Unaware of the fact or fiction section of the Watford Public Library

I feel a little bit bad for Mike Daisey. Slightly on a personal level, mainly because he's a neighbor of mine. I think I had a brief bodega discussion with him once, a long time ago, around the time maybe he first moved into the neighborhood, definitely after a run of that Dog Years thing finished, and it was reasonably amiable, but it didn't lead to any kind of connection or even acknowledgable acquaintance. So after that I would see him around the neighborhood and I'd think, "Oh, there's that guy," and then, on this past Sunday evening, I saw him getting out of a cab on Court Street, and I thought "Ooh, there's THAT guy," which was an interesting phenomenological experience I guess. 

But on balance, I have to say I'm kind of on the side of the outraged or at least irritated. Although I'm not inclined to get on board with Jack Schafer's tedious continuation of his largely ginned-up"what's good for Stephen Glass should be good for A.J. Liebling" argument. And when a guy as thoroughly smug and prolix as Michael Woolf is telling me "never mind the facts, focus on the writing," he's just giving me another good reason to ignore him. But even given the ostensible porousness of formats that Daisey is citing in order to absolve the fact that he just made shit up, I think he's being pretty goddamn disingenuous, and his crouching behind a "cause" is not likely to help him or his cause a whole lot in the long run. Daisey's case does differ from James Frey's largely in that he made shit up for a larger purpose, rather than to make himself look more badass/sad/pathetic; and the fact that Frey talked so much shit about other writers before his sins were discovered made his fall rather uniquely satisfying. One thing that makes the Daisey case so, um, fascinating for me is my own experience of having stood by and vetted the publication of a piece of writing that I was fully aware contained a large number of factual inaccuracies, and that I convinced the legal department of the publication's parent company that doing this was a good idea. 

This is an odd thing to admit because of something that I'm reasonably sure a lot of this blog's readers are unaware of. That is, while I was at Premiere magazine, besides writing film reviews and occasional thumbsuckers and editing top-drawer literary types, I also worked on a number of investigative journalism pieces and such. One of my first editing jobs was shepherding a piece by Mark Ebner about the actor Peter Greene's struggles with drug addiction. This was a more sensitive piece than I was even aware of at the time, but that's another story. I also edited all but one of the pieces John Connolly (of late working for Vanity Fair) wrote for Premiere between 1997 and 2001, including a well-known article called "Arnold the Barbarian." One piece I worked on with John was so fraught that it took eight months between pitch and publication and was punctuated by regular confabs with very expensive lawyers. Lots of them.  My attitude toward this kind of work was not atypical of an individual of my temperament at the time, e.g., I could be (and was) a complete fuckup in every other respect of my personal and professional life, but THIS I was going to get RIGHT. And I did, even while overplaying my only-guy-in-a-roomful-of-suits-wearing-a-Tex-Avery-t-shirt schtick.

And it's here that I'd like to direct the reader to a piece I wrote a little less than a year ago about David Foster Wallace's posthumously published unfinished novel The Pale King. If you're disinclined to read the whole thing, as they say, a particularly pertinent passage is below: 

Reading Wallace or someone like him assert that a clear fiction is in fact “really true” brought to mind working with him on the piece that was initially published as “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment, It Turns Out” in the September 1998 edition of Premiere, and then printed in expanded and unbowdlerized form under its original intended title “Big Red Son” in the essay compilation Consider The Lobster. Here is a passage from the beginning of the piece:

Let us not forget Vegas’s synecdoche and beating heart. It’s kitty-corner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The granddaddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, carpeting you can pass on without contusion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceilings, clerestories, barrel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self. It’s breathtaking. The winter’s light rain makes all the neon bleed.

