by Mark Bibbins, Editor

The Trouble with the Way Things Are

We’re going to make a doll
and dress it like a clown. We’ll have it do things
like go to the grocery store
or watch old movies.

Let’s play a game
where you try to run away from me
and I have to close my eyes, we’ll say
and the doll will start running
toward us.

It’s election day,
and we all need uniforms.

Our dolls hate us for it.

I like it best
when it’s hard to imagine anything
but the outside temperature
covered in pixie dust, we tell them.

And their job is easy,
they just have to put their heads
in this lion’s mouth.

One of these days we’re going to kiss them
and then throw them from a train
as it crosses a gorge
with a little river far below.

Maybe they’ll have wings
they never told us about.

Regions More Imperfectly Known

A lifelike quality ensues out over the little box
of old coins. It’s always based on light and dark,
even when color is involved, passing into some other time
we think we might want to visit with a hypothetical cocktail
where we’re just as we are now
but with white hair. With that, the flag blew from the porch
and took a string of lights with it. The rows of mothers
started practicing shh as the babies sang for the hijacked games
the news tells us were never played back then.

We couldn’t tell if it was mostly topiary or something else
they were attempting,
with the specter of the industrial revolution rising from the fields
mumbling something distasteful
regarding race relations and the best use of children,
where they like all the expected things. And sometimes it does happen
just like in the movies. The big reveal,
with the fireworks down the street
as the cape is off the future again, and we step into it,
in wave-like Technicolor, and we’re the caught glimpse of how things will be
for a time just prior to some further time
of which we can’t conceive, surrounded by playing cards
and dominoes.

We should go outside and maybe pick some of this up,
or just hope for streamers. The lights are still on. They’d look pretty
under streamers, and we could stand above them
asking if these are different things now
or parts of one thing, maybe many parts and some still undiscovered
or otherwise parts of different things closely related
in proximity — by design or chance . . . We tried it as a diagram,
but the focus group lost their nerve
and never filled out the questionnaires. Now they can be seen
barking at the shrubs and burying pictures
of ex-presidents. Don’t bother them. They’ll not trouble
anyone. You can even join in
if you like. It’s important. We have to keep burying things
so someday they’ll know who we were.

John Gallaher is the author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001); The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, from Four Way Books; and Map of the Folded World, from The University of Akron Press. He’s co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press. Currently he’s working on a book of poems with G.C. Waldrep, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, forthcoming from BOA Editions.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!

The healing is coming, America. Just hold out until February. We’re going to make it through, I promise. [Via]

George Lee “Sparky” Anderson, one of Major League Baseball’s all-time greats, has died. Anderson managed both the Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds to World Series wins, and should also be remembered for his refusal to manage scabs in the wake of the 1994–1995 strike. Anderson was 76.

The lady at my liquor store is a delightful woman in her mid-fifties who always beams brightly and is never particularly concerned about whether or not you’ve got exact change.

I was down there just now and it was pretty crowded for the middle of a Thursday afternoon. (The fact that I know the retail patterns of liquor stores in the middle of a Thursday afternoon is an entirely different matter.)

“You’re busy,” I said to her.

She nodded her head.

“The last three days,” she smiled. “Maybe the weather.”

That’s as good an answer as any, I guess. We all have our reasons for why we drink: We’re depressed. We feel as if we haven’t succeeded in even the modest goals we’ve set for ourselves. We’re nervous. We over-analyze the most rudimentary aspects of life, imbuing each detail with imagined tragedy when the sheer facts of living are tragic enough. We feel awkward. We are sad and alone. We like the taste. Reasons, we have plenty.

But in weather like this, yes, we drink. Have you noticed how dark it is in the mornings now? You lay there in bed, coaxing yourself to give it another shot while totaling up the happinesses and disappointments in your time on this earth thus far. The disappointments never come up short, and the ledger is always balanced in the favor of sorrow. You sigh, you pull yourself up, you turn on the light, and it starts over again. It’s all gray and the dusk comes early. Some days it rains. It’s hard to even try.

Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend. I can’t ever figure out whether we lose an hour or gain an hour, but this is the one where you turn time back. In the end it doesn’t make a difference: That hour will catch up with you one way or another. So will the darkness. That’s how life is. That’s why we drink. Anyway, don’t forget about the clocks.

