'Profound' and 'strange' have distinct meanings. I'd suggest the title be re-edited to either
Playing Santa did strange things to Bob Rutan
or just the first line of the Esquire title:
Playing Santa does strange things to a man
Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.
“ They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.”
“ For the price of three beers, he told me his story.”
“ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”
When I read things like this I find it very hard to take the wider message seriously, because it feels like writing-as-cosplay, the writer inhabiting a caricature of “hard bitten” and inserting that at the forefront of the piece.
Very odd.
Why must it be a caricature? Many successful writers are some rather extreme people, which is probably part of the reason why they're successful. Reality is, as always, far stranger than fiction, and a lifetime of exceptional experience is the writer's palette.
Everyone is just pretending to be something. The people writing in the 60s were also apeing a style in just the same way.
Personally, I liked the writing.
I could not for the life of me guess what in particular is wrong with at least the second example here, if not the others. Can you explain what you mean? Is it the very mention of beers and cigarettes that perhaps triggers this reaction?
Nothing wrong with it; it is simply colorful and overly verbose, perhaps, but that is a stylistic choice. Personally I feel like it really helps paint a mental picture. If the goal is simply to transfer information, then it would be considered fluff. But if the goal is to share an experience, I think it succeeds!
It's an article that tries to be literature rather than just the information it conveys, and some people don't like that whether it is successful or not.
> “ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”
13.7 per day, I guess it could be worse.
When I saw the title I wondered if Bob Rutan had any connection with Burt Rutan, the airplane guy. I guess not.
How do you get $200 an hour for a corporate Santa gig?
Article looks good. I'm just a paragraph or two in, but will probably read it.
So many are desperately wishing to be the next Tom Wolfe rather than striving to find their own voice and style (as Wolfe did).
"Queen of the Silver Dollar" was written by Shel Silverstein in desperation to pay rent, and dictated from a phonebooth* to a member of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Cabinet.
Sometimes people really are hard-bitten.
* It's kind of like a specially designed room standing on the sidewalk of a city street, where you can put your iPhone on speaker and still hear the other person talk. Only it comes with it's own iPhone that you can rent for less than a dollar with an old form of Venmo.
human.
> Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.
I agree: but to me that's at least something kind of interesting and evocative, even if it's a trainwreck. (In fact, it might even be better when it's a trainwreck). A nice break from LLM's this-not-that. This one's not so bad IMO.
Will gladly take this over the current tsunami of AI-written slop. “It’s not only a relic from a bygone era; it’s a rhetorical masterpiece”
I disagree. I love and miss this style. Old Car and Driver articles often had the same flair. It’s not always about conveying the information but how we get there. I would love to find more long form, flair writing like this.