Consider for a moment the phrase “synecdoche and beating heart.” (By the way, the "Rome, conquerer of its own people" riff is repeated, as it happens, in The Pale King.) Wallace just dashes it off, but its implications are kind of mind-boggling, particularly because of the use of “and” instead of “or.” We’re not just talking about a part referring to a whole, but that part being the driving, essential organ of the whole. It’s significant, but that phrase isn’t the reason I’m reproducing that particular passage; the reason is that one piece of data, that Caesars Palace contains “130,000 square feet of casino alone.” As it happens during the fact-checking process leading up to the publication of the article, we couldn’t verify that information. Dave didn’t give us a source for it, we couldn’t find a source, and so on. There were plenty of other pieces of data in the article that were entirely empirically verifiable for instance, the number of men that Stephanie Swift performs analingus on in Gang Bang Angels 1, and the number of gobs of spit she takes in the face from those men some moments after. You could sit there in front of the TV watching the tape and just tick them off. But the actions and the tales told by the fictionalized composite characters Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba (based on myself and Evan Wright, then writing for Hustler magazine and quite miserable about it) were not entirely above board in the actual fact department; the whole bit about Hecuba getting throttled by porn star Jasmin St. Clair and his “special autotint trifocals” disappearing into the “forbidding décolletage of Ms. Christy Canyon, never to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again” becoming a source of particular concern and confusion for our unusually helpful and cooperative legal department, members of which I did not pester with rationales concerning postmodern practice or tensions between provable fact and larger truth or any such thing but merely said, “The author of this piece is a really big deal, it’ll be okay.”

I admit that I was not in fact QUITE that cavalier with the Hachette legal department when they raised an eyebrow at the piece that was then, and would again be, titled "Big Red Son." The two top vetters in that department were astute general readers as well as sharp legal minds, and they were well aware that, say, glasses that sink into a woman's exposed cleavage do not dematerialize, that even in the context of a career in adult entertainment no individual named Richard Filth would go by "Dick Filth," and so on. They were kind of nonplussed by the piece in general; "What IS this?" is a question I heard early on.

I've discussed the fact-checking process on the piece with someone who's working with D.T. Max on that writer's forthcoming biography of Wallace, and I don't want to step on her or his or its toes, but the Daisey affair reminded me of working on this article for a bunch of reasons, not least of which was that Daisey's protestation "I'm not a journalist" is something I heard a lot from Dave during the process. (The variant was "I'm not a reporter." By the same token, I've never seen anyone, journalist/reporter or otherwise, take observational notes with the furious intensity with which Dave did.) The way we were able to get the piece published in more or less the form in which it was written was, frankly, via what some would call collusion. The fact of the false first-person-plural narrative voice was a function of the article bearing a dual pseudonymous byline. Now, Premiere had agreed that Wallace was gonna write and publish the piece under a pseudonym anyway, so two psuedonyms wasn't a big deal. As for the fictional constructs/characters named "Harold Hecuba" and "Dick Filth," adult-industry journalists who were "guides and docents" for Matt Rundlet and Willem deGroot (for such were the dual pseudonyms of Wallace); well, as I note above, they were stand-ins for Evan Wright (the future Generation Kill author was, again as I note above, then at Hustler magazine) and myself. And Evan and I made it very clear to legal that we were not going to object in any way to our characterizations by proxy, as it were. I don't think we were asked to sign anything to that effect; I was, after all, a full-time employee at Hachette, and Evan aspired to freelance for Premiere. But I do remember having to reassure legal more than once that Evan and I were "cool."

Still, there were at least two things in the piece that could conceivably be considered as potentially actionable, the first being the above cited throttling of fictional construct Harold Hecuba by real albeit pseudonymous porn performer Jasmin St. Clair. Well, Evan had in fact been accosted in a similar fashion and for the cited sin of having gone public with St. Clair's get-rich-quick scheme concerning pornographic gumball machines, so when push came to shove he said he'd be willing to back that up. The other possible problem point was this statement attributed to Dick Filth, pertaining to the actual integrity of the AVN Awards themselves: "The best perception, backed up by tons of anecdotal evidence, is that they are totally, totally fixed and rigged." Now you don't need a law degree to ascertain just how much legal wiggle room is already built into that statment. But just in case, I believe I was gonna volunteer to be the fall guy on that one. Although my default first position in the event of any saber-rattling on the part of the aggrieved parties was gonna be to say, "Oh, come on, guys." (Some kinda-sorta saber-rattling DID in fact come to pass, and a person at the Wallace-enthusiast website The Howling Fantods was kind enough to preserve it; see here.)

