“What’s exciting about writing for magazines is the knowledge that the game can be won or lost in the last two minutes, as the copy editor jams up the rhythm of the opening paragraph, or the fact-checker discovers that the opening scene of your article was described with a somewhat different slant in one of your notebooks. Writing, of the kind that appears in novels and poems, aspires to aesthetic perfection-to the formal beauty of a painting or a photograph. Writing for magazines is like playing sports. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, but sooner or later, you may experience a few moments of perfection in the middle of the scrum.”

- From the preface of Only Love Can Break Your Heart


Samuel’s publisher, The New Press, actually put out two of his books at the same time. I quoted the one, a remarkable collection of magazine pieces from his fifteen years of journalism and the other is The Runner, a book that seems to encapsulate Samuels as an author. His writing is obsessed with peeling away the layers of identity that people and nations construct around themselves. Informative, funny, dark and slightly offbeat…and while he tends to write about himself as much as he does the subject at hand, somehow it all manages to work. The subject at hand in this case being one James Hogue, a grifter for the ages who got himself into Princeton under the pretext of being a teenage long-distance runner slash literary genius who read Plato by starlight. He was, in fact an ex-convict who was pushing thirty.

I am to meet the author at his office, which turns out to be right off the Brooklyn Promenade, first floor of a lovingly renovated Brownstone. The room is warm with Oak and seems like the perfect place to write…anything. In another life-perhaps one in which I paid my student loans- I could imagine myself working in a room like that. He is engaging and more than happy to talk, which I realize will be a problem since I only brought one tape. I apologetically borrow a pen in case I have to take notes and he suggested we go sit out on the Promenade. It is a beautiful day, and I am never anywhere near this particular corner of Brooklyn, so I am more than happy to acquiesce. As we walk Samuels tells me something that I remember reading in his book, a story about realizing that there was un-spooled audiotape caught in the branches of trees all around New York. He points up and sure enough there is some tape in the arms of a tall tree, as well as what looks like a cardigan. We find a comfortable bench and start talking.



Your introduction to Only Love Can Break Your Heart was intriguing to me. It read almost like a eulogy, perhaps for the writer you were but also it seemed like a dark mediation on the future of that sort of magazine writing and books and reading in general. At points you seemed to be saying, “I’m publishing these things now and getting out before the roof caves in.”

Yeah, I mean, obviously it is very easy to conflate one’s own moods with external realities, especially if you’re a writer with a strong subjective bent like myself. But I don’t think that what I wrote was the product of my own momentary dissatisfactions, my career has never been better, so there is an irony to that. But I do feel that the world I entered when I was twenty-five doesn’t exist anymore; I feel like the magazines have gotten dumber. I feel like the people who edit them have gotten much less ambitious. I feel like the people who write for them are scared…

Of what?

They are scared because there is so much less room for them to do what they do. There is a lot less tolerance and patience, articles are much shorter, it is harder to make a living. I think that everybody responds to their environment and I think that this environment has gotten a lot less welcoming for people who want to do literate, voice-heavy narrative non-fiction. You can tell by looking at the length of the articles…and you talk to the editors-in-chief at these magazines and they will tell you, “Oh that’s not true, we still air it out a few times a year” [laughs]. There’s a ritual component to these magazine pieces, they are part of the rituals of the literate culture. And this culture is shrinking, even look at a magazine like The New Yorker, which is the only one of these magazines that under any definition turns a profit. It does have the Conde Nast empire and ad staff and Conde Nast offices to fall back on. One could certainly question how healthy they would be without that support, but I still think that obviously it’s a healthy magazine. David Remnick’s done a very good job of finally making it profitable again, and they certainly run long articles. But…if you look at those articles they are, by and large, long news magazine articles. The expectations that they make about a reader being able to step out—even for an hour—out of their comfort zone of what they saw as the leading subject on Drudge a couple hours ago. There is no confidence in that. Something has to already be established as a news story, the narrative must already be known, it has to refer to people and places that the reader has already had certified for them of being of importance and worthy of their time. And the way that it is written and constructed can’t make people uncomfortable for even a moment…or it’s over. Now, that’s still a magazine article, it’s still written at a higher level than Newsweek and Time and it’s still long but its hard to argue that a lot of the soul has gone out of that even if some of the form remains the same. And if you start looking at other magazines it’s not even like you have to read these subtleties, the articles are simply five thousand words long when they used to be twenty thousand words long. The [Atlantic Monthly], which is to me, a magazine that, to me, has shown the most ambition in figuring out how a magazine can fit together with the web. David Bradley, the publisher, has a background in the Internet and he has shown a tremendous amount of creativity in setting up this Atlantic website and in trying to establish a kind of “Atlantic World”. Something that will include bloggers, the magazine on the website, blah, blah and when you look at those various elements; it’s the web not the magazine that is…driving things forward. If you compare the length of a feature article in The Atlantic now to the length of one three years ago to the length of a feature ten years ago there is nothing subtle about that at all. And I am speaking as someone who is working on a feature for The Atlantic right now and is very glad to be doing it and the editors there are smart and blah, blah blah, but they will tell you right away, our top length for this thing is seventy-five hundred words and we will give you eight thousand, you know? [Laughs]



