MEDIA TALK: REPORT FROM A NEW YORK MOST NEVER SEE

The New York author Darryl Pinckney is a man with literary pedigree.

So why did Mr. Pinckney - frequent contributor to The New York Review
of Books, novelist, librettist who has collaborated with Robert
Wilson, and occasional writer for The New Yorker magazine - choose to
write in great personal detail about his recent squalid excursion
into the New York City prison system after an arrest on the street
for smoking marijuana?

Mr. Pinckney said he wrote the essay - which appeared in the Feb. 5
issue of The New Yorker - because his experience exposed a part of
New York that most New Yorkers never see.

"It was shocking but mostly because of what it put me in touch with,
all the things you don't see in New York, whatever your life is," he
said. "It is like ripping away the wall and there are termites all
over, a parallel world you know nothing about until you happen to
fall into it."

The essay detailed Mr. Pinckney's arrest with two female friends.
"We'd been smoking a joint right around the corner from the local
precinct house, that's how hip we were," he wrote.

He then tells of his overnight journey through the prison system and
his shame at what his parents, who were activists for black issues in
their town, might think. Mr. Pinckney, who is black, said he was also
surprised by how much racism still exists in the prison system.

"I in no way pretend to know that those few hours of inconvenience
approach any depth of understanding about what it really is like to
be in prison, but it certainly did brush me up against all sorts of
themes from black life you really do not want to come across," Mr.
Pinckney said, pointing out that many of the prison guards who
treated black prisoners poorly were also black.

The essay was too long for Mr. Pinckney's usual outlet, The New York
Review of Books, so he brought it to David Remnick, the editor in
chief of The New Yorker.

"I wanted to make a protest of some kind and David Remnick is a
writer I have always admired, and I think of him as a civilized soul,
and he agreed to read it," he said.

Mr. Remnick said he was impressed by Mr. Pinckney's ability to avoid
sounding whiny.

"It is a difficult piece to write because you have to walk a kind of
a tightrope so you don't fall into self pity," he said. "And
underneath the piece there is a real sense of shock and fury but at
least he is not licking his wounds all the time."