FORM & FORUM

Essaying for Change

Nancy Geyer

Critical Paper and Program BibliographySubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in

Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2013

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Form & Forum: Essaying For Change

Introduction

In 2011, Ann Pancake gave an enthusiastically received craft talk on political writing at

the Rainier Writing Workshop’s residency, using as an example her novel Strange as this

Weather Has Been, about mountaintop removal in her home state of West Virginia.1 The

novel was something of a departure from her earlier works. As Pancake explained it, she

had segregated her political concerns from her creative efforts prior to penning Strange

because, among other reasons, she had “accepted the conventional American literary

wisdom that explicit politics can ruin literary art, especially fiction” (1).

I’m a nonfiction writer, and yet Pancake’s fears resonated with me. As she went

on to say, “integrating into any literary genre the facts, information, and context a

political subject often requires is very difficult without undermining the art” (4–5,

emphasis added). I certainly encountered this difficulty in attempting my own political

essay, in which my subject is the prominent display of weapons advertisements in

Washington, D.C., where I live. In the run-up to the awarding of defense contracts, ads

for drones and fighter jets and the like will appear in Washington’s metro stations and in

the pages of The Washington Post, among other places, but there are also a few such ads

year-round—in an underground corridor that leads to a Virginia shopping mall, for

example, where I regularly meet my husband for lunch.

1 The talk took place at Pacific Lutheran University on August 15, 2011. I quote from the

paper Pancake read and shared with me later, titled “Creative Responses to Worlds

Unraveling: The Artist in the 21st Century.”

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When I first saw these ads, soon after moving back to Washington after a decade

away, my immediate thought was to fire off a few angry e-mails and perhaps be done

with it. But as a former art critic who often finds inspiration for my essays in images, I

inevitably began to think more ambitiously as a writer. Thus I found myself at the

intersection of literary art and advocacy, looking for ways in which to proceed.

This critical paper means to be a broad inquiry. It’s an attempt to learn how to

think about literary works that also have extra-literary purposes. I discuss four very

different essays that, in one way or another, advocate for change: David Foster Wallace’s

“Consider the Lobster”; Peter Singer’s “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What

Should You?”; Christopher Hitchens’ “Believe Me, It’s Torture”; and Reginald Gibbons’

“Christmas at Juvenile Court.” Although the four have little in common thematically and

stylistically, they all keep their issues front and center.

“Lobster” and “Billionaire” are primarily concerned with individual

behavior—i.e., that of the reader—while “Torture” and “Christmas” make a case for

systemic change. Thus Wallace’s and Singer’s essays are more ethical than political (to

oversimplify), which is not to say their subjects required that approach, while Hitchens’

and Gibbons’ are both, or ethico-political. “Ethico-political” is a clumsy word—I’ve

borrowed it from Wallace—but I prefer it to “political,” which seems to me inadequate,

not to mention subject to misuse. It is at once too broad—including, as it does, writing

that’s about politics—and too narrow, because it implies nothing about ethics, which

often is at the heart of the matter when we speak of the political essay.

Another thing that inspired this project was a handout for a class Pancake taught

with Holly Hughes during the Rainier Writing Workshop’s 2012 residency, titled

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“Worlds Unraveling: How Do Writers Respond?”2 Among the handout’s strategies for

“incorporating politics” into literary nonfiction are (I’m summarizing here):

1) Avoid a polemical or preaching tone.

2) Don’t overstate your message.

3) Present the facts so that readers may draw their own conclusions.

4) Present different perspectives/points of view.

5) Keep the focus on showing as opposed to telling, unless you are

explicitly exploring philosophical or political ideas.

I confess to having doubts about some of these. A couple of the writers in this

critical paper aren’t so well behaved, which is what I like about them. They don’t avoid

polemic (Hitchens) or overstatement (Wallace), nor do they seem especially concerned

with allowing readers to draw their own conclusions—which might only appear to be a

disingenuous concern in any event, their purpose being to persuade (or even to provoke),

after all. They succeed not despite these usually annoying qualities but because of them.

I’m also interested in how three of these writers employ the “I” in their essays,

and in why the fourth (Gibbons) does not. How to use the “I,” and how often to use it,

was probably my biggest stumbling block because it can feel especially self-indulgent

within the context of an ethico-political essay. Then I came across this statement by

Hitchens, in his essay “Unspoken Truths”: “In time I appreciated that my fear of self-

indulgence was its own form of indulgence.”

Another hang-up: I didn’t initially plan to include anything in this paper by

Singer, a moral philosopher currently at Princeton, even though he has influenced my

2 The class took place at Pacific Lutheran University on August 10, 2012.

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behavior more than any other writer (his 1975 book Animal Liberation was instrumental

in my giving up meat-eating more than twenty years ago)—because I didn’t consider his

writing sufficiently “literary.” But I came to realize that when it comes to ethico-political

writing especially, it makes no sense to set the aesthetic bar so high that it excludes such

a major player. And, as it happened, I discovered that Wallace had some interesting

things to say about Singer’s prose in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007,

along with questions about what the connections between literary aesthetics and moral

value are, including: Who gets to decide? This question was rhetorical, of course—and

liberating.

Boiling lobsters alive, giving up a large part of one’s income, waterboarding, the

sorry state of the juvenile justice system. As my second-year mentor, Rebecca

McClanahan, writes in “The Soul of Brevity: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Brief

Essay,” in reference to another of Singer’s essays, “The Singer Solution to World

Poverty”:

I’d rather be reading about lilies. But many essayists are not only working

their form but also working their forum, creating a space for public

discourse. They are agents of change. And because their essays are, in

many cases, brief, even the most hesitant or cynical reader will usually stay

until the bitter end. Afterwards, some readers will simply close the book.

Others will go directly to their desk to write a check . . . or pick up the

phone . . . (122)

My title for this paper is inspired by the above passage.

