Antonia Crane talks to David Henry Sterry about the sex he’s bought and sold, about his books about other people’s sex, bought and sold, and about how hard it is to find someone who will admit they’ve paid for sex. (“I didn’t realize the enormous stigma attached to the statement to say, ‘Yes, I hire someone to have sex with me.’ Easier to get people to admit they are a ‘whore’ than to get people to admit they hired a whore.”)

At The Rumpus, James Altucher has a non-mediocre piece about how to be effective as a mediocre person.

We can’t all be grand visionaries. We can’t all be Picassos. We want to make our business, make our art, sell it, make some money, raise a family, and try to be happy. My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure. For every Mark Zuckerberg, there are 1000 Jack Zuckermans. Who is Jack Zuckerman? I have no idea. That’s my point. If you’re Jack Zuckerman and you’re reading this, I apologize. You aimed for the stars and missed. Your reentry into the atmosphere involved a broken heat shield, and you burned to a crisp by the time you hit the ocean. Now we have no idea who you are.

Among other things, mediocre people tend to procrastinate, which could be a sign of many things (“Maybe you need to brainstorm more to improve an idea. Maybe the idea is no good as is. Maybe you need to delegate. Maybe you need to learn more. Maybe you don’t enjoy what you are doing. Maybe you don’t like the client whose project you’re working on. Maybe you need to take a break.”) Altucher also has a great story about embarrassing himself in front of Tupac’s manager when trying to pitch him a website for the deceased rapper. (“Mediocre entrepreneurs fail a lot. So they get this incredible skill of getting really good at dealing with failure. This translates to monetary success.”)

Photo: Lotzman Katzman

The money changing hands is a way of saying, “This money symbolizes our agreement that this is temporary, a fantasy, it’s just pretend, and at the end of the hour we go our separate ways. Now c’mere and let’s pretend!”

There’s a saying, which I think is kind of crass-sounding, that “You aren’t paying for the sex, you’re paying for her to go away afterwards.” But it’s true in a way, and the agreement goes both ways. By paying, you are agreeing that the hour is all you get, is all you are entitled to. In some ways, this is preferable to one-nighters and hookups and short-term affairs, when even if there is agreement to not get attached, inevitably somebody might anyways, and then there may be resentments and long-lasting emotional consequences to deal with

—from Antonia Crane’s interview with a John named Max for The Rumpus. The whole thing is really interesting and addresses a lot of issues inherent in sex work—whether paying for sex is something to feel guilty about, how to talk about the problems of sex work without disregarding sex workers’ own agency —but I keep returning to this bit suggesting that exchange of money is important to the experience in a positive way.

Not all writers make money from writing alone. Certainly it is possible! But many of the authors on your bookshelf have jobs—real, boring, non-writerly, totally-unromantic jobs. Others of them used to have those jobs, until fame and fortune conspired to keep them writing and reading and smoking and thinking and day-drinking full time  (that’s how it works, right? I think it must be).  Michelle Dean compiled a list of some famous authors’ day jobs for The Rumpus.  My favorite detail from the list is that J.D. Salinger once worked as a cruise entertainment director. What a gig.