Dispatches #154: Video poker, lucky men and unbroken runners

Thursday, 22 June 2017

Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Andrew McMillen, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia. No new words this week, but I wanted to write a little about something I mentioned in the first newsletter of 2017.

Back in Dispatches #136 in February, I wrote: "Now that we're a month into 2017, I wanted to share with you my behavioural change for the year: no phone in bed. I decided that I was spending way too many nighttime hours lying in bed, scrolling on my phone. Sometimes I was reading meaty articles saved on Instapaper, but often I was caught up in the endless flow of social media, too. It was a bad habit."

The main reason for this change is because I wanted to read more books, so on that count, the first six months have been a success. According to my Goodreads page, I've finished 14 titles so far this year, which is almost as many as the 18 books I read in the whole of 2016. Hooray!

It hasn't been a total win, though. Many weeknights, I've been reading iPad versions of the four weekend newspapers I subscribe to, and which form a large part of my reading recommendations here each week. It's rare that I manage to get through all four of those titles before the weekend is finished, so that reading usually spills into the workweek. And on a few occasions, I failed to set my phone alarm and put the device down before lying down, and I then got caught in the tidal rip of scrolling through social media feeds. Oops.

In sum, I'd say that my behavioural change has been a positive one. I like that I'm reading more books, and that I have proved to myself that I've got the long-term willpower to break a bad habit such as this. Many of us now live with our phones within arm's reach at all times of the day and night, so if you've been feeling an urge to try and break out of that loop, I can recommend setting your alarm and putting your phone beside your bed before you lie down, rather than holding that rectangular screen near your face until you fall asleep.

If reading this anecdote inspires you to try to change your own behaviour, good luck! And be sure to write back to let me know how you go.

Onto the recommendations – only reads this week, no sounds.

Reads:

Bret, Unbroken by Steve Friedman in Runner's World (9,000 words / 45 minutes). This is one my favourite magazine stories ever. I reread it this week for inspiration, and it really helped me with a hard story I finished writing yesterday. There are so many things to love about the way Steve Friedman chose to write this. The second-person point of view is arresting, as you'll see in the lede below, but it never feels forced or like it's a cheap trick. The way he lays the story out and brings it to a close is nothing less than masterly. This one should be studied closely by anyone who wants to write magazine stories. (Once you've read it, you should also listen to this great interview on The Rewrite podcast about how Friedman reported and wrote it.)

You know what people think. They see jeans too short and winter coat too shiny, too grimy, and think, homeless. They watch a credit card emerge from those jeans and think, grifter. They behold a frozen grin, hear a string of strangled, tortured pauses, and think, slow. Stupid. You learned too young about cruelty and pity. You learned too young that explaining yourself didn't help, that it made things worse. People laughed. Made remarks. Backed away. So you stopped explaining. You got a job, got a cat, got an apartment, and people can think what they want to think. You built a life without explanation and it was enough. What people see now, this moment, is a solitary man leaning into the wind, trudging down snow-dusted streets toward a faint, watery dawn. It's December 20, 2012, almost the shortest day of the year. You have been up since 4:30 a.m. You have eaten your oatmeal and cranberries, and you have fed Taffy the cat and packed your lunch of canned chicken and coleslaw, and you are alone on the streets of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, an industrial town of 7,800 that squats at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Pelican rivers, deep in the woods of the Northern Highlands. It's 2.5 miles, at least part of which you usually run, to Drs. Foster and Smith, the mail-order and online pet-supply colossus where you have worked for almost 18 years. (Warehouse dummy, people think, and they don't know about your college credits or your study of military history or that you speak German, understand a little Russian, and can say "How are you?" and "Thank you, goodbye," in Romanian.)

Why Aren't You Laughing? by David Sedaris in The New Yorker (4,200 words / 21 minutes). I've come to understand that anything published under David Sedaris's byline is well worth the time spent reading. In this case, he holidays while signing books and watching a TV show about drug interventions, which reminds him of his mother's alcoholism, which results in a beautifully written, painful tribute to her life. 

From the outside, our house on the North Carolina coast–the Sea Section–is nothing much to look at. It might have been designed by a ten-year-old with a ruler, that's how basic it is: walls, roof, windows, deck. It's easy to imagine the architect putting down his crayon and shouting into the next room, "I'm done. Can I watch TV now?" Whenever I denigrate the place, Hugh reminds me that it's the view that counts: the ocean we look out at. I see his point, but it's not like you have to limit yourself to one or the other. "What about our place in Sussex!" I say. From the outside, our cottage in England resembles something you'd find in a storybook–a home for potbellied trolls, benevolent ones that smoke pipes. Built of stone in the late sixteenth century, it has a pitched roof and little windows with panes the size of playing cards. We lie in bed and consider sheep grazing in the shadow of a verdant down. I especially love being there in the winter, so it bothered me when I had to spend most of January and February working in the United States. Hugh came along, and toward the end we found ourselves on Maui, where I had a reading. I'd have been happy just to fly in and fly out, but Hugh likes to swim in the ocean, so we stayed for a week in a place he found online.

Love and Loss by Trent Dalton in The Weekend Australian Magazine (2,500 words / 12 minutes). A funeral notice in The Courier-Mail showing that a husband and wife of more than 60 years died within one day of each other leads Trent Dalton to track down the family in question, in order to tell the story of their life in love. There is no other magazine writer in Australia you'd rather have on this case, and Dalton delivers beautifully. Read it to the end, and ruminate on that final sentence.

