Out of Not That Terribly Great Silence

Oh boy. There are times in life when one -- in this case, "one" being me -- does not have the time to do basic things. Not basic like shower or shave; once a week for each, and I've managed to maintain that even during periods of high stress. But stuff like updating this blog after I write something was, for a little while, something I didn't feel like I had time to do. I was, and to a certain extent still am, pretty much typing all the time every day, which made the prospect of doing more of it, here or anywhere, pretty unappetizing. And then there was the next stage, or time in one's life or whatever, when it had been so very long since the last time I updated anything here that the idea of doing it grew daunting and huge and cf. above in re: pretty unappetizing.

And so here we are, on a Sunday. I'm in New Haven with my wife, doing laundry, and the website that I have not really mentioned at all on this my personal blog is now over two months old; if you count our November preview period, it's been something more like three months. That website is The Classical, this website right here. While the maintenance and development of and crafting of content for and frantic sporadic attempts to improve that website is certainly the greater part of the reason why I haven't been doing much at this one, it's also more than that. The successful Kickstarter campaign that funded the site was and remains one of the most thrilling and humbling moments of my professional life -- we asked the internet to help us do this thing with small donations, and we got those donations from people who wanted us to do it, and we did the thing.

At the same time, The Classical has been humbling in another way: the site doesn't work as well as we want it to just yet, and the pace of improvement -- and, to go back to why I haven't put so much as a link up here in months, the capacities of the editorial team to do the writing and editing we need to do on what amounts to our bathroom breaks and pre-sleep hours -- is frustrating. Not difficult to anticipate, but also and all the same unanticipated. It's difficult, and while I'm delighted and honored to do it, it is also difficult. Fitting all of that into a life that, due to my current prevailing rate of pay, already demands a huge amount of writing in order to pay the usual bills and such, is also difficult. It is worth it, thousandfold. I am happy to be doing it, and proud to be doing it. But it has occasioned a certain drawing back in other aspects of my life. So yeah, less time to put up dog videos here, or sleep, or leave my apartment, or other things of that nature. How very sad for me and us all, I know.

Besides the Classical stuff, I've been doing the usual NFL season stuff -- yakkin'-related football activities with the brilliant and delirious Jeff Johnson at GQ, the weekly "Mercy Rule" column at Vice, the usual Wall Street Journal-based extrusions, and a few other things I'm happy with. Foremost among these is this massive, goofy feature/listicle on the idea of High Bro Culture, from the Man of the Year issue of GQ. It's a masterpiece. Diddy knows what I'm talking about.


Thanks, Diddy!

Anyway, all of this is to say that I shouldn't be complaining, and am more or less not complaining except insofar as it's tough for me to explain this without being like "My arms and eyes hurt a lot." But also I shouldn't be complaining because I've done some writing I'm really proud of at The Classical. The first piece I wrote for The Classical, back in the November preview period and in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky implosion at Penn State, is as vicious as I could've hoped it to be, and I'm still proud of it. My essays on the weirdness of big-ticket high school sports and the sublime positivity of Bill Raftery and the ulcerous ulcerosity of the Belichick Patriots are all things I'm proud of, and I don't even know what this one is about, besides an elaborate expression of Yuletide exhaustion, but I like it pretty well, too.

And I'm even prouder about the stuff that I've had the privilege of editing, by writers I personally know and love and writers I know less well, and which I've gotten to help make better and in some cases help make great... it's worth it. It's worth it because we are putting very good writing on the site every day, and because whatever success I've had over the past year came because people gave me an opportunity and an online space on which to stretch out and grow and get better as a writer; if it weren't for Gerard at Can't Stop the Bleeding and Alex and Choire at The Awl and Stephen at gbNYC, I would be notably sadder and worse at writing. The opportunity to do the same service to other writers makes me glad and proud all over, always. So, yes, The Classical will continue to be worth it. But, yes, too, it takes up a lot of time that I used to use in different ways. Like maintaining my professional site, or putting up that picture of Diddy, which I've been wanting to get up here forever.

I'm going to update the right-hand column with some recent pieces of note, and I'm going to try to get in here more often, because I like it. Talk to you again in three or four months!