I mention, only half in jest that that doesn’t sound too bad to me and he laughingly agrees. But we work our way around to exactly what the Internet’s role is in what we both do, albeit on entirely different levels. Samuels points out that the Internet is “exerting it’s own gravitational pull” on both style and how people actually read. He also feels that writing for print and writing for the Internet are something completely different. To him, the Internet is a more literate and interactive form on TV, enjoyable and useful but certainly not the same thing as long form magazine writing.

The “written-ness” that makes a magazine piece have gravity and life of its own is actually bad Internet writing. If I take my Atlantic prose or my Harpers prose and try to put it on the Internet, it’s pompous, it slow, it’s ponderous…the Internet is the world of two sentence…”that blows” is an acceptable comment on something. “I’ve read this before” with no explanation is criticism…the virtues of long form magazine writing is getting crushed on two fronts. Aesthetically, with the preponderance of that kind of prose in people’s minds and financially, because these magazines are losing money.

I think the worst thing about it is the lack of a conscious acknowledgement of the repercussions of these changes and these decisions. It’s like people shopping at their local mom and pop’s until Wal-Mart comes to town. And for a while people are like “Don’t worry, Paul and Mary at the hardware store, we are sticking with you”. And then slowly but surely people start to realize that Wal-Mart is cheaper and more convenient and slowly customers start to thin out, neighbors stop dropping by because they feel guilty…

[Laughing] Oh yeah, “Paul and Mary’s was always dirty anyway, right?”

It’s the same thing as the music industry, people will never sort of look at the repercussions of what they are doing. People say “Oh, well I stole the album but they can make money from touring.” But you tour based on album sales, that how promoters know how much to pay you or even whether there are any fans. People are basically like “I’ll kill the goose with the golden egg, just because that will be more convenient and I’ll have all the eggs now, who knows what we will do tomorrow but I am sure something will work out without any sacrifices on my part”

Right, but this is the Savings & Loan crisis, this is the mortgage crisis, this is the fact that Americans don’t save money, this is the fact that magazines are dying. This is a social phenomenon of which these are symptoms.



I have friends who can’t be bothered to come out to see a movie; they would rather download it on bit torrents and watch it alone on their PC. Or I show up to watch the NBA Finals with my friends and they have their digital recorders on, waiting until ten-thirty to start watching so they can see the whole thing without having to watch the commercials. I tried to point out that for our whole lives we watched the game and when commercials came on we talked about other things, went to the bathroom, got another beer, smoked weed…what was the big problem?