Photo by blastobutter, from Flickr.

“In high school I had a HUGE closet-homo crush on a guy named Mark. He was the super athletic jock and I was the invisible sad nerd. I discovered that he now runs a successful sports massage clinic in my hometown. I live 2000 miles away, I look nothing like I did then, and my name is different. I’m seriously considering booking a massage with him during my upcoming trip home. Am I way outside what is appropriate here? I know that this might sound really creepy.”

“Scientists often think of celestial bodies as roundish, and this obviously is not — it’s peanut-like. Mother Nature has once again pulled the rug out from under scientific ideas.”
 — Dr. Don Yoemans, who manages Nasa’s Near-Earth Object program, gets an early start on kowtowing to anti-science forces in the new Republican dominated congress, while discussing the very cool photos the Deep Impact probe has just sent back from it’s close pass by Comet Hartley 2 “We scientists are stupid,” he might as well say, “the government should definitely not give us any money or let us experiment on stem cells or listen to anything we say about global warming or anything.” Certainly, God knew the correct shape of the comet without sending a spaceship named after an Elijah Wood movie 23 million miles away from the earth to take pictures of it.

by Jessanne Collins

Remember that “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy and Ethel take jobs in the chocolate factory and the conveyor belt starts pumping out candy faster than they can pack it in the wrappers so they start stuffing their faces and cleavage with the excess, cowering from the intimidating factory matron? That’s kind of what it’s like to work for Demand Media, as I found out during a brief, ill-fated stint as a freelance copy editor at the 17th largest web property in the U.S. this summer.

The product coming down Demand’s virtual assembly line — 4000 “articles” a day with titles like “Hotels in Fayetteville, NC With Jacuzzi Tubs”; “Kosher Restaurants in Cluj-Napoca, Romania”; and “Hair Styles for Women Over 50 With Glasses” — is the empty-calorie “content” you’ve surely noticed cluttering your Google search results lately. If you’ve been keeping up with media musings on the Walmartification of service journalism by Demand — which runs sites like eHow and LiveStrong — and the other so-called “content farms,” like Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed, you know that this company’s business strategy is regarded as “audacious and controversial”; that their content is algorithmically designed be narrow in focus and broad in reach in order to maximize ad potential, and that it’s also generally kind of “crappy”; that by paying insulting rates to the freelancers who churn out this copy, they devalue the work of people who attempt to write for a living; and that they might not be as profitable as they like to say they are.

I knew all of this, too. But I have this compulsive condition, borne out of a cocktail of overoptimism, workaholism, and poverty, in which I troll MediaBistro, rampantly applying for freelance work. NB: without fail, a telecommute gig that advertises flexible hours, free-flowing assignments, and upwards of $20 an hour is too good to be true. This is a lesson I’ve personally learned and seem to be determined to keep personally learning until I retire. And it was in that spirit, one evening late last spring, that I put my skepticism on the same shelf as my discomfort with page-view whoring and the depreciation of my chosen profession, polished up my resume, and uploaded it to Demand’s resume-processing/world-domination cyberhub.

I should mention that I work at a magazine. As an editor. For money. Every day, and sometimes well into the night. This has been going on for about four years, and before that I worked in book publishing while I got a master’s degree in writing. Call me cocky, but I didn’t worry too much about meeting the professional prerequisites Demand thought necessary for the successful copy editing of five-point bulletins on topics like refurbishing vintage saxophones without the use of harsh chemicals. So, several weeks later, when I logged into the cyberhub and found that my application had been rejected, I felt less dissed than puzzled. Could it be that all 11,252 available copy editing positions Demand’s site boasted had been already been filled by applicants more qualified than I? If so, where on Earth was this modest-sized university’s worth of vastly experienced copy editors hiding?

About a week later, the exact same job posting popped up. I reread it carefully, and then cross-examined my resume, where I spotted my fatal flaw immediately. I was a masthead-certified “copy editor” for two full years before I took on a managing editor title. It seemed obvious that, in applying to be a straight-up copy editor, I should sell myself as a copy editor. So that was the title I’d highlighted on my resume. But duh! To qualify to be a Demand Media “copy editor,” the ad clearly stated, an applicant should have a “Minimum of 2 years as an Managing, Line, Features, Section or Associate Editor at a newspaper, magazine, book publisher or publication.”