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1. Essayist as Antagonist: David Foster Wallace and “Consider the Lobster”

How fortunate for the essay—and, one would think, a lobster or two—that Gourmet

magazine didn’t fully know what it was getting into when it assigned David Foster

Wallace to cover the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival. In one respect, however, his editor

must have been delighted: Wallace delivered an absurdities-packed account of the

festival itself, as one would expect from the author of “Ticket to the Fair” and “A

Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” both of which had been published in

Harper’s. But there’s a crucial difference between the Maine Lobster Festival, on the one

hand, and the Illinois State Fair or a Caribbean luxury cruise, on the other. A lobster

festival practically begs ethical scrutiny, whereas a fair or a cruise ordinarily does not. As

Wallace wrote in “Consider the Lobster,” the resulting feature article-cum-essay:

Since . . . the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the

2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of

Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think

hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns

out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions. (246–47) 3

Wallace is in a class by himself when it comes to examining America’s touristy

pastimes. His brand of dyspeptic humor—he’d rather be elsewhere, he makes clear—is

3 All quotes from “Lobster” come from Wallace’s book of essays by the same title, not

from Gourmet magazine.

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the hook.4 Imagine if, instead of plopping us down in “the enormous, pungent, and

extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival” (235), Wallace had begun with his

central question: “So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s

Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a

sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” (243). Fearing a guilt trip, we

might beg off. Instead, Wallace waits until we’re nine pages in and already invested. If

you were a Gourmet subscriber, you were in for quite a surprise. If you were reading the

essay in Wallace’s collection of essays by the same title, you perhaps already knew what

was in store and yet only now began to fully appreciate the impact on Gourmet’s editor

and readership. As Erik Marcus of Vegan.com writes: “Submitting a story on the ethics of

lobster eating to a magazine like Gourmet is the editorial equivalent to driving a truck

bomb to their offices.”

4 Wallace’s ramblings on tourism make up the essay’s longest of twenty-one

footnotes—a mini-essay in itself in which he confesses, “I have never understood why so

many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl

through maddening traffic to loud, hot, crowded tourist venues in order to sample a ‘local

flavor’ that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This may (as my festival

companions keep pointing out) all be a matter of personality and hardwired taste: the fact

that I do not like tourist venues means that I’ll never understand their appeal and so am

probably not the one to talk about it (the supposed appeal). But, since this FN will almost

certainly not survive magazine editing anyway, here goes . . .” —whereupon he

colorfully expounds on his objections, ending on this note: “As a tourist, you become

economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing” (240).

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In retrospect, the sights and sounds of the festival, which Wallace describes with

the usual baroque relish, are like so much damning evidence. But first, we get a bit of

dietary history. Lobster, Wallace tells us, used to be a low-class food: “Even in the harsh

penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to

inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like

making people eat rats” (237–38). These days lobster is seen as a delicacy, but it’s in the

interests of the MLF to modify that impression by offering an economical meal for the

festival-going masses ($12 for a 1_-pound lobster, with a bag of chips and a roll). Here,

though, is the catch:

. . . the Maine Lobster Festival’s democratization of lobster comes with all

the massed inconvenience and aesthetic compromise of real democracy.

See, for example, the aforementioned Main Eating Tent, for which there is

a constant Disneyland-grade queue, and which turns out to be a square

quarter mile of awning-shaded cafeteria lines and rows of long

institutional tables at which friend and stranger alike sit cheek by jowl,

cracking and chewing and dribbling. It’s hot, and the sagged roof traps the

steam and the smells, which latter are strong and only partly food-related.

It is also loud, and a good percentage of the total noise is masticatory.

(239)

Throw in the state of the Port-A-Sans and the fact that there’s nowhere to wash your

hands, and you, too, might wish you had stayed home.

But home is not your refuge from Wallace if you plan to prepare a lobster meal

there. In one of the essay’s many graphic passages, he tells us:

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However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home . . . it tends to come

alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a

container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to

the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a

person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof . . . . Even if you

cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and

clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping

the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around . . . causing some cooks to leave

the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic

oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process

is over. (247–48)

How do you know when the lobster’s truly done? “Try pulling on one of their

antennae—if it comes out of the head with minimal effort, you’re ready to eat” (242).

Bon appétit!

The ethical issue at the heart of all this, of course, is whether lobsters feel pain.

Wallace dives right into scientific matter in an attempt to get at some sort of answer.

There is, first of all, the question of what a lobster is, taxonomically speaking, which

means a discussion of crustaceans and aquatic arthropods and phyla and species. There

are “factoids” to impart about lobster physiognomy, behavior, and habitat. And there’s

some discussion of comparative neuroanatomy and neurological “hardware,” and of

philosophical argument (what are an organism’s “interests” or “preferences,” for

example, and how can they be deduced from behavior)—which, notes Wallace, who was

the son of a distinguished philosopher and had himself written an honors thesis in the

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subject as an undergraduate at Amherst, can be as technical and abstruse as the science.

How to present all this “without undermining the art,” as Pancake warns?

Phillip Lopate, in an article for the journal Creative Nonfiction about the

challenges of presenting technical matter, wrote of his own work that he “needed to

paraphrase the research somehow, put it in my own words, warm it with my stylistic

breath. To convert this obdurate magma into something relatively essayistic, intimate,

conversational, I had to call on every trick, irony and witticism I could muster” (66). He

goes on to say that his methods have included lampooning the tone of a “pedantic

biologist” and playing up his own ignorance “in a self-deprecating way” (66).

Perhaps Lopate is really doing what he’s been doing all along: he doesn’t

suddenly become witty solely to enliven the dry stuff. But this is harder than it sounds.

Many writers seem to automatically switch gears when they summon the technical stuff,

putting aside their quirks and mannerisms for the duration as if these could only

undermine their authority when it’s time to get down to business. In “Lobster,” nothing

changes—not Wallace’s voice, not his rhetorical gestures, not his sense of the absurd. (So

strong is his voice that one could identify him by the technical passages alone.) His

commentary continues unabated: a discussion of lobsters’ tactile sense, for

example—relevant to whether they feel pain—is preceded by “And there’s more unhappy

news” (250). His tone is wry: the behavior of worms after being cut in half is “post-op

behavior” (251). “All this is right there in the encyclopedia” (237), he’ll say, or “In order

to save you a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that . . .” (249).

