Interviewing

'PERHAPS SOMETHING INTERESTING WILL TRANSPIRE'

In his new book Eating The Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman talks with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris about interviewing.

Morris: If people were entirely reasonable, they would avoid all interviews, all the time. But they don't.

Klosterman: And why don't they?

Morris: Because perhaps something interesting will transpire. They think, "Maybe this person will present me in a way that will be interesting. Maybe this person will present me in a way that I would like to be seen."

***

My two questions:

1. Is Morris right about reasonable people avoiding all interviews?

2. In what percentage of your stories (if you had to guess) is your main character presented in a way that they would like to be seen?

Posted by T. Lake on 01/04/10 at 12:37 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

New Year Breslin

Big Shot. Damn Right.

Many thanks to Ramsey for this ...

People I'm Not Talking to Next Year

By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune

All these people today, they run around and put their arms around each other's shoulders and they say how much they like each other and they hope the new year is better than the old year. And all during 1965 they were trying to kill each other and now today, because of a calender on a wall, they think everything should be nice.

This is not my game. I can remember too well. And I remember everything that every person did to me during the year, and herewith, on this day of warmth and understanding, I present the people who did something very bad to me during the last twelve months and because of what they did to me I do not intend to speak to one of them throughout the coming year.

GOLDSTEIN THE PROCESS-SERVER: About a month ago I was walking on Seventh Avenue and this little bum in an overcoat down to his ankles comes up to me. "Pardon me, but didn't I see you last night with Johnny Carson?" I wanted to kiss him. Beautiful. "Yes, you did," I said. "Great," he said, "don't tell me your name. I have your name written down right here." Out of the pocket of his overcoat comes a folded piece of legal paper that said the Chemical Bank had put a lien of $1500 on me because I cosigned for another one of Fat Thomas's cars.

"Wear it in health," said Goldstein the Process-Server.

Well, Goldstein the Process-Server could go into the ocean and be drowning this year and I would sit on the beach and say, "I can't hear you, Goldstein."

PEPE: His real name is Norton W. Peppis. Pepe runs a saloon with his partner, John McGuire, and him I intend not even to nod to this year. All year they spend their afternoons at the racetrack. When the horses left, Pepe, who had started out the year with a Cadillac and now has to try to find change for a subway ride, sat down with his partner and tried to figure out how they could get some money. They found a way. On Christmas Eve, the manager of the saloon comes to my house with a bill for $895 they said I had run up in the joint. You should get paid by the hour just to be in the place. And they look to get out on Christmas Eve by sending me a tab. They didn't have it in them to come around personally. Well, I'm not talking to Pepe and when I see him riding on the subway train I am going to look out the window.

BIG SHOT MAITRE D' AT THE 21 CLUB: All my life I've sat in Mutchie's saloon and read stories about how so-and-so was with this big beauty at 21 last night. Back in October I was out with some guys, and one of them said he'd like to see what this 21 was like and I said I'd like to see the place too. We went to the 21 and I go up to the door and give it a push and we all go inside. You never saw anything like it in your life. All guys with tuxedos on started to run toward us.

"Can I help you" one of them said. A tall guy. He was in charge. He had both his hands on my chest.

"We are all filled here tonight," he said.

Then he pushed at me hard so that a party of about eleven could come in through the door. He smiled at them and the eleven strolled to the bar.

"You see this carpet on the floor?" I yelled. "I'll come back here with a guy and set it on fire."

One of the other guys in the tuxedos went for a telephone. He was probably going to call the cops.

"You don't want to come in here," the maitre d' said.

Big shot. Damn right I don't want to go into his place. You could take the 21. Take the whole joint and the suckers who go into it. It is a sink compared to Mutchie's saloon, which is directly across from Pier 29, East River, and last night Georgie Brown was seen with Sherry at the bar of Mutchie's, and Nunzi hosted a big party for Jumbo from the fish market.

What follows now is a list of people who I am not going to talk to. The reasons would take too long to explain. So I just list the people.

