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Monday, March 01, 2010
Today's fake: author made up quotes, degree, many other false claims
A recently released book, Last Train from Hiroshima, is so filled with inaccuracies and apparently made-up quotations, sources and facts that publisher Henry Holt is recalling the book, thousands of which are already in book stores.
There are many versions of this story around the web today, but the most complete and damning is the one on MobyLives, the website of publisher Melville House. In addition to the accusations against the Hiroshima book -- including a complete fabrication about how the pilot of the Enola Gay regretted his actions, which he never did -- the entry includes doubts about the author that arose in previous projects. The author, Charles Pellegrino, falsely (and transparently so) claimed to have invented the submersible robot that discovered the Titanic (he didn't), to have thought up the idea behind Jurrasic Park (not) and to have discovered the tomb of Jesus (no experts believe those claims, which are "nonsense" according to the Israeli Antiquities Authority). Finally, he gave himself a PhD from a New Zealand university which says it never granted him a degree.
A week ago Pellegrino had admitted to some of the errors in the Hiroshima book, but said he had been duped. The publisher at that time planned to correct later editions.
The MobyLives entry quotes a 2000 NYT review of the Titanic book which demands, "He shouldn't get away with it." Apparently he rather has, getting book contract after contract, until now. technorati: books, hoaxes Labels: books, fakes, hoaxes
Friday, January 22, 2010
Narcissism and literature
The new New Yorker has a review of a book titled "Memoir, a History," in which author Ben Yagoda looks at the history of memoirs starting with St. Augustine and coming down to our present era, in which a a desperate search by readers and the entertainment industry for authenticity and stories of redemption and triumph led to a spate of faked memoirs. (A couple years ago the NYT took notice of this phenomenon.) The writer of the review, Daniel Mendelsohn, names most of the recent flaming scandals except for the J.T. LeRoy hoax, but the LeRoy books weren't actually supposed to be memoirs. That particular flim-flam was more elaborate than a single (or series of) fabricated memoir.
For several years I've taken great pleasure in blogging about these cases, collected on my blog with the labels hoaxes and fakes (applied somewhat inconsistently, but do I look like a librarian?). technorati: hoaxes, literary hoaxes, memoirs Labels: closet cases, fakes, hoaxes, writers
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The lonely Brinks 'stockroom' man
It's one of those days when you read things in your spam inbox for entertainment. Usually I just peruse the subject lines, but I happened to open one of the typical Nigerian spam messages and realized just how quaint some of the assumptions are. Dear/Madam,
I am happy to write to you this mail. I am glad that i have you as a friend and i hope that this mail gets to you with all happiness in your mind to help me out in this crucial matter.
First and foremost i want to tell you that i am the chief accountant with the Brinks Hellas Security Company Athens Greece with head quarters in Athens. i want to tell you that this matter all started last year 2004 when i was rounding up accounts for the year ended and also taking into stock what was in store. Here we have a scenario worthy of the opening chapter of a Graham Greene novel. The formal, overly polite clerk of the Athens office of Brinks, somewhat marooned in his dusty backroom with God knows whatall. At the end of the year it's time to "round up" accounts, and he takes stock of "what was in store." Did I say Greene? It's almost Biblical. Actually, I was taking into stock all the treasuries we have left, both the ones claimed and the ones not claimed, when i realized that there was this consignment that has been in the store room for about a year and a half now and no one has come to claim it. Really, i have been with this organization for about five years and know exactly when the consignments came in.
The actual destination of the consignments is from Malaysia belonging to one Mr. Hang Chen. All this stocks have been in my books and it is only me that knows whose goods have been claimed and whose goods are still in the store. ... The letter then goes into the usual details designed to make the story more plausible -- the length of time (four months) Mr. Chen's goods were supposed to remain in the storeroom, a subplot about Mr. Chen flying to Dublin (of all places), and finally the literal money shot: Now when i checked out the consignment late last year i decided to Scan it and found out that the consignments actually contains money and to my knowledge it contains 3 million dollars which are wrapped up. Honestly, this consignments has passed out the time lapse and i have already written it off the books. Und so weiter. What impressed me was the opening: the figure of the lonely stockroom clerk, undoubtedly middle-aged; he's over-educated for a stockroom clerk, which raises the question of how he wound up there in the first place -- no doubt a sad tale of frustrated ambition, a sabotaged career, and bad luck. He passes the time by opening up unclaimed packages, really just out of curiosity. Imagine his surprise when he finds the three million dollars (dollars, not drachmas, yuan, Euros or whatever they use in Malaysia).
