Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

This is not the witchcraft post you thought I was going to write.

I do a lot of reading. I’m a reader, what can I say! I read at work, I read when I get home. I read books, I read newspapers, I read blogs, I read magazines. I write about reading magazines. It would only make sense for me to write about what I read in those magazines. And I wanted to! I had a plan and all for a running feature, where I would link to a piece of long form narrative journalism, and highlight the attributes that I consider to be truly masterful. I was going to call it “The Craft.” But then, for all the usual reasons (foremost among them my insecurity about being able to actually comment intelligibly about what makes a piece of journalism actually good), I spiked the project. A secondary reason, though, was the problem of volume. It seemed like every week, I was adding another story or two to the pile of pieces I just had to write about. This led me to doubt my own judgment; ALL of these stories couldn’t be THAT good, could they? Maybe! But the fact remains, I couldn’t have written about one and ignored all the others (and let’s not kid ourselves, precious readers. I just don’t have the discipline to write more than one lengthy post a week about anything, let alone a smart piece of journalism.) So I scrapped the idea.

Then I came across a story that blew me away. The printout came to 22 pages, but by the third one, I knew this story was going to be something special. How did I know? Because it passed what I’m deciding to call, in homage to David Foster Wallace’s opus, the “Infinite Test.” I might be the only person who feels this way, but there are a few reactions that I get when I’m reading a bit of prose. A bad story, I’ll just let go, maybe without even finishing it, because meh. A good story, I’ll blow through as fast as I can, because I want to see how it ends! But a great story? Well, a great story, I’ll read a little slower, draw out a little longer. Partially to savor it, but moreso because I want to spend as much time as I can with more left to read. The piece is called “A Pigeon in Piketon,” by Geoffrey Sea, from the Winter 2004 issue of The American Scholar, and it took me three days to read. On its face, it’s a story about the infamous eradication of the passenger pigeon at the turn of the last century. Sea travels to Piketon, Ohio, where the last passenger pigeon ever seen in the wild was shot on March 22, 1900. A story about the passenger pigeon—a story of hubris and folly—would have been worth reading on its own, and indeed, Sea handles the subject of extinction with the reverence it deserves:

The passing of the passenger pigeon in a cascade of folly, brutality, and denial that stands as the exemplar of extinction made by man is, on the one hand, an episode in discretionary history: a causal chain of casual choices that seemingly could have been broken by any minimally decent decision at any marginally opportune time.

On the other hand, it’s an exercise in predestination . . . When the forest expanse of beech and hemlock and sycamore gave way to defended fields of corn and tobacco, the fix was in—a catastrophe itself bound up with those vast historical complexes that we call the American and Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. And so we might follow backward, arbitrarily far, the infernal workings of the machinery of fate, until we’d say that the passenger pigeon was damned or (the same thing) doomed before the first bird ever flew.

But when Sea visited Piketon, it wasn’t just as a writer and pigeon historian: it was as a consultant to the union that represented workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, one of the largest facilities for the enrichment of weaponized uranium in the world. With deftness, Sea traces the historical and, for want of a better term, poetic synchronicity between Americans and the passenger pigeon, a species that was wiped clean from the face of the earth at the place where we came closest to planting the seeds of our own destruction.

It’s an incredibly rich story. In the process of telling the twin narratives of the last days of the passenger pigeon and the last days of the Piketon uranium enrichment plant, Sea gives a series of lessons in American history, geology, anthropology, ecology, physics, chemistry, technology, war, and language. I could block quote any of a dozen portions from the story here to illustrate the education that Sea endeavors to provide, but I really think you’re better served coming across them on your own. You might consider this to be a poor sell-job, but if you’ve ever believed me about anything, precious readers, believe me about this: you will learn something by the time you’re done with this story.

If I were to actually give this story the “Craft” treatment, I’d say that what sets “A Pigeon in Piketon” apart is Sea’s facility as a ship’s captain. Over the course of 22 pages, he takes the reader down every possible tributary of history, science, and psychology. The confluence, though, always ends up being the Sargents Grain Mill in southern Ohio, where 10 years ago one of the greatest engines of doom that man has ever envisioned finally wound down, and 100 years before that the only passenger pigeon on earth, in a hail of birdshot, breathed its last.

I dunno, guys. I thought it was a great story. I hope you do too.

