Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

In a meeting room at IFF, Brian Grainger let me sample some of the company’s flavors. It was an unusual taste test — there was no food to taste. Grainger is a se­nior flavorist at IFF, a ­soft-­spoken chemist with graying hair, an En­glish accent, and a fondness for understatement. He could easily be mistaken for a British diplomat or the own­er of a West End brasserie with two Michelin stars. Like many in the flavor industry, he has an Old World, ­old-­fashioned sensibility. When I suggested that IFF’s policy of secrecy and discretion was out of step with our ­mass-­marketing, ­brand-­conscious, ­self-­promoting age, and that the company should put its own logo on the countless products that bear its flavors, instead of allowing other companies to enjoy the consumer loyalty and affection inspired by those flavors, Grainger politely disagreed, assuring me that such a thing would never be done. In the absence of public credit or acclaim, the small and secretive fraternity of flavor chemists praise one another’s work. By analyzing the flavor formula of a product, Grainger can often tell which of his counterparts at a rival firm devised it. Whenever he walks down a supermarket aisle, he takes a quiet plea­sure in seeing the ­well-­known foods that contain his flavors.

Grainger had brought a dozen small glass bottles from the lab. After he opened each bottle, I dipped a ­fragrance-­testing filter into it — a long white strip of paper designed to absorb aroma chemicals without producing off notes. Before placing each strip of paper in front of my nose, I closed my eyes. Then I inhaled deeply, and one food after another was conjured from the glass bottles. I smelled fresh cherries, black olives, sautéed onions, and shrimp. Grainger’s most remarkable creation took me by surprise. After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous — as if someone in the room ­were flipping burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, I saw just a narrow strip of white paper and a flavorist with a grin.

2“Blossom Restaurant”: Abbott’s photograph of the restaurant, at 103 Bowery, was taken on October 3, 1935. — Eds.

3Police Gazette: A century-old men’s periodical that featured sensational news items and risqué photographs. It was especially popular in barbershops. — Eds.

*fall of Calais: After a year-long siege, Calais, a town in France, surrendered to Edward III, king of England and self-declared king of France. — Eds.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑What do McDonald’s french fries have to do with Schlosser’s primary aim in this selection? Why does he feature them in the title and use them in the opening to the essay? Why, in your opinion, didn’t he use a different example?

2. ‑Describe Schlosser’s attitude toward “natural” and “artificial” flavoring. Does he think one is superior to the other? How critical does he appear toward food additives in general? Do you read his essay as a condemnation of fast food? How does his account of his laboratory visit color your response? Overall, ­were his laboratory experiences positive or negative? Explain what in his account makes you feel one way or the other.

3. ‑Compare and contrast Schlosser’s investigative techniques with those of James Fallows (page 416), Amy Cunningham (page 355), or Malcolm Gladwell (page 432). How does each writer establish a question to investigate, provoke your interest in the issue, gather information, and conduct the investigation? How important are sources and interviews? What information about sources and interviews is omitted from the essays?

Charles Simic

The Life of Images

Charles Simic (b. 1938) grew up in Belgrade, Yugo­slavia (now Serbia), during World War II. He immigrated to the United States with his family when he was sixteen years old and became a naturalized citizen in 1971. “Being one of the millions of displaced persons made an impression on me. In addition to my own little story of bad luck, I heard plenty of others. I’m still amazed by all the vileness and stupidity I witnessed in my life,” he says. Since his first volume of poetry, What the Grass Says (1967), Simic has published more than sixty books and has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The World Doesn’t End (1989) and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” His book Walking the Black Cat (1996) was a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry; The Voice at 3:00 a.m. was nominated for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2003. Simic’s latest collection of poetry is My Noiseless Entourage (2005). He is a noted translator of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry, and his own work has also been translated into many languages. A professor of En­glish at the University of New Hampshire in Durham since 1973, he also contributes frequently to magazines and journals, including the Harvard Review, in which his essay “The Life of Images” was published in 2003.

When asked what he found hardest to write about, Simic replied, “Everything is hard to write about. Many of my shortest and seemingly simple poems took years to get right. I tinker with most of my poems even after publication. I expect to be revising in my coffin as it is being lowered into the ground.”

In one of Berenice Abbott’s¹ photographs of the Lower East Side, I recall a store sign advertising Silk Underwear. Underneath, there was the additional information about “reasonable prices for peddlers.” How interesting, I thought. Did someone carry a suitcase full of ladies’ underwear and try to peddle them on some street corner farther uptown? Or did he ring doorbells in apartment buildings and offer them to ­house­wives? I imagine the underwear came in many different sizes, so he may have had to carry two suitcases. The peddler was most likely an immigrant and had difficulty making himself understood. What he wanted was for the lady of the ­house to feel how soft the silk was but she either did not understand him or she had other reasons for hesitating. She wore a ­house robe, her hair was loose as if she just got out of bed, so she was embarrassed to touch the undies draped over his extended hand. Then she finally did touch them.

