J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye manages to scrounge some morsels of decent writing from the general morass of generic pigslop, but for the most part remains in the dreary rain of mediocrity.

            To build tension, stories should grab the reader and link them in the author’s thrall.  Salinger eschews the typical methods for engrossing the reader, and replaces them with… nothing, except perhaps brevity.  Character development is present, a welcome change from the masses of “me too” beach rags, but the central character, Holden Caulfield, is such an unlikable twat that watching him evolve from an obnoxious prick to an ignorant one is not exactly engrossing.  The “plot”, if one would sully the word so, is little more than a tour book for New York City, with Holden as an irascible guide.

The other characters in the book are almost total blanks.  Salinger does a decent job of distorting them through Holden’s perspective, but since Holden lives his life with blinders on, the reader hardly gets to know these other characters at all.  I could not find a compelling reason to care about a single one of them.  The most “developed” side character, Phoebe, is staggeringly generic, the classic heroic young girl archetype straight from nineteenth century literature.  Why Holden puts up with the little brat must be one of the great mysteries of the cosmos.

            Really, despite his ignorance and naiveté, Holden is one of the book’s few points of light.  The decision to make the central character an antihero at least shows some shred of originality, and Holden’s monologues accurately capture the mood of many loners struggling to adapt to the folly of our society.  Yet all this work is undone by Salinger’s slovenly prose.  Holden swears extensively, perhaps Salinger’s crude attempt at “authenticity”, and his internal monologues are barely more eloquent.  Whereas artists such as Proust would finely sculpt sentences and paragraphs, Salinger attacks them with a rusty chisel.

            I suppose that teenagers—the so called “target audience” for this sort of work—might find it vaguely endearing, on the off chance that they might pry themselves from their screens to explore the printed word.  Then again, this is like targeting a work at the lowest segment of intellectual society, and claiming it is “deep” because it has more substance than the other trash.  The competition is so weak that it would be almost impossible not to.  Compared to true masterpieces, Catcher in the Rye is little more than a paltry effort of a hack.

           

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/health/28kidn.html?ref=health

 

            The most interesting element of this article’s opening is that it focuses on parents, not children.  Repeatedly throughout the article the author discusses how shocked parents are or quotes doctors who comment on how surprised parents are.  Clearly, this is an article directed at parents who are worried about their children.  Once the article has set up a reason for the reader to care (their kid may have kidney stones) it proceeds to explain the causes behind this trend.  This sets up an implicit command for parents to follow to help their children.  After that, the article moves to more detailed figures on the exact prevalence of kidney stones, followed by more in-depth quotes from doctors.  This is longer, but still important information, which the author includes after the more important issues have been dealt with.

            Overall, I think this was a really effective article.  The author gives us important information and motivation to read the article quickly.  When planning a show, one starts wit a brief but interesting act, then slower and more involved acts, then a big finish.  This article follows that exact model.  The one downside of the article is the ending.  It ends on a kinda flat note with a lame ending to a lame anecdote.   Other than that the article is good.

 

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/video-is-dominating-internet-traffic-pushing-prices-up/

 

            I like reading articles that I’m the target audience for, so I was interested in this one.  This article is somewhat unusual in that it talks about a lot of only partially related things in a single article, and so spaces them out in large bolded sections.  That said, I found the word choice in this article to be poor at best, and totally disingenuous at worst.  For example, the article claims that “File sharing has been usurped by legitimate video services”.  That seems to imply that where people used to used p2p formats they now use video.  But that is simply untrue.  The p2p sector hasn’t shrunk, the online video market has expanded.  And the two sectors have fundamentally different functions, so neither “usurped” the other.

            Also, the article includes the bizarre not “I’ve e-mailed AT&T and I’ll update with the exact numbers if they give them to me.”  Which is basically admitting that the article isn’t ready.  What?

            Also, the article didn’t wrap up in any coherent manner at all.  Overall, I thought this was a pretty poorly written article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/technology/26boot.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

This is an interesting and somewhat unusual article about computer boot times that decides to avoid being technical and instead focus on broader themes that more computer users can relate to.  This choice is evident from the first line- using imagery to define the boot-up process instead of a more fact-based lead.   It's also interesting that the article focuses on the users more than the PC manufacturers.  I would appreciate a slightly more technical look though.  For example, a line like "...a version of an operating system called Linux" is awkwardly worded and just odd.  It seems to imply Linux is an obscure OS when tons of computers run Linux and it is not uncommon at all.