“They naturally called it a wild pigeon, as they called us wild men. . . . If the Great Spirit could have created a more elegant bird in plumage, form, and movement, He never did.” —Chief Pokagon

I’ve contributed another entry in my pal Reeves’s ongoing blog feature “On Board.” You can read it here. An excerpt:

If you’re a savvy urban mover and an earnest participant in the social contract, you have a Charlie Ticket or a Charlie Card, and you’re in the train in a jiff. If you’re a parent in town for a few days to accompany your kid while she goes through college orientation, you’ve only got two dollar bills, which you will fumble for, put into the machine backwards, and generally hold up the long line of people trying to get into the train behind you. Consequently, it’s imperative that you get in front of these folks and get on the train first.

Of course, longtime readers will recognize my antipathy toward those who pay for the T with money. Rooks can educate themselves by reading this Blogspot post from the proto-DD&U days. Money quote:

Who are these throwbacks, these anachronistic dinosaurs that cling so tenaciously to the old ways of exchanging bank notes for services? Paying with bills is bad enough, but at least once a week, I get stuck behind some brain donor that pays with dimes. For real. The nerve of these people.

For those interested in my first On Board submission, you can get to it through here. And, as always, if you aren’t already reading Meanderings, you’re cheating yourself.

I completely forgot that yesterday was Bloomsday, which is like, the Super Bowl for English majors. Bloomsday being June 16, the date that James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses takes place. In commemoration, here’s a story I wrote a few years ago about a Bloomsday celebration in Boston. Enjoy!

While the invoice from my hosting company should have been ample reminder, I completely forgot that May 29 was the one-year anniversary of dangerousdirtyunfun.com. What a horrible blogger I am. Where’s the romance gone? Sure, at the start, there were rose petals leading from the door down the hallway and right to my laptop. Pretty soon, though, the posts got less frequent, the writing got a little skimpier, until finally I’m forgetting our anniversary. I’m sorry, dangersoudirtyunfun.com! Let me make it up to you with a special Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Event.

In the coming days and weeks (because let’s be honest, precious readers, DD&U doesn’t do week-long events), I’ll be going through the past year’s worth of posts, picking out some of my favorites, providing some commentary, basically playing around in the archives. I’ll do my best to provide some fresh content so this isn’t some exercise in blatant narcissism. But then again, you people will read anything I post, right? Right?

Anyway, here’s the oldest post I can possibly point to: the first one, from May 29, 2009! It’s extra cute, because I talk about all this crazy customization I planned to do on the site, and reference all of these old details that are long defunct. Ah, capricious youth. The most substantive bit here is the origin of your favorite blog’s title, which isn’t really that substantive, but hey! Cut me some slack, it was my first post!

Way back when I was a junior in college, I and a group of dear friends took a road trip out to sunny South Bend, Indiana, to watch the mighty Eagles of Boston College vanquish their bitter rivals, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. On the way home, two of our group attained other means of transport home, so it was just Michelle, whose car we were in, Katie, and myself splitting driving duties. I remember being behind the wheel and blazing through Indiana in a pelting rain storm. I don’t recall how long it took us to get back to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but I do remember driving through the night, and trying to get some shut-eye in the backseat, which wasn’t necessarily easy.

So there we were, on the Massachusetts Turnpike, 15 or 20 minutes from home, going through a tollbooth. Michelle was driving, Katie was in the passenger seat, and I was in a half-catatonic state in the back. Michelle called our attention to an advertisement on the divider between toll booths. I think it was for Boston’s public parks. Anyway, it hyped up Boston’s playgrounds as “Safe, Clean, and Fun!” This wasn’t inherently hilarious. But then Michelle said “Of course they’re safe, clean, and fun. What are they supposed to say? Dangerous, dirty, and unfun?” This wasn’t inherently hilarious, either, but for whatever reason, be it the sleep deprivation, or maybe the residue of the copious amounts of fermented spirits I had imbibed hours before, I laughed harder than I ever did in my entire life. All the way home, I couldn’t stop laughing, gasping for breath, clutching the seat in front of me, wheezing “Dangerous, dirty, and unfun! Ha!” After that, the term became something we brought up in conversation, and it also became the title of the memorial mixtape of the trip that Michelle made for me.

So that’s it. I just thought it was a fun term. Is there any inherent meaning or application to the blog? I don’t know. You tell me.

I kinda wish I didn’t blow that “born back ceaselessly into the past” hed on a stupid post about making your blog look like a Geocities site. It would have been much more appropriate here. Oh well.

As you may be aware, your favorite blogger celebrated a birthday this week. Also, my birthday was this week, too. (See what I did there? With the self-deprecating implication that I might not actually be your favorite blogger? ::tap tap tap:: Is this thing on?) Anyway, as the early part of my mid-20s fades away in the rearview mirror of time’s unceasing advance, the idea of growing up has been on my mind. I have enough self-awareness to bristle at the concept of a “quarter-life crisis,” so don’t worry, this won’t be a post about how confused I am about the future as I watch the sands of time slip through my fingers like so many grains of sand.