And hand-in-hand with the invention was a particular conscientiousness. Wallace had an innate understanding of the margins he was playing with. When Evan pointed out that the pseudonymous porn performer Vince Vouyer had a real name that was, in a sense, even more ridiculous than his stage handle, Dave was dobermanesque in his determination to pin down that said name WAS in fact John LaForme, although this was a group effort and I do believe it was Evan who was able to track down the relevant documentation. When the piece was making the transition to book form, Dave was crestfallen/irritated at having learned that he had possibly misidentified one of the characters on the Felliniesque Adult Software exhibition floor as director Gregory Dark, and hedged a bit by mentioning Jeff "Hatman" Marton, and so on. There's also the matter of the fleeting moments that he got right in a way that's kind of scary, as in this passage: "Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affect the air of a Mafia don at the Sands' bar's nightly porn parties, extending his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance." Yes, I was there, standing next to him (Wallace), we saw it, and it was exactly that. And on the other hand, no, Dick Filth wasn't drinking Grand Marnier, it was Jack Daniel's, and he didn't HECTOR any waiters for change, that he remembers, and dozens of other not-quite little details that didn't actually happen.

But for all that, well...I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right. We stand by our story.  

Comments

[George V]

Now then what's going onward Christian Barnard Woolley jumper music critic Glenn?
#WatfordisfromEngland

[Not David Bordwell]

So you played Jim Fingal to DFW's John D'Agata, Glenn? What are the chances that the Mike Daisey affair would break so soon after The NYT Book Review and NPR spilled ink/bled air on The Lifespan of a Fact, anyway?

Interesting (to me) sidenote: St. Patrick's Day, after the quite uncomfortable what with all the silences This American Life postmortem aired in Chicago, we just happened to catch up with Burke and Hare, the latest John Landis effort -- which begins with the title card, "This story is true" before continuing, "Except, of course, for the parts that aren't."

Two thoughts arise from this juxtaposition of journalistic and filmic arts: 1) Is Ira Glass correct to assert his assumption as "normal" that people expect monologists who say "this happened to me" to mean they have not embellished? Did anyone check with the pharmacist or whoever the day Spalding Gray walked in from his movie set with full-on slashed-wrist gore FX to make sure that went down as related? and, 2) Does it really the ruin the artistic achievement to start a monologue with a Landis-style wink? Would ita killed Mike Daisey to do so? Apparently it woulda killed D'Agata, crusader against essaycide.

[Dusty]

I think one of the chief problems with Daisey's embellishments — at least in the stage production; I haven't heard the TAL episode — is that by the end of the show, he adopts a tone of incredibly righteous anger. There is no winking involved — explicit or otherwise. It may start out as a monologue, but it's a sermon by the time it's over, complete with proselytizing calls to action and a bullet-pointed handout.

In retrospect, his preaching is all the more irritating and troubling because of the deception.

[jbryant]

Speaking of sermons, the pastor of the church I attended in my youth once told a story about coming across a boy holding the string to a kite. Even though he couldn't see the kite, he knew it was there because he could feel it tugging on the string. Of course, the pastor said this was also a metaphor for faith in God -- you might not see him up there, but you feel him in your soul, or whatever.

I immediately recognized this little anecdote as the same one I'd heard Pop Staples relate on the Staple Singers' version of Paul Kelly's "God Can," from their great "Unlock Your Mind" album. Now for all I know, it didn't originate with Kelly or Pops either, but it really threw me off for the pastor to tell the story in the first person, as if he had actually experienced it. I didn't ask him about it though. I suppose he would've offered some rhetorical justification. But I felt his choice made the story a lie rather than a parable (or both, I guess).

[Petey]

"But for all that, well...I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right. We stand by our story."

Good enough for you and Wallace, good enough for Daisey.

Woolf didn't write the proper apologia, but a quite valid one exists out there. The facts were pretty much true to the facts on the ground, and Daisey doesn't just have the spin skills to explain his storytelling conflations to an Ira Glass indignantly proclaiming "I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview."

God save journalists, and god save folks who are trying to tell a true story from somewhere else than the "normal worldview". Time to re-watch 'The Conformist'.

[Todd Murry]

New-ish reader and Wallace fan. Became aware of you from Wells' site (FYI, mea maxima culpa, etc.).

Don't know if you do New Inquiry (they rub me wrong sometimes) but all but the last few graphs of this: http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-jimmy-mcnulty-gambit/ kind of expressed how I felt about this deal. The last few get to "late capitalism" for me. Their Stalker/Zona peice isn't too bad either: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/stalkerzona/ .

