What She Told Tony

The top reads: "I DON’T FUCK THE HELP TONY.” In fact, the line goes: “Don’t get confused, Tony. I don’t fuck around with the help.” I suppose LaQuan Smith couldn’t fit the full “Scarface” quote on a top.

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The Stretch

“For me, deeply immersive experiences have been both fascinating and disorienting. Spending long periods of time with people different from ourselves can affect our own sense of identity. When I return to my regular life, I think of it not like shedding a skin but like releasing the tension in a rubber band. My immersion stretched my somewhat flexible sense of self; returning home, the rubber band snaps back into its previous shape mostly … but not entirely. After all, rubber bands once stretched aren’t exactly the way they were to begin with. They hold more. And so I usually feel larger, in a good way, from having been stretched.”

—Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep

Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

I'm Thinking About Investigative Journalism

As of late, I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself in investigative journalism, and I have a few takeaways.

1. Investigative journalism is a boy’s club.

2. It is the responsibility of the men who run it to include women in it.

3. FOIAs are overrated.

4. Voice, storytelling, and serendipitous reporting are more important.

5. There isn’t one way to do it. There’s your way to do it.

6. People of color are excluded from it by the white men who run it.

7. You’re not a savior. You’re a reporter.

8. It isn’t easy.

9. Learn the tools and keep them in your toolbox.

10. If you can’t get in the front door, climb in a window.

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

Read It

"In one of several genial interviews, Dunne asks Didion about an indelible scene toward the end of her Haight-Ashbury essay—which, as any student who has ever taken a course in literary nonfiction knows, culminates with the writer’s encounter with a five-year-old girl, Susan, whose mother has given her LSD. Didion finds Susan sitting on a living-room floor, reading a comic book and dressed in a peacoat. 'She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick,' Didion writes. Dunne asks Didion what it was like, as a journalist, to be faced with a small child who was tripping. Didion, who is sitting on the couch in her living room, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater with a fine gold chain around her neck and fine gold hair framing her face, begins. 'Well, it was . . .' She pauses, casts her eyes down, thinking, blinking, and a viewer mentally answers the question on her behalf: Well, it was appalling. I wanted to call an ambulance. I wanted to call the police. I wanted to help. I wanted to weep. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get home to my own two-year-old daughter, and protect her from the present and the future. After seven long seconds, Didion raises her chin and meets Dunne’s eye. 'Let me tell you, it was gold,' she says. The ghost of a smile creeps across her face, and her eyes gleam. 'You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.'"

-- "The Most Revealing Moment in the New Joan Didion Documentary"

Your Monday Quote

🌅 "You are the sky. Everything else -- it's just the weather." -- Pema Chodron

0 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "🌅 "You are the sky. Everything else -- it's just the weather." -- Pema Chodron"

You can follow me on Instagram here. 

Like a Thought

"Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness." -- Raymond Chandler 🌊

29 Likes, 2 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: ""Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to..."

Quote of the Day

Instagram post by Susannah Breslin * Mar 14, 2017 at 9:58pm UTC

33 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram

"Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part."

-- Hermann Broch

"You Have to Know How to Accept Rejection and Reject Acceptance" -- Ray Bradbury

Dear Susannah,

Thanks very much for writing.  I'm afraid we won't have room for this one, but I appreciate the chance to read and wish you the best finding it a good home.

Yours,

[redacted]

Untitled

"I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." -- #markrothko

See this Instagram photo by @susannahbreslin * 14 likes

For the Sad

I spent a long time reading this very sad piece, "Five Hostages."

"According to several freed hostages, Kayla was not tortured or sexually abused. Didier François, the French journalist, sometimes heard Kayla asking her jailers for fruit or sanitary napkins. The male hostages wondered who she was. At one point, they heard a guard say that she was Muslim, and Kayla corrected him. The guard was impressed. 'She’s stronger than you,' the guard told another prisoner. 'She doesn’t pretend.'"

