Category: Blog Post

Yesterday, the people who organize the Gay Pride parade in the Twin Cities filed a complaint against the Star Tribune. This one could sting: They are complaining to the Minnesota Commission on Civil Rights because the Strib apparently refused to publish an advertisement for the parade that showed two men kissing.

Many interested readers who pay attention to the subtleties have been piqued by the Strib in recent years—in fact, ever since Keith Moyers took over the paper. There have been some real brow-raising moments, particularly on the publishing side of the paper. Last summer, for example, there was a widespread rumor that high-ranking ad executives were avid followers of Luis Palau. Thus had his ballyhooed “Twin Cities Festival” not only got sweetheart status in the sales department, but the edit department had also bowed to the will of the Lord and published numerous odd features that could only be called fawning.

Then this fall, the paper refused to publish an advertisement that had no images at all— in fact, it was a piece of poster art depicting a bunch of numbers. It was a mathematical compendium of the lives and limbs lost so far in Iraq. (An advertisement we subsequently published in The Rake, incidentally. Of all the consipiracy theories, we like the one that suggests the Strib has something against simple math. It certainly seems to be catching in the newspaper industry.)

So what the hell is going on with the Newspaper of the Twin Cities? We doubt whether there’s truly an emergent Christian fundamentalist impulse taking over down on Portland Avenue. Like most of these things, the real story is found neither on the front page nor the ad pages nor even in the op-ed pages, but in the McClatchy spread sheets.

It is just barely possible that the Strib is hoping to outflank the Pioneer Press’s alleged play to the right (going for all those wacky Woodbury readers with backyard bomb-shelters, you know). What is more likely is that the business is simply responding to a certain neap tide of community sentiment. While the city’s liberal core has been just as loud and outraged as ever, the Christian right has—as they say—been emboldened by what we in the Big Bad Media have made of them in the past 90 days.

We don’t hear about it so much here on the far-left side of downtown—but then we’ve always tried to respect community standards in a kind of surgical way. (A smarter culture war!) But over there on the right side of Minneapolis, we imagine the Strib has seen a real spike in envelopes bearing a return address from the Holy Name Society. The Strib is undoubtedly the bellwether for this type of critical mass. On the opposite end of the publishing spectrum, we understand there are similar pressures. We hear through the grapevine that the Minneapolis office of the Onion is no longer accepting display ads for sexual services—in other words, pictures of boys kissing boys—and it sure as hell ain’t because they suddenly got Jesus.

One word, people: Circulation.—The Editor in Cheese

I found an old scratched-up CD of Nirvana’s “In Utero” in my desk drawer today, no jewel case. I put it in the tray, pressed play. Of all Nirvana’s records, I like it best. It is the most raw, the most punk rock. At the time it was released, I remember, it was kind of a middle finger to the mainstream radio stations and fans that had annointed the band some kid of voice of a generation. They’d hired Steve Albini to produce their sequel to “Nevermind,” and no one likes Steve Albini. (Don’t feel bad for Steve. He prefers it that way.)

Until In Utero, I was skeptical of Nirvana. I remember hearing “Smells Like Teenage Spirit” on the radio while I was in Boston, in graduate school. Between classes on medieval church history and Mesopotamian creation myths, I said to myself, “This will be huge.” In the world of rock music, there aren’t many sure bets, but you had to be pretty dense not to realize that song was going to make a few people very, very wealthy. Nirvana, as far as I was concerned, was never really “underground,” never really “punk rock” the way I understood it (and preferred it), even though that’s one of the things they most wanted to be. They were trying desperately to be authentic outsiders, trying to espouse noble causes, to pay obeisance to the saints of latterday punk like the Meat Puppets and Husker Du. But as far as I was concerned, they’d always been a commercial enterprise. They just sounded too good and pleased too many people. It was easy to see their endorsements and pronouncements as poses, as commodifications of the things I valued. (I realize now that no one was better equipped to recognize imitative, faux punk rock than a semi-privileged white kid from exurban Minneapolis, who wanted deperately to be a beer-swilling, heroin-shooting, bin-liner-wearing bloke, pogoing to the amphetamine beat of the Jam or Black Flag or the Minutemen. Now I see the diminishing value of belonging to a club where you recognize other members by their haircuts.)

