Structure in Sante’s Low Life

In my own writing, I often find that I struggle the most with structure. I think the high school/middle school planning strategy of the “upside-down pyramid” can be helpful at first, but inevitably I come across the issue that I have much more information to share than the pyramid can bare. What is the pyramid for? What is organization for? Well, among other things, to create a scaffold for the building of a clear thesis.

Sante tells his reader up front, in his preface, how he will order his book on page xviii of Low Life by writing that “The book is organized into four sections. The first, “Landscape,” sets forth the lay of the land, the material conditions of housing and the look of the streets. The second, “Sporting Life,” concerns temptation and escapism…Within these sections are chapters, arranged according to broad and relatively obvious categories. These categories pertain to the city’s essential commonplaces…” Sante notes that he has a lot of information to share earlier, and now he describes for us just how he plans to dole out this dearth of material. Then he offers an insight into the symbolism of his structure, offering: “The categories can be seen as corresponding to cards in a Tarot deck of New York City…[or] the archetypal figures in a gambler’s dream book.” And Sante is offering us up the spine of one of his overarching themes: the snare, the lure, and how it runs through Low Life. Note how his major theme relates intrinsically to how he organizes his material.

Maintaining organization is one of the best ways to improve readability, and thus direct communication with your audience, and thus making accessible to the reader your thesis, your main idea. Adding a structure to your ideas is an effective way to maintain organization; a structure that your reader can readily recognize and say to herself: “Okay, first he’s gonna talk about this, then this, then this.”

As a writer, it is worth meditating on the question: “How will I structure this piece of writing? How do I maintain clarity? How do I keep the thesis alive even when I go a bit off-track from the main idea?”

One thing I say to myself as I write is: “Every sentence in this paper is meant to serve the thesis, or main topic, of this paper.” And then I go about asking myself of each sentence: “Is this serving the thesis? The general topic?” A lot of these questions can, and should, be asked in the act of revision (more on revision later). Without further ado, I hereby offer the floor to the class:

What strategies do you use in organizing and maintaining structure in a paper?*

I encourage you to look to what your other classmates (and whoever else choses to answer this question), for pointers, and I hope we may amass something of a list of effective strategies in writing a paper.

*You can comment by clicking “Comments” below.

Sante-Quoting

In Sante’s chapter “Home” in Low Life, Sante distinguishes one of his major themes in his first few sentences: the facade. Remember, the book is subtitled “Lures and Snares of Old New York.” and Sante deftly relates his chapter on impoverished living to his main subject.

Sante presents a grand, encompassing view of his subject, the tenement: “The tenement is the basic facade in New York, the face of the slums, a slab of tombstone proportions, four to six stories, pocked by windows. (pg. 23)” In this, the first sentence of his chapter, he has already cast his tenement in a negative light. Note how he compares the tenement facade to a tombstone, a pock. These descriptive words add to the the overall theme of decay and, well, low life living. Then Sante offers a glorious depiction of his tenement:

Above is the towering tin cornice, a confection of scallops and curlicues, with foliaceous brackets, often topped by a semicircular peak, a disk enclosing a rayed sun…The cornice exists in disdain of practical qualities…nit tjos function yield[s] to an aesthetic and the to a nearly heraldic role. It is the most conspicuous item in the tenement’s equipment of fictitious grandeur. (23)

This is prose in motion. Sante not only describes his main subject, but he makes his urgent point: it is all a lure. It is not really real, and as readers we can assume that he will explain exactly how horrible this building really is. Sante quilts his grand theme into the lush, specific detail of the world of Old New York. This is a careful art, one which can raise a piece of prose to an authoritative level of deftness that the reader is really drawn to, and which can lead to longer, deeper papers far more interesting to write and read.

Luc Sante: Re-Imagining New York

I suppose the first thing that I always thing of is that Greenwich Village seemed a much more suitable name for the neighborhood when it was just that- a village. Greenwich was, for a while there, a place far off the beaten path south of Wall Street (a bustling port city stuffed with trade and goods), where stone was crumbled under hammer to rise new houses in rows and cobblestones spilled out, forming these early streets. The rich “summered” and went on holiday in Greenwich Village, where they kept larger houses and cottages, just as they now escape to the Hamptons. Greenwich Village was “the country.” As in, “We’re going to the country house for the week.”

I learned this meager fact at some point during college, and I can’t for the life of remember who taught it to me, and from there my head began to reel. Take a late 18th century walking tour: Start at Wall Street (named at the time for marking the uppermost point of denizened living in the city), from there imagine looking out not onto high-rises filled with sleeping business interns and bachelor bulls, and try to imagine a grassy, hilly green yonder stretching as far as the eye can see, riddled with the occasional boulder, creek, and forest. Take a street toward Greenwich, imagining it a single, narrow dirt path suitable for a slow-traveling carriage, and when you arrive, let’s say, at Christopher St., stop and imagine that this is where you will spend your vacation before returning to the busy city life.

Sante’s Low Life does this for me every time I read him, transporting me to another world–Old New York–where just as much was the same as it was totally alien.

I’m reminded of Gibson’s Apocalypto for odd reasons, in that I more often than not found myself calling it a “space opera”- it was like Star Wars in that everything felt foreign and yet similar, this storied time. But as I said above, Sante’s Old New York (he remains one of its sole custodians) is familiar as well, and he does a superb job of drawing out the reality of this time just as he does its mythos.

Walt Whitman: Long Lines, Fewer Line Breaks…AMERICA!

Whitman was trying to write the big, American epic poem that bridged the gap between academics, artists, people of the working and non-working classes and people of riches. He was chided it for it, considered “immoral” (meaning sexualized) for it, and eventually celebrated as one of the most important poets of his time, and perhaps the most important American poet to have lived (yes, I am including many of my favorites, Stephen Crane, Alan Ginsberg, Edgar Poe, John Ashberry, and James Schuyler when I write this). How did he pull it off? Well, let’s start with long lines.

Granted, I titled this post with a bit of a smirk but nonetheless- Whitman does have long lines.

Where his lines are indented, as shown here, the typesetter is showing that his poetic line is so long that it runs off the page, and must continue on through to the  following, excuse me, line. This is nothing new to those prosy poets today: Poets writing today struggle with their long lines stylistically.

Do they justify their lines to form a block of text like this one, thus visually implying an intention to nullify their line breaks? This is a bit imposing and stiff. Not only that, but it does not feel prosy enough, in my opinion, to justify the justification. Looking at a tight block of text like this can be difficult for the eye. And readability is key, no matter what other poets tell you.

Or do they simply default to the modern English language style of letting the line break where the margin makes it break, thus creating a fringed, uneven profile to their poem? It’s all in a day’s work for a poet who cares.

And poets should care. I mean, Whitman did, right? Yes, Whitman did. Whitman didn’t just let his lines run because he was lazy. We have, multiple editions of his Leaves of Grass to show that he was anything but unconcerned about how his poems turned out. Whitman was “going for something” with his long lines. Broad, epic lines—that’s what his lines were, and if the voice of his poems didn’t tell you so, then certainly the way one could be left breathless after reading one of his longer, tangential sentences might.