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drama / history / journalism / metaphors / story ideas — No Comments
30
Aug 09

Why Do You Need Slaves? To Make Handmade Sand

In this fascinating, heartbreaking interview, Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery, discusses the four years he spent investigating the current condition of slaves around the world.

There are more slaves now than at any other time in human history: 27 million.

Skinner discusses the time in Romania he was offered a young girl with Downs Syndrome and slashes all over her arms as a sexual slave in trade for a used car, as well as being offered sexual-servant children in broad daylight in Port-au-Prince for $100. He talked them down to $50.

History’s worst stories just keep getting told over and over: as writers, our jobs are to find them, bring them to light, and show how they are the same but different.

TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.

BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. These are people that cannot walk away.

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who’d been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo — he asked me to protect his identity — was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

Since he was a child, he and his family and his children, along with the rest of the enslaved villagers, took huge rocks out of the earth. They pummeled those rocks into gravel for the subgrade of India’s infrastructure, which is the gleaming pride of the Indian elites.

They further pulverized that gravel into silica sand for glass. There’s only one way that you turn a profit off handmade sand, and that’s through slavery.

via There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

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Los Angeles / books / conspiracy / geography / history / maps / novelists — 1 Comment
14
Aug 09

Thomas Guide

Wired has put together a super cool google map of Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles. It’s like seeing my city annotated with a complete map of the conspiracy.

Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA’s greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer’s weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the ’60s and early ’70s, while writing Gravity’s Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp.

via The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles .

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art / history / journalism / photography — No Comments
29
Jul 09

Paris Evolving Under the Gaze of Notre Dame’s Gargoyles

A lovely photographic piece about Paris evolving under the noses of Notre Dame’s gargoyles:

Paris Evolving Under the Gaze of Notre Dame’s Gargoyles.

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books / history / interviews / literature / publishing — No Comments
22
Jul 09

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi | Poets & Writers

Legendary Publisher and Editor of Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG) Jonathan Galassi answers some questions for Poets & Writers. His life is like a history of publishing of the last quarter of a century:

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn when you were a younger editor?

One of the really hard lessons was realizing how much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you misjudged it. Maybe it didn’t get the right breaks. One of the hardest things to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in any human activity. And if you don’t get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don’t get the right reviews, or if books aren’t in stores when the reviews come, or whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl’s biography of Frank O’Hara so desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written. [Laughter.] But at the time I felt like a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very, very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings: excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don’t know if that’s a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my devotion was overwhelming.

via Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi | Poets & Writers.

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history / journalism / magazines / non-fiction / writing — No Comments
14
Jul 09

The Paris Review – The Art of Nonfiction No. 2

Gay Talese interviewed in The Paris Review. He writes all his notes and outlines on the cardboard shirt boards that come from dry cleaners.

INTERVIEWER

Your piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is often singled out as the classic work of New Journalism. How did that assignment come about?

TALESE

Harold Hayes, my editor at Esquire, said, I have your next piece: Sinatra. I told him I didn’t want to do it. Sinatra had been done to death. I mean, Christ, another piece on Sinatra? But Hayes is a strong person with a polite manner who got his way. So I go to the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles and I call Sinatra’s press agent, Jim Mahoney. He says Frank’s not feeling well. He has a cold. Mahoney is also not happy about other things. He’s unhappy about this rumor that Sinatra is friends with organized crime figures. Mahoney says, We may want you to sign an agreement saying we can see the piece first. I say, I can’t do that. He says, Then we might not have a deal. At the end of the week, I’m still in the hotel room, and Mahoney calls to ask me what I’m doing. I say, I’m waiting for you to call me. How’s Frank feeling? Well, he’s not very good. I say, He still has a cold? He says, Yes, he still has a cold. He brings up the agreement issue again, and again I say that’s a problem. He says, I understand you’ve been seeing people. Yes, I’ve been seeing people. You’ve been seeing some of Frank’s friends? I say, I don’t know if they’re Frank’s friends, but I’ve been seeing people. He asks me, How long are you going to be doing this? I don’t know, I say, and then he hangs up.

That night I’m sitting at a bar around ten o’clock, watching people, and sure enough I notice Frank Sinatra sitting down the corner of the bar with two blondes. Sinatra goes to play pool and I witness a scene between Sinatra and a guy named Harlan Ellison, and I write it down on a shirt board. But I don’t get it all, so I go up to Ellison and ask him if I can talk to him the next day. He gives me his phone number and address. When we speak in person I ask him not just what everyone said, but what he was thinking. I always ask people what was on their mind. Were you surprised by Sinatra? Had you met him before? Did you think he was going to hit you, or did you want to pop him? Then someone I knew had a secretary who had gone to school with Sinatra’s daughter Nancy. She told me this great story about how she went to this party at the Sinatras’ house. At the party she accidentally knocks off from the mantle an alabaster bird. And little Nancy says, Oh no, that’s my mother’s favorite. Then Frank Sinatra knocks the other one off.

via The Paris Review – The Art of Nonfiction No. 2.

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