Buy THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

The Future of Porn

"In September 2001, San Fernando Valley pornographers feared for their lives. In 2014, they fear for their imperiled livelihoods." -- The Future of Porn Is in Your Hands

The Pornography of Violence

Imaginary Enemy, The Used

"Today, films that promise spectacle, intensity, and, above all, whore-bashing are not the totality of the pornographic universe. But they are the primary thing that millions of heterosexual men flock to when they are alone at their computers (check out the popular titles at http://business.avn.com/charts/.) Author David Foster Wallace (2006) spent some time with Max Hardcore at the AVN Awards in 1998 and left convinced that the snuff film was the apotheosis of porn -- the 'horizon' towards which the industry was traveling (28). More recently, journalist Susannah Breslin (2009) left a movie set of director Jim Powers with a similar impression: 'The products that Jim produces are videotaped vivisections, studies in which homo sapiens lie upon the operating table, the director is the doctor, the camera is the scalpel, and the only question worth asking is, How far will we go if we are pushed to our limits?" Breslin suggests an answer in the ambiguous title of her essay: 'They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?'

There is good reason why critics entertain visions of lethal violence when they consider pornographers' commitment to the intense and extreme, to the hostile and aggressive. But there is less reason to believe we stand on the precipice of something else altogether new and more threatening than what came before. The apocalyptic visions of Breslin and Wallace are not unique in the twenty-first-century. For instance, pornography and pop culture in the 1980s left David Cronenberg with a vision as ominous as Breslin's and Wallace's: The sleazy pornographers of the fictional Videodrome (1983) promised to bring snuff to the hungry masses on their home televisions. And decades earlier -- well before the dawn of pornography's Golden Age -- George Bataille (1962) believed that murder was the essence and the end of pornography, that sex and death were ever fused in human minds and bodies. Bataille's work, like that of the Marquis de Sade before him, shows that sexual violence has long been a staple in the pornographic -- and the popular -- imaginary (Moore 1990).

What changes with time is the form our most violent desires take, how extensively they dominate our sexual imaginations, how we choose to express them, and, perhaps, how far we are willing to go in exploring and satisfying them. The power of violence to captivate a wide audience is far from new, but the warnings of pop culture's soothsayers should not go unheeded. We must consider what is born when we so readily fuse arousal with contempt, sex with fury." -- Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography, Natalie Purcell

The War

"On these occasions, he experienced an ache of longing for its shattering finalities, its deafening cacophonies, the way it changed you into something that you had no idea you could become, that you had no other way to become, something that you could never let go, and it wasn’t you that was holding onto the war, it was the war that was holding onto you, and that it would never let you go." -- work-in-progress

The Beholder's Share

"Our response to art stems from an irrepressible urge to re-create in our own brains the creative process – cognitive, emotional, and empathic – through which artist produced the work…This creative urge of the artist and of the beholder presumably explains why essentially every group of human beings in every age and in every place throughout the world has created images, despite the fact that art is not a physical necessity for survival.  Art is an inherently pleasurable and instructive attempt by the artist and the beholder to communicate and share with each other the creative process that characterizes every human brain – a process that leads to Aha! moment, the sudden recognition that we have seen into another person’s mind, and that allows us to see the truth underlying both the beauty and the ugliness depicted by the artist." -- The Beholder's Share

 

Rhapsody

"But Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.'" -- David Brooks in the NYT on Lydia Netzer's "15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years"

Famous

"Regular people thought you did it for the producers, the directors, the test screenings, the Q score, the paparazzi, the vanity. It wasn’t that at all. It was for the fans, not for their love of her but for their terrible intolerance of her getting older, for they could see no difference between themselves and her, and, for them, she had to be a god. It was the only way they could stand themselves; her immortality was their dream, the thing in which they believed." -- from "Famous Not Famous," a short story-in-progress

Bloomsday

"The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the waves." -- Ulysses

Words

"So I took Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at." -- Addie Bundren

Sharks

"You two would likely make a formidable if unsettling team, moving forward together like a pair of beautiful sharks." -- Prudie

On Haters

Thanks to Krystal Harrell for making this awesome image out of a line from my recent Forbes post.