Altar Egoism

So very much writing of late, so very little of it presently live or worth sharing. I took a big step today towards wrapping up a very big assignment, which I think is at the least going to be pretty funny. And the small assignments continue to pile up -- the last week saw a pair of NFL chats with Living Legend Jeff Johnson at GQ (here and here) and another on baseball, with beautiful human David Raposa at The Awl. There was a Vice column I was kind of proud of, like there always is. A bunch of Daily Fixes and some NFL picks and some other stuff and a couple dozen hours of sleep spread over the work-week. It was an average week, and this one will look a lot like it, albeit with a good friend's wedding at the end and hopefully the last stroke on that big thing for GQ sometime before that.

And this is all good: this is where the money (theoretically) comes from, and it keeps me busy and interested and intermittently proud. But there's more than one way to Do Me, and doubtless some that allow for more sleep and less stress and all that. This sounds whiny. What I'm saying is that I wish I could be a little more like David Roth The Non-Writer, seen above. Dude's living the life. Stacking coins, rolling up sleeves -- and here I am, blogging. Pimp hard, David Roth. I need you to.

The Century Club, Among Other Things

As you certainly already know, because you are a superfan, this is my 100th post here at David Roth, The Writer. Which means that I have now officially had 100 excellent thoughts -- thoughts about Guy Fieri and John Schnatter and libertarians and the "Ground Zero" "Mosque" (Oh man, remember that? CLASSIC SUMMER BIGOTRY!) and writing for no money and Frighteningly Nutty Sitcom Actors and terrible things and awful, awful David Brooks and so on. All of them excellent, all of them (apparently) worth the getting-deep-like-a-Navy-SEAL treatment. Which is to say: I guess I've been doing things at this address for a minute, now, although I'm still not exactly sure what I'm doing with it. I do know that I'm probably taking it a bit more seriously than I should.

I know that because the knowledge that this was my 100th post has kept me from writing anything here for awhile, because it Had To Be Good. Which is generally a good impulse, I suppose -- this sort of constructive self-consciousness is the thing that separates humans from Thomas Friedman -- but which also meant that I would periodically stare at a blank screen here, knowing that I should write something Totally Epic and Withering about a three-week old (but very terrible) feature story about evil prosciutto/New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (right), but also feeling tired and being busy and so on. And while I could easily fill my days writing about how sleepy, fatuous elites need to stop fluffing this graceless and cruelly cynical human hot pocket, I also know that that's not what this blog was for.

It was, almost a year ago, an attempt on my part to be professional, put all my stuff in one place, and do simultaneously a little plumage-flashing -- "I don't just write about sports, I also make fun of Paula Deen!" -- and some self-promoting. Which I guess I've done, but which I've also probably done too sporadically and (shock) in too prolix and off-topic a way to serve its desired purpose. What was supposed to be something I could put on a resume instead became, like, a blog. It's one with links to all my recent publications in the right-hand column (check it out, it's just to the right of these words!), but it's also a blog that I use the way people use blogs. I like it in that way, but also, really now. Really.

But also: really, it's nice to have a space to write about what I want to write about. I'm kind of past the "fuck an editor, it was perfect when I first thought it" stage in my life -- I make exceptions, periodically -- but given the stresses of trying to sell things, I suppose giving it away for free and enjoying the freedom from expectations that comes with that is maybe a healthy thing. And when someone calls me and says they want me to write a weekly column that is really a transcribed Gchat conversation about why so many Food Network personalities look like photographic negatives or freaky cartoons and yell all the time, I'm sure as hell going to be warmed up.

So yeah, 100 posts in a little under 365 days, and a 101st and so on in due time. I don't know that I'll use this space more effectively or responsibly in the future, but I know that I'll keep using it, and appreciate those of you who -- for whatever reason -- read it. (The Blogger stats thing suggests that, oddly and improbably, there are actually a few dozen of youse, which really reflects more on you than it does on me) I will also now use this post to promote something I wrote for The Awl about a week ago on the NFL Labor Apocalypse, which stars the adorable Jerry Richardson (he's the evil deflated Gingrich above). I'm happy with the piece, and think it's a good example of my work with The Awl over the past months, and that's why I'm putting it at the bottom of a 600-word post about myself and how I use my blog. I am really figuring this out!

