Wells Tower’s piece “Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference” is an amazing example of voice. Tower’s writing offered detailed imagery through comparison and humor. I enjoyed reading this because it was a story that I had never heard before. The beginning paragraph uses descriptive language to set the stage for the rest of the story. For example he writes, “Even with the windows closed, the air smelled like an emergency and had a salty chemical flavor you could taste with your eyes.” in order to describe the thick, polluted Chinese air. Tower also incorporates both imagery as well as satirical or comical language into his writing. For example in the fifth paragraph where he says “...whose mattresses would have registered respectably on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness.” While I found this comparison amusing it also gave me the perfect idea of the space where the story was taking place. It compared the thing that he was trying to convey to the reader to something that the reader could picture in their head. This sort of humorous writing not only made this an interesting read but also made Marbury seem familiar. This writing gave off the idea that him and the main character of the story are friends, and he’s writing about the trip to China the way you’d talk about a vacation. Tower also does a good job of infusing facts about Marbury’s life and business into his writing. He incorporates these statistics and pieces of information effortlessly, without taking away from the writing or feel like you’re being interrupted. These add to the content and understanding of Marbury’s past as well as his current situation without it being obvious. With all of these aspects combined, Tower gives a heartfelt story about a man’s emotional roller coaster ride of a career.
I totally agree with you on the fact that how this story portrayed a detail imagery about Marbury's life through comparison and humor. I also used the windows closed quote as well because it expressed Marbury's voice so well on how he felt about the city and how it also kind of a reflection on his life, Towers actually does an amazing job with the city description through Marbury's point of view. I really enjoyed how you provided descriptions in your blog that included both voice and imagery. Towers made Marbury's story seem more like a fiction to me than an interview actually and I also loved how Towers went deep with Marbury's childhood, his dreams, his vision, and his life as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Tower's humor as well-- especially how he trailed from the description of China as "gritty" and "smoggy" to "a fucking shithole." It was a great intro to the rest of the piece. I also think that he did a great job of making the piece read like a book instead of a typical news article. I think he did a really good job of portraying Marbury in a different light; here in the US he had pretty much been seen as this terrible person for a long time and Tower kind of gave an explanation for that and presented a different side of the story.
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