Aside from that complaint about the tone of the article the rest of it flows quite well.  One bizarre element is having two separate quotes about what people do while their computers boot up-- space that almost certainly could be put to better use.  Probably the most interesting part is where it analyzes the reasons that people are more impatient with their computers than before.  Yet while that is certainly fascinating, it is also a bit odd that there is no mention of if it takes longer for computers to boot now than before.  That seems like an important piece of information that could easily have been included, but rather inexplicably was not.  Manufacturers project future boot times, but do not provide any context for those numbers.  Even stranger, the article compares mac and PC start times without ever giving any numbers.

Overall, I though this was an interesting article, but it was not very informative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/arts/music/26waki.html?ref=arts

This article probably will not interest the majority of people, but being someone who listens to classical music I guessed I would be among the article's target audience.  The article tries to spice up a somewhat dry, obscure topic by using exciting verbs and vivid adjectives (tantalizing, etc).  It does a pretty good job of establishing an enticing lead and following that lead up with a mass of hard information.  This eases the reader into the article well, and works effectively.  I also like how the writer acknowledges the less exciting parts of this discovery- such as the fact that the sound quality is terrible and the music is only a few minutes long.  By not overselling his piece, the writer actually makes the article more realistic and better.

The writer also makes the search for the tapes interesting by describing it as a story, as opposed to briefly summarizing the journey to get to the "meat" of the story.  This again makes the whole tale more interesting.  Unfortunately, this also makes the eventual discovery of the tapes seem like a bit of a letdown.  After all the drama, the author barely spends a paragraph describing the music.  I would have liked a bit more at the end.  But overall, the author does a very good job with this piece.

            John Hersey writes in an interesting, if somewhat unconventional style in his book Hiroshima.  By focusing on five different stories, he provides a more varied view of the tragedy.  By not focusing on any one story, Hersey can make the emphasis the bomb dropping in general, as opposed to any one person’s personal tragedy.  At the same time, in such a short book focusing on so many disparate stories I felt like some of the people get left out.  Their tales have less than a dozen pages to be told each, which feels like an injustice.  Especially for more minor characters, often they get no more than a paragraph.  Hersey clearly has limited information about the people he is writing about, which reduces the amount of content he has to write about.

            Another interesting element of Hersey’s style is how matter- of-fact he is.  When writing about so horrifying a disaster as the Hiroshima bombing some writers may be tempted to use inflated rhetoric and dramatic imagery to convey a sense of horror.  Hersey realizes that these tools are superfluous, and instead merely describes events the way they are.  This makes the account seem more “real” in some ways, and it also makes it seem more like a piece of journalistic writing, and less like a novel.

            Clearly, Hersey is trying to convey the suffering of the people of Japan as simply as possible in a short work.  He largely succeeds.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/powell-endorses-obama/?hp

This article is somewhat unusual in that it is an online only article and will be changed (at least format-wise) for thew print edition of the paper.  The Opening of the story is totally straight, and goes sequentially from the more important information to the less important information.  That said, there were some really odd word usage in the article, such as claiming that Powell "is of the pragmatist camp".  I suspect that the breaking nature of the article caused the wordchoice to perhaps be a bit sloppy.  Also, the article does not discuss any players 
beyond Powell, Obama, and McCain.  Again, the tight deadline likely limited or eliminated  time for interviews, as a quotes are taken from candidate statements or other interviews.

Given these limitations, the article does a pretty good job of exploring both the reasons for Powell's selection and the potential implications.  The addition of a video link of ther announcement link embedded in the article was also very nice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19digi.html?ref=technology

This article is written in a somewhat looser style than a straight article.  It is discussing a serious issue, but the issue is not so vital as to warrant some sort of coldly grim analysis.  I do think the language does get a bit overflowery at times.  The quotes and analysis are straight, the language is not.  considering the article is indirectly about the current economic crisis, it does seem that the author is a bit too blase about the  whole thing.  The article does do a pretty good job at incorporating lots of viewpoints.

