Tag: Joyride

Categories
Aging San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Permission of Fridays

Doug always walked a half-step ahead, which meant he saw things first, which meant I was usually watching him see them — the tilt of his head, the small pause before he brought the camera up — before I ever turned to look myself. Market Street on a Friday morning has its own weather system, independent of the sky: the gray light fog gives even bright colors.

We would set out with no destination, which was the whole method — what Jay Maisel, who died this summer at ninety-five, called going out empty. Leave the plan at home, he taught generations of photographers, so there’s room left in you to see something you didn’t already expect. You cannot plan to be astonished. You can only put yourself in the path of it and hope.

I have thought about those walks more than I expected to, now that they are gone. Not gone dramatically — no falling-out, no single last Friday we knew was the last Friday. Covid arrived and shut the passes between people the way weather closes a mountain road, and by the time it reopened, the rhythm had broken. We still talk. We just don’t walk anymore, and I have never entirely worked out why something so simple didn’t start back up, the way you’d think a habit that good would insist on its own return. It just didn’t come back.

Susan Orlean, in Joyride, writes about being a writer as a kind of permission — an excuse to linger in places past the point a normal person would move along, and then to go back and report on what was seen. She’s citing Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

A camera grants the identical permission a notebook does. Nobody stops a man with a camera on Market Street and asks him what he’s doing there. The camera is its own credential — I have a reason to be looking at you, at this doorway, at the light falling across these particular twenty feet of sidewalk, longer than is socially normal. Doug and I weren’t tourists and we weren’t reporters and we weren’t, most days, even talking about what we saw until afterward, over lunch. We were two men who had given ourselves formal license to pay attention to a city we loved, as if it might not be there next Friday.

It mostly was there next Friday. Until it wasn’t, in the way that most disruptions to a good practice aren’t dramatic so much as quietly permanent — a scheduling gap that never gets rescheduled, a street that starts to feel unfamiliar again because you stopped walking it with intention. I still have the pictures. A woman waiting at a bus stop with an expression I never satisfactorily explained to myself. The chess player’s hands, mid-reset, waiting on the next stranger. Doug, once, caught by someone else’s lens, walking a half-step ahead of a man he didn’t know was photographing him photographing the city.

The third instruction is the one that survived when the walks didn’t. I don’t walk Market Street with Doug anymore, but I’m telling you about it now, on a blog nobody assigned me to keep for twenty-five years. The credential just changed instruments — camera to keyboard. Orlean’s point, I think, is that the excuse and the obligation were always the same thing. You get to be there because you intend to come back and testify, and the testifying is the toll, due whether or not the place is still there when you go looking for it again.

Doug and I are not going to start walking on Fridays again. I’m too old for that kind of recommitment, and pretending otherwise would just be a nicer way of lying to myself. Plus physically it’s just beyond me now. This essay is itself a kind of substitute — the telling standing in for a habit of attending that got interrupted and never fully repaired.

Mary Oliver’s instructions don’t say what to do when the astonishment outlasts the practice that produced it. Maybe that’s the fourth instruction nobody wrote down: keep telling about it anyway, especially after you’ve stopped going. Or at least remembering.

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Nerve of the Opening Line

For years I wrote first paragraphs that explained what I was about to say, which is a little like a joke that begins by describing how funny it is.

Susan Orlean has a better idea. In her book Joyride, she writes that a lede doesn’t need to preview the story or summarize what the rest of the piece will be about. What’s important is that it captivates readers and holds them fast to the page so they keep reading.

The conventional wisdom about ledes is that they exist to tell readers what they’re about to read. The billboard theory of the opening. Here is what this story is. Here is why it matters. Here is what you’ll find if you continue. The lede as table of contents, compressed.

Orlean is saying something stranger and more honest: the lede’s job is not to inform. It’s to hold the reader.

There’s a distinction there worth sitting with.

