We've probably beaten this to death, I guess, but all I can really say for my conclusion is that I think it's perfectly fine to be disappointed in the article that was written (maybe not finish reading it) and to wish she had written something else, but I don't think she should be criticized for writing what she wanted to write, not what a reader may have preferred she had written.
(A few more whacks to the rotting corpse) I'm not sure I see much of a difference between "I was disappointed in this article" and "I wish she had focused on a different aspect of this subject." Of course she can write whatever she wants -- we're not her editor or the Trump Administration -- but if what she wants to write isn't a good fit for what we'd like to read, it seems fair to say it would have been better had she made different choices.
Here's David Foster Wallace's 1994 classic, "A Ticket to the Fair." To be, uh, fair it's about 80 times the length of the N
ew Yorker piece and it doesn't focus exclusively on food, and another classic of his about a celebration that *does* focus on food, published in
Gourmet Magazine in 2004. Finally, there's a Garrison Keillor essay about the fair -- not the one I was looking for, but I couldn't find that. (Apparently he's written about the fair many times, unsurprisingly.)I don't love GK but have to admit he's a graceful lyric writer.
I think they're all better than the
New Yorker one.
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1994-07-0001729.pdfhttp://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/opinion/20iht-edkeillor.1.15466677.html