There’s an assumed intimacy throughout, established near the essay’s beginning

when Wallace tells us he is “[our] assigned correspondent” who “saw it all, accompanied

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by one girlfriend and both his own parents” (236), adding in a footnote that “all

personally connected parties have made it clear from the start that they do not want to be

talked about in this article.” And so it is that we seem to have Wallace to ourselves. He

addresses us directly, with an “as you can imagine” or a “Be apprised, though” or an “As

you may or may not know” or a “Let’s not even talk about . . .”—risky moves, because

they can come across as presumptuous, but Wallace handles them expertly. Having thus

warmed us to him, he’s in a better position to insist we engage in a little soul-searching.

This insistence is characteristic of Wallace’s fiction as well. Zadie Smith, in her

essay “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace,”

says that “his stories simply don’t investigate character; they don’t intend to. Instead

they’re turned outward, toward us. It’s our character that’s being investigated . . . .”

(273). And it’s characteristic, too, of other forms of expression, such as Wallace’s widely

circulated 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, in which he explains what

makes empathy so difficult:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that

I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and

important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural,

basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty

much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hardwired

into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had

that you were not at the absolute center of.

And yet Wallace’s intentions can also be difficult to decipher, which makes for

divergent readings: one person’s “heartfelt” is another person’s “disingenuousness.” In

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Smith’s words: “His urgency, his sincerity, his apparent desperation to ‘connect’ with his

reader in a genuine way—these are things you either believe in or don’t” (287). But I find

that I both do and don’t believe. Or maybe my third-year mentor, Lia Purpura, has the

right take on this when she tells me she has never found Wallace insincere, “in the way I

don’t find chess players plotting moves to be insincere.”5

In “Lobster,” Wallace worries (a “move”?) that his questions are “irksomely PC

or sentimental” and says (another “move”?) that he’s “not trying to bait anyone here”

(254)—but bait is what he does, repeatedly. He also says he’s “[concerned] not to come

off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused” (253). But to my

ears, he doesn’t sound confused. He does launch into a series of questions for which he

doesn’t provide answers, but these have a way of sounding like arguments in disguise: “Is

it possible,” he asks us, “that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and

eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s

experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical,

extreme—and yet . . . .” (253). There’s also the fact that many of his questions are more

rhetorical than genuine, like the zinger at the essay’s very end, where he singles out the

adjective in Gourmet’s subtitle, “The Magazine of Good Living,” and asks what it’s

“really supposed to mean” (254).

5 And then there’s what Wallace himself said about his intentions. According to novelist

David Gates, in Newsweek’s eulogy for the writer, “Wallace . . . told The Boston Globe

that his writing such a piece for an audience of foodies was—you saw this coming—‘just

an exercise in my weird self-destructiveness.’”

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In a not completely unfavorable assessment of Wallace’s essays, Maud Newton,

in The New York Times, writes that although Wallace detested the well-mannered

magazine feature, his rhetoric “is mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative

in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade.” His

verbal tics, she says, could make him seem “argumentatively, even aggressively,

disingenuous.”

And yet voice, with all its quirks, is what propels “Lobster,” and it’s difficult to

imagine any tinkering that wouldn’t result in giving a different, and perhaps even a false,

impression of the person behind it. (I find it tricky to apply the word “persona” to

Wallace’s writing, suggestive as that is of something “put on” and therefore adjustable,

even as I think Wallace often is putting something on.)

In the end, Wallace manages to put the plight of lobsters in the public arena as no

one before him had done quite so graphically, not even Singer. Or so cleverly: When he

makes a seemingly casual comment about restaurants that feature tanks of live lobsters

“from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point” (242), Wallace is

the one who’s pointing—at us, and at himself. It’s impossible to imagine that he didn’t

change at least a few people’s eating habits. As for whether Wallace himself was able to

eschew lobster, assuming he even tried to, he doesn’t say.

2. Literary Aesthetics and the Ethico-Political Essay: Peter Singer’s “What Should a

Billionaire Give—and What Should You?”

When Wallace, as guest editor, wrote his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007,

he was clearly in a sour mood, politically-speaking. His function as editor, he said,

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invoking George W. Bush, “is best described by an epithet that may, in future years, sum

up 2006 with the same grim efficiency that terms like ‘Peace with Honor,’ ‘Iran-Contra,’

‘Florida Recount,’ and ‘Shock and Awe’ now comprise and evoke other years. What your

editor really is here is: the Decider” (xv).

As the Decider, Wallace selected a good number of what he called “service

essays” (xxii)—many with “ethicopolitical” (xix) themes that address the “current

emergency” (xxi). Service essays might be editorials or personal accounts or literary

journalism or classically styled arguments; what they have in common, he said, beyond

handling facts with integrity, is that they cut through the “Total Noise” that is “the sound

of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and

context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to

make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value” (xiii–xiv).

In a footnote equal to a full page of text, Wallace raises the question of literary

aesthetics vis-à-vis the ethico-political essay, using one of his selections as an example:

“What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?” by Peter Singer, the

influential utilitarian philosopher. Singer’s essay, which originally appeared in The New

York Times Magazine and is a provocative argument for giving away a big chunk of

one’s income, is not, Wallace admits, “exactly belletristic” (xix). (Neither is its prose

“aureate academese,” he quickly adds.) But it is “brilliant and valuable precisely because

its prose is so mainstream and its formulas so (arguably) crude or harsh” (xix). Then,

characteristically, Wallace makes a show of second-guessing himself: “Or is this kind of

‘value’ a stupid, PC-ish criterion to use in Decidering about essays’ literary worth? What

exactly are the connections between literary aesthetics and moral value supposed to be?

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Whose moral values ought to get used in determining what those connections should be?”

(xix).