Anyway, at about that time I started publishing a weekly zine. Yeah, weekly! It was insane, but I didn’t have much else going on. It was a weird little xeroxed pamphlet that I called “The Blue Reader.” It contained short little experimental stories, the type of thing that has come to be called micro-fiction or “short-short” stories. (After putting this thing together for about a year, I realized the much-loved writer Donald Barthelme had been doing the same thing, a helluva lot better, about thirty years previously. Ah me; there is nothing new under the sun.) But part of the fun was publishing this thing just the way I wanted to, without any real consideration at all for who might pick it up and read it. In my egotism, I assumed the brilliance of my stories would be self-evident. It was a very mannered kind of experiment; I refused to put page numbers or titles on the pages. The only way you knew where one story ended and another began was a sudden change in fonts. (Yes, the heady early days of desktop publishing. I loved my fonts!) A couple of friends began to write stories for The Blue Reader, and the way you found out who had written what was to look on the last page, where the stories were indexed by their first line, sort of like in a protestant hymnal.

Well, my grandmother, who died last Friday at the grand old age of 93, once got a hold of several copies of The Blue Reader. Her critical verdict? “Too many dirty words. Do you have to use those kind of dirty words?” As far as I know, she never looked at my work again. (I am at her funeral today.)

I realize now that there is a lot of value in thinking about your audience, thinking about who might pick up your little pamphlet or magazine or book. It is the final little shine you put on a story, it is the impetus for one last read-through and brush-up, make that cowlick behave, dandruff off the shoulder. What will an indifferent reader think of this? Have I made an honest effort to invite him in? If not, what am I trying to hide? Just how badly would this alienate my grandmother?

When you sit down to create something, your first thought should not be about who you might offend, either intentionally or accidentally. But it should not be your last thought, either.-Jem Casey

If there is a holy trinity of writers who capture the spirit of what we’re trying to do here at The Rake, we would identify them as follows: E.B. White, H.L. Mencken, and Flann O’Brien. Much to the wife’s irritation, we have taken to hauling these three separate volumes all around the house, sort of juggling between the pig farm, Baltimore, and a Dublin pub. They’re paperbacks. Taken together, they are still less burdensome than “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” which wastes under the bed.

Last Friday, we were sitting contentedly by the fireplace shuffling through these three books, having a nip of whiskey. In the back of our mind, we thought we might set down the books and do something adventurous. Earlier in the day, we’d heard that Kid Dakota was playing a concert at a bar down the street. Now we’re sort of beyond the age of rock ‘n’ roll, and well beyond the age of voluntarily marinating in cigarette smoke and overpriced cocktails, but we like what we’ve heard about this Dakota kid. When the better half got home, she cast a disapproving glance at the tower of books presently in rotation on the sideboard. We received permission to check out the kid.

We’ve been hearing for a few years about Darren Jackson, the musician who calls himself Kid Dakota, who also dabbles in a few other projects, such as the Olympic Hopefuls (great name for a band!). When the local weekly posted an MP3 last week, we got hooked right away.

One of the ongoing, low-level frustrations of toiling as a writer: You go to see a brilliant young musician. You sit there passively; he works his magic under cover of stagelight and volume; he makes your own interior strings resonate sympathetically, powerfully; your throat catches, your eyes irrigate.

And, being a writer, you immediately convert this experience into professional jealousy. Your fear is that the medium in which you work—words—just cannot compete with this. People are not reading the way they used to read, because they are being enticed away by their other senses. Film, music, dance, theater, TV, even the web—these all engage several senses at once, and they can be taken in without much participatory effort, beyond parking your butt in a point of vantage and ordering a pint. The prospect seems so much more daunting to write a thing of beauty, that can really move a reader the way a good song or a good film can do, that doesn’t instantly become tomorrow’s fish-wrap. (I’m not saying it’s easier to write a great three-minute song; just easier to imagine that it will move your auditor.)