But I have been thinking about all the years gone by: some wistful stuff, but mostly good stuff, and I was grasping for something appropriate to post about on the event of the anniversary of my natal day. First, I considered discussing the pants-wettingly exciting news that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper are back in Taking Back Sunday, reuniting the Tell All Your Friends lineup that produced Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s third favorite album of the last decade. (I’m seeing them in June, and worry not, treasured reader, that show will get the eff blogged out of it.) But then I came across something better, a bit of nostalgia so potent that Adrian Veidt himself would be compelled to stroke his chin in admiration. Let me tell you a story.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have a Nintendo, but my cousins did. Whenever we went over their house, we played a lot of Duck Hunt, a lot of Mario, a lot of Monster Truck Rally. Every now and again, we’d fire up Bases Loaded. RBI Baseball, with its Weeble-esque renditions of Major League stars, was probably the more beloved baseball game of the era, but, because it didn’t have a license from MLB, Bases Loaded had the probably unforeseen advantage of being able to make up teams and players out of whole cloth. There was a New Jersey team, so of course I played with them every time I had the controller in my hands. Anyone that’s played Bases Loaded knows where this is going: I’m about to talk about Paste.

Many pixels have been spilled talking about Bo Jackson’s prowess in Tecmo Super Bowl, but Paste, the number three hitter in the NJ lineup, surpasses even him. Paste hit 60 home runs and batted .467 last season! He was less than a god, but far, far more than a man. So you can imagine my delight when, just a day after my birthday, as I was reminiscing about my youth, I came across this brilliant video tribute to the immortal Paste. Enjoy.

I consider myself to be a crummy writer, if only because it seems like a week doesn’t go by without me coming across some really wise habit that some writer has that makes me say “Hey, why am I not doing that?”

Not this time! Here’s the lead from a story by Slate’s Jack Shafer:

I store my very favorite works of long-form journalism in a hard-drive folder titled “Keepers.” There’s Jonathan Rauch’s 1995 defense of prejudice from Harper’s, Gary Wolf’s stunning 1995 profile of Ted Nelson in Wired, John Tierney’s 1996 piece on recycling in the New York Times Magazine, Gary Greenberg’s 2001 brain-death exposé in The New Yorker; and Sean Wilentz’s 2007 masterpiece about Blonde on Blonde from the Oxford American, just to name a few.

I do this! In fact, nobody even had to tell me. I’m motivated by the same instinct that compelled me to not sell back any of my books in college. Firstly, those books are the only proof that I have any education whatsoever. Secondly, if I read something I like, I’m gonna hold onto it! Of course, my keepers aren’t organized into a fancy “electronic” “folder.” More like a pile that I keep between a pile of bills and a pile of comics. Real professional-like.

Proof!

Problem is, most of my pile is articles I ripped out of the New Yorker or New York magazine (which I have subscriptions to), Vanity Fair (which I buy from time to time), and random crap that I come across at work (which I randomly come across. At work.) Which is to say, while those are top-notch publications, my scope is limited.

That’s why I’m so thrilled about the advent of longform.org, which Mr. Shafer writes about above. If you didn’t actually click through to that link, the point of longform.org is to aggregate some of the best long-form, narrative journalism out there. The stories are chosen by the dudes that run the site, Max Linsky and Aaron Lammer, and by users. Two great features of the site: you can browse through stories, and if you come across one you’re interested in, you can tag it “Read later.” You can access your list of “Read later” stories any time you log onto the Internet. And then you can read them through Instapaper, a service that renders the text into printer-friendly, ad-free format. Tremendous! I’ve been tooling around a bit, and many of the stories come from the usual suspects (Harper’s, the New Yorker, Esquire), magazines that I know to be good but just never get around to checking out (Wired, Texas Monthly), and then some publications that I honestly would never think to check out (Virginia Quarterly, East Bay Express).

Folks in my line of work revere the long form. (You can tell, because we use the term “the long form” for, basically, long magazine stories.) Even ambitionless, unmotivated hacks like me, in the back of their minds, dream of someday getting that assignment where you’ve got six months, but more importantly, 10,000 words, to just tell a story. That Slate story above was exuberantly teased on its homepage with a subhead like “The site that will save long-form journalism,” but a quick trip around longform.org should make you feel pretty alright about the genre’s prospects. Every week, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and the Atlantic are producing high-quality, long-form journalism, telling important stories, and telling them well. But better than that, the site is culling stories from the likes of n+1, Fast Company, and the Boston Phoenix. All of this is to say, there’s not enough hours in the day to keep track of all the great stories being written in publications, large and small, all across the country. Have fun, and keep reading.

