(no subject)
DAILY PAGE 25; response to reading
I'm fairly unimpressed by Katherine Boo's piece on poverty in DC. The information she has just doesn't move me, for whatever reason. Maybe I'm just numb to the whole affair of poverty already, but the whole thing was kind of like some ethnographic course, Inner-City Poverty 101. Stylistically, the piece read in an almost formulaic manner, clearly journalistic; it seemed particularly lackluster after Wallace. When she did try to put in figurative language, it was sometimes out of place: that one comment on sunglasses being "dappled like the 102nd Dalmatian" seems particularly ignorant from my perspective, because she's referencing a childhood that the children she's writing about never had. The random comics didn't help for atmosphere either; rather distasteful on the part of the New Yorker, but I guess they have a tradition to keep up.
I'm fairly unimpressed by Katherine Boo's piece on poverty in DC. The information she has just doesn't move me, for whatever reason. Maybe I'm just numb to the whole affair of poverty already, but the whole thing was kind of like some ethnographic course, Inner-City Poverty 101. Stylistically, the piece read in an almost formulaic manner, clearly journalistic; it seemed particularly lackluster after Wallace. When she did try to put in figurative language, it was sometimes out of place: that one comment on sunglasses being "dappled like the 102nd Dalmatian" seems particularly ignorant from my perspective, because she's referencing a childhood that the children she's writing about never had. The random comics didn't help for atmosphere either; rather distasteful on the part of the New Yorker, but I guess they have a tradition to keep up.