Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (1966) | Hacker News Reader

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (1966)

watertownology.com

65 pointsTomte22 comments

This article was obviously required reading in our long form journalism course in college. It's devastating that this is the kind of work that people deride now for its length and verbose cadence.

A piece like this is incredibly difficult to write. It doesn't just require embedding yourself in the life of a typically-unwilling subject but also to take what seems to be a random set of small anecdotes and finding the larger theme they speak to.

> It's devastating that this is the kind of work that people deride now for its length and verbose cadence.

I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, it's the duty of the writer to communicate, and that means meeting your reader where they actually are instead of where you might wish them to be. But on the other hand, the best experiences I've had as a reader were with writers who challenged me, who forced me to really chew on their ideas instead of just sucking down a pre-digested Soylent slurry.

There's probably a point in the middle of that spectrum somewhere, but I write a lot and I still have yet to discover exactly where it is.

I don't mind long--if it's well written. This essay had a beginning, middle, and end. It was obviously edited. It was a tight essay.

Did I read the entire piece--no. I just don't like the man enough to spend that much time on his life. I heard one story about the man from my best friend. Since that story, I just look at Sinatra differently, and there's no magic, or mystery.

That said, I skimmed the essay. It was written well enough to skim. That's all I ask for in a author.

I used to think TL;DR was just an excuse, but I was wrong.

Don't leave us hanging; what was the story your friend told you?

>> It's devastating that this is the kind of work that people deride now for its length and verbose cadence.

Do they? Not being snarky, but longform journalism is incredibly popular at the moment, to the point where some claim that it's the most shared form of content on social media.[1]

[1] http://buzzsumo.com/blog/buzzfeeds-most-shared-content-forma...

I don't know if it's popular. I think people share these to seem well-read. I don't think the majority actually read the whole article, but that's just a theory. In other words, you don't need to actually have consumed something to share it.

I'd also be curious what the most shared long-form pieces of this last year were. My guess is they aren't in the tradition of long-form journalism, where the subject is the absolute focus (rather than the writer inserting themselves into the story). I'd bet the most shared pieces were around hot button or politically ferocious topics.

>> In other words, you don't need to actually have consumed something to share it.

Point taken. However - and entirely anecdotally - longform content has been discussed, shared and consumed by my immediate circle of colleagues and friends in the past year or two far more than I can ever remember previously.

>> I'd bet the most shared pieces were around hot button or politically ferocious topics.

Maybe so. You could get a flavour for this by checking out aggregators like Longreads though: longreads.com

The problem is that more recently, long-form journalism has become commoditized. I get the feeling that in the past, you wouldn't see long-form journalism unless the writer could actually do it well. I love this piece of writing, but with modern long-form on the web, too often I've had this feeling that the "long form" is just turgid padding, and there isn't really the understanding of theme, or how the whole is really supposed to exceed the sum of its parts.

I notice modern long-form means, "Here's what happened to me when I met this person, in 1,200 words."

Pieces like Frank Sinatra Has a Cold swathe you in the life of the subject, and the writer takes a back seat. You literally will not find the words "I" or "me" used in reference to the writer once in this article. Modern day long form are vanity pieces; little more than well-written diaries or blog posts. So I definitely know where you're coming from, but I think it's simply a lack of discipline of the writers to take themselves out of the story. It's part of the reason I can't stand the Serial series.

I don't know that the insertion of the author is the problem - DFW was I think a master of the genre, and many of his pieces are completely self-absorbed.

Sorry, I know it's kind of mean and doesn't really matter to your point, but I see three uses of "I" that reference the article's author:

> I had seen something of this Sicilian side…

> And as I watched this ritualistic scene, I got the impression that Frank Sinatra was…

I didn't find any "me".

In fact, Language Log had a number of posts on pronoun counts and how people easily get them wrong and how they don't mean much anyway (https://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Alanguagelog.ldc.upenn....). It doesn't affect your point, of course, but the same point could be made just as well without counting pronouns.

Perhaps some stories are actually about the author as well. Serial, since you brought it up, always seemed to me to also be about Sarah Koenig's relationship to Adnan, how she feels about him and whether he's telling the truth, and her journey along the way. I really don't think "it's simply a lack of discipline of the writers to take themselves out of the story" is a fair representation of what the story is about. You might think it it would have been better presented a different way, but I don't think it's the way it is because they were sloppy, but because that's the type of story they wanted to tell.

Bingo. Used to be if you were going to give a writer a dozen pages, several very experienced people went through the piece with a fine-toothed comb. The writer was contracted because he was top of the pack. Used to be if you picked up an article in a mag like Playboy, you knew you were in for a ride.

Now long-form journalism just means "long". The editorial staff is dead and the gatekeeping process has been destroyed. Now the only thing you know starting in on a long article is that it's going to take a while before you get to the end.

I heard an excellent memoir on This American Life [NPR] last night about Sinatra. They referenced this article.

What particularly stuck out about him was his every-man-ness. He shook hands of presidents, mobsters (supposedly), and "normal" people. He touched every strata and maintained a class that let him stand apart from it all.

For those interested: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/574/s....

Among journalists, it's considered a classic.

Interesting, I also listened to a NPR podcast about Sinatra last night, but it was on Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/09/459116467/episo...

Probably because his birthday is this weekend :)

This American Life is a PRX program (PRI until the last couple years), not NPR.

After you've read this, read the annotated version: Elon Green's interview with Gay Talese about the piece, interspersed into the text. http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-gay-t...

Every time I read about Sinatra, I immediately recall the Doonesbury's strips back from 1985.

From the archives, starting on http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/1985/6/10

Frank Sinatra would have been 100 years today.

Worth listening to after reading the piece: Gay Talese being interviewed by Alec Baldwin.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/gay-talese/

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