The reason photographs live in my memory is that the city I continue to roam is rich with such visual delights. Everyone who does this is taking imaginary snapshots. For all I know my face, briefly glimpsed in a crowd, may live on in someone ­else’s memory. The attentive eye makes the world mysterious. Some men or a woman going about their business seventy years ago either caught sight of a camera pointed at them or they passed by oblivious. It was like hide and seek. They thought they had concealed themselves in plain view and the camera found them out. It showed something even they did not know they ­were hiding. Often people had the puzzled look of someone who had volunteered to assist a hypnotist on a stage and awakened to the sound of the audience’s applause.

I’m looking at the ­long-­torn-­down Second Avenue “El” at the intersection of Division Street and Bowery in another Abbott photograph. The date is April 24, 1936. It seems like a nice day, for the sunlight streams through the tracks and iron scaffold of the elevated train, making patterns of shadow and light on the sidewalk below. As far as I can make out, the street on both sides is lined with stores selling cheap furs. The entire area was for years a bargain hunter’s paradise. My father knew a fellow in his office, an el­der­ly, impeccably dressed man, who claimed that he did all his shopping on Orchard and Hester Streets, where he never paid more than five dollars for a suit. What interests me the most in this photograph is the shadowy couple under the El with their backs turned to us. She’s willowy and taller than he is, as if she ­were a model or a salesgirl in one of these shops. They have drawn close together as if talking over something very important, or why would they otherwise stop like that in the middle of the street? The way this woman in a long skirt carries herself gives me the impression that she is young. Not so the man. With one hand casually resting on a post and his other stuck in his pocket, he appears confident, even brash. It’s the way they stand together that suggests to me that they are not casual acquaintances. Most likely they work in the same neighborhood, but there is something ­else going on between them too. She seems very interested in what he is saying now. No one ­else in view pays them any attention. The fellow standing on the sidewalk in front of the Beauty Fur Shop looks off into the distance where a portly young man with glasses wearing an open overcoat over a ­three-­piece suit is coming into view. He has just had lunch and is glancing idly at the shop windows as he strolls lazily back to the office. He is too young to be the boss, so he must be the son or the ­son-­in-­law of one of the store own­ers. Except for the couple who elude identification, there is nothing unusual ­here. A photograph such as this one, where time has stopped on an ordinary scene full of innuendoes, partakes of the infinite.

I cannot look long at any old photograph of the city without hearing some music in the background. The moment that happens, I’m transported into the past so vividly no one can convince me that I did not live in that moment. I have heard just about every recording of pop­u­lar music and jazz made between 1920 and 1950. This is probably the most esoteric knowledge I possess. It’s easier to talk to people about Tibetan Buddhism, Arab poetry in Medieval Spain or Russian icons, than about Helen Kane, Annette Hanshaw, and Ethel Waters. Or how about some Boswell Sisters or Joe Venuti and his Blue Four, Red McKenzie and his Mound City Blue Blowers, Ted Lewis and his Orchestra playing “Egyptian Ella”? It scares me how much of that music is in my head. I have friends who cannot believe that I can enjoy both Mahler’s symphonies and Coleman Hawkins. Young Ella Fitzgerald singing “If That’s What You’re Thinking, You’re Wrong” with Chick Webb’s band would be just right for Abbott’s shadowy couple.

Can one experience nostalgia for a time and place one did not know? I believe so. You could put me in solitary with Abbott’s photograph of “Blossom Restaurant”² and I wouldn’t notice the months pass away as I studied the menu chalked on the blackboard at its entrance. The prices, of course, are incredibly low, but that’s secondary. The dishes enumerated ­here are what fascinates me. No one eats that kind of food today. Rare Mongolian, Patagonian, and Afghan specialties are procurable in New York, but not lamb oxtail stew, boiled beef, or even stuffed peppers. The ethnic makeup of the city has changed in the last thirty years. Most of the luncheonettes in 1950s and 1960s served samplings of German, Hungarian, and Jewish cuisine. Pea and bean soup, stuffed cabbage, corned beef and boiled potatoes, and veal cutlets ­were to be found regularly on the menu, together with the usual assortment of sandwiches. On every table, and all along the counter, there ­were containers stocked with dill pickles and slices of raw onion. The portions ­were enormous. A cheap dish like franks and kraut would stuff you for the rest of the day. I subsisted for years on soups and chowders cooked by a Greek in a greasy spoon on East 8th Street. They gave you two thick slices of rye bread and butter with the soup and all the pickles you could eat. After that, I could hardly keep my eyes open for the rest of the day.