Belated Bloggy Self-Promotion Moment: Blockbuster Knockoffs and More, at Slate

I'm still trying to figure out the fine points of self-promotion, here at David Roth The Writer, the Internet's Premier Site About David Roth, The Writer(tm). Obviously that sort of thing was this site's original purpose, although I haven't been terribly zealous about keeping things within the originally proscribed guidelines. (For instance) Some of this is because I'm just kind of geeked to have a place to write about whatever, and much of it is because I'm a little careless with my (strictly notional) brand as a general rule. It's like if I don't acknowledge that it exists, I won't have to deal with my ambivalence about being able to apply the word "brand" to myself. It works okay, actually.

Obviously, when I have a biggish deal piece like my compare-and-contrast between low-budget hit Paranormal Activity and its lower-budget knockoff Paranormal Entity at Slate, I'm going to link to it here. (The handsome devil above is Shane Van Dyke, grandson of Dick and director of Paranormal Entity) But despite the fact that I've felt like garbage -- or rather like a person whose sinuses are filled with garbage -- all week, I've actually done a great deal of other writing of late, and not actually put up the Slate piece. I suppose it might be a good idea -- or it might not -- to go into why.

I've written and edited some on my novel, and really and truly for the last time appear to be in the home stretch there. (Hopefully) (But I think maybe this time for real) But mostly I've been doing blogging work, paid and unpaid: three Daily Fixes at the WSJ (here's today's) and four posts at Can't Stop the Bleeding of variable interest to non-sports people -- rumors about LeBron James' mom sleeping with a backup guard on his team don't do it for you? maybe then a speculative grouse about the travails of smart football players? -- and the usual quota at Greenbuildingsnyc and this strange real estate place I work for, which I really probably shouldn't write too much about here. Some may be more worth reporting than others, but here as in real life I have tried to err on the side of too-little self-promotion rather than too much. Which is, again, absolutely 180 degrees from what this web-place is supposed to be about. So you see the problem.

But there's another reason why I was late on putting up the Slate piece, which came out while I was on my honeymoon. I didn't put it up right away because I was in Florence or Siena or somewhere and there were obviously better things to do/eat. But sometime between when it went up and the second-to-last night of the honeymoon, my editors at Slate took down a throwaway joke that had been in the piece and issued a qualified correction, in response to what some commenters were calling plagiarism. I emailed my editor after I saw this and asked what was up, and he emailed back quickly and seriously -- he would've gotten in touch with me, but figured (reasonably) I'd be out of touch while on my honeymoon. The whole exchange was good-terms, if not good-times, throughout, and I can only hope that his impression of the working-together experience was as positive as mine. It was embarrassing, but I've made mistakes before in print and dealt with it, and it didn't seem or feel like a big deal -- a botch I wish hadn't happened, obviously, but just that. It helped, of course, that I knew it was an accident and not a conscious thing, but while I'm really happy with the piece that resulted, and proud of it, I have spent a lot of the time since then wondering how big a deal I should consider this to be.

I have been and will be accused of a multitude of writerly sins, and I'll be guilty of a lot of those. My worst-ever mistake as a professional freelancer involved a toxic combination of excessive credulousness and hubris, and it involved this piece, and I can't really write about it right now. It was very embarrassing and I still feel very badly about it. But I've made other mistakes: I get little things factual wrong in the Daily Fix on occasion, and of course I can be strident and over-digressive and overlong and whatever else. These are all issues with Me the Person as well as Me the Writer, and so I can't say I was necessarily the most surprised to find them cropping up/fucking up in my work life. Plagiarism, honestly, is just not something I'd ever even considered as a potential issue.

What had happen was: a little joke in the Slate piece was, as commenters pointed out, fairly similar in structure to one made by Wired's Brian Raftery in this piece about The Asylum, the low-budget, knockoff-intensive movie studio I wrote about in Slate. I read Raftery's article in the print edition of Wired -- because I'm one of those (old) people that still gets magazines in the mail -- and probably should've read it again before doing the piece, if only so that whatever of Raftery's piece was latent in my unconscious would've been less latent and therefore would also have been less actually and embarrassingly present in the piece. I didn't, and I didn't, and I didn't, and the next thing you know: an embarrassing coda to a piece that felt, in just about every other regard, like something of a win. I know I didn't do wrong, here, and my editor believes that too, and so while it's embarrassing and frustrating to have screwed up, I'm not tearing myself up inside over it. Or not over just this.

