Oh, American Shopping Malls

Untitled (complimentary story chunk to my previous work)


The first Tuesday that I worked on the food line at approximately 10:30 a.m. (although it wouldn’t surprise me if it was 10:30 a.m. sharp), Dell told me, “Okay, we’re gonna do two chicken salads. Extra lettuce. No cheese. Oil and vinegar only.  Chop the chicken up real good.”

I looked around the restaurant, out into the food court, down the mall corridor. I didn’t see a soul.

I shrugged and started chopping chicken “real good.” Meanwhile, Dell poured two diet cokes, two glasses of water, and two cups of ice. This sounds like a simple task. And to a degree it was, but doing it at full-on, balls-out speed was not so simple.

Dell poured one diet coke, while at the same time, tossing ice in the cup with the ice scoop and then did it again. Boom. While the fizz receded, he spun around with two more cups. While holding one cup above the hand sink on the back counter, he reached to the far left “secret” water faucet on the lemonade machine and started filling both cups at once. Boom. He spun around, tossed ice in two more cups. Boom. With all six cups lined next to each other, Dell stamped down the assembly line, using both hands. One-two-three-four-five-six lids. Boom.

I was still chopping chicken.

Several minutes later “The Chicken Ladies” arrived, two gray-haired elderly women, one old, one very old – a mother and daughter duo. Before they arrived or after they left, Dell referred to them as “The Chicken Ladies,” but when they were in the shop, he called them by their first names. He asked them, “What’s going on out there?” his way of saying hello. He asked the younger one how her husband was; Dell knew his first name too. After “The Chicken Ladies” sat down, he ran two orders of extra crispy pita bread to their table, free of charge.

Dell had hawk-like features and eyes, an otherworldly blue. When he asked customers or employees how their families were, a frequent question of his, he looked them in their eyes. He didn’t just ask to pass time. He was sincerely curious. A man of consistency, his beard was always uniformly trimmed, his hair cut short, not styled, but neat. He wore a black t-shirt and red apron every day, the same as his employees. And he performed every task at a full-on, balls-out speed.

For 20 years, seven days a week, and, by my estimate, at least ten hours a day, Dell Deschene sold Greek food in shopping malls. After teaching high school history in Denver for a few years in the late eighties, he and his brother Carey began to open Renzio’s Greek Food franchises in shopping malls along the Front Range of Colorado and Wyoming. At one point, in the mid-nineties, they owned seventeen stores.

But Dell, 45, and his brother, 52, are business men. Indoor malls in the cities along Interstate Twenty-five, had been struggling for years (not able to quantify this yet), so they began to revamp their business model. In 2009 they opened a sit down restaurant with a bar and a full menu, and began abandoning their food court restaurants. Their new shop was in a cross-town shopping center, a shopping mall that featured the same stores as a traditional mall, but was connected by looping asphalt drives and stretches of parking lots instead of ceramic tiled hallways. These drive-in malls are referred to as lifestyle centers by real estate specialists.  When I worked for Dell in 2010 at the Fort Collins Foothills Mall, it was one of only two indoor mall shops that the brothers still operated. Dell ran the food court restaurant, while his brother ran the cross-town sit-down restaurant.  

There was a subtle downhome aura to their longstanding mall shop. Dell, his brother and his father installed the tables, counters, wall paper and fixtures themselves. There was a tarnished stain on the mirror above the hotline hood from when his father cleaned it with the wrong chemicals, when they first opened in 1991. The back counter by the cash register was four inches shorter than the prep counter because of a mathematical error when first installed. The wallpaper in the back corner was patched with scotch tape where teenage customers had picked at the wall.  Renzio’s was technically fast food, but it was the only restaurant in the mall with its own sit-down area. A crucifix hung across the top of the wide entrance that separated Dell’s shop from the mall corridors. The rest of the store’s décor was full of images of ancient Greek warriors and Athenian statues.

At Renzios we sold variations of beef, chicken, and falafel gyros, cheeseburgers and French fries. Dell knew hundreds of our customers by name like “The Chicken Ladies.”  Over time, I learned to recognize them by their food orders and professions. The Thursday HP engineers: one chicken with barbecue, one beef, easy sauce. The Friday accountants: three beef salads, one hot ‘n spicy. The high school janitor, his wife and their teenage daughter: three cheeseburgers, one with gyro meat on top with extra extra mayonnaise. The Sprint phone salesman: double cheeseburger, gryo meat on the side, and so forth. All items, for these memorable customers, were off menu – the types of food orders you can only get when you know the man who prepares your food.

One particular off-menu customer was named Pat. He was gangly and thin, with sharp features, all elbows and knees. He was part of the “mall crowd,” the daily mall walkers and people watchers, people who came to the mall every day but didn’t shop or work.

