Where I'm going this weekend

This weekend, I'm going to Kewanee, Illinois, hog capital of the world.

Wildcatting

Read Susan Shepard's excellent piece: "Wildcatting: A Stripper's Guide to the Modern American Boomtown."

At times the customers were bafflingly delightful. The farmer who pulled a Leica out of his overalls and asked if he could take my picture. The shy, funny drilling contractor who would bring us surf and turf from the nearby steakhouse on slow nights. The tattoo artist who said the town was so small you could walk across it. The photographer on assignment to shoot one of the first boomtown articles written about the area. The local fortysomething lesbian smiling like a 21-year-old. The kid who was tickled that I recognized his Daniel Johnston T-shirt. These people would make my day.

Muckraker

I added my journalism profile to Muck Rack. Check it out. Then hire me.

I'm a pole dancer

For my Forbes blog, I took a pole dancing class.

In pole dancing class, there is nowhere to hide. At the start of class, I had chosen a pole in the second row. Presciently, most of the other women had chosen poles in the back row.

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The Bitcoin girl

I really loved Kashmir Hill's bitcoin survival story. Hilarious, interesting, smart. Definitely check it out.

Kenna unlocks a barred door next to the T-Mobile store on 20^th Street to a bicycle-choked staircase that leads to the second-floor “halfway hacker house.” He tells me he took over the space 14 months earlier and convinced the landlord to let him live in it for 9 months rent-free while he and his childhood friend, Jeff, cleaned the place up.

“We think it was basically a crackhouse,” says Jered. “We were sweeping hypodermic needles off the floors.”

[READ]

The plight of the unreal writer

Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois

"Yet I don’t feel like a real writer. Both a screenplay based on a true story and a novel based on my own early life came grinding to a halt. Without being egotistical, I’ve been around long enough to know they are both excellent topics, great stories. But I just freeze up after three chapters or a couple of acts. I can’t seem to keep going. The bio-novel made me incredibly anxious, bringing up memories I don’t want to deal with but must to get them on the page. So I tried it as nonfiction, a pop-culture documentary, switching the focus somewhat and looking at events from a more journalistic angle. Nup." -- "Is Journalism Killing My Creativity?"

The great freelancing debate

You know what's embarrassing? Watching this debate over freelancing for free. Which started here. Had an orgy here. And reached its peak here with this interesting insight c/o Felix Salmon:

"Digital journalism isn’t really about writing, any more — not in the manner that freelance print journalists understand it, anyway. Instead, it’s more about reading, and aggregating, and working in teams; doing all the work that used to happen in old print-magazine offices, but doing it on a vastly compressed timescale."

I was in Boca Raton, Florida, when the whole thing went down. (Which, of course, is a ridiculous thing to say: "I was in Boca Raton, Florida, when [FILL IN THE BLANK].") Everyone where I was in Boca was rich. Actually, I realized, they weren't rich. They were wealthy. "What do all these people do?" someone asked me at some point. I had no answer. They drove convertible Bentleys and had young men in white shorts set up beach chairs for them and stayed out of the water when the lifeguard saw sharks. Observing the wealthy in their native habitat, it occurred to me what the wealthy want: For the time between when they want something and when that want is sated to be as short as possible. That is wealth. To buy that which cannot be bought: time.

Mostly, though, reading over the freelance debate, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed for the freelancers who couldn't decide whether or not freelancing for free meant they were worthless. I was embarrassed for the editors publicly admitting how poorly they paid their contractors without admitting how embarrassed they were by their actions. Embarrassed by what the internet has become -- a red light district in which the whores pretend they're not whores by fucking for cheap.

You know what else is embarrassing? I wrote a piece for The Daily Beast back in October, and I still haven't been paid for it. $300. I email, I ask, I remind, and they haven't paid it yet. That's embarrassing. Embarrassing for the woman in accounts payable who has to deal with it. Embarrassing for Tina Brown, whose 2011 salary was estimated by the NYT to be $700,000. Embarrassing for freelancers for whom there are no solutions, just more humiliation.

The forever war

How long do you think you’ll continue covering Guantanamo?

