Bad Writers and German Shepherds

While the crowd delightedly enjoys a puppet show, puppeteers in the audience peer critically at the strings. It's not the most enjoyable approach, but they can't help it. And it's the same for writers. Today I spotted this:

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, heavy storms buried multiple U.S. states in snow, paralyzing traffic and making it an especially good time, one imagines, not to be travelling by ox-drawn wagon.

I asked myself, incredulously, what "one imagines" is doing there. It adds nothing to an overstuffed sentence. Cramming it in was an indulgence, compounding the indulgence of the aside itself. Its only purpose is to establish the writer's wry detachment, like a German shepherd marking its scent. We, the readers, serve as hydrant.

The writing is bad, and the editor should be fired. Both seem satisfied with mere cleverishness. Ox carts stuck in snow! What a life, what a world! Henrietta, won’t you fetch me another cognac, darling? My piece for the New Yorker is coming along splendidly.

Much, much worse, this introduces an essay on the nineteenth century Donner family's tragic migration west, possibly involving cannibalism. The perfect context for wry detachment. I showed it to ChatGPT and asked which magazine it seemed like. Beautifully skilled in spotting patterns, it immediately guessed, correctly - The New Yorker - barely suppressing a "duh".

For the New Yorker this wasn't a bug, nor even a feature, but their proud signature. The editor, declining to blast this to smithereens, beheld the hollow pretention and approved. "This writer gets us!"

Calvin Trillin once wrote a piece about me and Chowhound for the New Yorker. It was laced with condescension. A friend remarked that he'd shown me no more respect than the ticktacktoe-playing chicken he'd profiled the year before. My favorite food writer, John Thorne, offered this magnificent advice: "Never let yourself be profiled by someone more famous than you."

But I can hardly demand more sober treatment than the Donner family, catastrophically lost in all that ironic snowy snow - which, if we took a moment to contemplate, might throw us off our cognac, or else compel, per my wont, six or seven more!

The Trillin piece was useful to my "career", such as it was, but was not a pleasant experience. And today, bombarded by New Yorker memories and associations, I find myself wondering how JD Salinger, the grand exemplar of phony-haters, ever wound up in such a place.

As a musician, I suppose I do understand. It was a gig. He took the gig. And his apocalyptic exit wasn't exactly unpredictable. He didn’t just leave The New Yorker, he blasted off so hard he reached galactic escape velocity, leaving public life entirely.

Perhaps Salinger wouldn’t have self-ejected so spectacularly if he hadn’t planted himself in the belly of the beast in the first place. It’s like the woman with the nightmare boyfriend who finally breaks up and immediately finds a girlfriend to hook up with. Long accommodation coils the spring tightly.


Note that this writing wasn't from Dana Goodyear's thoughtful article. It was penned by a staffer to introduce that article.


See my earlier thoughts on Salinger