Sometimes I caught him, sitting alone, talking to himself at a food court table. Some days he looked rough, sporting extra scruff, and seeming more tired than usual. Pat came into the store around one ‘o clock, and pointed to the gyro meet spinning on the burner, which was his own unique way of ordering. He had a mental disability and he had trouble counting money so when he ordered his food, Dell accepted whatever money Pat came up with. The amount of food Dell gave Pat – a hefty portion fries, and full portion of beef and veggies with extra sauce – was worth more than three times what Pat usually paid. On some days, when Pat was struggling more than usual, Dell gave him his meal free of charge. “We’ll take care of you Pat,” Dell always said. Pat lived off of social security, and had an on-again, off-again care taker, and some days it appeared as though he may have spent the previous night sleeping outdoors. Sometimes, I wondered if Dell was the only one helping Pat along. 

Dell didn’t have a wife or children. Instead he had a cat and a cabin in the mountains where he could shoot his guns and go fishing. And he had his customers.

Dell had grown up on a farm in Nebraska playing high school football. He earned his degrees in economics and history at the University of Nebraska and he bled Red and White Cornhusker football. These influences brought a gridiron infused element into Renzio’s. Dell’s customer base had a large contingent of Cornhusker fans and high school football fans, almost like groupies. After each weekend, some customers, I could tell, came to Renzio’s to talk to Dell about the Nebraska game. He’d always offer his bits of wisdom about “what really happened.”

And then there was the high school crowd.  Dell ran a “high school special,” a five-dollar meal for any high school student in the area, a price that hadn’t changed in more than a dozen years. When the football players came in, he gave them huge hearty portions. He would tell them, “Hey good game, out there” or “tough loss, man,” depending on the outcome. It seemed as though he knew the name, position, and class of every ball player in town. He didn’t go to the games, but he followed them on the radio and in the newspaper. When the ball players came in, Dell would run extra orders of fries to their tables, and talk to them about their college prospects. I remember him mentoring one youngster, “Yeah, you’d be wise to sit out track season, make sure you get that hammy right.” 

I worked in restaurants in the Fort Collins area for more than ten years, more restaurants than I can recall, and Dell was the best boss I have ever had. And it wasn’t just that he paid my coworkers and me more than the average food service wage. It was because of the way he treated people. Every morning when I arrived for work, he extended me the same question he asked his favorite customers, “How’s your family? How’s your brother?” It didn’t matter that I had told him the day before, that my mother and brother were both well, he wanted the update. When I worked at Renzio’s I didn’t work for Dell, I worked with Dell, a distinction that’s rare in the restaurant business. In every restaurant I had previously worked, there were tasks that the owners or managers consider beneath them. Not Dell. He did dishes. He mopped and scrubbed. He wiped down tables. He was tireless.

 Any faults of his as a boss were only because his dedication sometimes led to an overwhelming style of micromanagement. Every Tuesday when preparing for “The Chicken Ladies” he would say, “Did you chop that chicken, up really fine? They have trouble chewing.” Then a few moments later, he’d ask me again, “Did you chop the chicken up real good?” I don’t think he was senile, or riding me, I just think sometimes he cared too damn much.

I first worked for Dell and his brother in 2005 before they had opened their sit-down restaurant across town. Back then, it was busy. One of the two brothers was always in the shop. They staffed at least three employees for every shift, four for the busy days. Back then, I worked the cash register, learning to master Dell’s soda-filling techniques, learning to work at a balls-out clip. We had lunch rushes, dinner rushes, and busy weekends with lines out the door. As I moved customers down along the counter to wait for their food, Dell and his cooks assembled gyros and salads and platters at increasingly rapid speeds, in a sort of controlled mayhem. Dell always called called it, “the three ring circus.” At the time the big talk around the mall was how a Dillard’s was coming to town, how it was only going to get busier.

In 2010 when I rejoined the Renzio’s staff, things had changed. Dillard’s never came. The parking lots were empty. Brick facades on the outside of the building were crumbling. Throughout the mall corridors stores were gated shut. Two of the four large-scale department stores had been abandoned: J.C. Penney was in the process of being demolished, the vacant Mervyn’s was used only as training grounds for the S.W.A.T. team.  In the corridor connecting the empty department stores, every other shop, it seemed, was closed. The mall was dead.

Dell only staffed two employees per shift. Three on the busy days.  Only our most loyal customers remained. Dell’s scurrying about, fast paced nature seemed ill fitting.

That year, after Christmas, after our sales continued to dwindle, one day Dell unceremoniously moved a night shift employee to the day shift. It was an odd move. Business had been slow and getting slower. For the previous six months, Dell and I had been serving his regular lunch crowd their regular orders. It had been a two-man show.