Over the years, several people have said something along the lines of “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” (We prefer to attribute the saying to Frank Zappa, who seems the most credible candidate, and whose music was the most difficult to describe.) We see the point of this bromide. It is impossible to compete with the visceral power of music, and yet like moths to light, the music journalists—maybe more than anyone—are constantly trying to capture the numenous qualities of our most powerful art form.

And yet Zappa’s Razor has its limitations. It cannot really be applied to all writing, as you think maybe it should. Writing, as a medium, is most like visual art. It takes a certain willful act of participation from the reader. You have to be willing to spend some time in it, it could involve some work, you might not know immediately what you’re looking at. But in the end, you may be rewarded for your effort with a more memorable experience. You may even buy the damn thing for your bookshelf or your living room wall.

Still, we think we’ve hit upon the perfect new strategy: The party shuffle of literature. Pick three of your favorite books, and keep them in heavy rotation. When the going gets tough in one, move on to the next. Either come back and try again, or trade out the voulme. Listen while I tell you: You have nothing to lose but the sanity of your domestic partner. Begob, there’s my bus.—The Editor in Cheese

Especially clever readers
of The Rake know what we think of E.B. White. He is one of our pole
stars. When things seem to be getting a little too serious or ornery or
inhuman or just too damn wordy, and the readers are in trouble, we
refer back to the American master of the humane essay. Just last night,
we picked up our dog-eared, spineless, heavily highlighted copy of his greatest hits.
Like that old Bible trick, we let it fall open. And we reread White’s
wonderful little profile of Professor WIlliam Strunk Jr. , the man who
originally wrote “The Elements of Style.”

That book, of
course, is considered gospel today in most college composition courses.
But before White wrote this profile of Strunk for the New Yorker, “The
Elements of Style” was a tiny, self-published little pamphlet that had
fallen into disuse. (Strunk had been White’s composition instructor at
Cornell.) Shortly thereafter, White was asked to produce a new edition
of the book. Thus was it reborn into celebrity as “Strunk and White,”
its nom de guerre ever since. We keep it within reach at all times. We
think not enough people actually read it or take its chastening message
to heart.

Over lunch yesterday we happened to be browsing
through the latest issue of a good local paper that publishes some of
our favorite writers, including some Rake contributors. But something
funny had happened to the copy. It had been run through some kind of
taffy-stretching machine. Where we expected a crisp bite, we got
several mouthfuls of soggy prose. Here is a random sentence that we
noticed: “I don’t know what the lens looking back at me reveals about
my thoughts on sex, but I imagined on the other side of the room sat a
lonely rotund businessman who called for a raven-haired hottie while
wiping his sweaty forehead with a filthy handkerchief.” The excerpt
made us feel a little sad, because we suspected that our friend the
writer didn’t have much fun writing this.

But speaking
mechanically, this is a good example of gilding the lily, of obscuring
the picture by trying to be too precise. Some of the best writing is
distinguished by what is left unsaid. It reminded us of one of White’s
most wonderful emendations to the Elements of Style. Under “Style Rule
Number Four” (“write with nouns and verbs”), he says, “The adjective
hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a
tight place.” We think this is exactly right. It is our constant
struggle to unhitch adjectives from exhausted nouns that are spinning
their wheels in swampy sentences. (No one is blameless, by the way.
That last sentence is way too wordy, for example. Practically roccoco.
We would have improved it, but we are conserving our strength for
print.)

So, we have a larger more interesting point to make. We
were also reminded of Garrison Keillor’s most recent novel, “Love Me.”
We liked that book about as well as any of his novels, which is quite a
lot. Maybe a little bit more than the others, because it was his most
directly autobiographical novel. It was sort of like Bill Murray in
“Lost In Translation.” The perfect autobiographical vehicle, even if it
was slow and uninteresting to anyone who isn’t a superstar in
literature or film.

Keillor, in the person of his pseudonymous
self, Larry Wyler, discusses his years at the New Yorker, and it’s a
fun read. But there were two bizarre falsifications. First, he made
legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn into a capering cad, whereas
Shawn (it is said) was actually a mousey, painfully agoraphobic genius.
We’ll chalk this one up to humorous inversion, though we’re not sure it
works.