Atra Baer, Mike the Brain, Roger Kahn, Mr. Hitz from Bleeck's, B.J. Cutler, Mr. Finelle from the Municipal Building, Miss Stewart from the telephone company, Everett Walker, Harold Anderson, Harry Day, Harrison Salisbury, Jerry the Booster, Seymour the pirate, Mrs. Pirate, Mrs. Ahearn from Consolidated Edison Company, Hugo the Tailor, Mike Lee, Transit Authority cop who wouldn't let me go up the subway stairs on Thanksgiving Day, Nick Lapole, Max Kase, Boyd Lewis, Jack Powers, Mr. Fiore of Beneficial Finance Corp., Toney Betts, Tom Zumbo, Arthur J. Sylvester, Phil Pepe, Joe Alvarez, Mike Reynolds, Tom Frane, Ed Aurico, Lester Williamson, Louis Kleinsteuber, Al Newman the bail bondsman, Vivienne the housekeeper, and Joey Beglane.

Posted by ben on 01/04/10 at 13:29 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

The Secret Call

diagram of a rescue

Alex Zayas: TAMPA — The 911 call came in like many do: Nothing to hear but background noise.

People bump their speed dials. Little kids don't know who they're calling. Operators must decide whether to consider the call an error or to send help. At that point, it's their mistake to make.

On New Year's Day, police say, 911 operator Ve'Etta Bess made the right choice, one that led officers to the home of a sexual predator they say had disabled his ankle monitor, met a woman at a bar and brought her home — a man already convicted of rape, preparing to rape once more and threatening to kill.

Posted by ben on 01/05/10 at 13:10 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Name That Shirt

branding

Stop what you're doing and help us design some 2010 Gangrey paraphernalia. Got an original j-inspired slogan you'd love to see on a snug T? Great. Itching to drink coffee in the newsroom from a clever mug? Now's your chance.

You've already seen your narrative heroes pimping 2008's charcoal T with the sweet-ass-but-very-hard-to-see anti-inverted pyramid logo. What will they be wearing this year?

Drop your ideas in the comments and, if the Board of Directors approves, it could wind up on the shelves at the Shoppes at Gangrey.

Thanks.

Posted by ben on 01/06/10 at 14:05 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

Pulls Apart

three times goodbye

Lane DeGregory: ORLANDO — In the dark doorway of the airport hangar, he held her. It was warm inside, with all the other soldiers and their families. But she couldn't stop shivering.

"Don't cry," he said, pulling her close against his camouflage jacket. "It'll be okay. We've done this before."

She didn't nod. Wouldn't look up at him. Just squeezed his waist more tightly.

Posted by ben on 01/07/10 at 12:57 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Our Father, Who Art In Potato

'I said, aw, holy crap, it's a cross.'

Nigel Duara: IOWA CITY, Iowa - Move over, Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese. Step aside, Fish Stick Jesus.

Online bidders, meet the Holy Cross Potato. Both of them.

Yes, the 2009 holiday season bestowed (at least) two miraculous spuds with crosses at their centers. Aside from the sizes of the spuds, the main difference is price.

Posted by ben on 01/07/10 at 13:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

After The Jump

where it was no longer pretty and light

Michael Kruse: ST. PETERSBURG

One early evening 8 1/2 years ago, Hanns Jones, 35, lovelorn and broke, parked his purple pickup truck at the top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge and dived 197 feet toward his almost certain death in the tropical blue of Tampa Bay.

People sometimes think that to jump off a bridge in a beautiful place is a more beautiful way to die. It's a lie.

You feel for a moment like you're floating. That moment ends. Then you're falling, survivors say, and then you're accelerating, and before you can think about how fast you're accelerating you crash into the water. You don't splash. You crash.

Posted by ben on 01/11/10 at 13:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Perfect Fit

the drink

A million years ago, my wife asked me into the bedroom to break a bit of news: she was pregnant. Kid one. First time ever. Huge moment.

But we were whispering.

Why?

We had a guest. Mike Dawson, who was staying at our place in New York while he interviewed at the Times Herald-Record.

Seconds into that quiet, private celebration, Dawson sticks his head into our room.

"What's going on in here?" he asks.

Not sure if it's true, but in my memory he's holding a six-pack of Bud tallboys.

That's why I can think of no better curious drunk than Dawson to guide us through the mystical world of adult beverages.

Here he is on whisky, He'brew's Jewbelation and how to get a nice head:

Posted by ben on 01/11/10 at 16:25 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Levine Workshop

more pub

Check it here and get your applications in.