Informing a reader is a transaction — you transfer content, they receive it. Holding a reader is something else entirely. It’s closer to what a magician does in the first thirty seconds of a performance, or what a stranger does when they say something at a party that makes you turn and face them fully. You haven’t learned anything yet. You’ve just been made to stay.

The ledes that have held me longest tend to have almost nothing to do with the stories they open.

Joan Didion begins “The White Album” with a single sentence — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — that takes the entire essay to even partially fulfill.

Gay Talese opens his Frank Sinatra profile not with Sinatra’s voice or his legend but with a man going silent: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing.”

Tracy Kidder opens The Soul of a New Machine not with computers but with a boat in a storm, Tom West awake for four straight nights while everyone else is seasick, the rest of the crew left wondering what on earth this man does for a living.

None of these ledes summarize. All of them hold.

What they share, I think, is a quality of disturbance. They’ve moved the ground slightly underfoot. Something is tilted.

Didion’s first sentence argues that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and you feel the vertigo in it immediately — wait, is that true? Is that a good thing or a desperate thing?

Talese gives you a man diminished by illness and silence, and everything that follows is measured against that diminishment.

Kidder’s boat goes somewhere that prose about minicomputers wouldn’t, and by the time you’ve crossed that dark water with West, you’re already a different kind of reader than you were on page one.

I think about this when I try to write.

I grew up reading ledes the billboard way — I thought the first paragraph was a promise about what the reader would receive. And sometimes I still write them that way, which is to say I write them first and delete them later, because they’re stage fright disguised as generosity. Here is what I’m about to tell you really means please don’t leave before I find my footing.

The Orlean formulation — captivate, hold, keep reading — shifts the pressure off the writer’s anxiety and onto the reader’s experience. The question is no longer what do I need to tell them? The question is what will make them unable to leave?

That’s a harder question. It requires knowing something about what people can’t resist. Strangeness. Motion. A body in trouble. A door left open. The suggestion that someone knows something you don’t.

The best ledes I’ve ever written didn’t come first. They came after I’d already written the whole piece and finally understood what it was actually about — which turned out not to be the thing I thought it was about at the start. You can’t write the sentence that makes someone stay until you know what you’re asking them to stay for.

The lede isn’t a promise. It’s a wager. You’re betting that the reader will follow disturbance into the dark — and the only way to make that bet is to trust the disturbance yourself first. Most of us don’t. Most of us write the billboard because we’re afraid that if we don’t explain what’s coming, the reader will leave.

But the reader doesn’t leave because they’re confused. They leave because nothing reached out and held them.

The explanation never does that. The strangeness might.

Categories
Books

The Observer Observed

I first encountered Susan Orlean not in person, but in the ashes. Specifically, the ashes of the Los Angeles Central Library. Reading The Library Book was a masterclass in how to weave a forensic investigation with a love letter to a public institution. It was reportage, but it possessed a beating heart. She has spent decades at The New Yorker perfecting the art of the “curious observer”—the person standing just to the side of the frame, noticing the detail everyone else missed.

That is why picking up Joyride felt different.

In a memoir, the observer must finally step in front of the lens. The transition from The Library Book—which is about the preservation of collective memory—to Joyride—which is about the fluidity of personal memory—is a fascinating shift. When a journalist writes a memoir, there is often a tension. They are used to looking outward, hunting for the story in orchids or arsonists. Turning that gaze inward requires a different kind of bravery.

“A commute has a destination; a joyride has only a duration.”

The title itself suggests a specific philosophy of living. It implies that the movement itself is the point. As I read, I found myself thinking about the difference between navigating a life and simply driving through it. Orlean captures that distinct feeling of the wind in your hair, the blur of the scenery, and the realization that the “plot” of our lives is often just the things that happen while we are busy steering.

We read writers like Orlean not just for what they saw, but for how they saw it. In Joyride, she reminds us that the most interesting routes are rarely the most direct ones. A great read!