More bizarre is Keillor’s sustained soto voce attack on
“Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.” At several points in the book,
it is a metaphoric stand-in for writerly indulgence and
wrong-headedness. Late in the novel, Keillor puts these words into
William Shawn’s mouth:

“I don’t want you to turn into a stylist
like White and devote your life to painting Easter eggs. Him and Strunk
have screwed up more writers than gin and scoth combined. You take the
Elements of Style too seriously and you’ll get so you spend three days
trying to write a simple thank-you note and you’ll wind up buying a
nickel-plated .38 and robbing newsboys out of sheer frustration.”

Now,
we can understand the contrarian desire to dismiss any formulaic
approach to writing—there is a strong sense among writers that the act
of writing is more like surfing than wood-working. So reducing the act
to a handful of rules is offensive in principle. White knew this and
wrote about it. He said trying to analyze good writing is like
dissecting a frog; it won’t hop any more, and the innards will interest
only the scientifically minded.

But we can hardly think of
another writer who better embodies many of the principles of Strunk and
White. Few writers are as concise and fluid as Keillor, few writers are
so parsimonious about their structure, few writers make every word
count the way Keillor does. (Corollary: Comedy is HARD!) And few
writers have had the spine to leave the New Yorker as a result of having even higher standards of style and simplicity.

Strunk
and White would have been proud of Keillor, we think. Despite Keillor’s
odd dissing of the masters.—The Editor in Cheese

Last night, we stayed late at the office in order to crash a
party upstairs. We were finishing the new issue, too. Needless to say,
we were thirsty. Someone here in the art department (always the
hipsters at any magazine) had received an invitation to the WEA/ADA
office holiday shindig up on the seventh floor.

WEA is Warner Elektra Atlantic, and ADA is the Alternative Distribution Alliance.
In other words, the music biz—or at least Time Warner’s local folks
whose main job is to make sure Best Buy and Target stores get their CD
inventory. We’re told that Best Buy and Target are today the two
largest retailers of music on the planet, followed closely by Wal-Mart.

Now,
we’ve seen our fair share of music-biz hipsters on elevators, and we’ve
gibbered about Pavement and Modest Mouse enough to know how to inveigle
our way into a high-buck party in a swank office with leather couches
and atomic sound systems. We made our way up.

There were
beautiful boys and girls everywhere, and there were framed records on
the walls, and there was a spread of salsa and hummos and celery
sticks, and a god-awful lot of liquor, beer, and wine. We tried to
chit-chat with the powerful people, but the powerful people were
standing back with arms folded over name tags, avoiding eye contact,
trying to make sure—we guess—that no one set the place on fire.
(Smoking! Inside the office! When was the last time you saw that? Rock
‘n’ roll!)

We were overwhelmed by the memory of working more
directly with the music industry, the way we did a few years ago. Any
setting like this is always a study in extremes. You have very
powerful, very wealthy executives in tony offices, with unlimited
expense accounts, surrounded by starving artists and prestige laborers.
That is, the music industry is a star-making industry that attracts all
sorts of good-hearted people who will work
for peanuts as long as they can be in an office that plays cool music,
and allows you to wear leather pants and tee-shirts to work. (The
magazine business is not dissimilar,with one minor difference: We don’t
get filthy rich. Also, leather makes our butts sweat. We hate that.)
The neatest trick is when big money gets paired with a brilliant idea,
and deserving people receive their just reward—from an ingenious
A&R guy, to a cutthroat distribution manager, to a superoriginal band that represents the future of rock ‘n’ roll. It does happen.

This
is a neat trick because it is the rare exception. Money tends to be
conservative, hunger tends to be desperate. It happens just often
enough to be maddening—powerful people with equal amounts of money and
curiosity, willing to take a risk on creativity.

We mention all
this, because we ran into an old friend at the party, Simon Peter
Groebner. He is now comfortably installed in a permanent position with
the Star Tribune, where he writes about music, and god bless him for
it. We’ve known Simon Peter for almost ten years now, and he’s been
through a lot. The life of the writer and editor can be a difficult
one, especially if you can’t pick up and move to another city. Back in
the day, we used to run into Groebner at places like the music
conference SXSW, down in Texas. It was not uncommon to find that Simon
had hitchhiked the whole way, and was sleeping on whatever floor of
whichever record executive’s hotel room he could weasel for the night.
That was certainly rock ‘n’ roll, and we always felt a pang of guilt
for being—at the time—at the front end of the gravy train.

