Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.
“ They drank tumblers of Irish whiskey filled to the brim, illicit pours they secured with ten-dollar tips to a curvy Dominican bartender.”
“ For the price of three beers, he told me his story.”
“ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”
When I read things like this I find it very hard to take the wider message seriously, because it feels like writing-as-cosplay, the writer inhabiting a caricature of “hard bitten” and inserting that at the forefront of the piece.
Why must it be a caricature? Many successful writers are some rather extreme people, which is probably part of the reason why they're successful. Reality is, as always, far stranger than fiction, and a lifetime of exceptional experience is the writer's palette.
I could not for the life of me guess what in particular is wrong with at least the second example here, if not the others. Can you explain what you mean? Is it the very mention of beers and cigarettes that perhaps triggers this reaction?
Nothing wrong with it; it is simply colorful and overly verbose, perhaps, but that is a stylistic choice. Personally I feel like it really helps paint a mental picture. If the goal is simply to transfer information, then it would be considered fluff. But if the goal is to share an experience, I think it succeeds!
It's an article that tries to be literature rather than just the information it conveys, and some people don't like that whether it is successful or not.
"Queen of the Silver Dollar" was written by Shel Silverstein in desperation to pay rent, and dictated from a phonebooth* to a member of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Cabinet.
Sometimes people really are hard-bitten.
* It's kind of like a specially designed room standing on the sidewalk of a city street, where you can put your iPhone on speaker and still hear the other person talk. Only it comes with it's own iPhone that you can rent for less than a dollar with an old form of Venmo.
> Esquire writing is so weird. It’s genuinely like a relic from another age.
I agree: but to me that's at least something kind of interesting and evocative, even if it's a trainwreck. (In fact, it might even be better when it's a trainwreck). A nice break from LLM's this-not-that. This one's not so bad IMO.
I disagree. I love and miss this style. Old Car and Driver articles often had the same flair. It’s not always about conveying the information but how we get there. I would love to find more long form, flair writing like this.