One thing it fails to do is ever explain why anything in the article is particularly important.  There's no explanation of significance.  Also, while the article does an ok job at summarizing Apple's current corporate situation, it could be better.  I thought the article wa ok, but it seemed more like something you would find in a chapter of a book than in a newspaper.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/science/space/03sun.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

            The article is quite informative and pretty well written, with some minor faults.  While the article delivered a lot of content, the lede was intensely uninteresting.  The article never presented its findings as more than an astrological curiosity.  While it very well may be true that the lack of sunspots has no significance, it would be nice if the article explicitly said that the findings were insignificant, instead of leaving it implicit.  The article talked at length about how scientists disagreed on projection models, without ever explaining the significance of these disagreements.

            The article also used quotes pretty well, with various scientists disagreeing on the issue.  In some ways, I feel that the article actually uses too many quotes, and doesn’t use enough of the article’s analysis on the lack of sunspots.  Yet while the article lacks analysis, it does summarize what is going on quite well.  On that level it succeeds.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/science/26rock.html?em
 

Me in class: "Critiques... O YA CRITIQUES ME NO DO THAT"

So here they are, mad late:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-us-slide-facebook-usntech.html?ref=technology

The lede works pretty effectively.  This is a very dry story, so the lede is entirely fact based, which works well for this article.  All of the paragraphs are extremely short, with most being only one sentence.  But again, given the space constraints of the article this actually makes a good deal of sense, as there isn't really time to wax poetic.  One problem with the article is that it mentions a number of third party apps for facebook, without saying what any of them actually do.  Additionally, the article never discusses potentia limplications of the deal.

That aside, I think the article succeeded at getting to the basic facts of the story effectively, and using quotes for a bit of added effect.  Unfortunately, there is no real motivation or outside information linked to the article.

http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2008/10/01/money_sent_home_by_mexicans_in_us_drops_12_percent/

This article is written in a very similar style to the previous one, although it is longer and on a totally different subject.  Here, the author has far more time to explore the issue.  Using quotes from various disagreeing sources worked well to provide some varied analysis on this issue.  This article was far more effective than the previous one at placing the event in context and establishing its importance.   The article also nicely spreads statistics throughout the article, instead of placing them in one big clump.  The rticle gives a lot of information very effectively, while remaining interesting and not overly dry.  I thought it worked really well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22admissions.html?ref=us

The article describes a report's findings, and reactions to the report, but talks very little about the report itself.

Reading the article, one has no idea of what the methodology for the report was, or how the commission reached its findings.  All the article provides is blanket statements such as "But no one in college admissions who visits the range of secondary schools we visit, and goes to the communities we visit — where you see the contrast between opportunities and fancy suburbs and some of the high schools that aren’t so fancy — can come away thinking that standardized tests can be a measure of someone’s true worth or ability."  While that may well be true, the article provides no evidence to support that assertion.

the article links to a pdf of the commission's complete report, which presumably as not available n the newspaper print edition.  But the whole point of an article like this is to summarize the report.  The reader should not have to piece the information together themselves.

Overall, I thought the article spent too much time quoting sources, and not enough time summarizing what the report actually said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/science/21collider.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

I'm not sure how formal these are supposed to be, and honestly my "blogging" style is more informal than any writing in English.  Ah well, T_T

The article is terse but effective.  It lays out the facts in a concise manner, starting with the most critical information and then branching out into secondary facts and quotes.

Space constraints clearly affected this article.  No explanation is given as to why the Collider has had troubles or potential implications for the success of the project, aside from the fact that the Collider tests will be delayed.  Nevertheless, the article provides a good amount of background on past mishaps to help establish context for the current situation.

While the article lacks in some areas, it does an admirable job of laying out the facts of the situation given the space constraints.

...If you could call it that :p

There are several big problems with my essay (excluding the fact that it's incomplete, which is actually fairly mnior as I have already covered all my major points).

1.  The tone.  I sound like an objectivist nut.  I think that my rhetoric makes it harder to understand what I'm actually saying.

2. Organization/ sentence flow.  Yes, this is not supposed to be a rigid essay.  But I kinda fly all over the place, especially within my paragraphs.  They lack internal cohesion.

3. My thesis- I think I'm saying something, but I'm not really sure.  Again, making the essay clearer will probably help a lot.