Abbott’s photograph of the Blossom restaurant front also includes the barbershop next door with its own price list. Does a tonsorial establishment anywhere in this country still offer electric massage? The gadget, which resembled contraptions from a horror film, was a mesh of spring coils and electric wires. Once the juice was turned on, the machine squirmed and shook for a minute or two over the customer’s scalp, supposedly providing a stimulating, healthful, ­up-­to-­date treatment, while he sat back in the chair pretending to be absorbed in some article in the Police Gazette.³ That ordeal was followed by a few sprinkles of ­strong-­smelling cologne from a large bottle and a dusting of talcum powder on the ­freshly-­shaved neck.

The worst haircut I ever had in my life was at a barber college at the ­Union Square subway station. “Learn Barbering and make Money,” the sign said. It was the cheapest haircut in town. But, before I realized what was happening, the apprentice barber had cut off all my hair with clippers except for a tuft right up in front. The kid was clearly a hair fashion visionary de­cades ahead of his time, but back then I was in total panic. I rushed immediately across the street into Klein’s department store and found a beret, which I wore pulled down over my ears for the next six weeks. The problem was that it was summer, hot and humid as it usually is in New York. I also wore dark glasses to give the impression that I was simply affecting the appearance of a jazz musician. I saw both Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk similarly decked out, but they tended to make their appearance only after dark, while I had to go to work in the morning in the storeroom of a publishing company where everyone who saw me burst out laughing. Lunch was a hassle too. The customers at adjoining tables snickered and the waitress who knew me well gave me a puzzled look as she brought me my sandwich. I always held unpop­u­lar opinions and was not afraid to voice them, but to have people stare at me because I had a funny haircut or wore a necktie of some outrageous hue was something I had no stomach for.

“My place is no bigger than a closet,” a woman said to her companion on the street the other day as they rushed past me, and I saw it instantly with its clutter of furniture and its piles of clothes on the bed and the floor. Dickinson’s “Madonna dim” came to mind and I did not even take a good look at her before she was lost in the crowd. No sooner has one seen an interesting face in the street than one gives it a biography. Through a small window in her room, the eve­ning casts its first shadow on a blank wall where the outline of a picture that once hung there is still visible. She is not home yet, but there is a small bird in the cage waiting for her and so am I.

Mr. Nobody is what I call the man in the subway. I catch sight of him from time to time. He has labored all his life to make himself inconspicuous in dress and manner and has nearly succeeded. He sits in the far corner in his gray hat, gray moustache, pale collapsing cheeks, and empty, watery eyes, staring off into space while the subway train grinds along and the overhead lights go out briefly and return to find us puzzled, looking up from newspapers at each other sitting there. Even more odd than these searching looks we give strangers are the times when we catch someone doing the same to us. They see me as I truly am, one imagines, wanting both to run away from them and to ask what it is they see.

Today dozens of people are sunning themselves on park benches, sitting close together with eyes shut as if making a collective wish. An old mutt who has done a lot of thinking and sighing in his life lies at their feet, eyeing a rusty pigeon take wing as I pass by. The enigma of the ­ordinary — that’s what makes old photographs so poignant. An ancient streetcar in sepia color. A few men holding on to their hats on a windy day. They hurry with their faces averted except for one befuddled old fellow who has stopped and is looking over his shoulder at what we cannot see, but where, we suspect, we ourselves will be coming into view someday, as hurried and ephemeral as any one of them.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑Consider the pro­cess Simic goes through when looking at a photograph. How does he make sense of the image? What does he add to it? What conclusions does he come to about the value of photography?

2. ‑How does Simic move between interpreting the historic photographs by Berenice Abbott and interpreting scenes from his daily life in New York City? What does one have to do with the other? Does Simic read faces on the street or scenes in the city in the same way that he reads Abbott’s photographs? Why or why not?

3. ‑Discussing one of Abbott’s photographs of daily life, Simic observes: “A photograph such as this one, where time has stopped on an ordinary scene full of innuendos, partakes of the infinite” (paragraph 3). Read Zadie Smith’s “Scenes from the Smith Family Christmas” (page 278) and look at the accompanying photograph. Does it “partake of the infinite”? What stories does each writer use the photograph to tell? What do Simic’s and Smith’s stories share?

Calvin Trillin

A Traditional Family

The journalist, critic, novelist, and humorist Calvin Trillin was born in Kansas City in 1935, but has lived in New York City for many years. He works as a staff writer at the New Yorker and contributes to many other magazines, including the Atlantic, Harper’s, Life, and the Nation. Trillin is especially well known for his nonfiction. His magazine columns are collected in Uncivil Liberties (1982), With All Disrespect: More Uncivil Liberties (1985), If You Can’t Say Something Nice (1987), and Enough’s Enough (1990); Trillin has also published a series of very pop­u­lar books dealing with food and eating. In American Fried (1974) he paints a revealing portrait of American life through his discussion of regional and national eating habits. His love of traveling and eating in the company of his wife Alice also led him to write Alice, Let’s Eat (1978), Third Helpings (1983), and Travels with Alice (1989). More recently Trillin has forsworn the temptation to eat for a living and has taken his keen sense of humor to the stage in ­one-­man shows. “A Traditional Family” is excerpted from his book Too Soon to Tell (1995); his other recent publications include Deadline Poet: My Life as a Doggerelist (1994), Messages from My Father (1996), Family Man (1998), Tepper Isn’t Going Out (2001), Feeding a Yen (2003), and Obliviously on He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme (2004).