I’m convinced that it has an effect on people like jet lag. I’m convinced that if you violate the space-time continuum and you watch the NBA Finals on fast-forward, your brain notices that you’re skipping things. And you get used to skipping things, and you lose the ability to experience actuality. You do pay a price…people lose the ability to see form. They lose the ability to sit in their own skin, and experience something. They lose a sense of where exactly they are in the space-time continuum. There’s a toll that that takes on your nervous system that is quite visible, you see this twitchy people walking around… moms at the playground with Blackberries. Now, I spend a lot of time with my kid and I know that it can be boring as fuck. But the specter of a population of distracted, twitching zombies is not really pleasant either. And you wonder what people are really going to gain from all this…people can’t transmit the quality of their experience, because they haven’t really sat with it and felt it. There is a detachment that comes with it; you can always kind of lay off your investment of time because you are always kinda somewhere else. Always talking to someone else while you’re fast-forwarding through the songs on the album you’re not listening to, while doing your email…smoking weed has it’s own drawback though. And I should know, I have plenty of experience in the matter.



We talk about weed, music and technology for a while, then about growing up in New York and he points out that he grew up right in this area before becoming a speck in the tide of white flight. In his case to New Jersey. We talk about the city then…and now. It’s a beautiful day, and the sun is beaming down, seemingly happy people striding purposefully down the promenade. He waves at one of them, who turns out to be the president of his Synagogue, out walking her dog. The conversation moves to Israel and from there, to the Holocaust and Liberia and the comparisons between the two “imagined” nations.

Another part of that parallel is that for two thousand years Europeans told the Jews, “You’re not Hungarian, you’re not French, get the fuck out of our countries and go back to Israel.” The same way they told the African’s that they weren’t white and would never be Americans, “Go back to Africa”.

The interesting part of that is that in the end, Adolf Hitler is dead but he did indeed solve the “Jewish question” for all of Europe. The Jews are gone now…they are all in America, Israel, South Africa. And now Europe is enjoying peace and prosperity, with nary a Hebrew in sight, not too bad of a deal? I’m sure America wishes they could have gotten their “Negro question” gift-wrapped so well…

Well, you know what Europe got in exchange? Now they have a Muslim minority…Look at the Jew, what was the Jew? Why were the Jews kept alive? The Jews were Europe’s attempt to live with an “Other”, a “not us”, not Christian, not French, and how did they deal with it? They encapsulated them; they said “Oh, we’ll keep you alive because you are in too many of these Holy Books for us to just kill you all.” But we will persecute you and try to make you convert, we won’t let you own land, we’ll make you live in Ghettoes; that’s where the word came from. They were locked in at six o’clock; there were guards so their foulness wouldn’t contaminate anybody else. So they said “Okay, you can live like this. Because we cannot integrate you, we cannot accept you as human but we can’t kill you because our definition of what is human and our definition of what is faith somehow includes you in a way that makes us uncomfortable and we don’t like it but we can’t deny it, at the same time.” And so this problem sits in Europe’s hands for a thousand years or more until you hit Napoleon who opens up the ghettoes and says “The Enlightenment says that all men are equal and penning up Jews in Ghettoes is barbaric and now I am going to open it up”. Then Europe gets to work out this question of difference and it does so first…as it’s doing it overseas with people of different color skin who it must figure out how much better than simple beasts they are…it is also doing it at home with this other creature that has been living next to you for fifteen hundred or two thousand years but has never been accepted as human either. So they say “Alright, well if they dress exactly like us, kiss our idols, pay homage to the emperor, don’t talk about their religion, don’t do anything that makes us think of them as different, pay taxes, enlist in the Army…then maybe we can. But at the same time there is this tremendous split in these societies, in France or Austria, where half the society or more rejects this idea, and rejects it violently. And it is a part of politics, right-wing politics has a huge dose of anti-Semitism, throw out the Jews, throw them out of the Army, don’t let them vote, they are polluting our religion, our women, our faith…

Those sort of politics always need a scapegoat, if not the Jew it would have been the Roma or whoever.

