APPRECIATION
In Praise of the Poker ReportWASHINGTON, D.C. 27 July 2007 |
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In St. Petersburg, Russia, four gypsies stop me on a footbridge that spans a stone-walled canal. They shout in Russian and lift me up. I think maybe I’m going into the canal, which would be bad, but then Stephen Elliott lunges into them, demanding they put me down. After they run away with my wallet Steve makes sure I get home safely, and he also stays up with me until I calm down.
The next day I try to give Steve credit for his heroism but he’s having none of it. Instead he tells everyone a story about saving a friend from running her surfboard into a pier. She never let him forget it. The lesson he finally learned, he says, is that when someone says you’ve saved their life, it’s best just to be gracious about it and agree.
I am not Stephen Elliott. I don’t have six books to my name, my girlfriend doesn’t come to the city and beat me up, and I don’t have an on-line column about the low-stakes poker game I host in my Noe Valley apartment.
But Stephen Elliott saved my life.
Also, everything I know about nonfiction narrative I learned from reading Stephen Elliott’s Poker Report.
Start with Something Bold
The Poker Report
is the most compelling, edgiest, all around best narrative nonfiction
being written today. If there is an award for poker reports, or on-line
poker columns, the Poker Report should win it hands down.
Write What You Know
What could be more safely within a writer’s expertise than a poker game among his friends? Plus, a poker game always makes a great story (I believe it was Alexandre Dumas who famously said, “Whenever I’m stuck, I just have my characters start a poker game”). Your friends throw cards and money across the table and all you have to do is describe the tension and write down the dialogue.
Have a Theme
The beauty of the Poker Report is that on its surface it’s about the drama of a card game, but like any good story it’s really about something else.
The other beautiful thing about the Poker Report is that you can never quite tell what this larger something is supposed to be. You can’t quite grasp it.
A critic might say that when you de-construct the Poker Report, it really isn’t about anything.
I’m not a critic. I wouldn’t know.
Set the Scene
Steve begins each Poker Report with a dramatic summary of events, in the world and his life. It’s a way of lending historic weight to the game but also of skewing the perspective, of heightening the tension.
As he said in one report after going on for several paragraphs about Paris Hilton’s unauthorized early release from jail: “All [this] talk about Hollywood heiresses and $3,000 handbags is just to set the mood for our first-ever Friday-night poker game.”
If you were to write a poker report about your recent trip to the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, for example, you might begin it like this:
It is July 2007, two years after Stephen Elliott saved my life. I’m an environmental lawyer taking a week off to attend the Tin House Workshop on the campus of Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
There’s a war raging in Iraq. American soldiers and Iraqi citizens are dying but no one seems to care. The Supreme Court has just held that private parties can bring cost-recovery actions under Section 107 of the Superfund law. Such a holding should be unthinkable, but this is America, where anything can happen.
I unpack my bags. They’ve given me a corner room overlooking the quad. Emily, who runs the workshop, takes me into a back room and quietly loans me a desk fan, which other participants have suggested I might need, because sometimes it gets hot at night.
It turns out I never need the fan.
Focus on the Action and Make it Gritty
Here is a quote from a recent Poker Report:
“Cooney bet big on double barrel, four in the hole, two rows of cards across the middle, then two more to share. There were often four cards down. Often two and only two. There was California Peach Grove and San Francisco Peach Grove. There was even talk of Peach Grove 11th And Folsom, the only card game with a wraparound, the highest combination a suited king, ace, two.”
Who cares what this means? It’s brilliant writing, even if you can’t understand a word of it. This is the kind of writing that makes James M. Cain restless in his grave. Raymond Chandler was never so lean with his prose.
Here’s another example of what I’m talking about:
“I have brought this game Peach Grove from the prairies of the great Midwest, an area once covered beneath a giant lake and now flooded with ears of corn. And I have delivered this game onto the dry shores of the California coast, ” Cooney said. “Write that down.”
In the Poker Report words fly like cards across a felt table. There is energy in these chronicles, but what is its source? How does Elliott do it? Part of it is that he only describes the action, but of course there is more.
Artifice is Everything
There are amazing things to discover between the lines of the Poker Report.
The game, for example, is almost always Peach Grove. Steve calls it different things (Iowa Peach Grove, California Peach Grove, 11th and Folsom Peach Grove), and granted I don’t know anything about poker, but it all sounds the same to me. Note, also, that the dinner is almost always mac and cheese. The stakes are low. The buy-in is usually $20. There is a suggestion that in the most recent game Aimee Bender was allowed to buy in with candy wrappers.
This is not Vegas. It’s not even Elko.
And yet, despite the low stakes, the mac and cheese, and the essential simplicity of the game, there is a taut line running through the Poker Report. It is why I’ve made it the subject of this homage. In the inscrutable poker lingo set against the backdrop of larger events, Stephen Elliott has tapped into a mysterious and primeval literary power.
The Duty We Owe to the Truth
They printed the announcement in the House Organ, the daily newsletter for the Tin House Workshop. There would be a poker game that evening. You were to talk to Steve if you wanted in.
I thought about it — my chance to see the game I held in such awe, and had read so much about — but in the end I didn’t go. Who can say why? There were more fun things to do than there were hours in the day. There were no gypsies in Portland, but I was still pacing myself, trying to avoid workshop burnout. I was in bed by ten.
The next day there were no whispers about what had transpired the night before. Instead people talked about whether it was ethical to lift story ideas from the life experiences of others. I didn’t know the answer. On my way back to the cafeteria I saw Aaron Reichenberger under a big tree, typing furiously on his laptop.
He had been at last night’s game, and he had seen the report in that morning’s House Organ.
“It’s not true,” he told me, “that I arrived with grape jelly on my chin.”
Aaron was at that moment starting a blog about the poker game the night before, to be called “Blowing the Lid off the Poker Report,” or something like that. I told him to aim for the sensibility of “Arcade Fire Stole My Basketball” but without the weird undercurrent of anonymous hostility.
“I’ll have to check that out,” he said.
When I saw Steve around campus the next couple of days he would bump his fist with mine, or clink my glass, and ask how it was going. When the Poker Report came out the following week (guest written by Steve Almond) there was no mention of the grape jelly on Aaron’s chin. In fact, there was no mention of Aaron. It was as if he had not even been there.
Which brings us to our final point.
Writing is Power
There can be a poker game, and you can win $20 from the host, and start your own blog to pre-empt the claim you arrived with grape jelly on your chin, but in the official write-up the world may be told you were not even there.
That’s power.
Maybe that’s why the Poker Report is so captivating. It’s Stephen Elliott’s way of saying, “I was there, and this is what happened.”
And it turns out the exercise of this authority is more interesting than what actually happened. It even turns out that, as long as the report is compelling, we don’t really care that it be accurate, or even make sense. I don’t know what it means to win on the flop, or that you need trips or better to win and nothing higher than a seven to go low. It’s all Greek to me.
But you believe it. That’s the important thing, and why, even if you can’t understand it — even if you can’t understand any of it — the Poker Report is still the best thing in American letters today. It’s the most compelling column out there. It puts Thomas Friedman to shame. Paul Krugman can only hope to be as good. Someday.
Which is why I hope Steve keeps writing the Poker Report, and why I intend to keep reading it until the last player throws his last hand down.
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Third paragraph from bottom: Mr. Carman, you need a 6 to have perfect low which would be 6-4-3-2-Ace. I have $18, two pens, nail clipper, a Florida Marlins cap and credit card with $6 until it maxes. Can I get into the game? I can see since these guys think 7 is a good low I’ll own every thing they’ve got in 30 minutes!