There are people who call the War on Terror the "forever war"; if this is the forever war, then this is the forever prison. I want to stay here for the 9/11 trial, which I think is years away. I feel like I have an institutional knowledge. Everyone else rotates in and out of here. The soldiers come and go, the lawyers come and go, most of the reporters come and go. I feel a responsibility to stay. I want to see how it ends. I’m a little concerned it’s never going to.

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Trouble

Brandi Grissom's "Trouble in Mind" is a great piece of longform journalism.

That night, as he lay in bed, still high and muttering about angels, Andre stabbed himself in the chest with a knife, then fell asleep. The next morning, his mother, who had moved in with him, took him to the hospital, where Andre explained that he had cut himself trying to “cross over into heaven.” A nurse noted that Andre was psychotic. An emergency room physician, Dr. William Bowen, examined him while he rattled on about a new world order and the hidden meaning of symbols on the dollar bill. After determining that Andre’s self-inflicted stab wound was not serious, the doctor left the room to apply for an emergency detention order to keep him hospitalized. But by the time Bowen returned, Andre had slipped out of the hospital unnoticed. Bowen called the police and provided a description of him, explaining that he could be dangerous.

[READ]

Sausage

Doll, Las Vegas, Nevada

In a 2011 Forbes article entitled “Women Write Differently Than Men (Duh),” Susannah Breslin writes that she was simultaneously more compassionate and more ruthless when she wrote about the pornography business, because she could identify with women in a way that men could not. “The fantasy and the sex didn’t interest me,” she recalls. “I was looking for the ordinary in the extraordinary, the mundane in the hardcore, the human beings in the sausage factory.”-- The Walrus

Porn star

Porn Star, Las Vegas, Nevada

The most important thing you can do is write awesome stuff, no matter where it is published. Seriously, when people tell me they want to write profiles for the New Yorker, I’m like, "THEN GO DO IT. Have you heard of Blogger.tumblr.com?" I mean, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of us from spending three months with a subject and writing the definitive 10k word piece proving why they are important and fascinating. Except Homeland, bourbon, and laziness. So, shit, write a profile about a lazy alcoholic who watches too much TV. BOOM. Problem solved. (See: Susannah Breslin’s They Shoot Porn Stars, http://theyshootstars.com/). -- Alexis Madrigal, The Believer

Quote of the day

I'm not haunted by what happened to me. I never had any desire for vengeance. I never felt any need, even, for justice. Now I feel if I say something about it, people try and use it in certain ways and make it something that it's not. It is what it is to me. It happened. And actually, I got breast cancer a year after, and I think that scarred me worse than what happened in Egypt. When Egypt was over, it was over. I got on a plane, I came home, and I was thousands of miles away, and I had a choice. My choice was very rational. Are you going to take the life that you've been given, or are you not going to live it? Are you going to live it fully, freely — or are you not? Are you gonna be a victim — or are you not? -- Lara Logan

The things she carried

I came across this post by Susie Cagle on her blog. Susie does really amazing work. She's kind of an illustrated journalist, which is maybe something like the living embodiment of an illuminated manuscript.

I particularly loved her interactive field reporting kit post. You can see what she carries to create her unique work. Click here to experience the post's cool interactivity and learn more.

I found Susie's work through Symbolia, the new bible of comics journalism. There's an interview with her here.

[SUSIE CAGLE]

Cupcakes

Yesterday, I went to exercise my journalism skills by covering a cupcake story. You can read about my good time here: "A Cupcake ATM Dispenses Love."

I was sort of ambivalent about doing this story. I mean, it's not porn journalism.

I wondered if doing it made me a pussy, or if I was getting soft, or what else I could ask someone who was trying to use a cupcake ATM.

But I think it came out, well, cute. I like the photos, particularly the one of the dog.

Last night I told my husband that it's all about repeating. Do it over and over and over again, until you can do it with your eyes closed.

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Buy this book

My friend Adam Penenberg has a new novel out called Virtually True, and it's about:

The murder of a friend.

Conspiracy on a global scale.

A near-future, dystopic world run by corporations, where nothing is as it seems and everything is part of something else. Technology and everyday life are inseparable, and information is a weapon that can save your life--or kill you.

It's awesome. Buy it. 