Posted by ben on 01/11/10 at 18:54 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Ironman

RIP Mighty Joe

Manny Fernandez and Michael S. Schmidt (thanks, Raja): Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth. With just one finger he raised up 635 pounds; with his back he moved 3,200. He bit down on quarters to bend them with his thumb.

People called him the Great Joe Rollino, the Mighty Joe Rollino and even the World’s Strongest Man, and what did it matter if at least one of those people was Mr. Rollino himself.

On Monday morning, Mr. Rollino went for a walk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a daily routine. It was part of the Great Joe Rollino’s greatest feat, a display of physical dexterity and stamina so subtle that it revealed itself only if you happened to ask him his date of birth: March 19, 1905. He was 104 years old and counting.

Posted by ben on 01/12/10 at 13:45 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Climbing Back

check it

Jaimee Rose: PROVO, Utah
She wakes with the mountain framed in her bedroom window, her little boy lying heavy across her burned legs. Despite the pain, the pressure on her raw skin, she is grateful. Her son wants to be near her.

He was just 22 months old when her plane crashed. When she woke from a 10-week coma, he didn't recognize her scarred face. He asked for "Mom," and reached for her sister.

After, she spent nights at his bedside while he slept, begging him to remember her. I am your mother, she told him, and always will be.

Posted by ben on 01/13/10 at 13:04 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

New Deal to New Hard Times

'Your eyes look at some things through your heart'

Dan Barry: ELEANOR, W.Va.

Early spring, in the Depression year of 1935. A poor girl from coal-mine country, a dark-haired girl of 4, rocks beside her mother and two sisters in a car moving through the rain-swept night. Soon they will join her father, a Great War veteran who pads his shoes with cardboard. He has been working for months on some distant government relief project.

When the car finally stops, the sleepy girl can see only a blur of mud and midnight. Not until morning does she take in this government project: a new American town, raised from a field by her father and other men with families caught in the stalled gears of a broken economy.

The girl is told: You’re home now, Marlane.

Posted by ben on 01/14/10 at 13:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A Way of Life Redefined

'Let's go'

Jonathan M. Katz (thanks, Nigel): PETIONVILLE, Haiti (AP) — I was sitting on my bed surfing the Internet when I noticed silence, followed by a weird groaning sound. I figured it was a passing water truck. But funny, I thought — sounds more like an earthquake.

The house started shaking. Then it really started shaking. I walked out of my room and kneeled slowly to the undulating floor, laptop in hand, as windows, two years' worth of Haitian art and a picture of my grandfather smashed around me.

I was not hurt. Not only that, the staircase in the house where I live and work, while completely invisible behind a choking white cloud of drywall and dust, was still standing. I yelled out for Evens, the AP's all-in-one driver/translator/bodyguard here.

To my shock and delight he answered: "Let's go."

Posted by ben on 01/14/10 at 14:33 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

The Repo Man

'lucky i got this one'

Tom Lake: Crickets at three in the morning on Chica­mauga Avenue in West Atlanta and the fog had lifted enough so that Ken could see the blue BMW naked in the driveway and he figured he could snatch it if he moved fast. He parked his truck on the fractured asphalt and walked toward a shotgun house with brick-red shutters and geraniums along the front walk. When he reached the BMW he saw a small red light above the dash, flashing like a firefly, warning of an alarm to wake the dead. And through the flood of adrenaline, Ken the repo man felt something like fear.

This strange transaction would ramify through several economies. Sleeping at their home in Suwanee, Ken Lynam’s wife and five young children were relying on him for their sustenance. In turn, the nation’s slumbering financial system rested on men like him. Without the threat of repossession to cajole the debtor into making payments, there could be no car loans. And without car loans, hardly anyone would buy a new car. A legitimate industry depended on legal theft.

Posted by ben on 01/19/10 at 13:39 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Bag Boy With An MBA

working

Kruse: LAND O'LAKES — Don Gould clocked in at the Publix here in central Pasco County. The green computer font on the small black screen told him to BEGIN SHIFT.

Gould is 46, has been married 21 years and is the father of three boys. Three years ago, he was living in Indiana, managing a small design company and making a six-figure salary.

