On the one hand, argues Jeanette Winterson in the London Times, there are, currently, too many “throwaway books” that are more suited to being produced on electronic media.
But what if, as she also suggests, we are on a trajectory that will return us to mass illiteracy? And what if, as a result, we become more easily manipulated by “censorship and the rewriting of history”?
After stumbling across a description of Straight and Crooked Thinking, by Robert Thouless, on an unfortunately formatted website, I put it on my Amazon wish list. The book, however, is out of print, and the lowest priced copies have been in the $40-50 dollar range, with some copies fetching well over $100.
Then I happened to check Alibris one day and found a copy offered by a shop in Australia for under $20. I snapped it up, and received it yesterday. Isn’t the cover cool?
I’ll post a mini-review when I’ve finished reading it.
Publisher’s Marketplace offered up this little gem in today’s e-newsletter, about a new LA Times story on James Frey:
The LAT primarily rehashes basic Frey facts, though they do note with amusement that at one point Frey had a “class Hollywood fit” when a screenwriter hired by Warner Bros. wanted to change some of the events in the adaptation of A Million Little Pieces. “Frey said they didn’t have the right to alter the facts in the book, the observer recalled this week. ‘How could they do this? This was his life! How could they change the facts of his life?’ Eventually, Frey fired his agency.”
I love it!!! Who needs sit coms when reality dishes up juicy bits like this???
Wow. I swear, that phrase was on the tip of my tongue, and I discover that it’s been said. By “the British writer and psychologist Anthony Daniels” (aka Theodore Dalrymple) and quoted in a Washington Post piece by Anne Applebaum, who notes that James Frey is only the newest in a history of lying memoirists:
These fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, “autobiographical” tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, whose touching, prize-winning “autobiographical” tale of a Ukrainian girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.
Applebaum next mentions Nasdijj, who was outed last week by Matthew Fleisher at LA Weekly. Nasdiff — real name, Tim Barrus — had been posing as a Navajo memoirist. To much critical aclaim.
Fleisher interviews a real Navajo who mentions that Nasdijj isn’t even a real name in the Navajo tongue of Athabaskan. It’s gibberish.
Alrighty, then, here are my questions. What would drive a writer to assume the identity of a martyr in order to attract attention? Is it a variation of Munchausen syndrome? Or are these people simply afraid to achieve excellence as an expression of personal triumph? That is, is this a way for gifted writers to avoid feeling guilty about their gifts?
More posts on James Frey here, here, and here.
Update: Esquire wrote a piece on Barrus…
Last Friday, Publisher’s Marketplace reported in their e-newsletter that Riverhead, a Penguin subsidiary that had contracted with James Frey to write two more books, is having second thoughts: “The ground has shifted. It’s under discussion.”
Today, Publishers Lunch says that a movie deal based on “A Million Little Pieces” is also in jeopardy:
Warner Bros. President Alan Horn said Friday “We’re reevaluating our position on what to do” about the planned film adaptation of James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES.
The LA Times says Frey received a $125,000 option and another $150,000 to write the screenplay, and would be due $425,000 if the movie gets made. Warner’s had been planning on shooting the film this spring.
Hmmmm. I guess Frey’s happy ending isn’t so real, either . . .
This website, Lulu Titlescorer, lets you analyze a book title and tell you how likely it is to be a best seller. My novel’s title came in at 69 percent. Too bad the manuscript has fallen down some agent’s rabbit hole, and to get it back, apparently I have to play a game of croquet with a flamingo for a mallet. Wish me luck, I’m going in. As soon as I finish this cup of coffee with the “drink me” printed on the side.
No: it’s a Freymoir!
Even better: we’re now using cathartic television to help us recover from the trauma caused by . . . cathartic television. Oprah feels “duped.” Frey ‘splains it all was a “coping mechanism.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world, A Million Little Pieces languishes at #4 on Amazon.
No word on whether Amazon plans to re-tag the book as Literature and Fiction instead of Biographies and Memoirs. Or get rid of the now-embarrassingly-dated editorial reviews.
(Gawker live-blogged the show, if you’re interested in a minute-by-minute.)
Update: Also meanwhile, my dog training book is enjoying an Amazon ranking dip so deep it’s scraping barnacles off its belly. Maybe I should post about how naughty my dog is???? Secret’s out! I caught her gnawing a wooden block today! That is NOT a chew toy!
If you’ve ever read a supposedly “great” book, and hated it — or tried to talk with someone about a really-is-great-book and turns out he/she hated it — you’ll find this amusing.
Time magazine’s list (the 100 best books written in the English language since 1923) here.
In a post last December, the Argyleist (named as a featured blog on Technorati last night, which is how I happened to find this post — congrats, Argyleist!) raises the subject of faith:
I’m not necessarily talking about faith in a god specifically, but faith in anything. Believing in something without any real solid proof.
My take on this is that people err when they compartmentalize “faith” as exclusive to religion or spirituality, something that can’t be applied to the compartment that is governed by “proof.” So this morning, Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy put up a post about The Ethical Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, which has a chapter on religion, and writes:
One interesting point he makes in passing is that it turns out that scientists are just attached to their particular theories as religious believers, and in fact, scientists are just as reluctant to surrender their beliefs about science when confronted with contrary evidence as are religious believers.
Exactly.
The simple fact is that “faith” or “belief” is an intimate aspect of our cognitive experience. We like to claim that there are some things that are objectively “true” because they can be experientially proven, but that’s not the case — things we “know” will happen are actually just pretty solid guesses. To use a somewhat absurdist argument: the Earth has circled the sun every day for some 5 billion years. That doesn’t mean our beloved orb will rise daily in the east forever. Granted, it would be a waste of time to plan for a contingency in case the sun fails to make its appearance tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t taking morning on faith.
This all sounds too esoteric to be useful, and when it comes to the sun it probably is, but parse it out in the more intimate workings of our lives and we find it can be useful indeed. Faith “in the substance of things not seen” is the cognitive equivalent of walking, which as Laurie Anderson observed so smartly lo those many years ago is actually an act of falling:
You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it,
But you’re always falling.
With each step, you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you’re falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time.
We can’t make a move without faith, so as I wrote last night, the real question is not “to believe or not to believe” so much as “where does my belief lead me?”
“& quickly shot off.”
Dialogue from Two Gentlemen of Verona which I found last night, quoted in Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography .
That’s now the official slogan of my blog, and as soon as I get a chance to tweak the site design some more I’ll (hopefully, lol) figure out a way to display it somewhere.
It captures the way I see blog writing perfectly, which is no doubt why, with only a week of this blogging business under my belt, I find myself blissfully addicted. I should mention that I’ve been a blog reader for years now, and have joined the conversation of various blogs by leaving comments, so I have a sense of the pacing of this medium. It’s a huge conversation and while on the one hand it’s too sprawling to be considered “topical” in the classic sense (there are plenty of people, today, blogging about last week’s news), on the other hand, unless you want to sit in your own little corner talking to yourself, you need to find spots where the interest is sparking and jump in to contribute.
I like the water cooler analogy of the blogosphere — it’s much more apt, not to mention respectful, than the “mob” analogy that some find so comforting — but it’s also wilder than the typical impromptu office chitchat. So it’s more like a crowded party, and the trick is to float, keep your ear cocked for the liveliest clutch of conversationalists, and be ready to fire off that oh-so-fine volly.