Anyway,
Simon Peter at one point took one of the coolest jobs in the Twin
Cities. He became the editor of FATE magazine—an awesome, pulpy,
salacious little publication that explores the supernatural and the
conspiratorial. FATE is one of the oldest magazines in the Twin Cities,
having been launched back in the forties. In the 1980s, Carl Weschke,
the wiccan head of Llewellyn publishing in St. Paul, bought the
magazine. It seemed like a match made in, erm, a parallel universe. By
the late-90s, Simon Peter was working on the magazine, and quickly rose
through the ranks to become its editor in chief.

This was
right at the peak of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files. The time
could not have been better for FATE magazine to boldly go into new
markets, and capture young readers. Simon Peter, in his first job as an
editor, put together one of the finest business plans we have ever
seen—laying out just how he and his team were going to take FATE where
it had never been taken before, into the big time and into the
mainstream.

The main problem with FATE was that it remained
inertly earnest. It was a magazine locked in the 1950s. It ran stories
about UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters without acknowledging the exploding,
post-ironic world of pop culture. It spoke to its audience as if time
had stood still for them, too. In other words, FATE was comfortable
with a fringy readership that could not tolerate any real skepticism,
or tongue-in-cheek irony, or even the mainstream popularization of its
subject matter.

Llewellyn at the time was totally cashing in
on the phenomenon, becoming the world’s largest publisher of “occult”
books, especially a series about witchcraft specifically for teenage
girls. It was pretty cool.

So. Everything was perfectly in
place. A brilliant young editor with a great idea and a solid business
plan, and plenty of money at his disposal. The only thing missing was
the go-ahead, the nod of confidence, the “damn the torpedos, what are
we going to lose, money? We can always get more money!*” kind of
entrepreneurial spirit. (*Those, by the way, were the actual words,
uttered three years ago, of our own publisher. Yes, we know how lucky we have been.)

Alas. Llewellyn took a pass, the magazine was downgraded and eventually sold to an old-school FATE steward,
and Simon Peter moved on. Today, he’s a made man, but we can’t help
looking back with deep regrets at what might have been, if his bosses
had had any adventurous spirit at all.

Maybe they could see into the future, and they didn’t like what they saw. Fate can be such a bore.—The Editor in Cheese

We were thrown into a mild fit of nostalgia today, courtesy of Slate magazine. In graciously quoting an article from The Rake written by Albert Eisele,
Timothy Noah erroneously cited it as being from the current (December)
issue of the magazine. We certainly don’t mind if Slate quotes us and
makes us look smart and timely. But that essay was published in May of
2003.

Almost from the date we launched the magazine, we’d been
working on Albert Eisele. He is the editor in chief of The Hill, in
Washington D.C., and a native of Minnesota who made his way to the
capitol when he was Vice President Walter Mondale’s press secretary.
Eisele was a high-value target in our magazine’s hunt for interesting
and smart writers working on unexpected stories. Anyway, we thought it
would be very interesting to get Al’s perspective on the long decline
of Minnesota democrats on the national stage. Where were the men and
women who could steward the state’s good name? What had Minnesota’s
reputation become in Washington? How was it possible that the same
state that had produced two solidly liberal vice presidents, and two
radically liberal presidential candidates—how had this same state
produced Sentor Norm Coleman? The same Sen. Coleman who, during this
peacable holiday season, has been making a national ass of himself by loudly demanding the head of Kofi Annan?

We
don’t remember if we asked Al to try to keep his piece light— not too
heavy-handed in terms of partisan preferences. But we scarcely needed
to tell him how to keep ‘er between the fenceposts. After all, he’s got
decades of experience reporting and editing political stories in the
most neutral way possible. In fact, we were very pleasantly surprised
by his assessment of “The Minnesota Model.”