The next morning, when my co-worker Matt showed up, Dell said, “Okay. You guys can handle it.” He said that he was going to start working at their other restaurant during lunch shifts. He continued to open the store each morning, but as soon as I arrived he would leave for the day.

After eighteen straight years (the first two years of Dell’s career as a restaurateur he ran a different Renzio’s franchise), Dell no longer worked at the Foothills Fashion Mall. The effect was remarkable. Up until that day the number one question I heard from customers was some variation about whether our gyros were made out of lamb or not. And it was funny because it drove Dell bonkers. Every day the customers would ask: “Those are lamb gyros, right?”

Dell would say, “No they’re beef.”

“Aren’t gyros, made out of lamb?

“No they’re beef.”

 “I think they’re supposed to be made out of lamb.”

“Ah, no. I’ve been to Greece. They only serve lamb in places they can’t afford beef – for the poor people.”

“Oh. I’ll have the chicken.”

After Dell left, the number one question was: “Where’s Dell?” Again and again and again. The high school football players, Pat, “The Chicken Ladies,” the HP engineers, the accountants, the high school janitor, the sooper of the neighboring apartment complex, the real estate agents from RealTec, the man who owned the burrito shop downtown, the city councilman for the southwest district, the sooper at the other neighboring apartment complex,  the Macy’s employees, the Dairy Queen employees, the Sears employees, the Foot Locker employees the event coordinator for the Hilton, the countless Nebraska fans, the man who ran the nonprofit print shop across town, the tow truck driver, the cattle rancher, the employees from the local microbrewery and on and on.

When Dell left, Renzio’s lost its communal glue. It was odd for me, because, for every other restaurant job I had, if the boss man left, it meant my life was much easier, less stringent, less oversight. I wasn’t exactly working restaurant gigs because I enjoyed structure in my life. But with Dell gone, the mall became a vacuum; the Renzio’s community had no point. I knew I was watching a slow death crawl. The flow of business became slower and slower, like a river icing over. Other shop owners would come in and complain of rent hikes and dilapidating sales. In my time at the mall I saw over a dozen stores closed. Some of the businesses that I saw close didn’t have other viable stores to go run, like Dell did. Not every person had the foresight to change with times. And I came to realize that behind all of these brand name stores, it was people with families and bills and lives who were running them. But without Dell, I had nobody to talk about that type of thing with. The coworkers he left me with didn’t care. It became increasingly difficult to go to work.

When the customers asked me where Dell was, I told them he was working at his other restaurant. They were busy and needed his help. But I’m not sure if that’s the question that should have been asked. I think that the question is, did Dell abandon the mall or did the mall abandon Dell?

In Novemeber, 2011, Dell closed Renzio’s doors.

*Notes about this story: Every word in dialogue or quotes is from a repetitive phrase that Dell was known to say time and time again. This is a personal narrative, relying on my reporting from my previous mall story. Some Renzio’s facts will need to be fact-checked. For example, I’m pretty sure I have Dell’s and Carey’s age right, but I’m going to have to double check.  Over Christmas break, I’m going to try and see if Dell is available for comment now that he has closed his store.


Next part: The “Mall People” come to the forefront

***

Plan Moving Forward:

1.   The first and easiest thing I need to do is to rewrite my Matterhorn piece about the “Mall People.” It’s clunky and full of missed opportunities. I feel like I didn’t purvey how, the mall is a bastion for community. For Pat, somebody with no family, the mall is more than just a hang-out spot, it’s his world.

 

2.   Flesh out the small business owners, how are they affected by dying malls? Renzio’s was not the only family run business in the mall. I interviewed the Dairy Queen and Orange Julius owner for my previous story. The businesses had been in her family for thirty years; she had worked in her father’s shop since she was fifteen years old. In fact, the majority of the food court shops were family run.

I think malls, have a reputation as brand name marketplaces, giving them a sort of plastic gleam. But when you look at it, each of these brand name stores, are run by everyday people – in the community.

      3. The interplay between the small business angle and the “mall people”  
           makes foran interesting unique view of a dying mall – for which, my research 
           should be reasonably easy, and since I’ve done most of the footwork, it could make
           for a marketable piece.

4.  But how do I make this into a national story?

5.   I need to adequately answer these questions: Are American shopping malls dying? How many were there? How many are left?

-          According to The New York Times, the last time an American indoor shopping mall was built was six years ago. 

-          Vacancy in U.S. shopping malls reached its highest level in 11 years this fall. According to Reis Inc., a real estate research firm, the 9.4 percent vacancy rate is the highest it has been since they began surveying 80 large-scale marketplaces throughout America in 2000.

-          There are a slew of Real Estate Research firms with a studies and statistics, but their info is behind a pay wall. (Is there any way around that?)

