NYTimes Magazine Cover Story: Hunting to Pay the Karmic Price for a Meal

[WordMan]

@Trunk

Yeah, nice way to make a decision.

I don’t have the article in front of me, but I think the next line, which lissener cut out, was something like, “God, did I actually just write that paragraph?” and then went on to describe the feeling of the hunt putting him in the moment.

I found the article engrossing. . .his description of the hunt, his half-baked theorizing on hunting and cannabinoids, and the point of the article about getting closer to the food one eats. But, as with the OP, I connected with it, and I thought the author did a great job of really pulling one into the moment and the sensations associated with the thrill of the kill.

I suppose the story didn’t really come out of nowhere for me. I never hunted for real, but grew up in a hunting culture (small town Maine). And, I was no stranger to taking out birds and squirrels with pump-action bb and pellet guns. Also, I’m friends with – and agree with – people who are into the slow food movement. I’ve often thought I’d go hunting myself for a similar reason to the author if afforded the opportunity.

Great article.

(also, I thought the Xword was ridiculously easy. When they’re that easy, I make it a challenge to not make a single typo, and to not make a single “side note” – a little set of dashes, like a game of hangman, next to the grid that I use as a jump start.)

Great point, Trunk - thank you. I didn’t have time before heading out to work and re-check the article, but he does acknowledge the overwrought prose in that first paragraph, doesn’t he? There is definitely a risk to be taken when trying to describe being fully inside a moment - some people will appreciate the effort, some will think you captured it and others will think you’re a wuss for exposing yourself and, in their mind, not pulling it off. YMMV.

[singular1]

The first paragraph to an article is your introduction to the readers you’re trying to reach. If you decide to introduce yourself with a big steaming pile of purple crap, you should expect some people to decide they’d rather not wade through more of the same.
Sorry, you’re not going to shame me into apologizing for my decision.

[twickster]

Haven’t read the article, but like Michael Pollan a lot as a writer – unlike lissener, liked Botany of Desire (what are the factual errors of which you speak), and he wrote a wonderful book on gardening, Second Nature.

[Trunk]

@singular1

The first paragraph to an article is your introduction to the readers you’re trying to reach. If you decide to introduce yourself with a big steaming pile of purple crap, you should expect some people to decide they’d rather not wade through more of the same.
Sorry, you’re not going to shame me into apologizing for my decision.

He doesn’t immediately follow it with this, but eventually. . .

wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. Am I actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes.

One dude on a message board grabs one paragraph out of context and your response is, “Ok, that’s it. Thanks for saving me the time.”

Well. . .I’m not trying to SHAME you into anything, but that’s not exactly an attitude I’d be PROUD of either.

[lissener]

@twickster

Haven’t read the article, but like Michael Pollan a lot as a writer – unlike lissener, liked Botany of Desire (what are the factual errors of which you speak), and he wrote a wonderful book on gardening, Second Nature.

Too long ago, didn’t retain specifics. I’m a lifelong plant geek, and a more-than-casual reader of “pop botany,” if there is such a thing. Also an on-again-off-again professional garden/landscape designer. So I’ve come across a lot of garden wives tales, and also a lot of discussion/disproof of these wives tales in works of varying degrees of scientificity. I don’t remember specifically, but I remember I tossed the book aside the second or third time Pollan repeated widely-held-but-apocryphal factoids as received fact. Now, if I was exposed to more accuracy just incidentally, this suggested to me that the book was not very carefully fact-checked, let alone initially researched. This made the whole thing suspect, and left me doubting everything I was not specifically familiar with. Not a great perspective from which to read a work of nonfiction. So I passed it on.

(And no, I’m not going to re-read and exhaustively factcheck it for the purposes of this thread. I have no agenda to make others not read it, I’m only telling you why I didn’t want to finish it.)

[lissener]

@Trunk

Yeah, nice way to make a decision.

I don’t have the article in front of me, but I think the next line, which lissener cut out, was something like, “God, did I actually just write that paragraph?” and then went on to describe the feeling of the hunt putting him in the moment.

Um, no, the rest of the paragraph was more of the same:

. . . Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

[lissener]

@Trunk

He doesn’t immediately follow it with this, but eventually. . .

wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. Am I actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes.

One dude on a message board grabs one paragraph out of context and your response is, “Ok, that’s it. Thanks for saving me the time.”

Well. . .I’m not trying to SHAME you into anything, but that’s not exactly an attitude I’d be PROUD of either.

Dude, chill. Opinions will vary. Misrepresenting the original only muddies the waters, however. The quote with which you say he “eventually” addresses my quoted paragraph is NOT in reference to the purple prose that was what I was objecting too, but comes several paragraphs into the piece, and refers, in fact, to this:

Since there’s nothing he can do to make the encounter happen, the hunter’s energy goes into readying himself for it, and trying, by the sheer force of his attention, to summon the animal into his presence. Searching for his prey, the hunter instinctively becomes more like the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible, more exquisitely alert. Predator and prey alike move according to their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention and their own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or avert precisely this encounter… . .

So, while your opinion of his writing versus my opinion of his writing is not really open to debate or proof, being opinion, you’re “wrong” in that you’ve misrepresented the facts, such as they are.

He does not acknowledge the purple prose of my example with the apologetic paragraph you offer as such. He apologizes for the content, not the style, of a different paragraph entirely. The style, which is where I have a problem with, is not apologized for at all. Not that it should be, only that you’re suggesting it is.

You like that kind of writing, I don’t. Cites and proof ain’t gonna change that.

[Ukulele_Ike]

Stop it! Stop it!

{fingers in ears}

I can’t heeeeeeeeeeeeeear you! LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA…

[Ukulele_Ike]

(that was addressed to lissener’s second post above)

[lissener]

@Ukulele Ike

(that was addressed to lissener’s second post above)

To my quote? or to my post?

[Ukulele_Ike]

The quote.

[lissener]

Thanks for clarifying.

(Do people think I’m paranoid?)*

[Ukulele_Ike]

[sub]Nahhhhhhh…'cause we know we’re all out to get you[/sub]