If it were a Greene book, the ensuing chapters might deal with shadowy agents seeking the true provenance of the three million dollars. It would turn out there was no such person as a Mr. Hang Chen. Inevitably, a lovely woman in her mid-30s with a classical name such as Helen or Daphne would appear mixed up in the thing, probably trying to protect someone, and the storeroom man would have to choose between his secret love for her and his moral duty.
But they don't write them that way anymore, except in spam emails. technorati: hoaxes Labels: Greene, hoaxes, writers ideas
Monday, June 15, 2009
Today's fake: a troubled pregnancy
A Chicago area blogger who kept readers spellbound with reports on her "pregnancy with a terminally ill baby" was faking the whole thing, local media reported yesterday. Faced with the problem of finally coming up with a baby, the 26-year-old woman, Beccah Beushausen of Oak Park, furnished a picture of herself cradling a swaddled doll. Readers quickly noticed the deception: "I have that exact doll in my house," said Elizabeth Russell, a dollmaker from Buffalo who had been following the blog. "As soon as I saw that picture, I knew it was a scam."
By Monday, outraged followers on dozens of Christian parenting Web sites unmasked "April's Mom" as a hoaxer, and hundreds more vented their anger. Notice who got upset. The only problem with this was that it was not intentionally designed to punk the anti-abortionists, but was merely a symptom of a sick mind. "I've always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear," Beushausen said.
"Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand," she said. "I didn't know how to stop. ... One lie led to another." There goes the book deal! technorati: Beushausen, April's mom, abortion Labels: abortion, bloggers, fakes, Focus on the Fundies, hoaxes, over-reactions
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories
There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness: Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee. I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.
Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that. technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER Labels: Bad Behavior, celebutantes, dystopia, economy, fakes, geeks, hoaxes, identity, writers ideas
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Today's fake: man fakes his death, but really badly
If you're going to fake your own death on Monday, don't rent a storage locker in your own name, leave your getaway vehicle there, and let the manager know "I'll be back for it Monday night." So that when you bail out of your private plane and it crashes, obviously with no one in it, and the motorcycle disappears on schedule, people won't totally know what happened.
Actually even before people knew about the getaway motorcycle: "When I heard there was a plane crash, my first reaction was, this had to be staged," Tom Britt, a friend in Indiana, told CNN affiliate WRTV in Indianapolis. "[My] initial reaction was, 'I bet he wasn't in it.' That turned out to be correct. My second reaction was, he's trying to escape the pressure that was compounding on him." Could the guy have been any more transparent? Ow, compounding pressure!
Prosecutors in the guy's home state of Indiana promptly issued a felony arrest warrant for the bungler.Labels: Bad Behavior, fakes, hoaxes
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Tuesday™! -- holiday feeling edition
A guy who was on the plane that crashed in Denver on Saturday sent Twitter messages about the experience, beginning with "Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!" (sic) After being taken back to the airport terminal, he wrote that passengers were being held in the airline's lounge but weren't given drinks. "You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can't even get a vodka-tonic," he complained: "boo." His username? 2drinksbehind.
The CEO of Fry's, a West Coast electronics retailer, is being accused of scamming $65 million from the company in kickbacks from suppliers.
Today's fake: The New York Times apologized yesterday after publishing a fake letter to the editor purporting to be from the mayor of Paris.
Today's hoax: Publisher Jane Daniel is now speaking openly about having published a years-long hoax in which author Mischa Defonseca claimed to have survived the Holocaust as a child by living with wolves in a forest. Daniel is speaking openly, that is, because she has just published her own book about her role in the hoax. See my previous entry on the hoax.