It turns out that
Minnesota’s long tradition of progressive politics has as much to do
with the Republican party as the Democratic party. Nationally, we are
frequently remembered by our historical highwater mark of Hubert H.
Humphrey (and his hand-picked acolyte, Walter Mondale). But before that
generation of red-faced and owlish liberals took the dais, there was a
previous generation of Republicans who had established the standard:
Moderate government, reasonable taxation, widespread committment to the
common weal (especially education), an abhorrence of corruption (and
the appearance of same), embracing the global palliative of the UN, and
so on.

Al Eisele’s essay reminded us that the values we hold
dear here in the blue heartland are values that used to be shared by
both parties, that were actually established by the party of Abraham
Lincoln.

Sen. Coleman should bear the scruffy ears and
remarkable intelligence of a loveable political mutt. But the
inevitable view of him is not charitable. Even party flacks see him as
a flip-flopping turn-coat who once was Paul Wellstone’s biggest
supporter, who then became a Republican for no apparent reason other
than to get elected mayor of St. Paul, who now finds himself spouting
some of the most silly Republican clap-trap. He is a favorite lap-dog
of President Bush’s, which is probably the most obvious betrayal of any
moderate impulse he might ever have had. There are many things you can
say about Sen. Coleman. But you would not say he is his own man.

Our Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, also has the manner and bearing of a centrist Republican like Clark MacGregor or Elmer Anderson.
(The latter, we note, had a John Kerry sign in his lawn in the weeks
before he died, rest his honorable soul.) But the boyish gubernator is
constantly proposing radical-right nonsense such as reinstituting the
death penalty, and weasling out of unflattering revelations about his strange business dealings.

The problem as we see it is that the perceived

shift to benighted, self-serving, I-got-mine Republicanism is being
followed by a real one. But maybe this is a temporary thing. The last
election was a sign, we think, that things are evolving back toward the
middle, at least here in Minnesota. Still, we prescribe a strong dose
of historical perspective, just to insure a speedy recovery. There are
still some nasty viruses abroad.—The Editor in Cheese

We were amused to see StarTribune.com, along with virtually
every other online news outlet in the country, trot out the “Breaking
News!” banner yesterday for the Scott Peterson trial, whatever that
was. In an effort to string this along, first the big news was that the
jury had reached a decision. Then, a few minutes later: Verdict to be
announced later this afternoon! The appointed hour arrived. Scott
Peterson receives the death sentence!

Now,
we’re not going to grouch about the depredations of cable television
and second-string newspapers. They do what they have to do, and anyone
still trying desperately to hold them all to a higher standard has a
long row to hoe indeed. We are intrigued, actually, by the phenomenon
of the newsworm— which is similar to the earworm, where an annoying pop
song gets into your head through no fault or voluntary act of your own.

We
have almost literally no knowledge of the Scott Peterson affair. We
have actively ignored it. He killed someone—his wife? She was pregnant,
or had a small child? He was trying to weasel out of it? He looks a
little like our brother, especially those petulant lips? All of this
detail somehow got through the active, aggressive, angry filters we
have in place to not waste our time on such an obvious and vacant ploy
for our attention. We are proud to declare that we have wasted no time
on this (other than right now), so the filters have done their job. And
yet it has been a story with such a high level of saturation, it’s like
trying to keep your feet dry in a canoe.

We do not know whether
television stations interrupted regular programming to announce this
staggering news, but we think probably they did. (If we had to guess,
we’d say the daytime viewing audience could not wish to see anything
more titillating or gratifying.)

And we think back with a deep sense of pride for our countrymen when we think of the idiotic CBS producer
who was fired for breaking into CSI:NY to convey the news that Yaser
Arafat had passed away. An impotent world leader in the most embattled
precinct on the globe! It’s not like he was going to be alive again by
the time the 11 p.m. news came on. What was she thinking?!—The Editor
in Cheese

We’ve carped a lot lately about that annoying person who
claims that “the mainstream media” does not cover this story or that
story. Our boilerplate response is that this person has simply not
looked hard enough. (Hint: Most public libraries now provide free web
access—when they are open.) As an afterthought, we often ask: What
story were you looking for, precisely?