I, too, found Singer’s essay “salient” and “unforgettable” when I first read it in

The New York Times, and had even saved it, and yet I was disappointed to find it

reprinted in The Best American Essays because there I hope for something more from

language. But Wallace’s perspective made me reevaluate (and frankly I was beginning to

wonder if, when it comes to ethico-political issues, enough “literary” artists are stepping

up to the plate). His proposition intrigued me: How is it that Singer’s essay is “brilliant”

and “valuable” precisely because his prose is so mainstream?

Wallace doesn’t say. If his praise were limited to “valuable,” we might assume he

means that mainstream prose, because accessible, has the best chance of putting an

ethical issue before the largest possible audience, which is certainly the important thing in

any “current emergency.” (Which raises the question: In terms of literary aesthetics, do

you make accommodations for the ethico-political essay, and, if so, what should they

be?) But Wallace also credits Singer’s mainstream prose for making his essay “brilliant.”

If you were a New York Times subscriber, “What Should a Billionaire Give—and

What Should You?”6 landed with a thud on your doorstep just as your mailbox

overflowed with requests for money. With Christmas approaching, and Americans

writing checks to their favorite charities,” Singer pointedly reminds us, “it’s a good time

to ask [how our beliefs] . . . square with our actions” (266). One can easily imagine how

magazine article and nonprofit solicitations worked in concert to tug at people’s

6 All page numbers refer to the reprint in The Best American Essays 2007.

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consciences, the one offering utilitarian logic along with graphics to help us do our

arithmetic, the other supplying heartrending stories and photographs.

I agree with Wallace that Singer’s prose is as plain as his formulas for giving are

“crude,” though one could make too much of this. Perhaps “plain-spoken” best describes

the writing, in parts, as in “straightforward” or “frank.” Reading Singer is to imagine

sitting across the table from him as he looks you in the eye and asks uncomfortable

questions about what you do with your money. When plain talk is on the table, there’s no

evasion by way of language.

It’s almost as if Singer’s unadorned prose is meant to serve as an example: If

Singer were a stylist, how could he ask you to forego the elegant shoes you don’t need

that beckon from the store window? Yes, shoes—somehow a fitting (“no pun,” as

Wallace would say) object for Singer’s bedrock argument, variations of which have

appeared in other of his essays, where we are to imagine walking by a shallow pond in

which a child is floundering:

Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost

everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience to

ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent,

and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for

example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the

child to drown. Similarly, if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can

contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good

chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so. (271)

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In another essay, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” Singer defines a

utilitarian philosopher as “one who judges whether acts are right or wrong by their

consequences.” He offers, in that essay, this proposition, which goes far beyond the

above scenario: “If the upshot of [an] American’s failure to donate [money] is that one

more kid dies on the streets of a Brazilian city, then it is, in some sense, just as bad as

selling the kid to the organ peddlers.” Perhaps this is part of what Wallace means when

he says that Singer’s plain prose is what makes his essay “brilliant”: it echoes the

utilitarianism of his argument.

There is something else, something ironic, about Singer’s prose: it is forgettable

in the sense that it isn’t special, and yet it is unforgettable in the sense that you can easily

recall it. Ten years down the line, you’ll have no problem retelling the story about the

child in the pond and how buying a new pair of shoes is the moral equivalent of letting a

child drown.

In “Billionaire,” Singer’s poor people are something of an abstraction. It’s the rich

he’s interested in, for the purposes of this essay, and who are the most colorful, beginning

with two philanthropists: Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. These two deserve more praise

than criticism, Singer says, even though they should perhaps give away even more of

their wealth, and even though it may be troubling that a handful of individuals can make

such “momentous decisions” (268) about where to allocate resources. And then he ups

the ante by bringing in a third philanthropist:

Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell

Gates that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky.

A few years ago, when he was in his mid-forties, Kravinsky gave almost

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all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities,

retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia,

and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that

thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a

transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his

kidneys to a complete stranger. (275)

Kravinsky, as far as Singer can tell, loves his children as much as any “normal”

parent, but he admits that he would allow one of his children to die if it meant that at least

two children could live. “What marks Kravinksy from the rest of us,” Singer writes, “is

that he takes the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of

rhetoric” (275). If Singer finds this at least as chilling as it is compassionate, he doesn’t

say so.7

Singer is wary of the argument that the rich have ulterior motives, because their

motives aren’t as important as the effects of their giving, and because “if the rich just

give their money away to improve their image, or to make up for past

misdeeds—misdeeds quite unlike any we have committed, of course—then,

conveniently, what they are doing has no relevance to what we ought to do” (268). This is

utilitarian thinking at work. And isn’t it possible, he asks provocatively, that these three

men—agnostics or atheists all—are acting less out of self-interest than did Mother

Teresa, who presumably expected to be rewarded in heaven?

7 For more about Kravinsky, see “The Gift” by Ian Parker, in the August 2, 2004 issue of

The New Yorker.

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If Singer’s prose style is not unique, his words are still identifiably his by way of

his reasoning. By going to philanthropic extremes, Singer is as provocative as is Wallace

in “Lobster” when the latter brings up Mengele’s experiments. But that’s about all they

have in common. Wallace’s essay is voice-driven. What drives “Billionaire” is the odd

sort of tension that runs through it. Singer starts with the super-rich—a good place to

begin, as the rich are objects of great curiosity to most people—but we know (the

giveaway is in the second half of the title: “and What Should You”) that he’ll be working

down the income ladder . . . until the buck stops at us.

This is where the “crude” formulas for giving really kick in. Just as Singer’s

language is simple, so are his calculations elementary, purposefully failing to take into

account personal circumstance, which tends not to be an issue for the very rich. If you

make $132,000 a year and you support, say, four children, should you really cough up

$13,200, the same amount expected of a bachelor earning the same income but with no

college tuition looming on the horizon? There’s a basic mathematical and linguistic

precision about it all, clean and to the point. Singer gets in and gets out, leaving it to us to

assess the damage.

3. Speaking His Mind: Christopher Hitchens and “Believe Me, It’s Torture”

On the continuum from “tell it slant” to “state it outright,” Christopher Hitchens is

usually found well toward the latter end. In “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” his account for

Vanity Fair of undergoing the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, one need

go no further than the essay’s title to learn where he stands. Unlike David Foster Wallace,

19

Hitchens doesn’t much pretend to mull things over on the page. Reading him, we don’t

follow the twists and turns of his mind so much as we listen to him speak his mind.