Killer journalism

My first post for Thought Catalog is online: "All the Stories I Never Wrote."

I also never wrote a story about a young woman whose father had died tragically and famously, and then five years and five days to the day that her father, who was very handsome and supposed to be a very good person, had been killed, she wound up being involved in a homicide. I went to her hearing after I heard she’d gotten arrested. She was 17 at the time of the incident, and she was 18 when I saw her in the courtroom: pretty and blond and small. When she walked into the courtroom through a side door, her hands were shackled to her hands, and her ankles were shackled to her ankles. She looked across the courtroom to her mother, who had really had enough hard things happen to her already in her life, and there was so much sadness and tragedy and horribleness in between them that it filled up the room.

[All the Stories I Never Wrote]

How to interview people

1. Sit Somewhere Important. Where you sit matters. If you're interviewing someone who you really need to get stuff out of, sit close. Maybe stick your foot within three feet of them. Maybe let your mouth hang open a little while you stare into their eyes. But if you have time and they're weird in some way, you might want to sit further away. Like, if you want them to forget that you're there, even though you're right there. The latter technique works well for narcissists. The former technique works well for people you are trying to disarm. I guess if the person is in prison, your choices are more limited.

2. Record Two Times. I don't do this enough, but you really need to record the person on two devices, because if you only use one, and that gets fucked up, you will be fucked. You might feel stupid walking around and putting in front of someone two devices, but who cares? Your ass is covered. Get one of those little digital ones because people forget they're there, because they are small and also quiet and don't really look like much other than a pack of silver cigarettes or something.

3. Do All the Work Ahead of Time. Mostly you should know everything about your subject -- the person and the topic -- before you walk in the room. That's what the internet is for: finding stuff out. If you make a mistake in an interview and let someone know that you don't know something, you will feel stupid. This happens no matter what, but try and limit the amount of times it happens. People who think you're a moron will tell you less. This isn't the goal. You want them to tell you more.

4. Shut the Fuck Up. As I have stated previously here, this was taught to me by Mark Ebner who gets people blabbing shit at him all the time, so he should know. Recently, I was in a room watching a round table of journalists interview a famous person. It was amazing how it was the stupid middle-aged journalists who when asking their questions acted like the same assholes who go to book readings and "ask questions" just to hear themselves talk. Jesus. No one wants to interview you. If they did, you wouldn't be interviewing someone else. Ask short questions that make a semblance of sense and then shut your world hole, and let the other person talk.

5. No Scripts Allowed. At that same round table, there were two or three young female journalists. Maybe they were in college or something. They were comely. They were shy and not aggressive, which I guess was understandable, but they read their questions off the sheet of paper they brought with them. This made me want to crawl under the table with sympathetic embarrassment. If you have to read the question, you don't know your subject well enough. Do your research, write your questions beforehand if you feel like it, but in the room you can only use those questions as a cheat sheet and if you must, or you look like an idiot auditioning for a role or something.

6. Be a Mirror. This is more stuff in the behavioral department. You don't want to be all calculated with it -- ideally, you should do this stuff intuitively, after a while if not immediately -- but you should modify how you sit, and what you do, and the way you speak according to the person. Mostly, with chicks, I mean, it depends on the chick, but mostly with chicks I am more prone to nodding, saying stuff that sounds like I'm agreeing, and smiling. Probably, this is emotional babysitting, but whatever. With dudes, it kind of depends. The last time I found myself twirling my hair, which may have looked dumb, but apparently that's what my subconscious thought was warranted. Don't listen to your thinking brain. Listen to the reptile part. That part knows more than you.

7. Be Smart. Don't ask stupid questions that the person has been asked a million times, or shit that shows you don't know what you're talking about, or questions that reveal you're too much of a pansy to ask the hard stuff. I think from straight out the gate, I kind of try and "top" people. That's like passive aggressively clarifying you hold the reins in some vague, inscrutable way. In an interview, you want the other person to do what you want, not what they want, so it's a lot like if you go to babysit, and the parents walk out the door, and the kids go nuts: you have to lay down the law from the start or there will be trouble later on.