When asked to describe the pro­cess he goes through when writing factual as opposed to imaginative columns, Trillin replied, “In a nonfiction piece . . . you really have to carry around a lot of baggage. You have what happened, your understanding of what happened, what you want to get across about what happened, all kinds of burdens of being fair to what­ever sides there are. The facts are terribly restricting.” Trillin typically writes at least four drafts of nonfiction articles, but finds that imaginative writing is less predictable. When writing his humor columns, for example, “it’s a much less rigid system than that of writing nonfiction. Sometimes it only takes two drafts; sometimes it takes five.”

I just found out that our family is no longer what the Census Bureau calls a traditional American family, and I want everyone to know that this is not our fault.

We now find ourselves included in the statistics that are used constantly to show the lamentable decline of the typical American ­house­hold from something like Ozzie and Harriet and the kids to something like a bunch of kooks and hippies.

I want everyone to know right at the start that we are not kooks. Oh sure, we have our peculiarities, but we are not kooks. Also, we are not hippies. We have no children named Goodness. I am the first one to admit that reasonable people may differ on how to characterize a couple of my veteran sportcoats, and there may have been a remark or two passed in the neighborhood from time to time about the state of our front lawn. But no one has ever seriously suggested that we are hippies.

In fact, most people find us rather traditional. My wife and I have a marriage certificate, although I can’t say I know exactly where to put my hands on it right at the moment. We have two children. We have a big meal on Christmas. We put on costumes at Halloween. (What about the fact that I always wear an ax murderer’s mask on Halloween? That happens to be one of the peculiarities.) We make family decisions in the traditional American family way, which is to say the father is manipulated by the wife and the children. We lose a lot of socks in the wash. At our ­house, the dishes are done and the garbage is taken out regularly — after the glass and cans and other recyclable materials have been separated out. We’re not talking about a commune ­here.

₅

So why has the Census Bureau begun listing us with ­house­holds that consist of, say, the ­ex-­stepchild of someone’s former marriage living with someone who is under the mistaken impression that she is the aunt of somebody or other? Because the official definition of a traditional American family is two parents and one or more children under age eighteen. Our younger daughter just turned nineteen. Is that our fault?

As it happens, I did everything in my power to keep her from turning nineteen. When our daughters ­were about two and five, I decided that they ­were the perfect age, and I looked around for some sort of freezing pro­cess that might keep them there. I discovered that there was no such freezing pro­cess on the market. Assuming, in the traditional American way, that the technology would come along by and by, I renewed my investigation several times during their childhoods — they always seemed to be at the perfect age — but the freezing pro­cess never surfaced. Meanwhile, they kept getting older at what seemed to me a constantly accelerating rate. Before you could say “Zip up your jacket,” the baby turned nineteen. What’s a parent to do?

Ask for an easement. That’s what a parent’s to do. When I learned about the Census Bureau’s definition of a traditional family — it was mentioned in an Associated Press story about how the latest census shows the traditional family declining at a more moderate pace than “the rapid and destabilizing rate” at which it declined between 1970 and 1980 — it occurred to me that we could simply explain the situation to the Census Bureau and ask that an exception be made in our case.

I realize that the Census Bureau would probably want to send out an inspector. I would acknowledge to him that our daughters are more or less away from home, but remind him that we have been assured by more experienced parents that we can absolutely count on their return. I would take the position, in other words, that we are just as traditional as any American family, just slightly undermanned at the moment — like a hockey team that has a couple of guys in the penalty box but is still a presence on the ice. We could show the official our Christmas tree decorations and our Halloween costumes and a lot of single socks. We might, in the traditional American way, offer him a cup of coffee and a small bribe.

I haven’t decided for sure to approach the Census Bureau. For one thing, someone might whisper in the inspector’s ear that I have been heard to refer to my older daughter’s room — the room where we now keep the exercise bike — as “the gym,” and that might take some explaining. Also, I haven’t discussed the matter with my wife. I would, of course, abide by her wishes. It’s traditional.

*Castle . . . Enguerrand: Enguerrand de Coucy is the historical figure on whom Tuchman focuses in her account of the fourteenth century. — Eds.

*Dauphin: The eldest son of a French king and presumably heir to the throne. — Eds.