“Speak” is the operative word because in Hitchens’ essays we have as good a

correspondence between speaking voice and writing voice as is possible to attain. Sadly,

it took a battle with esophageal cancer for Hitchens himself to appreciate just how

instrumental is the one to the other. In his essay “Unspoken Truths,” which appeared in

Vanity Fair six months before his death, Hitchens writes about how he attempted to hail a

taxi one day “and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost

its meow.” A cruel predicament, but he was able to give it some perspective:

In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only

in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed

of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the

page. I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian . . . who about

35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull,

and advised me briskly to write “more like the way you talk.” At the time,

I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him

properly . . . .

It’s unlikely that Hoggart doled out that advice to just anyone, as Hitchens was legendary

for speaking in elegant sentences and complete paragraphs.

The above passage also contains a big clue to what drove Hitchens: the desire

never to be dull, in writing and in life. “The one unforgiveable sin is to be boring,” he

writes in his memoir, Hitch-22, quoting his mother (13–14). He hungered for battle—and

the bottle, telling Charlie Rose in a 2010 interview that “writing is what’s important to

20

me, and anything that helps me do that, or enhances and prolongs and deepens and

sometimes intensifies argument and conversation, is worth it to me.” All of which is to

say that Hitchens’ outsized personality comes with his writing; we can’t separate one

from the other.

So, we learn at the outset that Hitchens will declare that waterboarding is torture.

What keeps us reading? Well, for one thing, we never know what to expect from

Hitchens, per that desire of his to never be dull. This is a writer who, the year before, had

undergone, at the suggestion of his Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter (who also came up

with the waterboarding idea), a “sack, back, and crack,” or the male form of the Brazilian

wax, for a three-part series titled “On the Limits of Self-Improvement.” The parallels are

obvious. In that essay he had written, “The combined effect was like being tortured for

information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly)

sandpaper handjob.” Furthermore, the accompanying photos—one of Hitchens lying on

the grooming table and another in a fully reclined dentist chair (he also had his misshapen

teeth entirely redone)—were not unlike those of him stretched out on the (water) board.

If, by association, the earlier bit of shtick-lit cheapens the later exercise, one can

place some of the blame on an enterprising editor. Still, “Torture” is worth reading. It’s

not immodest, in part because Hitchens doesn’t condemn anyone in the Bush

administration by name, personal attacks being where he’s most likely to engage in

showmanship. Perhaps he felt his hands were tied, so to speak, given that he’d “hitched

his wagon to Bush’s star,” as Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post would have it,

but one could argue that restraint, in more ways than one, is the name of the game here: it

puts more of the spotlight on the procedure itself. A video of the session, which took

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place somewhere in the “hill country” of western North Carolina, in what looks like an

attached garage, is available on Vanity Fair’s website: we see a rather perfunctory

(chilling, for that) performance on the part of the “handlers,” though it’s accompanied at

high volume by “New Age techno-disco.”

It’s perhaps useful to think of “Believe Me, It’s Torture” as a work of immersion

journalism,8 though the participatory part of Hitchens’ project was extremely brief. “I

find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted [on the sloping board],” he writes.

The video displays a timer, however: he lasted no more than sixteen seconds, signaling

his desire to stop by letting go the metal objects he’d been grasping in each hand.

In A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, Robin Hemley offers this general

definition of immersion writing:

Immersion writing engages the writer in the here and now in a journalistic

sense, shaping and creating a story happening in the present while

unabashedly lugging along all that baggage that makes up the writer’s

personality: his or her memories, culture, and opinions. (8)

More narrowly, the immersion journalist “includes the self in order to write about the

world” (9), as opposed to the immersion memoirist, who “writes about the world in order

to examine the self” (9). The immersion journalist’s project might take several forms.

Using Hemley’s criteria, it seems to me that Hitchens’ project is both an “investigation”

8 Poet Christopher Merrill made this (presumably) tongue-in-cheek observation at the

2012 AWP conference in Chicago as a participant on the panel “The Writer in the World:

A Look at Immersion Writing,” according to Kate Fox in a March 3, 2012 blog post for

Brevity.

22

(into the human cost of waterboarding and whether it is torture) and a “reenactment” (of

an interrogation technique). It allowed Hitchens to leave the realm of abstraction, in

which he had been participating in the debate, and to resolve things in his mind once and

for all via firsthand experience.

Fig. 1. Video still of Christopher Hitchens being escorted to his waterboarding session. From VanityFair.com.

Hitchens doesn’t get very far into his essay before he acknowledges his project’s

limitations:

It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and

that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather

than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die

many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely

forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed.

Hitchens then goes on to sketch the set-up: how he contacted “specialists” until he

found one willing to orchestrate the procedure (the first such person laughed him off

when he found out Hitchens was 59—as Hitchens writes, “Waterboarding is for Green

23

Berets in training, or wiry young jihadists whose teeth can bite through the gristle of an

old goat. It’s not for wheezing, paunchy scribblers”); how he had to provide a doctor’s

assurances that he didn’t have asthma; how, while “sitting on a porch outside a remote

house at the end of a winding country road,” he was grabbed from behind, handcuffed,

hooded, spun around, and “led over some crunchy gravel into a darkened room”; and

finally how he was pushed down onto a sloping board and his legs “lashed together so

that the board and I were one single and trussed unit.”

What baggage, as Hemley put it, did Hitchens lug to this experience? A fear of

drowning, for one thing, “that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight,

when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where

what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my

version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me.”

This brings him to his central point: waterboarding does not simulate the feeling

of drowning, as the “official lie” would have it, but is drowning. You are being watered,

not boarded (the board being merely an instrument), he realized when

on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and

worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were

added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while

until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined

to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been

in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale

and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the

24

damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been

suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face.