Well, yeah. And so Hitler rises up and takes care of the problem. And of course the reality of Hitler is…everyone says, “Oh, it was Hitler!” It wasn’t Hitler. In those few countries where people really didn’t believe in murdering their Jewish neighbors, miraculously almost everyone survived. The reality is that the people who killed all the Jews were the people who lived in those countries. French people rounded up their neighbors, put them on trains, brought them to camps, shipped them off knowing full well what was going to happen to them. Italian people did it to the Italian Jews. In the east it was much worse, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the killing of the Jews was not Hitler’s least popular program in Europe…



Hahaha

And now [Europe] has a minority who instead of being a very small group of people who are very eager to acquiesce to the mores of the majority, they have a group of people, which is connected to a huge—1.6 billion Muslims in the world—a little harder to pick on them. They are much less eager to assimilate in ways that make European people comfortable and so, to my mind, the cosmic punishment for Europeans being unable co-exist with this relatively eager to please minority and insisting on wiping them out is that now they have a somewhat less eager to please minority who is much more numerous. Now they can work out their problems with being unable to recognize the humanity of people who aren’t exactly like them.


Boats are chugging by and the water somehow looks blue enough to be the Caribbean, at least from the bench we are on. We talk about the Jews’ attempts to solve their problems in Europe through assimilation and through communism, and how the failure of both made Zionism all the more real. Then we talk identity in general and in short order, Barack Obama in specific.

As someone who writes a lot about the invented nature of identity, whether it’s these broad categories about racial or ethnic identities or just personal stories, I love writing about people with double or triple identities, imposters, because we all make ourselves up in this way and then deny that it ever happened. Yet, when viewed from the outside the constructed nature of these stories is so plain that it’s funny. Barack Obama, to me is such an interesting figure and such an American figure, because his identity is so constructed. I mean, who is he? Barack Obama is a person who grew up partly in Hawaii, partly in Indonesia, his father who he didn’t have any memory of until he was an adult and went to seek him out, is a Kenyan man, his mother is a white person. His stepfather for eight or nine years is Indonesian. He’s never really lived in mainland America let alone had any participation, except as an intellectual construction, in the narrative of African people who were transported here as slaves. That’s not part of his family history but it became a necessary part of his identity first because his white mother told him “You are a black Afro-American man and that’s something to be proud of” and then because people were inevitably—not in Hawaii where the racial dynamics are different but in the mainland United States—going to relate to him as a Black American man. And he’s such a cerebral guy…for a politician, y’know? I don’t want to overstate the case and make it seem like he’s Ralph Ellison or anything but for a politician, he is someone who is especially attuned to writing. I mean, think of this guy right, you could just as easily construct a story about how he could easily be a rising bureaucrat in Indonesia, right? “I came to Indonesia with my stepfather, I went to schools here, I was educated overseas at Colombia University and Harvard and now I have come back to Indonesia to help build prosperity and democracy.” The story would be a little weird but on the other hand he went to school there…this is all because I like counter-factual history. You could see him as a high official in Indonesia; you could see him as a high official in Kenya…



I point out that the one line he definitely would not be able to cross remained the color line. Samuels laughs and says, “not in America”. But the little exchange has dropped us off right at the foot of his book The Runner and the story of James Hogue.