If
you honestly believe that newsrooms are driven by national politics,
that reporters at real news organizations are secretly trying to get
you to vote for a Democrat, then we think you maybe don’t understand
journalism very well. The only bona fide, premediated prejudice that we
know of is to be the first to report a credible story.

This is
why so many media people are so bent out of shape about the Fox News
Channel. Fox has successfully convinced its viewers that all other news
outlets have a liberal bias. The only formulaic way to distinguish
yourself from all other news organizations in one stroke is to be what
all the others are not—subtly but unmistakeably partisan. (You want an
example of a news organization that does the same thing on the lefty side of the equation?)

The
other day, we got into a conversation with a particularly smart
neo-con. He seemed smart to us, anyway, because he was willing to talk
about facts rather than opinions—a rare bird indeed. We said, “Facts
are not partisan. The truth is not, itself, predisposed to one
particular party or another.” He seemed to disagree. We proceeded to
talk facts, and we found that the facts themselves were frequently in
dispute, even when they came from what any normal person would consider
a neutral source. It was news to us, but even the University of Maryland folks who found a majority of Fox viewers believe the opposite of the reported facts—are being attacked.

(Typically,
convoluted arguments are fomented about particular semantic and
syntactical questions. If you have no stomach for this kind of
tit-for-tat, skip to the next graf. Sometimes you have to get dirt
under your nails to gainsay an idealogue. An example: PIPA found that
most Fox viewers believe Saddam Hussein solicited uranium from Niger,
whereas this is simply not true, and has never been proven. But if you
are a neo-con, you say this: Niger does not equal Africa! There are
studies—the Hutton Report, the 9/11 Commission—that show British
intelligence suggested it was solicited from somewhere else in Africa.)

“It depends on whose ox you’re trying to gore,” said our neo-con friend.

See,
that is precisely the problem. There is no ox to gore. Reporters at
real news organizations don’t give a toss for anything but the
late-breaking, exclusive-scoop, over-the-fold story with their byline
on it. To put a point on it, with our example: Either Hussein went
looking for uranium in Africa, or he did not. If he did, it would have
been reported that way. The sketchy intelligence President Bush may or
may not have believed and based his actions and his speeches on is
irrelevant. There is no independent, verifiable proof that Hussein ever
went looking for uranium in Africa, which is why it has never been
reported by a news organization. So why do Fox viewers believe this
untruth?

It is interesting to find neo-conservatives now arguing
so vehemently on the side of epistemological relativism— that there is
no news, that there are no facts, that can be communicated WITHOUT some
sort of normative spin, without an “ox to gore.” Call it the Heisenberg
principle of journalism— we cannot observe and record reality without
promoting (or denigrating) George W. Bush.

We can’t speak for
neo-conservatives, but we guess this is now the state of things: A
“truth” is a self-evident moral proposition like “abortion is wrong”
which does not require any physical evidence. Observable, recordable,
verifiable, repeatable scientific facts, on the other hand, are
rudderless things that make no sense until they’ve gotten a hard shove
to the left or the right. What a strange world we live in!

Still, there is an easy solution. One word, actually: OMBUDSMAN. Fox News still doesn’t have one.—The Editor in Cheese

You might find this hard to believe, but we get writers around
here who constantly want to use the F-word in their stories—and
presumably in their lives. (My daughters call this the “F-swear,” which
they’ve heard daddy say once or twice, I’m sorry to say. To which I
have responded, “Do as I say… not, uh….. as I do—say… er. Never
mind. Just don’t use that word. It’s a bad daddy word.” ) Why do so
many writers wish to use that word? Because they see so many other
writers getting to use that word in other publications.

When
we first launched The Rake three years ago, we considered whether or
not we were going to print that word. It slipped into a few early
issues, but only in direct quotes, and more or less under our breath.
(If you can find the issue and the story, I will personally buy you
dinner and drinks, no kidding. But you may have to sign a
confidentiality agreement, heh heh.)

We never would have
decided that it was OK to print the word in display type (a headline,
or a pull quote, or any other loud context), and we always intended to
work very hard to find alternatives to the word, even in direct quotes.
This can be an interesting challenge, and it leads to some artful
editing—which is one of the little word-geek things that makes this job
fun.