So I made a tiny tweak on my resume. And by “tweak” I really mean tweak, not lie: I changed “copy editor,” which was my previous title, to “managing editor,” which is my current title, and lo and behold I had a positive response in my inbox within 24 hours. In retrospect, this was just my first brush with the habitually defensive posture Demand assumes in the face of some of the pointed criticism it regularly receives, such as that about the professional credentials of its “content creators.” (It was also emblematic of the way the whole corporation, not just the web content creation factory it manages, seems to be run by an algorithm.)

To wit: the response in my inbox was from a robot. The robot told me that it had decided to move me onto the next stage of the application process for further consideration. If I passed the editing test, I’d be expected to log at least 12 hours a week, minimum, and at $3.50 per article I could expect to pull in $20–30 an hour, with the potential for “higher-value” pieces down the line if I was a “top” performer. I managed to put off daydreaming about the bills I could pay with that extra $200+ a week for the hour it took to go over two short articles. Then I proposed a toast, with two hypothetical bottles of Charles Shaw, to the $7 I would have been paid for the feat if it was not just a test.

A day or so later, the robot booped at me again, welcoming me to the copy editing community. It told me I could prepare myself to hear from a human, who was to act as my human point of contact for questions that required human answers. In the meantime, perhaps I could familiarize myself with the content farm ethos and process and other details by reading these enclosed packets? One was a sprawling 14-page document labelled “A Quick Breakdown of the Copyediting Process,” the other a 12-pager called “Editor Guidelines.”

Meanwhile, there arrived the email from the Actual Human. At least, it purported to be a human. It had a human name, anyway, which we’ll say was Robert. “We work at an accelerated pace, and I don’t care if you send a note filled with typos or missing words, as long as I understand your intention. Don’t waste time copyediting yourself, and don’t fret when you spot a few gaffes in one of your communications,” Robert insisted. Also: “Important: When I do provide advice or render a ruling, please don’t reply with thank-you notes. I’m sure all of you were raised with respect for the traditional courtesies, but nearly 500 editors work alongside me, with that total growing weekly. Between this box and the Help Desk, I typically receive 200 queries a day. If each of you sent missives of gratitude, I’d never be able to dig out.”

Okaaaaay.

Robert would be available to answer any content crises that I should encounter, but would close his “answer desk” promptly on Friday afternoons, and I was not to email during this time. Also! Before I was to contact him with any questions, I was to read the section about contacting him in the attached guide; a different 14-page document from the one I’d previously received, this one enthusiastically entitled “Tips for Making a Magnificent Team Greater.”

One soul-crushingly hot day this past July, I set aside an afternoon to comb through this novellas’ worth of explanatory documents. Together, they amassed 40 pages that were sprawling and contradictory and confusing and repetitive and overwhelming and detailed but not really in quite the right way. I did not make $3.50 that day. In fact, I paid $3.50 because it was so freaking hot, I had to seek shelter in an air-conditioned, WiFi-equipped organic coffee shop, drinking organic iced coffee.

“We aren’t here to break news, lay out editorial opinion, or investigate the latest controversy,” Demand’s corporate manifesto declares. “Our audience tells us they want incredibly specific information and we deliver exactly that — in a style that the average consumer appreciates and understands.” In a nutshell, what the company does is to take informational demand and create, in virtual-sweatshop fashion, supply. Basically, if you plug it into Google — “Seasonal mating habits of poison dart tree frogs,” say — it’s got a good chance of eventually finding its way, via a proprietary set of content-churning algorithms, into a list of “topics” to be turned into an article or bullet-point list by Demand’s cadre of stay-at-home moms, independently accredited experts in something or other, magical writing elves, and junior high honors students. Just kidding! These people are professional freelancers, who make $15–30 per piece. Then, the next time you’re researching the seasonal mating habits of poison dart tree frogs, or anyone else on Earth is, since Demand’s properties reach 59 million users a month, said article will top out the Google results.

