Yeltsin, the eXile, and the guy who taught me to write

This is how Matt Taibbi’s obituary for Boris Yeltsin starts:

Boris Yeltsin was always good for a laugh, which is probably why on the occasion of his death people outside of Russia are not calling him words like scum and monster, but instead recalling him fondly, with a smile, as one would a retarded nephew who could always be counted on to pull his pants down at Thanksgiving dinner.

Taibbi’s piece is a great read. Well, when I say ‘piece’, I mean ‘first few paragraphs’, because I was too fucking lazy to read all four pages. And will someone please tell the Rolling Stone that serif fonts are excruciatingly difficult to read for any length of time on a computer screen? But still — nice to see some brisk journalism out there brimming with personality and irreverence.

Reading those paragraphs reminded me of where I first encountered Taibbi’s writing: in a wonderful magazine called the eXile. (I notice the eXile has revamped its previously awful site design to something even more deliciously ugly — it looks like a site that would have come from Soviet Russia, if Soviet Russia had hung around long enough for the internet.) Taibbi was a founding editor of the eXile, a free magazine for expats in Moscow, with another spirited writer: Mark Ames.

I became of fan of Ames’ after reading his columns about sleeping with Moscow hookers: Whore-R Stories. The columns were notable not so much for the sex, but for the sympathetic light in which he portrayed his subjects, and their various stories, which were always fascinating. (Come to think of it, I wonder if those columns prepared me for life in Wan Chai.) Of course, that doesn’t mean Ames is all about meditative contemplations on the plight of prostitutes in Russia. He is, after all, the author of a piece grandly titled, ‘Nine Years, Nine Whores, Nine Hours‘.

You might wonder how I got to reading a magazine for Moscow expats. Well, that brings me to John Dolan, one of my lecturers at Otago University. Dolan is pretty much responsible for turning me onto writing. I mean, I always was interested in journalism, and thought I’d make it my career, but Dolan’s advanced-writing and poetry classes actually convinced me I could write, and that writing imaginatively was an idea worth pursuing.

I remember very clearly some advice he passed on to us in class: Most things in the world haven’t been written about yet. “Sure, someone has written about London — but no one’s written about you in London,” he said. Pretty simple stuff, and maybe not inspiring to everyone — but to someone who thinks their voice mightn’t be worth hearing because of the noise from all the other voices out there, it had quite an impact.

Dolan also did a strange thing. He told me my writing was good. He even told me my poems were good. I’m from a town of 5,000, where a man’s qualities are measured according to two variables: his ability to sink piss, and his ability to discuss rugby. Academic compliments weren’t something I was used to.

Dolan was friends with Ames and Taibbi, and, soon after teaching my poetry class, moved to Moscow to co-edit the eXile. While there, he penned wonderfully vitriolic book reviews, such as ‘A Million Little Pieces of Shit‘, which called out James Frey’s fraudulent novel before Oprah had even heard of it.

I like Dolan, and I think that came through in a profile I wrote about him for Critic in the olden days, when my writing was, shall we say, patchy.

Now, how did I get from Boris Yeltsin to John Dolan?