But it's a part of something bigger that has been nagging at me for awhile. There's very little in the way of unambiguous victories, from my experience, in freelance writing. Write a great piece you're proud of? Terrific, send it to your friends and parents and don't spend all 300 of those dollars in one place/portion-of-rent-check. Write something for money you don't care as much about? How proud you must be. And so for the emotional sustenance a writer needs, from readers and from him/herself, I'm left with the things I don't get paid for. When it comes to satisfaction on my own terms, I have the novel, which might yet pay, and the stuff for CSTB and The Awl and here. That's not a living, obviously, but it's the stuff that makes me feel most creatively alive, and so I need it. I'd hoped, when I tried to make a career of this, that somehow all of the above could share the same space -- enough money coming in from the work I care about to make possible work I care even more about, with stuff I don't care about picking up the slack. It's not happening, and that's vexing. It'd probably be less vexing if the pieces I was proud of didn't come with corrections and semi-retractions on them, but that's on me. The whole deal kind of is, as is solving this problem. Anyway, yeah: enjoy the Slate piece. I did.

The Pwn Collector, or My Uncollectible Works

The idea behind this little sitelet is, in the abstract, practical. You see the other writers out there, and what have they got that I don't have? For the most part, the answer is a Tumblr, although often "good clothes," "health insurance," and "better professional stories than my 'Turns out Hilton Armstrong is a total gentleman'" offerings. But for the most part -- because some of my shirts are okay, and my sister is a doctor and can usually consult on should-I-get-this-lanced questions, and because there will thankfully always be a market for Hilton Armstrong anecdotes -- the answer is a Tumblr with their name on it.

And it's a good thing to have. You can plug your work and link to things you like (and presumably host videos of your parents' dog) and it's all very current. It just always seemed to me like Tumblrs weren't for writing, and I am about using lots of words. I'll leave the x-treme short form prose to the experts. There may be a time when I get a Tumblr, and then I'll post links to Jeff the Brotherhood songs (because they're excellent) and three hyperlinked sentences from an article somewhere, but considering how 2006 Blogspot is, I wouldn't expect that for at least another few years. Anyway I just wanted to say that those are the reasons why I do not have a Tumblr and that argument is what this website is here to communicate and so I thank you for your time. No, wait.

Actually, salient as all that was, the purpose of this post was to kind of flesh out the purpose of this website, and what kind of feels like the impossibility of it actually fulfilling that. All those Other Writers have Tumblrs because it's good to have something on the internet with your name on it. The idea of the site being to have someplace where people can go to check out your work, and the internet of course being a A Terrifying Mall Of Screaming And Pornography That Is Inside Your Computer.



And so while I'm aware that all this is a good idea, it's strange -- in putting it together and trying to go back and put my best writing stuff together -- to note how much of that work is either not for sale in The Terrifying Mall or was dated seemingly the moment it went up. Over the last couple of years alone, to take one saddening instance, I've had my name on probably a couple hundred thousand words of prose in various venues, and yet you wouldn't necessarily know that to look at the feature links on the right. And yet most of those 200,000-odd words -- fucking ouch, there, by the way, because it's not like I have crappy shirts because I can afford better shirts and choose not to buy them -- are not exactly the sort of thing one can link to on one's personal living-resume internet website.

The not-available stuff isn't any great loss, necessarily; I wish there were links to some of the articles I wrote for the now defunct Fly Magazine (which was run by this excellent lady and could've been pretty cool if it hadn't run out of money), but I suppose I could scan some stuff. The 3,000 word pieces I wrote for a trade magazine called Dermatology Business Management -- on topics like picking the right aesthetician for your (dermatology) practice -- paid well and were surprisingly enjoyable but also feel like a dream, were never available on the internet, and would almost certainly be so dull as to induce vertigo in anyone who didn't 1) write them or 2) need advice on hiring an aesthetician for his/her dermatology practice. So those are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry. But they're a very small part of my uncollected and seemingly uncollectible work.