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Petey: Just for the record, a lot of the stuff Daisey said didn't just not happen to him, it didn't happen at all. If you listen to "Retraction", there's quite a few facts that are just wildly untrue, including armed guards at factory gates, underage workers all around, and cameras in people's bedrooms.

[StephenM]

Just to say: Wallace's piece is brilliant, and it's gratifying to know just how rigorously fact-checked it was, but while reading it it's pretty obvious that it should be taken with a grain of salt. The names clearly aren't all real, and the satirical--indeed, hilarious--tone throughout makes it difficult for anyone to claim to believe it to be an eyewitness, CNN-style work of reporting. At the least, it's a Tom Wolfe-New Journalism kind of thing, and most people understand that those things are coming from a person with a point of view out to describe things with a certain amount of embellishment, even if that embellishment never quite goes outside the bounds of provable fact.

The Daisey thing sounds pretty much like a you-are-there actual report, even if it's also kind of a travelogue, and there's clear indignation and implicit political and legal action warranted from what he said. He wanted to have real-world impact from this, and he lied not just in misrepresenting his exact role to an audience, but directly to his producers/editors, and that's inexcusable.

To put it another way: Wallace was mostly just observing people at an event and satirizing them, Daisey was making accusations about the most popular company in America and the way it makes its products. If you're gonna do the second, you need to be able to back up your facts.

[andy]

I felt sick listening to the Daisey piece the first time around, bc his self-conscious, self-infatuated storyteller cadences and choices were so trite and obvious to me...Several times he drew out a long pause and I was able to finish the suprise ending of his sentence for him. (After he echoed me verbatim the audience would respond with delight, of course.) I still didn't suspect truth bending, although I think may have anticipated the "it's a kind of magic" tag (but can't recall). In retrospect that line especially seems too pat, and given my over-awareness on his packaging of his material, I was not a whit surprised when the news broke. Also, what Spalding Gray got up to in his private time is not the same as lobbying human rights accusations. What no one mentions to Daisey is that even though workers that fit his descriptions have existed *somewhere,* his telling us that he kept tripping over them wherever he turned implies to the listener that there are far more rampant abuses than actually happen. You can't decide to inflate numbers because the reality will insufficiently outrage people--then they are outraged about a fiction, and his rationale for neatly collating things into his one experience goes out the window.

[PaulJBis]

It's not just about what he said or didn't say in his monologue. The problem is that Mike Daisey has also written op-eds and given interviews, and in those, *out of character*, has made the exact same claims: "I met a group of workers poisoned...", etc. Which, we now know, isn't true.

[JREinATL]

"Daisey's protestation "I'm not a journalist" is something I heard a lot from Dave during the process. (The variant was 'I'm not a reporter.'...)"

And this is why all the blame for this incident lies squarely in TAL's lap, not Daisey's. Even as a long-time admirer of TAL, it made me somewhat sick to listen to Ira's constant "You lied to me" badgering. I haven't seen Daisey's show or seen any of his material in other media, but it seems like the errors that he's being faulted with—narrative compression, character consolidation, and re-arranging timelines—are pretty common narrative/theatrical devices, making it 100% on TAL's shoulders to verify his story or spike it if they couldn't.

Glenn and Dave did it right, and it sounds like Ira should have called Glenn to learn how to deal with journalism coming from a "not a reporter."

[Zach]

For me, what's so galling about the Daisey Affair is that he was ostensibly meaning to illuminate a very real problem. There shouldn't have been a need to embellish; it's obvious that workers at Foxconn (and many, many other offshore firms) are being harmed by their working conditions. If he had done the work, and argued his case cogently, he could have struck a good, honest blow for a worthy cause. Time will tell if this really damages the cause of fair trade, but for right now it seems to have significantly muddied the water.

And yes - no one reading Big Red Son would confuse it with pure journalism, even those unfamiliar with Wallace. Daisey's piece was structured and presented as muckraking journalism, which makes his "creative license" claim absurd.

[Bilge]

Typically late to these momentous cultural events, I spilled some "ink" on this issue here:

http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2012/04/to-thine-own-self-be-truthy-on-facts.html

Really, though, it was mostly an excuse to mention F FOR FAKE, which this whole zeitgeisty focus on fact and fiction seemed expressly designed to do.

(Be warned, though, I say nice things about Dan K. in my post.)