I wanted to publish a book like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s book. In my mind I had been writing these pieces for Harper’s and The New Yorker and they had been my attempt to… give an accounting from different perspectives and different places, this sort of patchwork portrait of America. The America I see. And, you know, I love the immediacy of long-form nonfiction for magazines. To me it’s the one original American literary form, it doesn’t exist in any other country and we need it. We need it because the country is so big and it changes so fast…and because the nature of identity [in America] is still so up for grabs. You don’t have this kind of journalism in France or China or in England because there isn’t the question of what are people like, what are they doing, who are we? People know the answers to those questions. If you start proposing new answers to those questions you are either a hopeless rube or you’re incredibly obnoxious. But here; the country is so young, so big, so spread out, geographically so diverse, it changes so fast that there is an authentic sense of “Let’s send someone out to Oregon and figure out what they hell they are doing out there”…so, to me, putting together a series of those encounters, inflected by my own feelings about what’s tragic about American life, this sort of sense of this sort of process of destruction…of freeing ourselves from the past, that being the source of this enormous protean energy like atomic fission. To me that is part of the secret of American invention and prosperity, in addition to the expropriation of things that belong to other people. But lots of people did that; the Spanish did that on a far bigger scale and yet their empire ended up as a dead letter that was fit only for comedy in Don Quixote, pretty fast. Why? Because the nature of Spanish society was incredibly rule-bound, class-bound, you are who your father was, who your grandfather was, everybody is a Catholic, everybody’s identity is fixed and immutable. America adopted a kind of opposite principle of creative destruction, which creates a tremendous amount of human pain and loss and confusion, trickery, lying and deceit…all at the same time as it produces this tremendous amount of energy and inventiveness. I thought I understood this American approach to history as something that was both very good and very, very bad. So I set off across the country to kind of look at it and understand it in this way and I love those journalism collections I read as a kid by Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and I wanted to write a book like that. And so, Only Love Can Break Your Heart came first because that was a book that I was writing for ten years as I went off to write these pieces. The way I kept myself sane was telling myself that I’m not just doing journalistic piecework at the behest of some editor, I’m coming up with these stories myself because I feel an internal need to understand these things on a certain axis. And that axis is in my mind, you know? And it has to do with this big abstraction called America. It’s like stringing beads and once I have enough, I will know that I am done and that I have strung enough beads. The necklace is done, all these beads are in the pattern that I want…and that just happened one day. I went to the Super Bowl and saw the Super Bowl with Stevie Wonder. Super Bowl XL, Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks.”


Which team were you rooting for?

I was rooting for the Steelers. The Seahawks? That’s not a real team. The Seattle “Seahawks”…don’t you mean Seagulls, what is a Seahawk? It’s like; I’m rooting for the Bill Gates team, it’s owned by his partner, Paul Allen right? I was a sucker for the whole Jerome Bettis, his last year, he was from Detroit. So yeah, I was there, always wanted to do a Super Bowl piece and I’m there with Stevie Wonder seeing this game and understanding it through the eyes of a blind man…



How does one acquire tickets to the Super Bowl with Stevie Wonder?