My role, as a “copy editor,” was roughly akin to that of Lucy’s with the candy wrapper. I was to be an intermediary between the web at large and the raw, reliably weird substance that results from the unlikely union of algorithmically created topic assignments and writers of, shall we say, widely variable competence. The actual nuts and bolts of style consistency and tone were part of it, of course. But they seemed to be peripheral to what I was actually being asked to do, which was to quality-check each piece of content according to a set of generic yet meticulously detailed standards. It fell on my shoulders to ensure not just that no dangling modifiers marred any directories of Jacuzzi-having hotels, but that the piece wasn’t plagiarized, written off the top of some Jacuzzi-having hotel aficionado’s head, based on obvious or non-information, referencing other websites, or plagued by any of the other myriad atrocities that web content can be subject to these days.

The overarching theme of the trilogy of how-to manuals, as far as I could tell using my admittedly rusty elementary reading comprehension skills, was “cut fluff.” A straightforward enough mission, and obviously, a necessary one. I was to ensure that as many sentences as possible began with vivid, actionable verbs. And that I could clearly picture in my head the step a reader was being instructed to take. If a piece was a total mess, I wasn’t supposed to spend time rewriting. Instead, I was to make very specifically worded comments (there were so many notes on phrasing said comments constructively and politely, I could only assume that this had been a point of prior contention) back to the author. The author then had a few days to turn a rewrite around. I’d review it again, and then I could approve it for publication or reject it if it was still too fluffy or sucky. At the time of publication or rejection I’d also rank the veracity of the article on a numerical scale, and have the opportunity to make notes about the author for internal review.

And then? Then I would get paid $3.50.

Given the intellectual investment I’d already put into this process, I judged, badly, that it was too late to turn back. So, I turned to my “queue” of editable articles, and chose the one that sounded like it had the least potential for tears or disaster. It was on crafts to do with preschoolers. Like, macaroni and yarn collages. I dutifully made sure all the verbs were actionable and that the instructions were vividly picturable and that none of the suggestions seemed totally implausible. Might have even gotten some subject-predicate agreement all up in there. Then there was a vaguery I was unable to resolve. It was about the orientation a yellow-painted paper plate should take before the adhesion of tissue-paper “sunbeams.” Wait, was the author saying that the paper plate was upside down at this point? Or was it right-side up!? The classic, dreaded copy ambiguity. I could not, for the life of me, picture it. So I queried the writer, who, some days later, clarified the issue (upside down!).

Accept. Rank. Ka-ching (or, I suppose, kerplunk).

It was an entire week before I could cajole myself to do another one. Then two more before I could do a third. I logged in every few days, full of good intentions, determined to make the most of the time I’d already spent learning the ropes. But then I’d scan a list of titles such as “How to Get Free Plastic Surgery” or “How to Unseal a Cremation Urn,” and I’d get depressed and have to go out on an urgent Charles Shaw run.

Meanwhile, there was a weekly deluge of informational emails from Robert, my human point person, which provided extra extra detail (“How to Hide an Erection” and “How to Be an Escort in Second Life” were deemed examples of inappropriate article titles that should be flagged for review; “At-Home Treatments for Anal Warts” might be okay), occasional heartfelt thanks, and sporadic missives that totally contradicted established paperwork instructions. In something approaching a tizzy toward the end of the summer, for instance, Robert insisted that people stop emailing to let him know they’d be out of town and thus not meeting their weekly quota; earlier we’d been instructed to do exactly that or risk lose editing privileges forever.

By this point it’s fair to say that the issues were mine, and that they were motivational in nature. Here’s the thing. Supposing that copy is composed by someone with a decent grasp of the English language, I can edit it rather quickly. But I’m also, admittedly, a bit of a perfectionist. It’s an industry hazard. I was beginning to seriously doubt that it would be ever be possible to churn out five of these puppies in an hour, which is what it would take to net $20, which was the lowest freelance editing wage I could begin to justify working for. All told, I found that I spent a minimum of half an hour on each piece — even on “How to Start a Successful Pop-Punk Band,” by far the cleanest and possibly most informative of the articles I edited — after editing, fact checking, querying, and navigating the rejection/publishing/ranking process. Leaving out my unpaid training, as it were, this put my average hourly rate somewhere around $7. Peace!