In Colorado Springs, this headline says it all: Man Found Outside With Pants Down May Lose Legs.Labels: Bad Behavior, books, Colorado Springs, fakes, hoaxes
Friday, December 05, 2008
Today in politics: fearing hoax, Florida congresswoman twice hangs up on Obama
The hoaxing of Sarah Palin no doubt still fresh in her mind, a Florida congresswoman twice hung up on President-Elect Barack Obama when he called to ask her help on coming legislation. technorati: hoaxes, fakes Labels: fakes, hoaxes, Obama, radio
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Today's hoax: fake pundit not really a 'McCain adviser'
A person(a) named Martin Eisenstadt was behind the assertion that Sarah Palin didn't know whether Africa was a continent or a country, people have reported this week. Now it turns out that "Martin Eisenstadt," his blog, his supposed status as adviser to McCain, and his "Harding Institute" are all an elaborate hoax played out for months. Among the media outlets that were taken in by various postings and press releases made by "Eisenstadt" -- actually the creation of two filmmakers -- were Mother Jones, the LA Times, the New Republic, and most recently with the fake Palin story, MSNBC.
My favorite bit of the story is that the filmmakers based his name on the notion that "all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names."
I read much of the article to Cris, who said, "It isn't very funny."
I said, "It's meta-funny -- it's making fun of the whole superstructure of blogs, pundits, opinionators and so forth who form a sort of mulch that feeds the news cycle." (I thought I was clever for coining a neologism, but "opinionator" turns out already to be in common use.) technorati: fakes, hoaxes, Martin Eisenstadt Labels: hoaxes, media
Today's fake: woman stages daughter's kidnapping
A British woman staged her 9-year-old daughter's kidnapping, going so far as to drug the girl and tie her to a roof beam in order to gain access to £50,000 in reward money. The 33-year-old woman is on trial with a 40-year-old male acquaintance who claims he had acted "under duress" with the girl's mother telling him what to do. The British press is having a field day with the case, calling the man "pervy ex-lover of abducted Shannon Matthews's mum" and "vile."Labels: hoaxes, parenting
Friday, October 24, 2008
Today's fake: GOP volunteer charged with making false report
Well, that didn't take long: The young McCain volunteer who said she was attacked by a black man who carved a (backwards) "B" on her face has been charged with making a false police report after admitting the story was false.
I mean: Police suspected all along that Todd might not be telling the truth, starting with the fact that the "B" was backward, Bryant said.
"We have robbers here in Pittsburgh, but they don't generally mutilate someone's face like that," Bryant said. "They just take the money and run." Labels: 2008 president race, hoaxes, McCain, Republicans
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Today's fake: Artist hoaxes Florida city mag
Courtesy MediaBistro: an artist pulled a major hoax on Orlando magazine, resulting in a feature story filled with bullshit. Among other claims, artist Mark Pulliam claimed to have played for the New York Yankees and to have done a commissioned painting of Yankee Stadium for team owner George Steinbrenner's office. Evidently the magazine, which published this fantastic tale in its August issue, never did any fact-checking for the piece.
Not known yet is whether Pulliam pulled the hoax intentionally or whether he just fed a gullible interviewer a load of crap, never dreaming his wild claims wouldn't be checked. But at least the guy really is an artist: view his work here. The interviewer, Jay Boyar, is primarily a movie writer who "teaches film analysis at the University of Central Florida."
The article doesn't seem to have been cached by Google, unfortunately, but at least you can read the magazine editor's column that issue, in which he says: Associate editor Jay Boyar's profile of Winter Garden artist Mark Pulliam ("The Natural," page 74) is a great read. Although Madonna is a fan of Pulliam's paintings, he is a virtual unknown in this area. And would you believe he also once pitched for the New York Yankees? Hey, I couldn’t make that up if I tried. But someone did. technorati: hoaxes, fake, Orlando Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Pilates godfather: Yur doin it wrong
Ron Fletcher, the man who is responsible for passing on the Pilates bodywork technique, says it shouldn't be thought of as an exercise regimen but as "an art, a science." Millions of grim-faced twenty- and thirty-somethings disagree.
No one ever points out that the regimen, or whatever it is, is named after the Roman administrator who famously washed his hands of guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus, and how fitting it is that such a strenuous exercise should be named for a torturer. Coming soon: the Torquemada.Labels: dominatrix, hoaxes, marketing
Friday, June 06, 2008
It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Munchausen Syndrome By Internet edition
You may have heard of the mental disorders Munchausen Syndrome, and the even more nauseating Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. In the former, a personality disordered person deliberately injures themselves to gain attention and sympathy; in the latter, they injure a loved one, usually their child, so that they can appear to everyone as a loving and selfless caretaker of their poor hurt little darling. The phenomenon experienced by the writer Armistead Maupin, in which an insane woman built up a phone relationship with him based on a supposedly seriously ill but actually non-existent child, was written up by him in the novel "The Night Listener." The J.T. LeRoy hoax, which was carried out primarily on the telephone by a manipulative former phone sex worker, also had a whiff of this.