8. Don't Be Shy About Being Weird. If you're listening -- and it's amazing how many people don't -- you'll probably get to a point about 2/3rds of the way through the interview when you'll either get bored or realize you're not getting what you want. You can do random weird stuff at this point, and that will usually quietly freak out your interviewee and make them more prone to distractedly saying uncalculated shit. Like steal a pen. Or pick up the audio recording device, look at it, and then sigh. Or stare down at your notepad and bang your pen on it a bunch of times. People who agree to interviews a lot of times either want to please you or they want you to leave, and at a certain point they will give you shit they don't mean to if you make it seem like either you are not pleasing them or you will never leave.

9. Entrapment. Mostly, I prefer to interview people sitting in a chair trapped in a room. I think that ends distractions and makes them feel more trapped. Trapped people are more prone to confessing. And that's what this is. A confession.

10. Never Let Them See You Think. Generally, I think I'm too reactive in interviews, but that's probably my imagination. I don't know. If you're too, like, "YES!" then they try and pander to you. If you're too, like, remote, I think they feel sad and lonely and there's no connection. Not long ago, I interviewed a bunch of people who had disabilities. The narcoleptic's energy was totally different from the schizoid affect's energy was totally different from the psychotic episode's energy. I'm still tired.

11. The Right Questions. I was going to stop at 10, but I guess I should say something about questions. Honestly, I feel like if you don't know what kind of questions to ask, you should be in another profession. Don't ask stupid shit.

12. Hear the Story. I still need to get better at this, but basically you're doing three things in an interview. You're you, a human being, in a room or whatever, talking to a person. That's YOU. The real you. The you that's sometimes thinking, god, does this suck? Am I getting what I need? Why am I sweating? Then there's you the reporter or whatever stupid name you have attached to yourself. That person is engaged in the call and response of questions and answers. You do your thing, and they do their thing. This is the thinking mind, connecting with its subject, wondering if it wants to get engaged to its subject and maybe marry it or just get it drunk and take it home and bang it. Then there's your inner-editor. That's the monkey bicycling really fast inside your brain that's thinking globally. That's listening for those perfect quotes. That's hearing the story's narrative manifest in the air above the words. That's falling in love with its subject a little bit more every time the clock clicks forward. If you can do those three things at the same time, you're either really good or getting old or something else.

What is journalism worth today?

"We pay $100 for a set of ten interviews the first two times a writer does the column, and $125 after that." -- editor

In which my journalistic integrity is questioned

"Which is where we differ. Few print writers want to assign, edit or read the stuff [Susannah Breslin] covered. I didn’t find either of those qualities in her work. You did. But it was certainly sexy and flashy and got lots of angry comments, so it’s a great fit for the web. Does its popularity in that medium — where the loudest and most shocking win — make her, de facto, a great journalist? Not in my book." -- Caitlin Kelly

***

The first time I was on TV, I was a guest on "Politically Incorrect." Basically, it was a set up. At the time, I was the co-editor of an online magazine that had the word "postfeminist" in the title.

Sitting directly across from me on the stage was Erica Jong, whose Fear of Flying had long ago turned her into something of a feminist icon.

I knew what the deal was. This was a show. The intention was a cat fight. And a cat fight is what they got.

For the next 22 minutes, I insulted Jong, suggesting her feminist ideologies were woefully outdated, sad, and boring. Jong insulted me, positing me as an uppity idiot who was too naive to know anything of the world, a fool who had no appreciation for what her generation had supposedly done for me.

After the show, us four guests -- Dylan McDermott and Rita Rudner had spent the majority of the show gawking as Jong and I had gone at it -- walked off the set.

Backstage, I turned to Jong, who sneered at me with cool disdain. I smiled politely. She understood this was a show, right? Jong looked the other way, enraged.

It was no show to her. This was her life. And it was all too clear to her that she had been replaced.

***

Yesterday, Mark Dery wrote a wonderful post over on True/Slant: "Goodbye to All This: On Leaving True/Slant." In fact, I was going to write about that post on my blog today.

If you've not been following the True/Slant story as of late, the site was bought by Forbes Media a few months ago, and as of August 1st is no longer publishing.

Some of the True/Slant writers will be heading over to Forbes.com. Some will not.

