Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite writers. He's a national correspondent for The Atlantic. I don't always agree with him, but I love his arguments supporting whatever he's writing about.
Below is an excerpt from a piece he wrote about the recently deceased New York Times writer, David Carr. He describes how David saw past his life as a troubled kid, and encouraged him to be the writer, and the man, he is today.
Before taking up my studies, I’d enjoyed a successful career as knucklehead, which is to say that before I practiced the trade of narrative argument, I practiced the art of fucking up. My résumé was impressive. On two separate occasions, in two consecutive years, I was kicked out of the same high school. When I was 14 years old, I was arrested for threatening a teacher. Two years later, I was suspended for the same thing. I was not a thug, to the extent such people even exist. I was the kind of kid who sat in the library reading all day, and then failed my literature classes. I was the kind of kid who minored in literature and then failed my literature class and my humanities classes. Adults often think children take a kind of rebellious pride in these sorts of antics. If so it is the pride of fuck-ups and knuckleheads, the shadow of a deep and abiding fear that your life is going nowhere.
In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry—and David Carr hired me. I can’t even tell you what he saw. I know that I immediately felt unworthy—a feeling that never quite faded—because I was a knucklehead and a fuck-up. But what I didn't then know about David Carr was that he'd written and edited the knucklehead chronicles, and published annual editions wholly devoted to the craft of fucking-up. I think that David—recovering crack addict, recovering alcoholic, ex-cocaine dealer, lymphoma survivor, beautiful writer, gorgeous human—knew something about how a life of fucking up burrows itself into the bones of knuckleheads, and it changes there, transmutes into an abiding shame, a gnawing fear which likely dogs the reformed knucklehead right into the grave. Perhaps that fear could be turned into something beautiful. Perhaps a young journalist could pull power from that fear, could write from it, the way Bob Hayes ran with it, because the fear was not of anything earthly but of demons born from profound shame and fantastic imagination.
Find the entire piece at the link below.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/king-david/385596/
Below is an excerpt from a piece he wrote about the recently deceased New York Times writer, David Carr. He describes how David saw past his life as a troubled kid, and encouraged him to be the writer, and the man, he is today.
Before taking up my studies, I’d enjoyed a successful career as knucklehead, which is to say that before I practiced the trade of narrative argument, I practiced the art of fucking up. My résumé was impressive. On two separate occasions, in two consecutive years, I was kicked out of the same high school. When I was 14 years old, I was arrested for threatening a teacher. Two years later, I was suspended for the same thing. I was not a thug, to the extent such people even exist. I was the kind of kid who sat in the library reading all day, and then failed my literature classes. I was the kind of kid who minored in literature and then failed my literature class and my humanities classes. Adults often think children take a kind of rebellious pride in these sorts of antics. If so it is the pride of fuck-ups and knuckleheads, the shadow of a deep and abiding fear that your life is going nowhere.
In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry—and David Carr hired me. I can’t even tell you what he saw. I know that I immediately felt unworthy—a feeling that never quite faded—because I was a knucklehead and a fuck-up. But what I didn't then know about David Carr was that he'd written and edited the knucklehead chronicles, and published annual editions wholly devoted to the craft of fucking-up. I think that David—recovering crack addict, recovering alcoholic, ex-cocaine dealer, lymphoma survivor, beautiful writer, gorgeous human—knew something about how a life of fucking up burrows itself into the bones of knuckleheads, and it changes there, transmutes into an abiding shame, a gnawing fear which likely dogs the reformed knucklehead right into the grave. Perhaps that fear could be turned into something beautiful. Perhaps a young journalist could pull power from that fear, could write from it, the way Bob Hayes ran with it, because the fear was not of anything earthly but of demons born from profound shame and fantastic imagination.
Find the entire piece at the link below.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/king-david/385596/
No comments:
Post a Comment