6.    I could travel to various dying malls and spend a day or two getting the stories of “mall people” and small business owners, and back the story by statistics showing national trends. I would imagine it as a This American Life, type piece.

7.   Another angle I see, is that in the 1990s (I think) malls took on an image as champions of the brand name. The immorality of retailers like Nike, manufacturing shoes in sweat shops, entered the social consciousness of the nation. It seems to me, that this issue of drive-in shopping malls or lifestyle centers spread along Interstates is an interesting turn of events. Instead of people trolling around shopping malls buying brand name goods, I feel like the social ire should be projected toward shoppers idling their gas guzzling cars and cruising around shopping centers miles at 5 mph buying brand name goods. In Colorado, they’re moving these shopping centers 15 to 30 miles away from dying malls, making people drive out of their community to go shopping. Given, the lack of fossil fuels, and the call for a greener world – this seems to go against the logic of “smart development.” Development professionals in Fort Collins think that, a similar drive-in set up may be in the future of the Fort Collins Foothills Mall. Is there an irony here?

8.   Another angle to pursue could be the Orange Julius story. They’re a trademark of malls and that could be something to track.

9.   Is the corporatization of small town dying malls a national trend? GGP and Simon Property Group the nation’s largest REIT, own a combined 562 malls. GGP made $158 million in bonuses in 2010 for navigating the company out of bankruptcy. Dell Deschene told me this. He refused to publicly comment or share his opinions about dying malls, which was a shame because, he's very opinionated about it. Do other mall business owner feel the same way?

How do these publicly traded portfolios affect communities like Fort Collins? What are the implications for small communities like the “The Mall People” and small business owners like Dell? Why are executives that live miles away letting mall properties lay fallow?

The big trap on this is that I’m assuming because the Fort Collins mall, owned by GGP, is a dead mall and because the Pittsburgh mall, owned by the Simon Property Group, is dead, that this is a trend. I need to set a measurement, like a certain number of vacancies and make some e-emails and phone calls to different malls around the country before I can establish whether this is a trend or a coincidence.

             These, to me, are the compelling facts about how Fort Collins mall become a   
             corporate entitiy:

-          The Foothills Mall was founded by Bob Everitt on the edge of town, opened in 1973.

-          After thirty years as a family operated mall, the Everitts sold Foothills Mall to General Growth Property, a publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust, in 2007. By this time the mall was no longer on the edge of town, suburbs had swelled around it.

-          Owners of family run mall businesses like Renzios and Orange Julius, told me, that the new corporate culture GGP brought to the mall was accompanied by rent hikes, blight, and bureaucratic hoops, driving tenants and therefore customers away. Slumping numbers of city sales tax revenue suggests that this is true. For the first time in the history of the mall, crucial decisions were being made by executives in Chicago, instead of  businessmen familiar with the Fort Collins community.

-          While the mall still stands, lifestyle centers closer to the interstate are the new trend. A Real Estate professor from Colorado State University, told me in an interview that this is a national trend.

(I’ve attempted to set up a walking tour with the original owner of the mall to get the before and after, glory-days-type perspective….)

            Burnining question: Is Fort Collins Foothills Mall an exemplar

for national trends?

         

***

I once had a multimedia blog idea...

But my blog idea crashed and burned along with my computer this weekend. My photo and video files are backed up somewhere, but dealing with my multimedia mall files was not in the cards at this week.  I’m still going to create my mall blog. I’ll be sure to tweet or e-mail when it’s ready.

If you’re interested this is some of the text I was playing around with to fit in with my forthcoming video and images:

Mall Blog Intro or stuff …

Despite this plastic glaze through which I sometimes see malls, I’ve also come to find telling and touching human stories that lay beneath the façade of consumer culture. This is a site for my nonlinear stories expressing both cynicism and hope about the state of the American shopping mall.

There’s something about indoor American shopping malls.

They have a pattern, like a dull drumming down.

A walk around a mall, like déjà vu, like a lolling dream: Penny fountains, ceramic tiling and dulcet tones; faux-oak kiosks, plastic plants, and elevator music.

People in streams, in petering spurts: the couples, the elderly, the awkward teenage clumps, the solo shopper; of all colors and sizes, to each their own orbit; janitors milling, people watchers watching, mall walkers walking. Like drifting snowflakes, each their own molecular make, completely different, completely the same.

A mall is a mall is a… In Chicago, in Denver, in LA, and Pittsburgh, and Omaha and Rochester and…

You don’t have to buy anything. But if you want to, the mall has something just for you.

Brand name stores: Radio Shack and The Body Shop and Victoria’s Secret and Lens Crafters and... Don’t forget the candy store, the sports memorabilia store, the Oriental shop. Every mall: the same

American shopping malls: offering a plastic hominess, like an airplane blanket or like a microwave dinner.