I sort of don't know where to start with this stuff. I write the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix sports blog/column three or so days a week, every week, and have for over a year. There's even an unflattering WSJ-style stipple portrait of me on the site:

Which on the one hand "Good Evening Ladies And Please Check Out My Stipple Portrait" and on the other hand Jesus Christ look at the size of my jaw in that thing. But that image aside, this is a huge part of my typing life (if an oddly small part of my financial earnings) and it's essentially dated a day after I put it all together. Like, I think I did a good job rounding up the coverage on those non-allegation allegations of steroid use by Raul Ibanez last year, but at the same time, the non-what what of what by whom? And the Daily Fix I wrote about those creepy peephole pictures of Erin Andrews is apparently the most-read Daily Fix in history ever by a factor of a million, but that's because people on the internet are just living nightmares (the comments section had to be shut down less than an hour after the post went up). And I am doing these a hundred-plus times a year. I really like some of them a lot, and may someday put together a greatest-hits thing -- again, for professional purposes, not because I think anyone needs to read about The Crisis of Officiating in the 2009 UEFA Champions League Semifinals -- but they're not evergreen.

The same can be said of my writing at the sports blog Can't Stop The Bleeding, which is really just an awesomely wonderful site run by the insanely smart and impressive and gracious Gerard Cosloy, but which I increasingly use for writing that's both more passionate and personal and more hilariously dated than anything else I've written. It's good if you want to see how pissed I was about Jorge Sosa blowing a late-season Mets game during their 2007 flame-out, but... yeah, that sentence kind of concludes itself.

Even leaving out all the baseball and basketball cards I've written -- the most literally collectible and literarily transient writing I've ever done -- a great deal of what I write is explicitly built not to last. I worked until 3am or later for MLB.com last year, typing furiously about things happening in baseball games that were notionally of significance to fantasy baseball owners, and almost drove myself insane doing it, and now every single one of those (unbylined) words is gone forever: Juan Pierre's 2-for-4, two run, two steal game of May 15, 2009 is the very definition of old, and the very definition of not-news. But, again, a great many hours were spent on all that.

Sic transit everything, I guess. The whole post could've been those last few words and some hyperlinks, but then I wouldn't have had a chance to address The Tumblr Issue and put up that Everything Is Terrible link. Actual professional stuff -- that is, stuff that actually aids in this site's ostensible purpose, rather than turning it into a Livejournal called "l i v i n g i n w o r d s" -- is coming soon, I promise.

Oh, Hello

Relax, everyone.

I am listening. I have heard the people of the Internet -- the entire Internet, even YouTube commenters, who are not actually people, strictly speaking -- crying out for a one-stop venue for all things related to words that I type about stuff. These words are currently scattered all over the Internet, a blanket of self-indulgent parentheticals and mildly unexpected adjectives coating the information superhighway like so many cast-off, mushed-up cigarette butts. There are blog posts and features and blog posts the length of longish features. There's a lot.

There are anguished musings about Gary Matthews Jr. (at Can't Stop The Bleeding) and there are less-anguished musings about, like, Friendster (at Slate). And there's also me on New Hampshire Public Radio talking about Friendster. No one has ever asked me how I feel about Gary Matthews Jr., blessedly, but you're getting the idea: there are several years of my professional life that are just out there, diffuse and dispersed and lurking down in The Google Search beneath results about Diamond Dave and David Roth the Coin Magician Who Compulsively Says 'Thank You' After Everything and David Roth the Folk Singer and so on. It's a lot of ground to cover, what with all the anguish and the musings and the aforementioned parentheticals and adjectives and such.

I'm going to try to do some of that covering, here. I'm under no illusions about there being a legion of Roth Completists demanding access to the blog I set up for my old Athlon football previews -- although -- or the scab-picking but sadly prescient fake Obamacare satire blog I briefly attempted. But that stuff does exist, and it's silly if I don't do my best to put it all together. Over coming days I'm going to try to round up most of my clips and get them all in line. At which point I will have a sort of living, breathing resume for all to read! Or something.

Also, I'll finally have a place to host videos of my father playing with his new puppy. You basically can't be barefoot in my parents' kitchen anymore because it's so full of things the dog likes. Whenever I go home to visit I'm constantly stepping on giant dinosaurian pork-roast bones and sticks the dog brought in from outside. As if the dog remembers that stick, and would be upset if that stick wasn't right there on the floor, causing me to turn my ankle.



In future posts, I will perhaps go into my jealousy of the dog, because it is cuter than me and allowed to bring sticks into the house.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Watch this space, I'm going to do more soon/eventually.