point is doubly irritating because the reader has seen the damn pictures of said point.

 

Jeff MacGregor is the best current example of the successes of writing to write. The guy can string together words in such a way that I'm eager to read him on any topic. That's the success of a great writer. But there's no denying that his words overpower his subject on a regular basis. That's not a failure. That's why I (and, I think, many others) read MacGregor.