Dangerous, Dirty, and Updated: The Official Roommate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun checks in with the following message:

ORODD&U: you are indeed a crummy writer. “lead” instead of “lede” ? journalism 101!

My bad, readers! Please accept this supplementary graf as some small consolation.

The increasingly unaptly named David Foster Wallace Fortnight continues with a few links that have been accumulating for a bit. Click on the “David Foster Wallace” tag below for earlier installments.

# My buddy Reeves, who also read Infinite Jest last summer, did a little project over at his blog, Meanderings. (Which, if you’re not reading, you should.) It was called Infinite Words, and basically all he did was transcribe all of the masterfully crafted phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that he marked down in his copy of the book. As you can see from the picture on that first post, there were a lot, enough to categorize. (The full list of posts is here.)

I expressed to Reeves my envy, that he came up with this idea first. But then I hoisted up my copy of the book and realized that there was no organizing principle behind the words I underlined, the phrases I highlights, or the pages I dogeared. To say nothing of the notes I left on post-its, the backs of envelopes, and in the margins of wholly unrelated magazine articles. So while I had every intention of promoting, so to speak, the Infinite Words concept, I suppose I didn’t have the foresight/intellectual discipline at the time to sufficiently record the things I liked. Oh well. Here’s a miniature version of well-crafted sentences that stuck with me from IJ.

38–39
On the grade-school beauty of Mildred Bonk: She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.

142
Hal Incandenza, from an academic paper on the future of the action hero: We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.

203
One of the things you’ll learn in rehab: That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

228
Joelle van Dyne, star of the eponymous film “Infinite Jest,” on the finished product: Joelle’s never seen the completed assembly of what she’d appeared in, or seen anyone who’s seen it, and doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he’d stuck that long quartzy auto-wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he’d said the thing he’d always wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up.

268
Teddy Schacht’s self-awareness, and quite possibly my favorite line in the book: Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller. . . . He’s one of those people who don’t need much, much less much more.

309
One of amateur tennis radio announcer Jim Troeltsch’s more creative reports: Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d’oeuvre and bit down 6–4, 7–6.

1048
An old friend on Orin Incandenza’s pick-up method: “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” Which in a way of course is being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And-I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This-Wittily,-Transcendently-Open-,-But-Will-Bring-You-Into-This-World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence, which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know.

# “Become an agent of light and goodness.” Or, to use a term my predecessor left on a post-it on my computer, “All words should be true and precise.” These are less goals to be achieved, and more landmarks to keep in your sights, I’ve found.

# Below is a Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny, anyone who heard it would die laughing.

Anyone who’s read Infinite Jest knows that a joke so funny it kills sounds a lot like a movie so entertaining it kills. Are we dealing with a case of Infinite Theft? Meh. Probably not. But I’d be shocked and amazed if a guy as smart and witty and well-versed in well, everything, as DFW wasn’t aware of Monty Python’s entire oeuvre. What an homage!

There’s been a lil bit of talk on the old Intertubes (or at least in the stupid blogs I read) about books in schools, probably precipitated by this Dana Goldstein piece on the Daily Beast. Here’s a telling couple sentences:

The average reading level of the top 20 books read by U.S. high school students is 5.3—two and a half grade levels easier than a front-page article in The New York Times or Washington Post. In no grade do students typically read nonfiction, beyond memoirs like the The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night—even though success on standardized tests, in college, and in many jobs requires the ability to comprehend dense nonfiction texts.

Yikes! Goldstein and her sources lament the quality of young people’s reading lists, and take the tack that what we need is more non-fiction in the curriculum, to serve the dual purpose of giving kids real-world “background” knowledge, and to generally engage kids who otherwise yawn at traditional fictional offerings. To which I say, fine! I’m not going to argue with adding some non-fiction variety to middle and high school curricula. What I wouldn’t want to see is a dramatic swinging of the pendulum away from fiction. I was an English major, so I’ve got a dog in this race, but I definitely think there are things that fiction is uniquely positioned to teach us. The important thing to remember, especially for the teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats with influence, is that it’s not a contest. Good writing is good writing, and we should be putting good writing in the curriculum no matter what form it comes in.