Not only is this belletristic prose—the quality Wallace had said Singer’s writing

lacks—there’s some wry humor (navy ancestors!) in it that mitigates, just a little, the

horror of the method. And there’s wordplay throughout: he’s “flooded more with sheer

panic than with mere water” and finds that he’s “an abject prisoner of my gag reflex”

(emphases added). Hitchens clearly relishes the writing, however unpleasant the

experience, and, like Wallace, he can’t resist the puns.

Because it’s over so quickly, Hitchens decides to go for another round, in part to

try to understand the experience more fully but also because his competitive instinct

kicked in after he learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “mastermind” behind 9/11,

had himself lasted all too briefly, and “no Hitchens is going to do worse than that.” Add

his family’s legacy, then, to the baggage. But Hitchens was never able to do his Navy

ancestors—which included his father, a commander in the Royal Navy who served in

World War II—proud, and this time was no exception: “The interrogators would hardly

have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed

to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it.”

25

Fig. 2. Hitchens is helped up after signaling for the waterboarding to stop. From VanityFair.com.

There is disagreement among the veterans of waterboarding—including those for

whom it is part of their readiness training (that is, Americans doing it to other

Americans)—over whether it constitutes torture. Toward the end of his essay, Hitchens

summarizes the two main arguments, careful to show respect for those who, like the

“team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina,” hold the

opposing viewpoint. “These heroes,” he writes, “stay on the ramparts at all hours and in

all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some

domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture

and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press,

and possible persecution.” He goes so far as to say, “I myself do not trust anybody who

doesn’t clearly understand [their] viewpoint.” This is no pose, coming from Hitchens. It

26

doesn’t hurt his position that he initially defended waterboarding in the service of the Iraq

war, which he supported to his dying day—the same day, as it happened, that the war

officially came to an end.

But ultimately, in this particular essay—a short essay, it should be said (my

printout from the Vanity Fair website amounts to five pages, which include several

photographs)—it comes down to firsthand experience; that’s the point of this immersive

exercise, after all. And underlying it is Hitchens’ philosophy of argument, as stated in the

concluding pages of his memoir:

The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist

that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced

to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that

some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated . . . . (418)

In “Torture,” this other responsibility wins out, and Hitchens does indeed take

advantage of an easily repeated formula: “I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral

casuistry: ‘If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.’ Well, then, if waterboarding does

not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

4. No “I” but the “Eye”: Reginald Gibbons’ “Christmas at Juvenile Court”

Once or twice a year, I retrieve Reginald Gibbons’ “Christmas at Juvenile Court” from a

file and reread it. It’s one of my favorite essays, a mere four pages. If “essay” is indeed

its best descriptor—for “Christmas” doesn’t have the usual hallmarks of the form. There

are no twists and turns of the mind, no speaking of the mind. And there’s little of what we

mean by “voice.” Publishers Weekly, in a capsule review of Lee Gutkind’s anthology

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Surviving Crisis: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About Events That Shaped Their

Lives, refers to “Christmas” as a “report.” But that’s not right, nor does “Christmas” have

the usual characteristics of a story. None of this matters, of course, but it’s good to be

reminded that some works best serve their subject in a form that evades easy

categorization, which may require not “thinking like an essayist” (so to speak, or like a

storyteller or a reporter).

The first paragraph in “Christmas” brings us abruptly to a place that the more

fortunate among us know only through feature stories—a juvenile court complex, this

one in Chicago. In real life, Gibbons tells us, we would not arrive so quickly if, like most

visitors, we depend on public transportation. (The difficulty of getting to the complex is

the first of many systemic failures.) What unfolds in that first paragraph, and continues to

the very end, is a series of contrasts: between those with cars and those without cars;

between the entrance to the juvenile delinquency center, bare and cold, and the entrance

to abuse-and-neglect, decked out for Christmas; between the mostly white folks who

flash their identification cards as they move past security without slowing, and the mostly

black folks who stand in sluggish lines; between the language of the courts and the

language of the street; between the inside of the detention center, where it is noisy and

chaotic, even after hours, and the out-of-doors, where it is silently snowing.

We find ourselves inside a courtroom. A hearing is taking place; a boy is brought

in. Something is decided—we don’t know quite what—and the boy is taken out. Only

three minutes have gone by. Then we’re in a “hidden” corridor—on one side of which is

a holding tank of about fifty boys “standing, talking, yelling, sitting, remaining silent,

staring out through the glass wall and the glass door” (53)—that leads to a small

28

interview room in which the boy is meeting with his public defender. We feel a little like

voyeurs. We learn that the boy is fourteen and black, and short and thin. His crime was

that he “accompanied another boy who killed another boy with bullets from a pistol

belonging to another boy” (54). He does not grasp the seriousness of his predicament, nor

can he explain why he did what he did. He fidgets and is surly and demands a lawyer

who can get him out in time for Christmas. We know that his world is “tiny,” his life so

circumscribed that he has never been to the Loop or strolled along The Magnificent Mile.

How does Gibbons convey so effectively the alienation in these scenes? In part, I

think, by radically restricting the use of pronouns. Unlike Wallace and Singer and

Hitchens, he doesn’t ever address us directly—nowhere is there an intimate “you”—nor

does he include us in a “we.” These are means of connecting, after all, which is not what

is being portrayed here. (A “we” would also be presumptuous: Whom would it

include—or, more to the point, exclude?) The “I,” too, is entirely absent “except as an

‘eye’ surveying the landscape, or as an unseen hand shaping the text,” as McClanahan

puts it in “Thirteen Ways” (119).