Dery's farewell post was, as his stuff always is, complicated, brilliant, and too smart. Too smart for the internet, too smart for me, too smart for you. That's how Dery is.

I've written about his work here before. I enjoy it most not for his insights, his ability to be intoxicatingly complex and hilariously insightful at the same time, nor the way his prose dazzles on the screen like Nurevey danced on the stage, but because I always feel embarrassed when I read him. He's my own personal homo sacer, whom I can neither kill nor usurp.

This is why I like him: because he is better than I am.

***

What is Dery's post about? Well, it's about the current state of journalism. Although, it's as much about the current state of journalism as Penelope Trunk's blog is about career advice.

(Which is to say, Not much, and, Thank god.)

In a nutshell, the post is a pyre upon which he tosses journalism (dead), books (antiquated), magazines (over), and, of course, himself, for no man who kills something does not love it, too, love it enough to bother to kill it, for every man who kills knows when he does so that he kills not the Other, but himself in effigy.

"I was a desultory True/Slant-er, posting infrequently and at inordinate length, on topics that were sometimes topical but often not. I’m not immune to newsiness, but refuse to be stampeded trendward, along with the rest of the goggle-eyed media herd."

Dery's post in two words: fuck you. Or, more properly put: fuck you, because I love you.

To wit: Fuck your internet. Fuck your SEO. Fuck your page views. Fuck your what you're supposed to do. Fuck your flaccidity. Fuck your boredom. Fuck your ease. Fuck your dysentery of the mind. Fuck your unthinking idleness. Fuck your pablum posts. Fuck your verticals. Fuck your listicles. Fuck your PowerPoint presentations. Fuck your shit.

After I read it, I thought, oh, I know what I'll say about it on my blog. I'll say, Isn't it funny the best post on True/Slant was published after the site stopped publishing?

(Surely, the greatest post ever written on the internet will be the one written after the internet is gone.)

Then I read the comments.

***

Before my father left my mother, he would get home from work, and I would try and get him to wrestle me on the living room floor. I have no idea why. Invariably, these sessions would end up with me crying. I don't remember why that is the case. Years later, it occurred to me that I was entirely very likely attempting to get my father -- who had been raised by an Irish Catholic alcoholic father in the bowels of Brooklyn, and so, therefore, was not exactly what one would call physically demonstrative -- to touch me. That he was a writer, and that I became a writer who spent most of her so-called writing career wrestling with the act of writing, was to become all too obvious for far too many years.

***

When I began posting on my True/Slant blog, Off the Record, earlier this year, my posts would not infrequently, shortly after publication, show that a comment had been added by another True/Slant blogger, Caitlin Kelly.

I don't know Kelly. Her comments were sometimes if not oftentimes in disagreement with something that I had written. Occasionally, I read Kelly's blog.

So, I suppose I was not entirely surprised to see that Kelly had posted a series of comments to Dery's post that referenced me. In his post, he had mentioned me in flattering, surely undeserved ways as someone who wrote things that weren't, well, shit.

Among various other points, Kelly seemed to take issue with this idea. She argued that, no, my writing was shit, the worst kind of shit, really, because it wasn't even authentic shit, but manufactured shit, shit prose pumped out in hot pursuit of page views. It wasn't even good shit. It was shitty shit.

Not only, she seemed to be suggesting, was I shitty a blogger, but I was a shitty writer, and not even a shitty journalist, but not a journalist at all, as Dery had had the gall to posit. I was a shitty not-journalist.

"'Content' is just a pile 'o [sic] words produced in some order," she scolded him. "It does not demand thoughtful or insightful ideas. And, while you laud Breslin, much of her work focused on incendiary topics like porn — which attracted, as we all know it would, many prurient eyeballs."

***

In April of 2009, I spent a week in Los Angeles working on a story about the adult movie industry and the recession. I wrote it for a publication that I was writing for at the time.

I came home and wrote a 10,000-word essay about what I had done, and what I had seen, and what I thought about all those things. I submitted the story to the editor. The editor wanted to change it in ways that I believed would work counter to the truth of the essay. I withdrew the piece from the publication. I published it myself.

1. This is what is called "operating at a loss."

2. This is what could be called journalism.

3. This could be dismissed.

4. This (the story) could be misconstrued as a bid for page views (of which there have been over 1 million, but, hey, who's counting?).

