A L S O_ T O D A Y

Comics
Keith Knight: Epiphany on the Great Salt Flats

Camille on Campus
By Camille Paglia
"The Nurture Assumption": A rambling, anecdotal memoir

T A B L E_ T A L K

Is California's next target ethnic studies? Discuss the West Coast's attempts to end "racial preference" in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Ufology
By Christina Valhouli
Aliens invade the ivory tower
(09/22/98)

Sacred rites of an acid house
By Isaac Zaur
Beyond the bad food and the bad poetry, a tribe of students seek life's mysteries in a collective hallucination
(09/21/98)

Recess
A one-stop playground for weekend frivolity and fun
(09/18/98)

Going adjunct
By Andreas Killen
The grueling plight of underemployed academics and the violent fantasies they entertain
(09/17/98)

Vocational fiction 101
By Carol Lloyd
The principles of creative writing can help make sense of the absurd autobiographical art of résumé creation
(09/16/98)

S A L O N
E M P O R I U M
FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

BY MARC HERMAN | In May 1994, an assistant editor at Harper's magazine called me in San Francisco to ask if I wanted to intern at the magazine that summer. This came as somewhat of a shock. I'd been rejected for the same internship two months prior.

In the competition for one of the four internships available, the assistant editor explained, I had apparently come in a close fifth. Fortune looked down on me when one of the lucky four opted to take a paid position at New York Newsday. His space was mine, the editor said, if I agreed to move on short notice back to Manhattan, a city I'd left just two months prior, homesick for California, tired of constant noise and fed up with crummy, overpriced apartments.

After packing a duffel bag with three books, a laptop computer and a suit jacket that I wore the first day of work and never put on again, I caught the next plane back to New York. It was a job at Harper's, after all, one of the country's oldest and most respected magazines. The fact that the job was unpaid, and I was pretty sure it would mostly involve running a copier, hardly mattered. I was sure that this was the best opportunity I'd gotten in my professional life.

When New York Newsday folded a month later, probably throwing the guy who'd actually won the job out of work, I took this as a sign that someone was watching over me. Newspaper jobs were hard to come by, but magazines had always seemed completely inaccessible, and hopelessly elite. When I arrived at Harper's slightly cramped, quiet Broadway office, the doors suddenly were open. I'd even been given my own desk, in a windowless corner of a small, paper-strewn room.

The internship turned out to be a heady experience. I had a chance to meet reporters and writers, sitting in the lobby moaning about their last story for some award-winning magazine. Often I hit them up for advice, probably way too eagerly. They were almost universally welcoming anyway. I learned how to buy and sell ideas, how to introduce myself properly to editors (this is more important than you may think) and how to influence the way things get printed. I learned how writers are regarded differently by different editors and publications, how fads influence publishing and how capricious and difficult the magazine business can be. I met several people I respected enormously and others I thought were less valuable as professional or personal role models. This could grow disheartening, but it did not dissuade me from a career in publishing. Finally, I realized the amount of business involved in something ostensibly not about business at all.

I ignored that lesson -- either because I was too busy and naive to notice it -- or because I didn't want to think about its implications. So when a Harper's writer called about her paycheck, which was way overdue, and another intern answered the call, I didn't think anything of it. When the intern, after acting as confessor to the writer's financial woes, got off the phone and said, surprised: "I figured once you were publishing in Harper's you'd made it," I never thought to ask the obvious: Why is she talking to an intern and why didn't she get paid on time? Nor did it occur to me that someday -- if I was lucky -- I could end up in a similar situation -- an experienced professional having to plead with interns for my paycheck.

You know that old joke about the sausage factory? ("Anyone who enjoys sausage and respects the law should never watch either being made.") I knew it then, but I suppose I missed the point.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. The darker purpose of the slush pile