Week 7 Reading Response

To begin with, I was really taken by the Talese piece. Without Talese ever actually getting the access to him to do a proper interview, I felt like I knew Sinatra as well, if not better than I would have from a more traditional profile piece. Even the sheer fact that the piece deals with Sinatra, the paramount singer of the times, has that most banal of sicknesses, a cold. This humanizes Sinatra, who from what I know of him, was often seen as larger than life. I think this is a big facet of the piece, enough for Talese to name the piece “Frank Sinatra has a Cold”. Sinatra is also squarely in middle-age, the piece identifies the time as a month before his fiftieth birthday and he is trapped in a malaise brought on by the cold. Talese’s word choice is impeccable. When he writes “some men will become aggressive, some women will become seductive, others will stand around skeptically appraising him”, I could vividly picture the scene in my head and I knew exactly what he was talking about. Talese also shows a strong command of Sinatra’s recording history and is able to number his personal staff and also describe the fierce security that surrounds him.
Sometimes it was a bit hard to see the piece as something groundbreaking but I attribute that to the fact that it has been emulated so much by journalism and the writers whom we have already read and it still manages to feel very freshly written and indicative of locating a certain man and time in history while not seemingly stuffy and like a time capsule. The way that Talese even changes the lengths of his sentences is something I want to emulate such as how he opens a paragraph with “Frank Sinatra does things personally” Then returns to long, complex sentences. Great stuff.