5. This is the stuff of which vitamin soup is made.

6. This is what I'm trying to say:

7. Fuck you.

***

The other day, somebody wrote me an email. A woman. Someone I know only lately, and only a little bit. But I have the impression that she is very tough. Not tough. But solid. Solid like an Oak. Like an Oak in a hurricane.

This is what her email said:

Yeah, you are in there.

You do.

As you say and I concur, Folks just watch, they stare, they don't get moving.

Yeah, you engage. Keep doing that. It's good. And don't ever stop doing that.

***

A long time ago, I was on the set of a really crazy movie where a lot of really crazy things happened.

Driving home in the darkness, I was in a very strange state of mind. Years later, I would understand that there was a word for this state of mind, and the word was "dissociation." But that was later. Too late, really. But that's another story for another time.

I was driving out of the Valley, over the Cahuenga Pass, going back to the shitty little one-bedroom apartment I had on a boulevard named for the Happy People.

Well, at least I had balls. (That's what I told myself.)

At least I had something to say.

At least I wasn't a crashing bore.

At least I didn't waste my time on submitting pitches to the Times, on whining about my page views or lack thereof, on writing throw away comments tacked onto blog posts that I could never hope to write because I lacked the insight, the talent, and, perhaps most importantly, the balls to write them myself -- and, worst of all, I knew it.

How to hustle a warlord

If you have a chance, definitely watch HBO's new documentary, "Reporter." It follows New York Times op/ed columnist Nicholas Kristof's journey to Congo and back and various points in between. It seems strange to call Kristof a columnist, as when I hear "columnist" I think of like, Handy Hints from Heloise, or some broad blathering about relationships, and, you know, Kristof is breaking bread with Congo warlords.

It's not a perfect piece. It's a little all over the place, and the mealy-mouthed voice over could definitely be done without, but what makes it interesting is seeing Kristof in action, because, when you think about it, you see a lot of the consequences of what journalists do, but you don't see a lot of journalists in the field, doing what they do. Kristof is kind of an odd bird. He's sort of what I think of as a traditional newspaper reporter. They have no facial expressions. They seem sort of detached from everything, even as they move through it. And, you know, Kristof is not, ah, easy on the eyes. Oh, but, dang, he's just a marvelous reporter, and watching him "carelessly" wing off into the DRC and track down a warlord and traipse through the jungle is, well, I haven't done that. Have you?

The most interesting part is when Kristof sits down with General Laurent Nkunda, a warlord, and one bad ass motherfucker, no one I would want to mess with, or, like, meet while speed dating. And it's very intriguing to see Kristof and Nkunda do the interview dance. Kristof is very, very good, and he gets what he needs from Nkunda, surrounded by guards with guns bigger than the likes of anything I've ever seen, somewhere out in the jungle deeper than you've ever been. Afterward, Nkunda asks them to stay for dinner. Really, they can't, Kristof explains, because the trip home is four hours, and the sun is getting low in the sky, and if they travel at night, they run the risk of being killed. But how do you say no to a warlord? So, they stay. Nkunda provides them with armed soldiers for the ride home, and sends word that no one is to harm them on their return trip, presumably so the man who the warlord has perceived to be his messenger can spread the leader's word to the world.

Now, I've never sat down for dinner with a warlord, but it did remind me of the dance I've done with some of the people in the Valley, particularly the men, the directors. The stereotype of "those guys" has a hairy chest with a phat gold chain tangled in it, but, in fact, directors who cajole people into doing what they otherwise would not do are without a doubt charming. And so is Nkunda. As the interviewer, you can't hustle this subject. A hustler can't hustle a hustler. Yet, you do the dance, and, oftentimes, along the way, the subject falls in love, with something -- the sound of his own words, his story told his way trailing out of his mouth, the way that even though you are an outsider you are here and now giving him your undivided attention. So, in the end, maybe you both fall a little bit in love, mostly, in all likelihood with yourself, or some idea of who you think you are when you play this verbal game of chess, and both sides walk away thinking they've won, and the game keeps on playing.

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."--The Journalist and the Murderer