(put my mall music video here.)

Excerpts from a Mall Diary: Passing Time at the Mall. (I kept an extensive journal of notes while working in the mall. Some of them fit well with photos I’ve snapped, and I’d like to have a Mall Diary tab.)

6/04/11

Mall Walkers:

I’m seeing a crumbling dying beast. One part odd-ball community, One part city planning and commercial tomfoolery. It’s a mall, man. What a ridiculous notion. The very concept of a mall is to take big ass brand name department stores and then connect that to big ass department store to another big ass department store. Then to connect those two department stores with a giant corridor with brand name department stores. 

Lately though, It’s like I’m seeing a slow death crawl. The waves and the currents of the corridors are running dry I’ve been trying to find new ways to pass the time. I tried timing one of the mall walker’s laps around the mall. She clocked in at eight minutes. Then I had her at twenty minutes, so I assumed I might have overlooked her on her previous lap. Then for her next lap she came around from the other side, walking in the opposite direction. Results for her average lap speed were inconclusive.

After that I tried to count the number of people carrying shopping bags. I decided that to make it simple, if somebody was carrying more than one bag, I would count the person as one and not keep tab on the actual number of bags. My first count was on a Friday night shift. In the first hour I counted 5 people with shopping bags. I decided that, my powers of observation were only so strong, so I implemented an imaginary handicap adding two shopping bags per every five bags. In the second hour, my total was up to 17 shopping bags. But with my handicap in place I credited the food court with visits from 23 people carrying shopping bags. I tried this for a few shifts in a row. The time I had to wait between my countdown from one shopping bag to the next ended up taking so long, that I eventually forgot I was counting. The results of this arbitrary count of shoppers were inconclusive.  

The crew of kids grows as the afternoon wears on and the Transfort buses make continual stops at the mall. With each bus stop their numbers grow. Through my window, sometimes it’s funny to see the youngsters trolling by at their ho-hum pace only to be passed by an elderly mall walker. Some mall walkers are middle aged housewives who chat and gossip as they take their laps around the mall. Some are younger and use the mall loop to rehabilitate from injuries. However the majority of mall walkers are of the elderly variety. Some walk by themselves. Some walk in pairs. I like to imagine that every time one of the elderly mall walkers laps the bus rat kids, that it scores them a small moral victory.

The Fort Collins Rabbit

Class Prompt

About medium height, almost a five o clock shadow, but not quite. He speaks with a deadpan that could be construed as grumpiness, or he’s simply a guy who calls it like it is.   But momentarily he’s not speaking. He’s googling. Furrowed brow,  eyes scanning the pixels, forming black-lettered words.  He’s on the clock. Every class – every goddamned class she beats him to it.

But not today.

His fingers nimbly type his keyword search, not a second to waste.  Quick – control C. He glides the mouse from left to right.  Quick – control V.

Boom!

http://www.amazon.com/Wave-Pursuit-Rogues-Freaks-Giants/dp/0385666675

He beat her. Finally.

Reader Response: Three Readings and a Semester Reflection.

Okay, so this week’s readings were, indeed, an unusual grouping. What do Gary Shteyngart, Tom Wolfe and an investigative report out of  the Star-Ledger have in common?

Well, to me, they’re a reflection of the diverse and unique reading list throughout the semester. It’s almost a perfect representation: a column by a nonfiction icon, an essay by a fiction writer who muses about the pitfalls of the digital age and an in-depth series of kick ass investigative reportage.

When I try to explain to folks what the general gist of this class is, I tend to say something like, “We read a seemingly random, er, a diverse array of nonfiction pieces against the backdrop of the digital publishing world.”

But were they random? I’m inclined to say no. But how do I weave this all together?

Let me give it a shot.

I think I’ve got to start with Shteyngart.  Shteyngart’s essay, Only Disconnect, which is another episode of “when fiction writers write nonfiction,” is a meandering piece, where the author is, no doubt, projecting his imagination upon reality and reality is pushing right back. His essay, I think, pairs well with the David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead,  Zadie Smith and Cabernet Sauvignon. But for me, Shteyngart’s essay epitomized, what was perhaps one of the biggest questions, of the semester.  How does a writer manage her/his existence in the digital world? Well, as Shteyngart follows his Itelephone taco-ward, seeing his once-nostalgic Boulevardier disappear into pixilated, streaming cyberwaves, it presents an unsure, uncertain reality of a digitally washed world. It’s a world that I think rightly lends itself to hyperbole. How far will this go? How long before social networking incites riots and sit-ins? (Oh, nevermind.) How far is too far? How many hours, minutes, seconds can I go without checking my e-mail, my facebook, my twitter? How long before I no longer drive across town for interviews, and I simply skype with all my sources? (um, excuse me Mr. Smith, could you please pan your laptop around your living room, so I can add some detail and color to this article.) I mean, when I wrote a recent draft of a story about the town of Braddock, I was using Google map’s street cameras to recollect details of the streetscape. Things may be getting out of hand.