With the internet, we have a new version of this illness. There are two websites called Dogster and Catster -- run by the same company -- which are social networking sites for pet owners. The conceit of these sites is that the pet owners don't post as themselves, but in the personas of their pets. My wife Cris has been a member of Catster for several months in the persona of our cat Milagrito. She is essentially writing tongue-in-cheek blog entries about current events; right now Milagrito is running for president.
Of course, pets do get sick and die. When this happens, the other users in their network -- their cat's "friends" -- naturally post sympathetic messages and condolences. One of the users, I mean cats, makes little "angel wings" graphics to bestow on the departed kitty.
By now you may be able to see where this is going. According to a post from the wing-bestowing user, someone is going to elaborate lengths to create fake users, complete with pictures taken from cat adoption websites; after their cat has acquired several "friends," it begins to suffer a series of illnesses and accidents and eventually "dies," all accompanied by an outpouring of sympathy from their "friends." The wing-building user realized this was going on when she sensed something strange about a request for wings for a newly dead cat. I'll let this user, Krishna, take it from here: A couple months ago I was contacted by a member of our community with a request for wings. The person asking for wings had recently lost their cat to a degenerative health problem that they did not name on their profile.
Something about the request set the hairs on the back of my neck up. As I read the pmail and looked at the picture I had a sense of deja vu. I had seen the writing style before and had seen the same picture on the profile somewhere else on the internet.
After spending about an hour or so searching google images using countless search strings I came across the picture of the departed kitty same cat same picture of a garden in the background same everything. The cat was alive and up for adoption on petfinder. The petfinder entry was a new one too. I was infuriated! I started searching for pictures of the persons other cats and dogs and found them on google. Some were stolen from kittenwar some from petfinder and some from independent breeder sites.
I was so angry I confronted the person. They first tried telling me that they travelled extensively and picked up animals from all over the world. I asked them for the pets pre-adopted names, they couldn't. They told me to go to hell and stop being so nosy. That I was cruel for doubting them and their pain. Then they dissappeared off of dogster and catster completely. I breathed a sigh of relief.
But a day later I was asked to make wings for a new member. After reading the profile outlining their rapidly declining health and final death; my suspicions arose again. I went to google and again found the profile pictures mocking me. Mocking the pain I felt at the death of my beloved pets. I couldn't understand it at all. Why would someone fake a death? Is it the attention, is it the rosettes [virtual presents given from one user to another -- ed.], is it the wings, or something else?
Honestly I couldn't figure it out. Anyway as the weeks passed I started noticing more and more profiles using the same writing style, same flash toys on the pages, same backgrounds from the same site, and the same types of dramatic deaths. It was amazing to see the unbelievable events that lead to the deaths of these pet profiles.
It has prevented me from enjoying this site. Following the new profiles that come on, the insurgence of users that only join for the free giveaways, it's overwhelming. Understanding the freebees was easy. The fakes sickness and deaths is dumbfounding. So, that's pretty pathetic, faking the death of a pet to get people's attention and sympathy. I suppose it's better than actually hurting yourself or, worse, a child or pet, but really, how gross. technorati: Munchausen Syndrome, pets, catster, internet Labels: cats, fakes, hoaxes, the internets
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Hoaxers as superheroes
 To bring this week's literary scandal to a close -- a quite minor scandal it was, but one that bloggers have chewed thoroughly as if it were the last piece of steak before a year-long Buddhist retreat -- NYT books reporter Motoko Rich drew up a collection of literary hoaxers from Clifford Irving to JT LeRoy to the current, soon-to-be-forgotten Peggy Seltzer.
While looking over the illustration (left) for Rich's article, I suddenly realized that her rogue's gallery suggested a sort of sick Legion of Literary Super-villains who went over to the dark side; I envision them sitting around in their decrepit Brooklyn headquarters, all trying to write "true memoir" versions of their experiences while drinking out of the same bottle of cheap Cabernet Sauvignon from Trader Joes and all sharing the same cellphone while they try to get an agent or editor to return their calls. When the cellphone rings they all dive for it and end up in a heap on the floor, the wine puddling into a stain that can never be washed away.
