COMM 337: A typical New Yorker color story

On the New Yorker's website is a "Wall Street Postcard" or vignette by Lizzie Widdicombe on the Occupy Wall Street protesters in lower Manhattan. The New Yorker is famous for little sketches - postcard-like - in "The Talk of the Town" section of the magazine, which Wikipedia describes as "a miscellany of brief pieces — frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York — written in a breezily light style." Widdicombe's qualifies, from the broad historical analogy at the beginning:

Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week—a month after the protest began, and shortly before Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s threatened and aborted cleanup—was a bit like visiting a civilization at its peak: Paris in the twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at the very least, Timbuktu in the fifteen hundreds. ...

Other than an imprecise analogy or two (and analogies are imprecise by definition), Widdicombe's piece is pure New Yorkerly description right through to the descriptive passage at the end ...

... There was cheering, and a makeshift marching band sashayed through. Someone yelled that a faction of protesters was leaving to march down to Wall Street—a development that would, inevitably, lead to scuffles with the police, undermining the Gandhian glow that had momentarily graced the proceedings.

Back at the park, Kevin Doherty, a protester in a backward cap, looked around. “It’s kind of fun,” he said. “Chanting mobs are fun for a day.”

When you hear people talking about literary journalism or creative nonfiction, this is the kind of writing they're talking about. Hemingway, who must have been in the back of Widdicombe's mind, was writing stuff like this for the Kansas City Star from Paris in the 20s.

Tundra tangent. Far, far away from the New Yorker both in concept and execution is a liberal, or progressive, political blog in Alaska called Mudflats, which has one of the catchier subtitles in the realm of political blogs: "Tiptoeing Through the Muck of Alaska Politics." (Anchorage, where it is published, is surrounded by mudflats in Cook Inlet.) It also has one of the cuter pictures I've seen since "Occupy __________" (fill in the blank with the name of your locality) demonstrations started spreading worldwide from New York City, even to Springfield --

What the dogs might think about Wall Street isn't recorded. But that's what tundra looks like. Low-growing plants where it's too far north for trees to flourish. As Michael Lewis points out, they have it in Iceland too.