Now he's living in Wesley Chapel making $8.25 an hour. Publix calls him a front service clerk.

"I used to be a big shot," he said one day last week. "Now I'm just, 'Hey, bag boy.' "

The national unemployment rate is 10 percent, the state rate is 11.5, and the local rate is 12.3. For every open job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 6.4 people who want it and need it.

Gould is in none of those numbers. He is part of the large swath of the humbled underemployed — people who during the recession have gone from highly educated and highly paid to paper or plastic.

Posted by ben on 01/19/10 at 21:04 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Lovelady

REST IN PEACE

Steve Lovelady, a legendary newspaper and magazine editor, died last Friday at age 66.

I never had a chance to meet the man, but a few years ago I was at a conference in Fort Lauderdale and another editor -- he was from the Detroit News, if I remember correctly -- handed out copies of an internal memo Lovelady had written for reporters at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The title was something along the lines of "How to Get Your Story on Page One."

It was a brilliant guide to what makes a great story -- advising the reporter, for example, to zoom in as tightly as possible on the story's single most fascinating aspect -- and I've used it as a guide to my work ever since.

Sadly, I misplaced it somewhere along the way. I've even asked around, trying to see if anyone else had it, with no luck.

So I'll try one more time. Does anyone know the memo I'm talking about? Would you share it here if you do?

Posted by T. Lake on 01/20/10 at 17:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Without My Leg, I Am A Freak

the signature injury

Meg Laughlin: JIMANI, Dominican Republic — At the public hospital in this border town, no one can say how many amputations have been done since the earthquake. One surgeon says he did 32 yesterday. Another says 22 in the two days before. Mostly legs. Mostly from infection.

They come in truck beds, the backseats of taxis and police vans. Tuesday, a tap-tap, one of the small colorful Haitian buses, showed up full of people, most of them from Petionville, the exclusive enclave of Port-au-Prince.

The vehicles line up, waiting for their broken cargo to be unloaded to dusty gurneys. Unless they are critical, the victims line the entrance on the floor for days.

The lucky ones have crushed arms and legs but keep their limbs. They lie in body casts, whole. They may limp. They may need canes. But they do not belong to the burgeoning class of Haitian amputees.

Posted by ben on 01/21/10 at 13:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Norwegian Newspaper Commercials

what do you think about the spring, summer, autumn and those things?


Funny Norwegian Newspaper Commercials - Click here for more blooper videos

Posted by ben on 01/21/10 at 21:02 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

And The Beer Was Gone

heartbreak at the river side inn

Erin Sullivan: NEW PORT RICHEY – Eighteen months ago, a 40-something man began a pen pal romance with a woman in prison. Her name is Theresa Jones. She's 49 and this was her fourth stint in prison. She'd had convictions of cocaine and cocaine again. Prostitution. This sentence was for escape.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jones' two year, eight month sentence ended. Her pen pal was there outside Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala to pick her up, authorities say. Both Jones and her friend are from Fort Myers. But they decided to drive to New Port Richey and holed up in a room at the River Side Inn on U.S. 19, according to authorities.

Around 10 p.m., Jones told the man she was going out to his car to get a case of beer. After awhile, the man went to check on her.

Posted by ben on 01/21/10 at 21:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

We Thought We Knew Him

AND THEN WE READ THIS

Have you read Jason Fagone's investigation of Marvin Harrison in GQ? It's stunning.

Posted by T. Lake on 01/25/10 at 01:44 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

The Emptiness Echos

Doesn’t 125 years count for something?

Dan Barry: DAYTON, Ohio

Every 15 minutes the chiming bells of the Deeds Carillon mark time’s passage in Dayton. Their ever-repeating song reminds the city of its deep connection to the NCR Corporation, formerly known as National Cash Register, for generations known here as The Cash.

The carillon, a 151-foot tower of limestone and steel, was a gift from a former NCR chief executive and his wife. It sits beside a boulevard named after the eccentric man who founded NCR, not far from other NCR touchstones: an office building here, a former warehouse there, and acres and acres of land.

As those bells tolled one day last June, the company, which specializes in automated teller machines and other self-service devices, announced a “major investment in innovation and people,” though not the people of Dayton. NCR stunned the city of its birth with the news that it was moving its world headquarters to suburban Atlanta.