The Super-Hoaxers, their true identities, and some details about them: (Note: all have the super-power of assuming others' identities; each has at least one additional power) - Wannabe Girl (Peggy Seltzer) -- Her uniform is a red hoodie and red kerchief with baggy jeans and $150 Timberland boots. She speaks in a patois of fake South Central ghetto-speak until the other Super-Hoaxers cover their ears and tell her to shut up, whereupon she starts asking them to help her write a prep school memoir. Her super-power is making bourgeois editors believe that the cultural signifiers of powerless people are actually powerful totems that magically grant a sense of authenticity and genuine feeling.
- Big Lummox (James Frey) -- Speaks in a strangely high-pitched voice, tending toward whining when talking about himself. His uniform is a Gap denim shirt and Relaxed-size jeans with $300 Nikes. His super-power is getting women to feel sorry for him.
- Red-Faced Man (Tim Barrus) -- Growling, mumbling, often drunk, his speech is often unintelligible, but Wannabe Girl pretends to understand it. His uniform is red plaid shirts, cast-off red kerchiefs from Wannabe Girl (though they are often thought to be romantically involved, they actually can't stand one another), dirty brown trousers, and moccasins. His super-power is that, while everything else in his books is a lie, he actually knows how to fish, though in Brooklyn this skill is useless.
- Cherry Pie (Laura Albert) -- Though middle-aged, her uniform is a 12-year-old Victorian child's dress, worn with a floppy hat from the 1960s. Her super power is being able to sound like any other human being, but only on the phone; if you watch her performing this feat of vocal impersonation in person, it just looks weird. She also has a sort of super-hypnotic power that can make others believe that some random people she's with are actually family members or somehow also famous, but it only works on has-been celebrities, and it's weakening as time goes on.
- Super-Daughter (Kaavya Viswanathan) -- Her uniform is smart college togs from H&M, and she speaks like an east coast prep school student, but can turn on a curry accent when provoked. Wannabe Girl is dying to be her best friend. Her long hair is capable of reaching out and entangling reporters, college admissions officers, editors and potential mates, and she also knows everything, but no one believes her.
technorati: hoaxes, JT LeRoy, Peggy Seltzer Labels: fakes, hoaxes, superheroes
Monday, March 03, 2008
Today's fake: she wasn't half-native American or a gang chick
A woman who wrote a memoir about being a half white, half Native American gang chick who worked as a drug courier for South Central L.A. gangs made it all up, and the publisher is pulling all unsold copies and cancelling her book tour. Her rationale?I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it's an ego thing -- I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it. She was found out when the New York Times published a profile of the author last week; her sister read it, agog, then called the publisher to squeal.
I wonder how many of these the publishing industry will take before the entire memoir genre becomes a thing of the past. technorati: hoaxes Labels: fakes, hoaxes, publishing
Friday, February 29, 2008
Today's hoax: author says 'I felt Jewish'
A woman who several years ago insisted that her 1997 memoir "Misha, a Memoir of the Holocaust Years" was true has admitted that the whole story, in which she depicts herself as a Jewish child who wanders by herself across Nazi-occupied Europe searching for her deported parents, is a hoax (courtesy Publishers Marketplace). The book is the basis for a new French movie, "Survivre avec les Loups" -- it seems that according to one passage in the book the author claimed to have been sheltered by wolves.
In a statement, the author said the real story is that while she is a Belgian Catholic, her parents were resistance fighters who were arrested by the Nazis, and that therefore she "felt Jewish," and believes the story "was my reality, my way of surviving."
Apart from the preposterous notion of a small child being taken in by a wolf pack, rather than devoured for lunch, the notion of a child being protected from the Nazis in this manner seems very strange even as a fictional trope, as wolves were a symbol favored by the Nazis themselves.