For example, in this month’s short story, by Sara Woster.
The story is about a young girl whose father spends a lot of time
teaching her outdoor survival skills. At one point in the story, the
girl is speaking to another girl—a teenager—at the side of a hotel
swimming pool somewhere in South Dakota. Here is the exchange:

“How long can you tread water?” Laurie asked, inching toward her father, who was holding open the door to the hotel.

“Who cares? It’s the goddam prairie. There is no water,” the girl said.

Now
Sara’s original draft had the girl saying “It’s the fucking prairie.”
That is a much stronger word, much more acidic, and really works a lot
better than “goddam.” It rings truer, and hits the ear better. But a
policy is a policy. We made the story a teeny-tiny bit worse—something
we never otherwise do, especially in a piece of fiction—because we
simply do not print that word. It wasn’t that big a trade-off, in the
grand scheme of things, and Sara was gracious about it.

When we
were considering whether or not to take a hard line on this policy, I
called up Adam Moss, who was at the time the editor of the New York
Times magazine, and I asked him if the word “fuck” had ever appeared in
the New York Times. Everyone at the Times knows the answer to that
question. The word “fuck” appeared once, in a direct quote from Richard
Nixon.

So that is now OUR official policy, too, and we think
it’s a good one: Only Richard Nixon gets to say “fuck” in print, and
he’s dead (though I suppose he is still imminently quotable).

Also, we get to say it on the web. Just this once, maybe.—The Editor in Cheese

Today, the AP reports the tragic news
that a person with a gun charged the stage at a rock concert and opened
fire. Last night in Columbus, Ohio, Damageplan was one song into its
first set when a man opened fire and killed three people before being
shot and killed himself by police officers. Among the dead: “Dimebag”
Darrell, real name Darrell Abbott. It’s the first I’ve heard, but the
AP tells me he was among the finest “metal guitarists” of his
generation. He was killed on the same day John Lennon was murdered.

I
certainly don’t want to insult a man tragically killed in the prime of
life. I don’t mind insulting the AP, though. Several things struck me
about the report as it appeared at the New York Times. First, I wonder
how much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair there must have been in
newsrooms all over the country this morning. First, call the music
critic! Do we have a music critic? Does he know anything about this
band, this “Damageplan”? The early wire says “formerly of Pantera,”
I’ve heard of them, they’re big, right?

Next. Shit, better brew
another pot of coffee, this is going to be a long meeting with copy and
standards. Is it gonna pass muster to use this guy’s name—”Dimebag” in
the lead? I mean, fer chrissake, that means DRUGS. And it was a
nickname. But that’s what everyone knew him as. “Darrell Abbott” means
nothing to people. Yeah, but “Dimebag”… drugs! OK, but first
reference ONLY!

OK, I’ll stop pretending at this point, because
I honestly don’t know how newsrooms work, and The Big Cheese is too
busy to ask (new issue). But what I thought was goofiest about the AP
report was this paragraph:

“Telephone numbers for both Darrell
and Jerry Abbott are unlisted and could not be reached early Thursday
by The Associated Press.”

Two thoughts on this:

A) You
do not just look up a rock star in the phone book. Anyone who has ever
dabbled in music journalism knows that you first subscribe to Pollstar
magazine for several hundred dollars, then one to twelve months later,
you get a special phonebook that allows you to look up any major record
label, then a record-label phone-tree connects you to a “publicity and
media” office, then you send a fax describing the reason why you called
the PR office, then you are given the number of a PR person, who then
promises to get back to you “later today” which is code for “after you
call me about a hundred times for the next two weeks and finally reach
my assistant,” who then must repeat the process with an agent, who then
repeats the process with a personal handler, who then “might have him
call you sometime.” This whole process may start over, if any one
person in the line of command is away from his or her desk. Shortcut:
Say you are with the Times or Rolling Stone, and this is for a cover
story. Can you hold? I’ll connect you now.

B) Who did they expect to answer the phone at Dimebag’s house? And what would the AP have said if he’d answered?—Jem Casey