Playing Santa changed Bob Rutan profoundly

Posted by Lightbody 5 days ago

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Comments

Comment by peteforde 1 day ago

https://archive.is/14tiy

Comment by NaOH 1 day ago

'Profound' and 'strange' have distinct meanings. I'd suggest the title be re-edited to either

Playing Santa did strange things to Bob Rutan

or just the first line of the Esquire title:

Playing Santa does strange things to a man

Comment by saaaaaam 1 day ago

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.

Very odd.

Comment by somenameforme 1 day ago

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.

Comment by throwaway81523 1 day ago

> “ In the two decades since the show aired, a hundred thousand American Spirits had yellowed Bob’s fingers and turned his voice to gravel.”

13.7 per day, I guess it could be worse.

When I saw the title I wondered if Bob Rutan had any connection with Burt Rutan, the airplane guy. I guess not.

How do you get $200 an hour for a corporate Santa gig?

Article looks good. I'm just a paragraph or two in, but will probably read it.

Comment by fallous 1 day ago

So many are desperately wishing to be the next Tom Wolfe rather than striving to find their own voice and style (as Wolfe did).

Comment by IAmBroom 1 day ago

"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.

Comment by levinb 1 day ago

human.

Comment by mulr00ney 1 day ago

> 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.

Comment by uean 1 day ago

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.

Comment by loloquwowndueo 1 day ago

Will gladly take this over the current tsunami of AI-written slop. “It’s not only a relic from a bygone era; it’s a rhetorical masterpiece”

Comment by suddenlybananas 1 day ago

Everyone is just pretending to be something. The people writing in the 60s were also apeing a style in just the same way.

Personally, I liked the writing.

Comment by beepbooptheory 1 day ago

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?

Comment by adzm 1 day ago

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!

Comment by vidarh 1 day ago

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.