The eXile in Vanity Fair

I’m a great fan of Matt Taibbi‘s work, and I’ve also long been a fan of Mark Ames and his now-defunct Moscow-based rogue magazine, eXile (that link leads to its new home, which basically just hosts the archives).

I found eXile after studying under John Dolan (who I’ve written about before), the paper’s sometime-co-editor and, for a while, a lecturer at Otago University, where he taught the advanced writing and poetry classes that marked my high-point of university study.

Dolan as a teacher was a strange mix of cynicism and optimism, railing against society and all its capitalist masters while at the same time warmly encouraging expression and imagination through writing. He spoke of his relationship with eXile once or twice in class, and from there the curious found out more.

When Dolan left Otago to do his full-time stint at eXile, I chased him by email and wrote a story about him and his experience with the magazine. Turns out I was a good seven years ahead of the zeitgeist!

Vanity Fair has just published a long and fascinating, web-exclusive story about eXile, Ames and Taibbi, detailing the personality politics behind the magazine. Dolan features in the story, and I was interested to find out he taught Ames, too. Awesome.

By the time he got to Russia, Ames relished rejection, he says. At U.C. Berkeley, he’d rebelled against the “bland liberal consensus” by flirting with right-wing politics, getting into arguments with humorless lefties, and falling under the wing of John Dolan, a literature professor and campus cult figure who liked Ames’s personal essays and macabre short stories, loathed though they were by his fellow students. Ames still remembers Dolan’s first somber career advice: “He said, ‘You’re talented, but one thing you’re going to have to get used to is that you’ll never get published in The New Yorker.’” Dolan also introduced him to that urtext for masochistic littérateurs everywhere, Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, the story of a doomed anarchic plot hatched by amateurs.

Dolan is also quoted in the piece and described as a “first-rate” literary columnist:

By most accounts, Ames slept with as many women as any Moscow expatriate of the period. “Russian women liked the kind of sternness and scariness he had that didn’t work in California,” Dolan says.

One of Ames’s first regular columns was “Death Porn,” which rehashed stories of grisly murders and suicides from police reports and Russian media, printing them alongside crime-scene and autopsy photographs. He was most renowned and reviled for his regular “Whore-R Stories,” for which he hired prostitutes and then wrote about them. Like corruption and casual death, prostitution was a reality of Russian life that every reporter saw, often more than saw, but refused to discuss in straight terms.

“Everyone in Moscow at the time—and I mean everyone—used prostitutes. That’s what Moscow was in the 1990s. But no one would talk about it,” Dolan says. Ames seems to have had no need to pay women, and the column appears self-serving only until you read it. Some of the pieces’ poignancy and attention to detail call to mind Studs Terkel’s Working. But Terkel only listened; Ames partook.

And…

John Dolan moved to Moscow and started a first-rate literary column in which he was an early outer of faux memoirist James Frey. But The Exile was never much of a business, and Moscow was changing. It had become expensive and clean and was taking on an ominous neo-Soviet flush. The expats had gone home, and journalists, including Americans, were being killed. Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov, whom Ames knew, was gunned down in 2004. “Even the snow seemed archaic and doomed,” says Dolan, who left in 2006. The Exile nearly collapsed in 2007, before a group of private investors bailed it out.

I wrote about Dolan’s Frey expose back in ’06. Because that was how I rolled.