The email landed two weeks after Hope and Lancelot died. Subject: "Gotta be a story here". A tip from intrepid Australian travel writer and journalist Glyn May, who still has a nose for a yarn, even in retirement. "Hi Trent, the attached funeral notice caught my eye. If there's not a story there, I'll give up. Over to you. Cheers, Glyn." We were having dinner the night Gayle Kiepe phoned me back. Thanks for calling, I said. I write for a magazine. "Mmmmm?" she said, puzzled and cautious. A reader was moved by your mum and dad's funeral notice, I said. "Okaayyyyy?" she said. I was moved by it, too, I said. It felt like there was a love story spanning a lifetime in that small newspaper notice. "Mum died 24 hours, less 10 minutes, after Dad died," Gayle said. It felt to me like Hope Hogg might have died of a broken heart. "Well, yeah," Gayle said. "A saddened heart. She didn't want to be without him. It was their undying love." But there was something more to it, she said. Gayle went quiet down the phone line. It took me three seconds to realise she was weeping. "We thought..." she said, before breaking off again. "We thought it was a miracle."

Lucky Man by Ben Hoyle in The Weekend Australian Magazine (3,200 words / 16 minutes). A thoroughly enjoyable profile of one of the world's most successful non-fiction writers. Fun fact for the freelancers who subscribe to this newsletter: Michael Lewis is paid USD$10 per word for his features in Vanity Fair. At that rate, his brilliant profile of Barack Obama from 2012 earned him about USD$134,000. Nice one, Mr Lewis, who reckons that word rate is "underpayment... it's five times that for the books".

One summer, when Michael Lewis was about 13, his parents sent him to a tennis camp in New Hampshire. "We went to a lake called Echo Lake. And Echo Lake is, like all New Hampshire lakes, dark and freezing," he says, eyes sparkling at the memory. "I swam out and 30 yards off the shore dived down to the bottom and grabbed whatever I could grab." His trophy felt like damp paper. Returning to the surface he opened his palm and found... a $20 bill. Seriously? "Seriously," insists the author of Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short. "It was a soggy $20 bill. I thought, 'That's just the kind of thing that happens to me'." Four decades later, Lewis has no reason to see life any differently. His outrageous luck is a "running joke" with those who know him. It helped Lewis to stumble unqualified into a plum job at Wall Street's top trading firm in the early '80s, so that he was perfectly positioned when that world imploded to write an explosive book about the working culture that made the 1987 crash possible, which in turn earned him an even larger fortune than he'd made selling bonds. He was only getting started. Having struck gold with his first literary effort, Liar's Poker, Lewis swiftly became, without any apparent strain, that rare nonfiction author whose name alone propels a new hardback to the top of the bestseller charts. His 15 books to date, tackling subjects as diverse as high-frequency trading, fatherhood and the evolution of tactics in American football, have sold more than nine million copies. Three of them have become films that either won or were nominated for Oscars.

Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich–Then Vegas Made Them Pay by Kevin Poulson in Wired (5,400 words / 27 minutes). An absorbing read about a glitch in a video poker game that allowed a couple of American dudes to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars each, until they were caught by casino operators. The bug that lurked in a particular Game King machine survived undetected for nearly seven years, in part because the steps to reproduce it were so complex. Written five years after the event, this is an excellent feat of reporting and writing, and I absolutely love the final sentence.

John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak. On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a $4,300 jackpot. Kane waited while the slot attendant verified the win and presented the IRS paperwork–a procedure required for any win of $1,200 or greater–then, 11 minutes later, ding ding ding!, a $2,800 win. A $4,150 jackpot rolled in a few minutes after that. All the while, the casino's director of surveillance, Charles Williams, was peering down at Kane through a camera hidden in a ceiling dome. Tall, with a high brow and an aquiline nose, the 50-year-old Kane had the patrician bearing of a man better suited to playing a Mozart piano concerto than listening to the chirping of a slot machine. Even his play was refined: the way he rested his long fingers on the buttons and swept them in a graceful legato, smoothly selecting good cards, discarding bad ones, accepting jackpot after jackpot with the vaguely put-upon air of a creditor finally collecting an overdue debt. Williams could see that Kane was wielding none of the array of cheating devices that casinos had confiscated from grifters over the years. He wasn't jamming a light wand in the machine's hopper or zapping the Game King with an electromagnetic pulse. He was simply pressing the buttons. But he was winning far too much, too fast, to be relying on luck alone.

The Best Man I've Ever Known by John Birmingham on Brisbane Times (500 words / 3 minutes). A short, poignant one to end on: John Birmingham's moving tribute to his father, who died this week. 

A few minutes after three o'clock Monday morning my father drew in his last breath. He lay in bed in the palliative care ward of the Wesley Hospital. My brother was with him holding his hand. Our mother, his north star, his forever love was there too. I was crashed out on a couch in a visitor lounge, having turned Andrew out of the same couch an hour earlier, after many hours, of sitting our father's final vigil. He drew in his last breath. He let it go. And he let go of this world. He had been a long time dying. A cancer diagnosis more than five years ago. Small skirmishes and border wars with lesser cancers in the years since. He'd fought the good fight but in the end he was overwhelmed by his nemesis, an aggressive, relentless angiosarcoma. The cancer did not care that he was a good man, the best I've ever known. It did not care that he was loving and loved. It just took him. But we cared. So let me tell you a little about him. 

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Thanks for reading. If you have feedback on Dispatches, I'd love to hear from you: just reply to this email. Please feel free to share this far and wide with fellow journalism, music, podcast and book lovers.

Andrew

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