The harder pill to swallow in Goldstein’s piece is the negative judgment she levels against the type of reading kids these days do for fun, panning “lightweight fiction” and taking the requisite cheap shots at Twilight. Which is why I liked this piece by Katie Baker on the Awl, examining, among other things, why boys don’t read as much as girls. As the only boy in my book club, I have a tremendous interest in why, at least in my experience, it’s so hard to come across a serious reader who’s a boy. Baker revisits what she calls the age-old issue: “should kids be allowed to read whatever they want, so long as they’re reading?”

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I’m no expert. Of anything. So I won’t offer any firm prescriptions for what I think is the right thing to do in the classroom (except for that good writing bit above). What I also won’t do is pick nits about what children read outside of the classroom. Are we really going to look down our noses at a kid for reading Twilight instead of The Best and the Brightest? I don’t want to alarm you, but most adults don’t read books. If a youngster is going to pick up a book, sit down, and read it cover to cover, I really couldn’t care less what it is. Good for her!

Baker’s point about the Sweet Valley High books being just, well, more interesting than typical academic fare is well-taken. I’ll speak from personal experience here. I’ve always been a reader, dating back to the day where I just got bored of the story my first grade class spent a week reading. (It was in an orange Houghton Mifflin reader, about a girl learning to roller skate, and she was really scared of falling, so she left the house with a football helmet and like, a bunch of pillows tied to her torso. Does anyone remember the name of this story? It was a turning point in my life!) My teacher, Ms. McDonald, bless her heart, gave me access to the bookshelf in the back of the classroom and let me read whatever I wanted once I had finished what the class was working on in the reader. After that, it was off to the races w/r/t me and books.

I usually just read what was made available to me by my teachers. It wasn’t until Goosebumps that I started making my own reading material choices. Like many boys my age, I was a CONSUMER of Goosebumps books. Every month, like clockwork, I’d grab the newest installment and rip through it in a weekend. (My parents were cool and would take me to the bookstore pretty regularly and let me get whatever I wanted, which allowed me to rent out the newest Goosebumps to classmates every month once I was done with them. I actually did this!) Goosebumps, of course, were a sort of little boys’ analogue to The Babysitter’s Club: quick, schlocky, cheaply suspenseful horror novels. Nobody would confuse them for high literature, or even high young adult literature. But that’s not the point.

The point is, I looked forward to a new Goosebumps book like I look forward to a new episode of Gossip Girl. It’s something special when a book can excite and engross a young kid like that. Reading Goosebumps books, as low-brow as they were, showed me that it was possible to be captivated by words on a page. Once you put that concept in a kid’s head, it’s not a huge leap to say, Douglas Adams, or Frank Herbert, or George Orwell (all writers I read when I was in grammar school). I always laugh when teachers and sundry authority figures refer to books as “friends,” but it’s not untrue. If you can learn to trust that a book can be worth your time, you’ll always have something to do, and something to learn.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that their favorite blogger occasionally moonlights as a professional writing guy. Because I know you folks are always jonesing for more content, here are some selections written by yours truly from the latest issue of Boston College Magazine. This story is about the George Plimpton–esque afternoon I spent making fundraising calls to BC alumni. If you know me, you know how hard a time I have even asking for like, extra oyster crackers at a restaurant, so you can imagine how much I was pulling my collar in those three hours.

And here’s a story about Boston College’s last football game at Notre Dame for the foreseeable future, and a general overview of the rivalry between the last two Catholic schools playing big time college football. Despite the loss, it was a pretty heartwarming experience. I wound up talking to at least half a dozen pairs of fathers and sons, all of them just thrilled to be on that train from Chicago to South Bend, because they knew they might never get another chance.

And if you happen to be interested in my whole BCM oeuvre, you can find it here.

I may have mentioned earlier that I’m reading Everything and More, David Foster Wallace’s history of infinity. As with everything that DFW writes, it’s awesome. The problem is, the man is a super genius about everything, including math. And I’m a non-math-doing guy. So the book started off pretty good, with a lot of intellectual history and basic mathematics, it very quickly spiraled into a discussion of calculus and linear algebra and all sorts of advanced concepts that I have no idea how to even begin to describe. Which stinks, because I’d really like to finish the book.

This is all to say that I’m thrilled that the New York Times’s Opinionator blog has decided to commission Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied math at Cornell, to do a series of weekly blogs about the principles of math. Says Strogatz:

I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

Is anyone else tremendously excited about this sort of thing? Maybe it won’t put me on the path to finishing the history of infinity, but math is very important! And, if mathematicians are to be believed, fun! Eh? Anybody?