Minefield: Difficult Emotions to Communicate Well

I’m going to assume there’s no thread on this. If there is, I’m too lazy for the creative search it’ll take to find it.

A couple of pieces linked to on ILX the past week, one excellent and one dreadful, got me thinking about tone when trying to write about something: specifically, which emotions are the hardest get just right?

Satire isn’t an emotion, but it’s really hard to pull off. The McSweeney’s piece by Tom Russell that was linked, “How to Talk to Your Teenager About Colluding with Russia,” was a workshop on how to write satire, I thought. The writer came up with a great idea, then took the time to look carefully at the kind of writing the piece is modelled on and caught the tone perfectly. Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker has some good ideas, but he usually steps on them at some point in his pieces. Thirty years ago, a friend and I wrote in that vein for a publication that encouraged it--e.g., a fake review of The Joshua Tree that was half-aimed at U2, half-aimed at a certain kind of record reviewing then prevalent (still may be, I don’t know). That piece holds up reasonably well, but other things we did in that vein, whenever I have cause to look at them now it’s like, “Rein it in a bit, guy.” Twenty-five-year olds aren’t big on subtlety. (Around here, I think Karl Malone and Old Lunch--posting quickly, probably not even thinking about it--manage deadpan really well.)

Anger is exceptionally difficult to communicate. Case in point: Caitlin Johnstone, who I’d happily never heard of till a couple of pieces by her showed up on ILX. If you miss on anger, invariably because you overstep, the end result is shrill, pushy, repetitive, adolescent, and always feels like someone’s yelling at you. The Cintra Wilson collection I read a few years ago--widely acclaimed, which baffles me (especially that Marcus liked it, someone who I think conveys anger very well)--felt like that. With anger, I think you need to write in the opposite direction. If you choose your words well, the anger will come through.

What else is really challenging?

Tom Russell: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-talk-to-your-teen-about-colluding-with-russia

Caitlin Johnstone: http://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/if-this-tweet-bothers-you-its-because-you-re-a-piece-of-shit-de0f0cec0e1f

Generally agree but I would advise being careful with the adjective "shrill," which I am reliably informed is problematic genderwise.

You're right, and I walked right into that by singling out two women. I would, for what it's worth, apply the same term to Matt Taibbi, to numerous Trump-related posts by males on my Facebook wall the past year (many of which I agreed with, just not the hectoring, bombastic voice), and--different medium--Bill Maher a lot of the time.

It's a valid term throw it out when it fits and damn the galleries

clemenza hits it out of the park

i had a journalism teacher a long time ago who told my class "be careful about using sarcasm in print, because it almost never works." he didn't just mean that sarcasm could easily be misconstrued as sincerity, but that sarcasm in print usually comes across as heavy-handed and obvious, like the writer is wagging a finger in your face. i see it on facebook a lot. it's not always even necessarily "sarcasm," just a sort of puffed-up facetiousness. it's the kind of thing you see in mediocre local-weekly opinion pieces, or online bloggers who try to mimic the matt taibbi/hunter thompson style. i suppose it can be done well (i'm not much of a taibbi fan anymore but classic era thompson is still fun to read), but most of the time i end up thinking that writers who adopt that kind of bombastic, seen-it-all tone are desperate to prove that they know more than they actually do.

i agree about andy borowitz. i always cringe when somebody links to one of his pieces because they always seem so tone-deaf and obvious. it really makes me appreciate how good the onion is at what they do. you really need to take as dry a tone as possible to pull off that sort of satire.

Thanks, Ross. Sarcasm's up near the top too--agree wholeheartedly with J.D.'s professor that it rarely works. There's a kind of playful sarcasm I don't mind--and you've got to be careful there that you don't lapse into whimsy--but when the sledgehammer comes out, which is usually the case, forget it. It's almost always fish-in-a-barrel, too. Half the stuff I post on Trump here I catch myself thinking "This is too easy" (I post away anyway...).

I sometimes wonder how I'd react to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if I read it today. Loved it when I was 17, have always been wary of going back to it. Someone here or on Facebook quoted something by him the other day about Watergate, though--that the real danger was letting it happen again--and his anger and disgust came through clearly, and the tone was just right.

(Actually bought a remaindered copy of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 just last week; thought I'd give that a try.)

Re satire: there are still people who take Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick to have a whiff of truth in the neomalthusian community.