Both “eye” and “hand” function with forensic acuity. In an interview with

Creative Nonfiction, Gibbons says, “I tried to sharpen each sentence so that every detail

would be clear and meaningful, and so that the ideas and feelings on my mind would be

conveyed in those details, without my having to say anything at all in my own voice.”9

This makes for some spare sentences: “That door leads to a hidden corridor. Along it are

9 The link is no longer accessible from the website, so I provide it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20111007104531/https://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejourn

al/articles/issue08crisis/08crisis_gibbons_ai.htm

29

the chambers of seven or eight judges. At one end is a police desk” (53). These sentences

are as close as they can get to a common-denominator English, and they are exemplary of

the clear, easily comprehensible language that should be the language of the courtroom,

where communication across socioeconomic groups is a problem even apart from the

legalese. Gibbons describes a typical scenario:

The state’s attorney speaks; the judge speaks; the person of whom they are

speaking is not asked to speak, and does not speak. Although they have

had time, in their service, to learn somewhat the language that he speaks,

they do not speak a language that is intelligible to him. (53)

Gibbons also says in the interview that he visited the juvenile court several times

while doing research for a novel but that, in this “very short space,” he wanted to avoid

narrative and characterization. We know this place is full of sad stories, but he doesn’t

really tell us any stories, thereby reinforcing our sense that language, here, is a barrier.

Anyway, the boy is voiceless: he “is not asked to speak, and does not speak.” Even when

he is free to speak—in the small room with his public defender—he cannot explain

himself. This lack of voice keeps us at a distance, even as Gibbons makes us feel that

we’re physically present. It’s right that Gibbons’ own voice is absent too.

The boy is flesh and blood, but he’s also a stand-in for other boys. A newspaper

article or magazine feature would tell us more—about the boy, about other boys, about

failures of policy, about recidivism rates and other pertinent statistics—and yet, for all

that, perhaps not tell us more, or at least nothing we’re likely to remember.

The pattern of contrasts that Gibbons establishes in the beginning is echoed in our

conflicted feelings. In the courtroom, where the fate of a mere teenager (Gibbons

30

frequently refers to him as “the child”) is being decided—a fate, rather, that seems to

have been decided before he even got to the courtroom—we feel the injustice in his

predicament. At the same time, knowing that he’s accused of being an accomplice to

another boy’s murder, and seeing him fidget violently in his chair, we can’t help but feel

relieved he’s locked up. His age—fourteen—pulls in opposite directions too: he both is

and is not old enough to fully understand what he has done.

Gibbons takes an unexpected, lyrical turn at the essay’s end, when we learn that,

since late afternoon, it’s been snowing. The impact comes via the heightening of

contrasts, and through repetition and—at the very end—alliteration. The courthouse is

now empty, and it’s dark outside. Steady snow “makes everything quiet” (56). The street

itself is “bright in that strange, nighttime snow-lit way, from the light of a few

streetlamps, home lights, headlights, reflected up off the soft whiteness. Quiet” (56).

Then Gibbons brings us back inside, where it’s still noisy in the juvenile detention center:

“People are getting in each other’s faces. Taunting the weak. Threatening” (56). Then

we’re outside again, where beyond “the dirty unbreakable windows the snow is falling in

the night, falling freely, softly, steadily, slowly” (56).

Gibbons has, in effect, released us into this snowy scene—a magical scene

unavailable to the boys even through those dirty and (likely) barred

windows—unavailable to them, one senses, even if the windows had been clear. But the

snow is not only beautiful; it’s indifferent. It’s the rest of the world continuing on. And

the rhythm in those concluding sentences is such that when we’re done reading, the snow

continues to fall. In this way, the essay’s impact, too, lingers on.

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Concluding Thoughts

So far I’ve explored form more than forum when, in fact, the two are entwined, often

from the get-go. One informs the other, especially to the degree that audience and

platform (key components of a forum) are considered early on in an essay’s

development—or are predetermined, as when Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter,

suggested to Christopher Hitchens that he personally undergo waterboarding. It’s also

worth looking briefly at what happens once these essays go out into the world. Given

their extra-literary purposes, how else do these authors work their forum (if they do), as

McClanahan put it?

Two of the writers—Singer and Hitchens—have made careers of persuasion, so

we can’t ignore their biographies. If there’s no metric for determining precisely their

influence via writing and speaking—the degree to which they change minds and/or

behavior—we can easily assume a good amount of influence based on their public

stature: both are in a position to broadcast their issues to world-wide audiences.

Peter Singer took the academic route. He is, among other things, a professor of

bioethics at Princeton University’s University Center for Human Values, and Laureate

Professor at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public

Ethics. And yet his prose in “Billionaire” is not, as Wallace puts it, “aureate [which

means ‘affected’ or ‘grandiloquent’] academese” (xix). If it were, to state the obvious,

The New York Times would not have given Singer a platform for putting forth his

solutions to world poverty—an uncomfortable position for a utilitarian philosopher to be

in, given his belief that acts should be judged by their consequences (academic prose = a

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smaller audience = fewer children saved). Therefore, for the platform he seeks, Singer

chooses mainstream prose and simple logic.

Singer maintains an active website.10 On his home page, the words HOW TO

MAKE A DIFFERENCE appear, followed by THE LIFE YOU CAN SAVE in blinking red

letters. Click on the link and you get to The Life You Can Save’s website, where you can

enter your income into a calculator to determine “exactly how much you should give”

and then take a pledge to help eliminate world poverty.11 (The website is not a hard sell

for Singer’s book by the same title, though you can find it there.) The site is constantly

updated: “TODAY IS FEBRUARY 9, 2013,” it reads as I write this. “MAKE IT THE

DAY WHEN YOU JOINED 15 332 OTHERS IN SAVING LIVES. IT ISN'T HARD

TO DO.”

Singer, then, makes it very easy for us to take the very action that “What Should a

Billionaire Give—and What Should You?” urges upon us. So long as we’re calculating,

we might even be tempted to quantify his influence: based on the number of pledges and

the reported income brackets, the website makes a “conservative estimate” of the amount

that was raised in February as of the 9th: $36,153.00. Over the past four years: $106, 498,

657.

Like Singer, Christopher Hitchens didn’t lack for platforms, having blazed a path

as a public intellectual. He wrote regularly for magazines like Slate, The Atlantic, and

Vanity Fair, this last one having suggested and funded his attention-getting immersion

10 http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/

11 The Life You Can Save is a registered charity in England and Wales and is part of the

Centre for Effective Altruism, according to the website.

