Monday, April 18, 2011
Choose Your Own Assignment
Originally, I was trying to find a profile of a place but this one is more about a person. But it does seem like a hybrid of person and place since it is important to know about the city that this person lives in. "Body Collector in Detroit Answers When Death Calls" follows a man, Mike Thomas, in Detroit who collects corpses for a living. Charlie LeDuff sets Detroit as the backdrop of Mike Thomas' current life where he goes around looking for dead bodies in order to feed his children. I read a couple of Charlie LeDuff's other pieces before picking this one. (One was a profile of Flint's diminishing police force). This one stuck out to me because Mike Thomas' job relies on other people dying in Detroit where murders are high. But he is grateful for his job in these economic times, especially in Detroit where the unemployment rate is much higher than the national average. His job relies, in most cases, on murders and suicides.
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I had a hard time focusing on craft while I read this piece, but I managed to come up with a few thoughts on the matter.
ReplyDeleteI was struck initially by LeDuff's decision to not name his subject until the 4th paragraph. To me this created a sense of emerging layers in the story that added a great deal of depth to the story. I liked how we started extremely broadly with the city, then focused down briefly on the field and this man, then focused tighter on the body collector, who, after finally being named, gets his own set of other focus points like his family, personal history, etc.
Further, I was very impressed by how LeDuff moved fairly fluidly amongst these image layers. By working on image for a bit and then switching to another, I felt that I was given a very rich backdrop for the subject. I got a good sense of the type of Detroit LeDuff was creating and I was able to see how Thomas operated within LeDuff's Detroit.
As I took note of this I began to realize something about profiles that I hope will help me in getting better at them: Profiles are not supposed to be succinct biographies of people or encyclopedia entries about places. I think they are instead supposed to be a working out of tough images that, if built up correctly, do more speaking than the words on the page alone.
Thanks for a great read, Kristin.
I really got a lot of this piece in terms of craft and a limited amount of space: This piece is short but somehow manages to not only capture the personality of this man who collects bodies but also really manages to say a lot about the city of Detroit through the actions of Mr. Thomas and his descriptions of what he sees on a daily basis. I think this goes back to Franklin and word choice. In this piece every single word counts and contributes to the tone, feeling, and essential point of the piece.
ReplyDeleteThis was a really interesting read and I really appreciate that is was about Michigan and a city that we claim as ours despite its tragic flaws.
I really enjoyed the style and tone of this piece. The tone was rather conversational, and the quotations from Mr. Thomas accurately reflected his unique speech patterns, which does so much for characterization without being explicit. It was a very smartly written piece, and I was fully engaged by the story from the first sentence to the last.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite section of the piece was Mr. Thomas's speech about death, given to neighbors who gathered around his porch. It provided a great deal of commentary on race and class, in a way that I think is easily relatable and doesn't distance the reader in a way that academic discourse tends to do. I do think that the piece would have benefited from a more explicit discussion of race relations, which are so often swept under the rug or merely alluded to in news stories.
I do think that this piece covered a bit too much ground for its brevity. The author spent a lot of time explaining the economic situation of Detroit, and I think this space could have been better served focusing more on the uniqueness of the character Mr. Thomas. Maybe I'm naive because I'm from Michigan, but I feel like even in 2006, people knew that Detroit was economically depressed and had high rates of crime. Once again, this goes back to audience, and maybe the New York Times audience needed all those details about Detroit. I just wanted a few more moments with Mr. Thomas.
This was a very interesting, enjoyable read, mostly because of its main character, Mr. Thomas, his macabre occupation, and his apt, witty observations about the city surrounding him, Detroit. With that said, it is more of a hybrid profile about Detroit and Mr. Thomas, as Kristin said, and I think it suffers for that. Like Lindsey, I wanted to see more of Mr. Thomas as opposed to hearing about Detroit. He's what gives the piece its originality, his unique occupation and personality what gets the reader into reading this. And his line “White people kill themselves. Black people kill each other. Chinese people don’t die,” is just incredible. Either way, an enjoyable read that might have benefited from more focus on Thomas.
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