Like everything I do, it’s pretty much that once you latch onto an idea; the Super Bowl, it’s an American symbol; it’s who we are. Different sports have defined America at different moments and now it’s football, we are locked into this whole militaristic plan. It’s not a very inventive idea but there is something in it that I am thinking around. Then I get frustrated with whatever the out-of-the-box idea I have is and then I’m like “It’s really about Stevie Wonder coming home to Detroit, that’s what the story is about. That’s what I care about.” Because I’m like I’m going to the Super Bowl, I’m going to do a Super Bowl piece…but I don’t really care about the Seahawks or the Steelers or the Super Bowl that much either. But I’m feeling that there is some symbolic resonance in this, something that is vibrating in it for me. I love music and I am getting into the whole controversy of Motown and their place in music history and was Motown ultimately good or bad, and why are the Rolling Stones the main act. Then suddenly they put on Stevie Wonder too but he has to do the warm-up for the Rolling Stones [laughs]. And I’m kinda like “Okay, here is another conventional story; great black musician ends up being warm up act in his own hometown.” That’s a little more interesting to me than the Super Bowl, big abstraction but still, it’s kind of an out-of-the-box story that can write itself…then you get into Stevie Wonder, he’s blind, right, so what does race mean to him anyway? What does he know, what does he see, how does it feel to him? He’s absorbed all the music of Detroit, white, black, whatever, because he couldn’t see anything. Does Stevie Wonder like football? See, this is where it gets interesting because it’s not schematic. Does Stevie Wonder like football; does he like sports, what does he like about them? Does he follow them, does he care, what did he listen to on the radio growing up in Detroit? What is it like coming back to Detroit with his LA family and all his kids? What does he want to show them about Detroit? And there I was, I had my story. I found Smokey Robinson’s old guitar player who wrote all his music and talked to him in a crappy dressing room the night before the Super Bowl, watching Smokey Robinson and what he’s become. And suddenly I was in my world again, where in the end you can’t predict it, you can’t schematize it. It’s the weirdness of Smokey Robinson’s guitar player really getting no pleasure from life except for grape soda and there is no grape soda in the machine, you know? Then he tells me about how they called him Smokey because he loved Western, then he’s like actually that’s not true, he liked love stories and he used to go to the movies and cry [laughs]. And so I ask if other guys in Detroit used to do that and he says, “No, just Smokey”. Then it’s like, okay, that’s a bit more revealing about Smokey, you have the myth about Smokey but the real truth about Smokey is a seventeen year old kid who used to go see romances in the movie theater and cry. And you’re like okay, that’s not about anything predictable, that’s about the cosmic collision of everything. Of entertainment, race, of this guys heart and soul and music and this guitar player who was able to translate this into music. So I asked this guy “How did you write these songs?” and he’s like “I stole them, I stole them from The Rolling Stones, I love stealing music from the Rolling Stones.” And then he showed me how he took great Smokey Robinson songs and which ones he stole from Harry Belafonte and which ones he stole from The Rolling Stones. So this is great because it all comes full circle, the minute you have your good guy and your bad guy identified and your plot in which someone is the hero and someone is the villain, it turns upside down because no one is just one thing. Identity is not one thing, identity is not stable in America and there are too many different atoms colliding to ever come up with the schema of who is this thing, and who is that thing and who’s story is a direct outcome of this and that. Every time you’ve got a schema America will blow it up, something else will happen because the society thrives on this creative destruction and recombination. It’s a…historical phenomenon and it’s both scary and fascinating to live in the middle of it. When I finished that story I felt like…I’m done with this book, I’m done with this process. Part of it is age; I’m forty now, I still love to do it but the persona of being a young man with no attachments…I’ve got a kid now. It’s different, I’ve gotta admit that this book is over, there is a new me that is going to write new stuff, but this particular me who wrote this stuff…I’m a new person now, I don’t want to pretend to still be that guy. So I put that book out and found a publisher…I mean, nobody wants to put out collections of stuff. This thing ended up getting the front page of the LA Times book review and got a great review in the New York Times and ended up being editors choice-and nobody in New York wanted to publish this stuff because collections of magazine pieces…it’s like I want you to publish my emails [laughs]. So the publisher, New Press, there was a woman there who had written me a letter maybe four years before, saying “we would like to do a collection of your stuff”. I couldn’t remember her name; I sent a letter to the publisher saying “Someone at your publishing house wrote me a letter four years ago.” They were like “What, who are you?” [Laughs]



So I sent them some stuff and they thought it was pretty good. Then a month later they said they found the woman who wrote that letter, luckily she still works here. She was still excited about doing the book and came back to saying “Look, they want a stand alone piece, is there one piece you want to expand? We’ll publish the two books together; one will be like an LP version and the other like a Greatest Hits. So I said okay, but I never wanted to stretch out any of those pieces because they were what they were. I never liked the people that padded out a magazine piece into a three hundred-page book. But luckily, right at that time, with the Hogue story this whole other thing happened right then. My old editor at The New Yorker sent me a story from the Denver Post that he had been arrested again and there was this whole other chapter to his life. So I finally knew how the story ended because I never knew, would he turn out to be a good guy? Would he turn out to be a bad guy? Would he go have a successful career, get an education or would he go back to being a thief? That question of how he was going to turn out had always prevented me from taking it any further but now I knew, he was going to jail for fifteen years. He had made his choices and they had defined him in a way that he had not been defined for me before so I was like okay. I could go back and write this without feeling like a complete sellout and it interested me to go and find out who he was, who he became.


As we walk back to his office, where I have left all my stuff, I ask what he is working on now. Samuels smiles and says he is editing a big piece for The New Yorker that is about a friend of his who is a big medical marijuana grower in California. He starts telling me about going up into the mountains and trimming season, and then sees his son’s nanny headed up the block and excuses himself. I figure it’s time to do the same but let him know I look forward to reading that one too. On my way to the train I crane my neck looking into the trees.