Posted by ben on 01/25/10 at 13:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Spirit World

the earthquake is a warning

Joe Mozingo (thanks, Raja): Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the balmy air.

This was the time for God and for spirits.

On a road next to the central cemetery, residents of a small slum were lying on mattresses and pieces of cardboard set out on the broken pavement. A woman started to hum a Christian song, and soon rallied a chorus, singing and dancing and clapping for rhythm.

"Kem kontan Jesus renmem, aleluya," they sang -- joyously, not mournfully. "I'm so happy Jesus loves me. Hallelujah."

Posted by ben on 01/25/10 at 15:21 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

On Haiti

found

Two stories about searching.

First, from Theola Labbé-DeBose and Wil Haygood (thanks, Mark): At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about an English course he hoped to take.

"I was sitting there," he recalls, "talking to the counselor, and my cellphone started going off." He had the phone on vibrate. He did not want to be rude by answering it, so he let it go.

(Intersting stuff on how this story came together from the Post's Story Lab.)

The second is from Meg Laughlin: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

For nearly a week, the road to find Daniel Thelusmar's brother was blocked by a nation of people desperate for help.

He left Tampa three days after the earthquake. He left his job at Humana, left his Creole radio show, his college coursework, and his church congregation in north Tampa. He promised to call his wife and his three young children — if he could — and he got on a plane. Born in Haiti and fluent in six languages, Thelusmar, 31, knew he could help with the relief effort. What he didn't know was whether his older brother, Fenel, was alive or among the estimated 200,000 who had perished in the quake. But from the moment he landed at the airport in the Dominican Republic, finding Fenel seemed to fall farther down the list of things he had to do.

An American rescue worker needed help getting his search dog through customs. Thelusmar translated and then accompanied him all the way to Port-au-Prince. "I was thinking of all the people trapped in buildings and I had to help him," he said. Hospitals needed translators for foreign doctors. Food and water distributors begged for someone to guide them through a nearly unnavigable city. Three more days passed. Wednesday, his mother called him. Please, she implored, stop what you are doing. Go find Fenel.

Thursday morning Thelusmar climbed into the front seat of an SUV he procured for the day and asked the driver to take him to Matissant, the neighborhood where he grew up and where he hoped to find his brother still alive.

Posted by ben on 01/25/10 at 16:05 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Along The River

fear sets up camp

Missed this way back when. Here's Chris Goffard: After the killings, the people on the river slept with their knives closer. They leashed guard dogs outside their tents and cardboard lean-tos. They listened for strangers' footsteps above the thrum of traffic on the bridges overhead. They got used to the sight of police stepping carefully along the big white rocks of the embankment. Below, in its concrete jacket, the dirty river crawled.

Violence is common and often unreported along the 51-mile Los Angeles River, daytime haunt of the occasional jogger and bird-watcher and in many parts a lawless no-man's-land populated by hard-core addicts, the mentally ill and uncountable others, broke or hiding. But what happened last November made an already fearful place feel more perilous still.

Posted by ben on 01/26/10 at 13:49 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Benjamin, The Bunny

'There's no life in here. It's just emptiness.'

Reid Forgrave: Walk into Donna Toombs' apartment on the ninth floor of Plymouth Place, a retirement community in Des Moines, and you can almost feel the ghost of Benjamin the Bunny around you.

The first thing inside Toombs' door is a framed photo of Benjamin, who died earlier this month. And that's only one of a fistful of photos scattered about her place. Dozens of rabbit statues and stuffed animals adorn the apartment. There's a rabbit head cover on a golf bag, plates decorated with rabbits, a stained-glass rabbit in the window, rabbit calendars, a rabbit table runner.

Lest there be any confusion over what this story is about, let Toombs and her friend, Kay Gerhart, explain:

"This is about Benjamin," Gerhart said.

Posted by ben on 01/26/10 at 13:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

24-Hour Cycle

buried their eyes in their clothes

N.R. Kleinfield (thanks, Scott): At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers — mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fold T-shirts. Women conveniently forget a negligee in a dryer so you’ll find it and marry them. Street people try to sell utterly unnecessary things. Pesky process servers visit bearing summonses. People stare without mercy.