I suppose, the easy answer is that it’s a blessing and a curse, a curse and a blessing. But how does it fit with nonfiction "literature?" Does it give the modern nonfiction authors and edge over NF forefathers and foremother (Didion)? Let’s consider Tom Wolfe. He’s an icon. In the who’s who of Nonfiction classics, it’s usually Wolfe, Didion, Hunter S.  in some order, right? (By the way, the aforementioned list of authors reminds me, that it would be super fun to take a class where we read fiction by nonfiction writers.) But, these days when we read the NF classics, it’s imperative to consider how they fit into our modern world.

I heard in  an interview with Ken Kesey on NPR, and he was reflecting on how Tom Wolfe pretty much nailed it, in regards to his portrayal of the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test. The incredible thing, Kesey said, was that Wolfe didn’t even pick up a pen or paper, in all of his time with the Pranksters. He did it from memory, and was pretty much spot on. (Kesey, did object a bit to Wolfe’s portrayal of the women in the group – saying the Pranksters weren’t as patriarchal as perceived.) But, by God, how can that be? No notes?  I think those are days over. If I were to shadow a group of Anaracho kids travelling cross-country in a van, living dumpster to dumpster, for a few months and wrote a book or an article about it, it’s all but guaranteed that, if I didn’t have any documentation, there’s no way my work would get published. Imagine: no pictures, no tapes, not even a notebook. I get the feeling an editor would laugh me out the door. A more likely scenario, would be that even if I did document it, an editor might ask, why didn’t you roll any video? Where’s the multi-media effect?  

Although, considering, I’m analyzing a piece of work by Tom Wolfe and comparing it to a writing project that I’d like to pitch, it’s kind of  a moot analogy. It’s Tom Wolfe we’re talking about; by the time he wrote that book, he was very well established in the literary world and he had an extensive reporting pedigree. I suppose to look at his NYT piece, One Giant Leap to Nowhere, I ought to consider The Right Stuff. He spent seven years researching for that book and two years writing it. ( according to Wikipedia, and I’m sorry. Please excuse a Wiki-reference – but this, of course, is just another digital pitfall we must consider, right?) When Wolfe was researching for The Right Stuff he was working toward a comprehensive history of the space program before he decided that the Chuck Yeager era rightly symbolized the whole of  it. So in his NYT piece, when he uses an anecdotal memory about Wernher von Braun’s  "bridge to the stars," as the hinge of his piece, with no way to document the idea, it’s a move that, in my mind, can only be pulled off by Wolfe – or other iconic types of authors. But Wolfe, no doubt, has the type of resume where we can take his word for it.  He is, after all, living history. His body of work epitomizes American Culture in the late 60s through the 70s.

But it begs the question, where did Tom Wolfe go? I know he’s still writing fiction and the occasional nonfiction article or book, but in his NYT essay, the core of it is based on Wolfe’s creative peak in the 70s. One could say Tom Wolfe’s past work is influential, and his current work is nostalgic. I myself couldn’t rightly say though, b/c I haven’t read a Tom Wolfe book published before 1987. And that’s the point.

It’s the type of thing that’s documented in rock music all the time. Pre-80s Dylan is the best. Pre-68 Beach Boys is the best. Pre-90s Bruce Springfield is the best. And et cetera. So my question is, who are the NF writers of our time? Perhaps the New Journalism movement was a one-time spurt of history, revealing a list of icons –  McPhee, Capote, Talese, Mailer.

If so, what does it say about the world of NF today and  who is the quintessential voice in the field, is there a Tom Wolfe lurking among us today? What does that even mean?

Or given these times when internet publications, kindles, and half-decent blogs can overwhelm our literary gaze, giving access to a plethora of view points, a plethora of voices, and a plethora of standards, is it even possible for an icon to come out of the wake of inundation?

Did we read anybody’s work this semester that would fit the bill?

Well, it’s an obviously subjective question.  But let me answer it by saying, for me, yes. But not how you’d think.

***

To be continued. (my folks are in town tomorrow and I probably won’t have a chance to finish this post until Monday but … I think I can tie these three readings together, maybe, which may entail some heavy editing, and reeling in of some of these tangents, like I said: to be continued…) spoiler alert: my personal icon would be Krakauer.

Who do you root for?

David Brower

Floyd Dominy

Charles Park

Charles Fraser



John McPhee

Talking points for class presentation:

Encounters with the Archdruid, in a sense,  is three extended scenes where McPhee makes some choice maneuvers into backstory. The essential resonance of the book comes from the three different characters trekking through three different zones of environmental contention and their interactions with David Brower. 