33

journalism (relevant to form), and where he was, in his editor’s words, the “signature

columnist” (Mortality xi). In the words of another political writer, New York Times

columnist David Brooks: “When Hitchens came to the U.S. he brought a style that was at

once more highbrow, more ribald and more conversational than is normal here.” Any

issue that Hitchens wrote or spoke about was likely to make for an especially lively

forum.

“Polemical” is probably the word most commonly applied to Hitchens’ essaying.

He was “a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell,”

writes William Grimes in The New York Times. Hitchens himself embraced the word. In

his introduction to The Best American Essays 2010, he defines the polemical essay as “an

attempt to persuade, or refute, or explode and debunk, or to mobilize” (xvii), and says

that “the polemical element of the essayist’s craft is an essential one: the element that

sounds an alarm or calls attention to an injustice or explodes an inflated reputation” (xix).

“Believe Me, It’s Torture” isn’t slashing, nor does it deflate a reputation (at least not

overtly), but it does call a great deal of attention to an injustice.

I think of “Believe Me, It’s Torture” as a multimedia effort that allowed Hitchens

to work the forum from every angle. There’s the essay itself, which is based on a

performance of sorts, and which appeared in glossy print, in Vanity Fair; VF’s website

publication of the essay, accompanied by the slide show and video footage; the inevitable

lighting up of the blogosphere, including the comments sections (a forum in itself); the

television appearances by Hitchens and his opponents on the issue of waterboarding; and

then more lighting up of the blogosphere. If all this tends to overshadow the art (which is

not the same thing as undermining it), and if the personality risks eclipsing the issue at

34

times, we can still be confident that the issue got quite the airing—much more than it

would have gotten had Hitchens not been . . . Hitchens.

Both Singer and Hitchens come to their essays with ethical intent. David Foster

Wallace starts from a different place. He’s given an assignment: cover the Main Lobster

Festival. Once there, “it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral

questions” (247, emphasis added). Which suggests a lack of premeditation, so to speak.

Furthermore, he says, of “the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue,” that “as far as I can

tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the

whole unpleasant thing” (246).

Whether or not Wallace really avoided thinking about “the whole unpleasant

thing” up to that point (he had to have been more than familiar with Singer’s animal

rights arguments), landing this particular assignment was fortuitous and Wallace seized

the moment: he turned Gourmet, the Magazine of Good Living, into a platform that calls

into question that same magazine’s definition of good living. Preaching to the choir this

is not. Later, “Consider the Lobster” would lend its title to a collection of Wallace’s

essays, thereby giving the issue top billing.

Reginald Gibbons’ “Christmas at Juvenile Court” is something of a counterpoint

to the three above. It’s all “eye”—a classic case of “show, don’t tell,” whereas the other

essays both show and tell, in varying proportions. And we don’t hear Gibbons’ voice the

way we hear Wallace’s and Hitchens’ voices—so essential to their essays—or even

Singer’s (less distinctive) voice. What we get from “Christmas” instead of voice is spare,

rhythmic, and ultimately lyrical writing—writing that, except for the ending, is

transparent: we see right through it and directly into the scene.

35

And so it was a surprise to find, in the course of Googling around while writing

this paper, an archived audio clip of Gibbons reading “Christmas” (an abbreviated

version, presumably to fit the time slot) on the radio show This American Life (then

called Your Radio Playhouse). In fact, it appears that the piece—which aired on

December 22, 1995, two years before it appeared in the Gutkind anthology—had its

debut on radio and may even have been written for the show, judging by Ira Glass’s

introduction to Gibbons’ reading: “Well, Reginald Gibbons is writing about a lot of

things right now. But one of them, at least, concerns boys in pretty bad situations . . . . He

is hanging around a lot at the Juvenile Court Building here in Chicago. And so when we

asked him if he wanted to write about Christmas, he decided to set his story there.” 12

If the radio-listening public was indeed the original audience, this might account,

at least in part, for Gibbons’ writing style and rhythms: spare language and short

sentences are easier to follow by ear. Of course when radio is the medium, many people

are following along at the same time. The exact timing is, as it was with Singer’s essay,

meaningful. One imagines these people listening to Gibbons’ sad story in their holiday-

decorated homes, perhaps while snow is falling outside their windows.

~

12 An audio clip, along with a transcript, is available at

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/6/christmas. The portion of the

tape devoted to Gibbons begins at 42:30.

36

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Calderone, Michael. “Christopher Hitchens, Despite Criticism and Casualties, Defended

Iraq War to the End.” The Huffington Post. HuffingtonPost.com, Inc., 16 Dec.

11. Web. 4 Jan. 2013.

Fox, Kate. “AWP 2012: Immerse Yourself.” Brevity. Brevity: A Journal of Concise

Literary Nonfiction, 3 Mar. 2012. Web. 3 Mar. 2012.

Gates, David. “David Foster Wallace, 1962–2008.” The Daily Beast. Newsweek, 13

Sept. 2008: n. pag. Web. 20 Jan. 2012.

Gibbons, Reginald. “Christmas at Juvenile Court.” Surviving Crisis: Twenty Prominent

Authors Write About Events That Shaped Their Lives. Ed. Lee Gutkind. New

York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1997. 52–57. Print.

- - -. “Christmas at Juvenile Court.” Perf. Reginald Gibbons. This American Life. Narr.

Ira Glass. Chicago Public Media. WBEZ, Chicago, 22 Dec. 1995. Radio Archive.

Web. 10 Feb. 2013.

- - -. “Interview with Reginald Gibbons.” Creative Nonfiction. Creative Nonfiction, n.d.

Web. 11 May 2011.

Glass, Ira. Introduction to Reginald Gibbons’ “Christmas at Juvenile Court.” This

American Life. Narr. Ira Glass. Chicago Public Media. WBEZ, Chicago, 22 Dec.

1995. Radio Archive. Web. 10 Feb. 2013.

Grimes, William. “Christopher Hitchens, Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at

62.” New York Times. New York Times, 16 Dec. 2011. Web. 14 May 2012.

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Hemley, Robin. A Field Guide for Immersion Writing. Athens: University of Georgia

Press, 2012. Print.

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