For The Love of Language

"Raw Meat, Barry White, and the Brothers", a piece by Matthew Gavin Frank, was a fairly interesting read and filled to the brim with detailed descriptions but sometimes they were almost a little too much to stomach, near the end I felt almost painfully full of detail. Not all the detail is overkill though, the introduction for example was a perfect use of description as a means of intrigue; "I see her spider tattoo before I see her face. It's on the back of her right hand, a fat-bodied camouflage-green spider crawling along a web that covers knuckle, wrist, all five fingers. For a second, I think she's going to throw it at me". After reading that it's almost impossible not to wonder to yourself, who is this woman? He goes on to describe the color and texture of her skin, making a fairly common comparison to leather and olives but then a slightly less obvious one when he says, "There are those rare times when you can tell the texture of something just by looking at it. It works with a few species of cacti and it works with this woman's face".

He goes on to describe how he comes to sit at the restaurant and have a meal, he then goes into lengthy description about every detail of the meal and the crooning of the background music of Barry White. Then he meets the chef and goes into detail about him and his barrel chest and small-town boy but wise misdemeanor. He does describe his language in a slightly playful but rather accurate manner when he mentions the name of Bill Clinton, "His I's are extended as double, no, triple-E's, his O is longer than his fingers, and the name comes out as Beeell Cleeentone". Some of his other descriptions like his one about the taste of grappa, "...like silk soaked in kerosene. If the earth were a grape, this would be the taste of its core". Between the two descriptions I think even someone who hasn't experienced the intensity of grappa can picture it pretty accurately.

He concludes the piece in an equally descriptive manner but it does have some sense of finality to it, the piece was definitely more of a personal experience piece I felt like rather than a travel piece but I did think it was a good example of well-written descriptions and strong word usage, even if sometimes it was a tad overdone.