{"id":754,"date":"2012-06-15T08:45:24","date_gmt":"2012-06-15T15:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=754"},"modified":"2012-06-15T08:45:24","modified_gmt":"2012-06-15T15:45:24","slug":"gems-of-insight-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=754","title":{"rendered":"Gems of insight, writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s summer \u2013 almost \u2013 so Bob Moyer is off on a road trip on his Harley. But, fortunately, he\u2019s had time to send us a review of a book that offers a more sedentary way to sample what America has to offer.<\/p>\n

By Robert Moyer<\/p>\n

PULPHEAD. By John Jeremiah Sullivan. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 369 pages. $16.<\/p>\n

Wow.<\/p>\n

Few writers produce sentences that make the reader say that.\u00a0 John Updike could do it; so can Martin Cruz Smith.\u00a0 Lucy Grealy comes to mind as well, writers who make sentences we haven\u2019t read before, sentences that stand out, stand up, sum up, shout how good they are.\u00a0 Sentences that appear in John Jeremiah Sullivan\u2019s collection of 14 essays, like these:<\/p>\n

About Miz, a star from MTV\u2019s The Real World<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cTo me he look like he\u2019s always looked, like he\u2019s looked since his debut season, back when I erst fell in love with his antics, all bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happened to be and a smile you could spot as Midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0About a hometown friend of Axl Rose:\u00a0 \u201cHe was nervous, but nervous in the way that any decent person is when you sit down in front of him with a notebook and are basically like \u2018I have to make a two-thirty flight.\u00a0 Can you tell me about the heaviest things in your life?\u00a0 Order more spinach-\u2018n-artichoke dip, I can expense it.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

About the little-known 19th<\/sup>-century explorer Rafinesque floating down the Mississippi:\u00a0 \u201cHe felt the vegetable pulse of the continent shuddering down its veins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sullivan has been compared to flashy writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson.\u00a0He\u2019s got more than stylistic flair, however; he\u2019s got substance.\u00a0His narrative style smacks of the solid literary journalists like Tracy Kidder and John McPhee.\u00a0 In fact, McPhee, in the book Literary Journalism<\/em> aptly described the strength of Sullivan\u2019s writing when he spoke of the \u201carchitectronics\u201d of a piece, how if one pays close attention the piece will reveal its structure as you write.\u00a0Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening story in the book, Upon This Rock<\/em>, about a three-day Christian rock concert. At first, Sullivan laughs the assignment off.\u00a0 It\u2019s a simple scenario as he sets it up \u2013 liberal journalist shows up, makes fun of good Christians and bad rock, writes a quick piece, goes home, hands in his expenses.\u00a0On the way to his story, however, he gets caught up with his conscience and some guys who become his cronies, people he tries to make fun of, but ends up having fun with.\u00a0Experiences lead him to a minor breakdown where he ends up weeping.\u00a0He soon reveals his own evangelical experience in high school, calling into play the attraction he felt, and the affection he took away.\u00a0 Basically, Jesus was a cool dude, as he explains it (no footnotes, but some good references) \u2013 and so are his buddies<\/p>\n

Sullivan\u2019s capacity for engagement is the strength here.\u00a0He doesn\u2019t submerge so deep that he can\u2019t still see the reader; he rides the surge he gets from his connection to the subject, waving to us with excitement.\u00a0Sometimes his connection comes easily; he\u2019s a connoisseur of popular culture who can name former contestants on the MTV show The Real World<\/em> more quickly than a current contestant, the subject of\u00a0\u201cGetting Down To What Is Really Real.\u201d Familiarity breeds connection, and he uses it to get close to his subject.\u00a0It even works when he can\u2019t get an interview with Axl Rose of Guns and Roses. He creates a verbal holograph by taking us on a tour of Axl\u2019s hometown in \u201cThe Final Comeback Of Axl Rose,\u201d somehow making Axl\u2019s high-pitched yowling logical by giving it a historical perspective. In a masterful piece, he manages to make not just a case but also a place where we can allow Michael Jackson room to be himself, not just a supposed pedophile, in his rumination on \u201cMichael.\u201d He brings focus to blues singers long gone, \u201cLost Bards,\u201d and reggae singers thought to be gone, \u201cThe Last Wailer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in those stories far from popular attention, he can forge a connection.\u00a0 In the \u201cUnnamed Caves\u201d of Tennessee\u2019s Cumberland Plateau, filled with prehistoric paintings, he gets us into the darkness where the painters walked, \u201c\u2026 constantly finding yourself doing things in just the way they would have done it.\u00a0You know they had to slide their backs along the rock like this.\u00a0They had to step there, they had to crouch down here.\u201d\u00a0 In \u201cLa*Hwi*Ne*Ski: Career Of An Eccentric Naturalist,\u201d he reveals that the naturalist of the title lived with his great-great-great-great-great-grandparents at Transylvania College in Kentucky.\u00a0The naturalist became extremely fat while living there:\u00a0 \u201cShe\u2019s known to have physically forced plum pudding on people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The strongest piece is probably the first he wrote, when his brother got electrocuted and found his \u201cFeet in Smoke.\u201d\u00a0 Touching his mouth to a microphone in band practice, his brother was clinically dead.\u00a0When revived, he spent months with scrambled brain circuits, not remembering anything or anyone.\u00a0During that recovery, Sullivan paid close attention, trying to make sense of what didn\u2019t make sense to his brother \u2013 but didn\u2019t bother him:\u00a0 \u201cLike a lot of people, I\u2019d always assumed in a sort of cut-rate Hobbesian way, that the center of the brain, if you could ever find it, would inevitable be a pretty dark place, that whatever is good or beautiful about being human is a result of our struggles against everything innate, against physical nature.\u00a0 My brother changed my mind about all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

That last quote contains all that Sullivan has to offer \u2013 intelligence, clarity, insight, intellectual reference, personal engagement and some sharp writing.\u00a0 Dive into the book anywhere; you\u2019ll come up with a gem about America you just didn\u2019t think about before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s summer \u2013 almost \u2013 so Bob Moyer is off on a road trip on his Harley. But, fortunately, he\u2019s had time to send us a review of a book that offers a more sedentary way to sample what America has to offer. By Robert Moyer PULPHEAD. By John Jeremiah Sullivan. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,268],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-nonfiction","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":760,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}