There’s no small shortage of Amway-esque hyperbole on Demand’s site about how awesome life in the freelance “studio” can be. The Demandifesto woos with promises that beyond the basic pay-per-piece, frequent contributors are eligible for perks like affordable health insurance and grants to pursue their creative aspirations. It’s forums are full of beaming profile avatars, cheery bios, and accolades about how great it is to be able to set one’s schedule and get paid like clockwork via PayPal, which, granted, in this day and age of invoice voids, it is.

Except when it just isn’t worth it.

Maybe I’m just lazy? Incompetent? Entitled? To think that earning $3.50 shouldn’t be so much damn work? Or maybe I’m not. The eHow article “How to Price Yourself as a Freelancer” is broken down into three steps. “Determine a ‘minimum wage’ for yourself based on an assumption of 40 hours a week and your barest financial needs according to your expenses and where you live. Use this number as the minimum for negotiations on your price, taking into account ALL the time you are devoting to the job in question,” it advises. This is step 1. Also in step 1? “Resist the temptation to do any work for less than legal minimum wage. Sure, almost nothing is better than nothing if you don’t have work, but don’t do it: it just makes everything worse for yourself and others in your industry in the long run as freelance employers come to expect more and more for less. There’s a reason wage laws exist in the world of permanent employment!” I hardly needed to read on to step 2. Especially as I was distracted by the accompanying banner ad that blared: “Become a Bartender.”

I stopped editing, waiting for my a robot or human or hybrid to find me out and fire me. Nothing happened, for weeks and weeks. Finally, a human I hadn’t been introduced to heretofore wrote to check in. “I notice you’ve only edited three articles,” she said. “Do you plan to resume editing?” When I didn’t reply (I was thinking!) she wrote again, a few weeks later. “Please let me know ASAP if you intend to edit. Otherwise, we’ll remove your editor permissions from the site.” I can’t say I wasn’t given plenty of time and a fair chance to change my mind, which made me wonder if their supply of overqualified professional editors with the time and inclination to throw their labor into a web well for 1980s babysitting wages wasn’t dwindling, just a little. I took my summer’s worth of earnings, $10.50, and called it a day.

“Listen Ethel,” Lucy says, back on the assembly line. “I think we’re fighting a losing game.” So it goes in the back end of Demand Studios. In fact, being in there felt a lot like it feels to search the web in the content farm era: There’s more than enough information, but none of it’s really useful. I’m not the first, on either side of the mirror, to make such a critique. Indeed, it’s been made so often that Demand has heard it loud and clear and would like you to know that it does not give a shit. “The critics are outnumbered by the millions of consumers who are satisfied… and the hundreds of content creators who go on record saying Demand Media is a hero for them,” proclaims the Defensifesto. “Unlike many around us, we aren’t worried about the future of the Internet because we are too busy trying to create it.”

If that’s going to happen, it’s not going to be on robot sweat alone. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of human hands. And mine, at least, won’t be among them.

Jessanne Collins is a Virgo with a Gemini moon and a Capricorn rising. Obviously.

by Abe Sauer

• Dave Reichert, $1,000

• Mary Bono Mack, $1,000

• George W. Bush, $2,000

• Martin Meehan , $1,000

• Daniel Coats, $2,000

• John Conyers, $500

• Martha Coakley, $1,800

• Charles Schumer, $1,000

• Richard Burr, $2,000

• Norm Coleman, $2,000

• John McCain, $2,300

• Ben Quayle, $1,000

Abe Sauer knows the score.

Nextflix is eating up the Internet, but that seems a small price to pay to have Season 2 of “The IT Crowd” available for streaming any time I want.

As of five weeks ago, there were two women staff reporters at the New York Observer. Three weeks ago, one of those women quit; today, Irina Aleksander, the last woman staff reporter, has given notice. (We hear she’ll be writing regularly for Times Styles — Alexandra Jacobs, a long-time Observer editor, decamped for Times Styles two months ago.) According to the paper’s newly updated masthead, the paper now has nine staff writers, all of them men. (Of its non-staff “contributing writers” list of 13, two are women.) This all comes not long after the last woman editor — excluding the managing editor — quit. In the last month, one man was hired at the paper as a reporter (and he’s doing good work!) and another man was promoted from within. (A woman designer was also recently hired.) By our count, nine out of nine of the latest Observer departures were women or gay men. All left in the last three months. (P.S. Some good stuff in today’s (err, yesterday’s!) paper! Have a browse!)