One of the striking things about the book was that it didn't follow the typical environmental schema. Usually when I read about environmentalism I expect to hear someone say, “By God look at what they’ve done! , Exxon Mobil, BP, U.S. Gov., whoever." It seems like it’s always a right-or-wrong, good-or-bad frame. So, it was interesting to me that this book and this thesis of “what is conservation?” was a much more complicated, well rounded question which called for more complicated, well rounded characters.

McPhee's keen ability to make keen observations and to let the characters grow through the narration gave a texturing that allowed for such complications.

These observations include some incredible dialogue. I had highlighted page 11 and page 138 but of course it's strewn throughout. Page 138 features one of the scenes where Fraser belittles Candler  and proves he’s not the conservationist he claims to be. The dialogue between Fraser and Candler also goes a long ways to developing Brower. It’s telling a detail that Brower didn't stand up for Candler (or become argumentative with Fraser in any sense.)   

But McPhee also has some of his most telling details in his back story. Like the bit about how Parker loved basketball so much that he went to two churches every Sunday so that he could play basketball for each church.  Once he stopped playing basketball, he never went to church again, with exception of the day he was married.

It's these little details that fleshed out McPhee's characters. It's these human details, like Dominy firing up a bulldozer in desperate times to dam a pond for his Wyoming brethren. (And you can tell McPhee went to Wyoming and visited this farm where Dominy's first dam existed!)

And then, of course, there's Brower who McPhee, throughout his clever structure, develops from beginning to end. Brower grows from from toothless, butterfly-chasing kid to a powerhouse broker in environmental matters to his Sierra Club dethroning.

So I guess my point would have been that if you take the time to create well rounded characters showing both their flaws and their strengths, it makes the traditional protagonist vs. antagonist dichotomy moot.



Reader Response to Paris Review:

I’ve decided to respond to the Janet Malcolm interview by Janet Roiphe because it has the double distinction of being (towards the end) an interview about interviews.

It also happens to be a timely topic for me, as I’ve spent the last three days barreling through hours of interview tape for a story I’m working on. Malcolm is, no doubt, a sort of unofficial arbiter on all topics journalism, so I think her commentary on how she approaches interviews while a bit ambiguous stands as “must-hear” content for aspiring journalists.

But first I want to comment on the style of this interview. I think it’s an interesting twist that Malcolm as a prolific journalist who has built a living by asking folks questions – in  many instances to their faces or as Roiphe calls her “the masterful interviewer”– that she will visit with Roiphe face to face but the interview is conducted in meticulously thought-out e-mails. Roiphe explains that Malcolm “has politely refused the role of subject and reverted to the more comfortable role of writer.”

But it begs the question – is this really an “interview” or is this some other type of exercise? Maybe it’s guided autobiography.

On one hand this process undermines the ad-lib, organic, pick-your-brain concept of interviewing, but on the other it shows the over-analytic thought process of Malcolm. She’s may be wary of a slip-of-the-tongue inarticulation but I get the sense that she’s more concerned with the words on the page, and meaning what she says.

(I thought it especially poignant when Roiphe calls her out on quoting herself or others in large chunks, showing just guarded she is about the words she’s willing to proffer.)

It reminds of the Paris Review interview I read with Robert Frost, who kept making side  comments throughout the interview about the tape recorder – and would at times reverse back over his words – almost nervous to make sure that he’s recorded saying exactly as he means.

It’s funny to think about the double standard that Malcolm perhaps posits when on the topic of interviews she says:    

  

… I learned the same truth about subjects that the analyst learns about patients: they will tell their story to anyone who will listen to it, and the story will not be affected by the behavior or personality of the listener; just as (“good enough”) analysts are interchangeable, so are journalists.

This idea that when you and I interview somebody, we’ll get the same responses seems a bit too general  on first appearance. I agree that’s the case if we’re talking about public figures – but I think it depends person to person. I know for myself – oftentimes when I interview someone if the conversation ends up on a common interest such as music or if we share familial traits – sometimes the interviewee opens up and shares things with me that they wouldn’t otherwise.

Of course Malcolm, despite the controlled arena of the interview, does double back and says in the next paragraph that she’s second guessing her habit of quoting herself and “suddenly not at all sure about any of this.” Reading between the lines – I think the fact that Roiphe called her out on the quotations and the fact that her responses are reacting to this unique point (unique to Roiphe) it causes the response to double over itself.

To say it bluntly, it’s a unique and funny interview moment.

But really, in the end I can’t help but wonder how the conversations between Roiphe and Malcolm in the confines of her own home went? What are the inflections of Malcolm’s voice, and how does she gesture when she talks? It’s not something I wonder about with any other Paris Review interview. There’s not normally wild gesturing on behalf of Cormac Mccarthy or who-have-you, but now I’m just curious.

