The Lexicographer's Rules

"The lens of public attention attracts a certain brand of person; and in America, at least, those people seem unusually good at finding their own lunch. Sometimes a subject will distort his story; sometimes the media does it for him. Often it's a collaboration. We had a photographer who carried a woman's high-heeled shoe in the trunk of his car. Fortunate enough to chance upon a ghastly auto crash, he'd put that shoe in the foreground before he took the picture."

—Archipelago. Benjamin Cheever, novelist and son of a well-known writer, occupies himself with the difficulties of pimping his third novel and of pursuing a writing life of any kind. "He and I worked together once on an article about the local emergency food cupboard. The photographer went out to take a picture of the cupboard. When he got there and opened the cupboard, it was crammed with food. So our photog, he turned to the woman who administered the program and said, 'Now, this is a story about an empty cupboard. I'm going out to the car to get fresh film. When I come back, if the cupboard is empty, weŐll have a picture and a story. If it's not empty, you got no picture and no story.'"'

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