In 2000, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames wrote a book called The Exile, about their time in the 1990s running an English-speaking alternative newspaper in Moscow, after the fall of the Soviet Union and during what we now look back on as the rise of oligarchs and Vladimir Putin.  The Exile crashed together the ethos of gonzo journalism from the Hunter Thompson years (still ongoing) with the style of the self-published Zine movement (not yet displaced by blogs) with what we might still recognize as "regular journalism" (which no longer exists, I kid.)

Matt and Mark describe outrages, including their persistent sexual harassment and debasement of their locally hired staff and Mark raping a teenage girl. I read the book when it came out because a friend introduced me to the editor and he gave me a copy. I had no idea what The Exile was and found the tale of its founding and downfall thrilling, inspiring and hilarious. I was 25 when I read it and deeply enthralled with Thompson, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and (of course) everything Jazz Age. I remember loving that book, as a kind of journalistic bridge between the turn of the century and the literary brat pack era of the 1980s and 90s led by Bret Easton Ellis and Jay Mcinerney. Which is to say, I remember loving the book, loving other stuff that happened within decades of the book, and not a lot else.

I want to say that I followed their careers after that, but I didn’t.  We just did have encounters.  In 2005, Mark Ames wrote an excellent book that I reviewed called Going Postal. Google is what linked him to the book on my shelf.  Taibbi emerged for me after his “Vampire Squid” star turn.  I thought it was awesome that a guy who had left a middle class American life behind to take a chance at running his own publication in Moscow during a time of known turmoil and uncertainty could really both make it and make a difference and questioned my own life choices. I did briefly meet Matt in the lobby after we “debated” each other for the Canadian Broadcasting Company.  I was from Forbes and he was from Rolling Stone. I think we were supposed to argue as partisans but we agreed about everything. The lack of combat was probably fine for Canadian viewers.

Last night, while out with Dagblog’s proprietor and benefactor, Michael Wolraich, I said that Mark Ames was a confessed child rapist, based on The Exile, without any caveats.  

How did I get to the point where I'd tell a friend something like that, even though I'd once read the book in context?

Well, recently, a friend of mine was "outed" by Buzzfeed as having sent emails to Milo Yiannopoulos, back when the Neo-Nazi boytoy was technology editor of Breitbart.  My friend had quipped to Milo that the subject of an online dispute ("Gamergate") looked like a transsexual.

My friend has written best selling books, edited prominent websites and wrote for a television series that we all probably watch. I'm not hiding him, I'm just not giving SEO so that we can have a civil conversation. He's a reasonably sized deal. My friend found himself attacked as a misogynist and transphobic. He isn’t.  I’ve known him since 1999.

I got into a bit of a Twitter fight on his behalf.  He’s had a history in technology journalism and I found myself arguing with people who have had beefs with him for years. Whatever the merits of their arguments, they were intense. So I went to the Google to arm up. I found that the two people most vehemently against my friend had prominently employed Mark Ames, and so I went back to Googling him and found, on social media, the excerpt from The Exile where he said he raped a child in Russia.

I never associated the passages I read online with the book I’d read earlier. Any gun in a fight.  Fortunately, our Twitter duel fizzled before I pulled this one. But it was in my head afterwards that Mark Ames was a teeager rapist and I said so, without qualification, to a friend, just last night.

But it’s wrong.

I take that book off my shelf and its pages are yellowing, and I flip through it and read bits and pieces and, all together, you get the sense of an unmoored Moscow in transition, and a lawless place.  No doubt what was exaggerated or fabricated in The Exile was happening elsewhere, unavailable to traditional reportage. The book is true, but not every bit in it is factual.

That's life.

A couple of things to finish:

• It has been suggested that Taibbi and Ames must have done everything in the memoir because of a New York Observer piece about them, from 2000, where the two "talk the talk."  But I think the writer, George Gurley, is in on it.  The article starts with the two subjects and the reporter, gathering in an apartment to do drugs. The subjects snort speed off a CD while the reporter takes a muscle relaxer (Soma, of course, from Brave New World). Seems like a set up from the get-go.

• Thing wrong with social media: None of our other mutual friends defended my friend.  People are  scared to voice unpopular opinions.

• The Exile was published by Grove. I saw Grove described dismissively on Twitter as “a small press, now known as Grove/Atlantic.”

  • Grove publishes Samuel Beckett, bitches.