Reader Response: Shipping Out

I was late to the David Foster Wallace party. I unfortunately only began to read his work after his untimely death. In his wake, I read so many glowing paeans to his writing in various publications that I wanted to see what the hoopla was all about.

So about two years ago, Shipping Out was the first piece of his that I read. And as I’ve now re-read it, it’s interesting to note that my reactions are similar. This may sound silly or glowing, but there’s a kind of amazement that I feel to be able to find myself invested in something as simple-minded and trite as a Caribbean cruise.

Reading Wallace’s work is more of an interactive and entertaining experience than a feat of intellectual absorption (although it is that too). Reading Wallace is different than a typical reading experience in that it requires a little extra work on my behalf. Wallace’s sentences have this way of making me feel intellectually deficient yet privileged to have access to his mind. Or to put it more plainly, reading Shipping Out, and every other Wallace piece I’ve read, is a weird dichotomy of constantly reaching for my dictionary and flipping through endless footnotes but also laughing out loud at the absurdity of everyday happenstances – things that take no dictionary to interpret.

Here’s an example what I mean. This sentence is from toward the end of the section titled, “Pampered to Death, Part II,” when he’s become increasingly paranoid about being monitored by the cruise staff and how it is that they know when he leaves his room and  how it is that the maid, Petra, keeps his room sparkling clean despite all of his attempts to leave it soiled:

Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression and appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden for thirty-one minutes and then haul ass back – again no sight of Petra, but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming, and there’s a mint on the pillow’s new case.

   

So, this may not be a quintessential Wallace sentence, because it doesn’t employ a colon to and jump into an unexpected deeper level. But I wanted to look at this sentence to make a point. I have a decent-sized vocabulary but when I read Wallace’s work I find myself learning a new word every couple of pages. In the sentence above I had to look up ‘appurtenance,’ which means an accessory. (Maybe I’m dumb, but I just plain didn’t know that word. Other words I learned from this article include: glabrous, simulacrum, sommelier, sybaritic, and lapidary – among others.) But the sentence above illustrates this dual role that Wallace inhabits so gracefully, the role of brainiac in one sense and a funny , everday type of guy in another sense. The point being, that not too many writers will employ a word like ‘appurtenance’ and a phrase like ‘haul ass’ in the same sentence.

That’s just a single example of a pattern that repeats itself throughout Shipping Out. Wallace’s language inhabits that duality when he makes his first major move in the essay. When he describes the former cruise attendee who committed suicide, Wallace says the young man, “did a half gainer from the top deck,” which is the sort of phrase someone might use to casually to describe a suicide while nursing a beer on a barstool. Then in the same paragraph – Wallace is pushing the intellect of the piece making the deeper connection that a cruise ship is a place of despair.

There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly  elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir I felt despair. (First paragraph, Pampered to Death, Part I)

Other Notes on Reading:

-  In the hands of another author (or pseudo-journalist) this piece could have been overwhelmingly snarky or suffered from forced irony, but that was not the case. Even as Wallace takes his shots at the Cruising subculture – there’s an underlying type of respect and dignity that remains. Like, no doubt, Wallace saw over 20 makes of rubber thongs, was forced into a conga line, and found himself eating nightly dinners with South Floridian elderly folks endlessly discussing the quality of food, but his humor is just that – it’s humor. In my opinion, he’s not making fun of the culture. It’s almost like he caricaturizes it a la Hunter S. Thompson, except there’s a genuine realness to the portrayal of his characters. (My favorite description may have been when he describes the couples walking with the grain of the rolling and pitching waves supporting each other like “high school steadies.”)  And it’s not a caricaturization, it’s just an incredibly vivid portrayal. In the end if he’s over-embellishing anything – it’s his own forlornness; however, that seems to be genuine as well. It’s odd that with his endless details and listing of the characteristics of the ship, the cruisers and the staff – it almost seems hyperbolic. But it’s not. I think it’s just a reflection of the hyper-activity of Wallace’s mind.   

- Before I began to read David Foster Wallace, my literary intake was heavy on guys like Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski, masters of the short, economic sentence. Writing short sentences, in turn, was a practice I emulated. But, when I read Wallace – he made me think about it differently. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why.  I do think some of his paragraph-length sentences are overboard (no pun intended.) Though, in the same sense, it’s a crucial part of his voice and it suits him perfectly. One thing, I’ve learned (I think) from Wallace is that he uses the colon to extend a thought or an idea – and pushes what would be an otherwise simple subject into the next level of thought: it’s something I may one day try to emulate as well.

- And finally, I’m sad that David Foster Wallace is no longer with us. He was a great one.