Charles Johnson has a 10-second rule. Mr. Johnson is 44, an occasional personal trainer with loose hours, and was juggling three loads one Wednesday afternoon at the Clean Rite Center in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He insists on doing the wash for his family (wife, two kids) “because I do it better, not because I have to.”

He does the cleaning too. In eight years, he said his wife has touched a mop perhaps twice. She cooks.

“In a laundromat you get a lot of eye drama,” he said. “That’s when someone may or may not like you and they look at you and you look at them and then you try not to look at them. So my rule is if you stare at me more than 10 seconds, I’ll talk to you and find out why you’re staring at me.”

Posted by ben on 01/27/10 at 13:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Deadline

mike levine journalism workshop

Get those applications in, friends. Deadline is Feb. 7.

Posted by ben on 01/28/10 at 15:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

State Of The Union

and get that weak-ass shit out of my house

Best thing out there. Charles Pierce: It's a wonder he didn't laugh out loud.

Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of man-cheese that make up the assembled political establishment, and beyond them to a spavined and impotent political culture that would embarrass any self-respecting monkey house, and beyond that to a country willing to abandon almost anything it once deemed important to the first huckster who turns up weeping on cable television, Barack Obama must have been sorely tempted to let out one final, mighty guffaw and close his first State of the Union address with the words, "And I am the only president of the United States in this room, motherfuckers," after which he would return to the White House and eat Mitch McConnell's gonads on toast.

Posted by ben on 01/28/10 at 17:04 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The Coulee

'a massive glacial lake containing more water than all the lakes on Earth today'

Gary Smith: Maybe, if you were lucky, you had one too. Maybe you had your own patch of earth where your legs and mind might roam and you could make a sport your own.

I once had such luck. It came in the unsightliest of forms, a crater bulldozed in a field of weeds where workers at the cemetery behind our house dumped the browning wreaths and flowers that had been left upon the graves. What else, to my 12-year-old eyes, but a baseball stadium?

The embankments created by the earthmover became my backstop, my bleachers, my outfield walls. The wreaths became my bases. I cleared away the stones and withered sorrow, burrowed a hollow in the dirt wall along the first base line and roofed it with scrap plywood: my dugout.

No parents or pressure ever approached my ballpark, no meddling or minivans, just me and a buddy and our imaginations.

What follows is the story of a family, someone else's, perhaps the most remarkable sporting clan in the United States.

But it's really an ode to a ditch.

Posted by T. Lake on 01/28/10 at 17:40 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Salinger Dead At 91

enigma

Charles McGrath: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Posted by ben on 01/28/10 at 17:58 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Iceberg Sources

HIDDEN BELOW THE SURFACE

A question regarding long-term reporting projects.

With as many interviews as you're likely to do, you probably can't (or shouldn't) quote everyone.

So is there a good way to tell the person who just gave you an hour of their time that they probably won't appear in the story?

Should you inform them of that possibility beforehand?

These days especially, certain people give interviews about someone else or something else specifically because they want publicity for themselves.

Is it our job to let them know they might not get it?

Posted by T. Lake on 01/31/10 at 15:19 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

Free Services

'A VERY PLEASANT DEATH'

Excerpts from "A Free Shave," by Ernest Hemingway, from The Toronto Star Weekly, March 6, 1920:

If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and hair cuts go to the barber college, but take your courage with you.

For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death. If you don't believe it, go to the beginner's department of the barber's college and offer yourself for a free shave. I did....

...Just then I noticed that my barber had his left hand bandaged.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"Darn near sliced my thumb off with the razor this morning," he replied amiably.

The shave wasn't so bad. Scientists say that hanging is really a very pleasant death. The pressure of the rope on the nerves and arteries of the neck produces a sort of anesthesia. It is waiting to be hanged that bothers a man...

...Free barbering is not the only free service to be obtained in Toronto...

...If you wish to secure free board, free room, and free medical attention, there is one infallible way of obtaining it. Walk up to the biggest policeman you can find and hit him in the face.

The length of your period of free board and room will depend on how Colonel [George Taylor] Denison [police magistrate] is feeling. And the amount of your free medical attention will depend on the size of the policeman.

Posted by T. Lake on 01/31/10 at 22:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)