“There’s no moisture, no hint of green left in the land. The mountains look as dry and cracked as a mummy’s tongue, and I can’t believe anyone ever made this trek on horseback. They call this stretch of road the Devil’s Playground, and there’s a sign along the highway with a skull and crossbones on it and a little silhouette of a roadrunner that says LAST GAS FOR 30 MILES. IF YOUR CAR BREAKS DOWN, NO ONE'S GOING TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU. MEEP! MEEP! Thank God I’m driving a Prius, I think.” [Emphasis in original.]—Liz Phair, “Exile in Greenville,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 2010
Musician-writer Liz Phair’s piece aims for enough snarkiness to take the edge off all that earnestness that inevitably surfaces as she whipsaws in Phoenix between a NASCAR event (The Checker O’Reilly Auto Parts 500—is this for real???) and the 2009 Greenbuild Expo on eco-conscious design—two events occurring simultaneously. Only in America!
(Surprise, surprise—NASCAR is more eco-conscious than one might ever dream—at least as embodied by female driver Leilani Munter, who speaks—who’d have thought it?—about “carbon footprints.” Just what you might expect from someone whose homepage urges, “Life is short. Race hard. Live green.”)
Unfortunately, even before one gets to the end of Liz's first paragraph, there’s that one sentence—yes, the “Thank God” one--that inevitably sticks in the mind. It underscores, in a big way, one major disadvantage of print compared with online writing: the still-sometimes-lengthy lead time between when an article is written and edited and when it finally is bound and on newsstands.
Surely, Liz wishes for the few extra weeks that more immediate online writing might have provided. Then, either she could have come up with—or a helpful editor might have suggested—a sentence like the following, one that takes into account news of Toyota’s Prius recall: Thank God I’m driving a Prius with brakes that still work.
Musician-writer Liz Phair’s piece aims for enough snarkiness to take the edge off all that earnestness that inevitably surfaces as she whipsaws in Phoenix between a NASCAR event (The Checker O’Reilly Auto Parts 500—is this for real???) and the 2009 Greenbuild Expo on eco-conscious design—two events occurring simultaneously. Only in America!
(Surprise, surprise—NASCAR is more eco-conscious than one might ever dream—at least as embodied by female driver Leilani Munter, who speaks—who’d have thought it?—about “carbon footprints.” Just what you might expect from someone whose homepage urges, “Life is short. Race hard. Live green.”)
Unfortunately, even before one gets to the end of Liz's first paragraph, there’s that one sentence—yes, the “Thank God” one--that inevitably sticks in the mind. It underscores, in a big way, one major disadvantage of print compared with online writing: the still-sometimes-lengthy lead time between when an article is written and edited and when it finally is bound and on newsstands.
Surely, Liz wishes for the few extra weeks that more immediate online writing might have provided. Then, either she could have come up with—or a helpful editor might have suggested—a sentence like the following, one that takes into account news of Toyota’s Prius recall: Thank God I’m driving a Prius with brakes that still work.
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