Coincidentally, I saw part of "Dr. Zhivago" on TV last night, and as we watched the scene where Zhivago and Lara are marooned in a snowy dacha surrounded by howling wolves, Cris murmured, "The wolves symbolize the Bolsheviks." That never occurred to me, but I realized she was right. I'm terrible at symbols, they go right by me -- somewhat of a handicap for a novelist. technorati: literary hoaxes, holocaust, novels, French cinema Labels: Bad Behavior, books, hoaxes, writers
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Lit liars in the news
Coincidentally, two of last year's most disgraced authors were in the news today. The filthy rich parents of Kaavya Viswanathan, whose name was attached to a largely plagiarized novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed" etc., bought a $3.2 million condo in Manhattan. And Galleycat reports that James Frey has recovered enough from his national humiliation on Oprah to pen a novel. Man, that's one book that's going to be combed for lice like a first grader's head. technorati: James Frey, Kaavya, hoaxes, writers Labels: book deals, fakes, hoaxes, publishing, writers
Monday, December 18, 2006
People continue to take "JT LeRoy" writer seriously
On the Zen Monkeys site is a big interview with Laura Albert, the woman who wrote the JT LeRoy books, conducted by the pre-Web 1.0 personage RU Sirius.
I have never cottoned to the work of either person, in any of their roles. I always hated Mondo 2000, the magazine edited by RU Sirius -- it was the epitome of flashy cool crap, with startling, fluorescent eye-catching graphics accompanying articles about bullshit. It was like porn for Burning Man types before there was Burning Man and before porn was cool, though it wasn't porn except in the sense of being masturbation material about "alternative" future crap, like "smart drugs" and hypertext fiction -- stuff that might have been interesting if it had existed, but which they treated totally seriously as if it did. (At one point, about 1992, another magazine came along that tried to look similar and was porn -- "Future Sex," which was almost as bad, though it was at least about something.)
I guess that makes RU Sirius the perfect person to interview Laura Albert, who wrote books that were considered to be good mainly because they were supposed to be not just novels but the merely lightly fictionalized story of a tragically victimized person whom, as it turned out, did not exist, thus rendering the books uninteresting. On the subject of Albert having been interviewed by the Paris Review (which was careful to characterize it not as an interview but an "encounter"), RU Sirius says, apparently with an absolute straight face: "It's a sign of respect for your work."
No, it's a sign that the Paris Review has changed its focus and now interviews freaks, like the Serbian assassin they talked with the issue before that. That was also an "encounter." (From a piece on the Paris Review's new editor Philip Gourevitch: Best of all, he added a feature he calls Encounter, a short Q & A with interesting, obscure people.
One Encounter was an interview with a professional mourner in China. "We used to treat every funeral like a contest," he said. "There were lead wailers and backup wailers, and after the gig was over, members would get together and critique each other's performances." Another Encounter was with a Chinese public toilet manager. ... Those Encounters were amusing, but the Encounter with Nikola Kavaja was chilling. Kavaja is a Serb assassin who served 18 years in U.S. prisons for hijacking an American Airlines jet in Chicago in 1979...) I'm still waiting for an agent to sell a book with Laura Albert's name on it. According to Publisher's Marketplace, that is yet to happen.
Update: Apparently Albert is really making the rounds. Here's a USA Today -- or rather, a USA Today blog -- interview in which she starts crying when asked "is JT's voice completely gone from your head now, or does it still come back?" Utterly shameless.
Previously:
The Fake Patrol
Suckers line up to claim they were duped by LeRoy hoax
'Other writers latched onto JT as career move'Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Friday, September 29, 2006
'JT LeRoy' fraudster still milking it
Laura Albert had a tea party (when? The article doesn't say; so much for the five Ws) to "celebrate" the release of the Paris Review with her "interview."
Not one of the high-profile official Paris Review interviews; in this issue they give that treatment to Stephen King. No, the Albert interview is called an "encounter." Lots of bio info, judging by the online excerpt.Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Monday, May 08, 2006
MethaPhor five six
The Boston Globe has a piece about the book packager involved in the MethaPhor scandal (link courtesy Galleycat).
I was thinking last night that there has to be a good joke that begins with the line: "J.T. LeRoy, James Frey and Kaavya Viswanathan go into a bar..."Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
MehtaPhor, act III
Thought that Indian-American girl's troubles were over? Thought the story would die down now that the publisher has pulled her book from shelves? Not even close. Readers have found plagarized passages from additional books by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Sophie Kinsella.
Perhaps we'll soon see a story like this: Teen author also stole from Jefferson, Twain, Whitman, others
A close examination of Kaavya Viswanathan's now-infamous debut novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life" has uncovered passages from several famous American authors, according to media reports.
The Harvard Independent reported that a passage on page 164 of the novel, which is about the life of an over-achieving daughter of Indian immigrants, resembled Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. The passage reads: "You're a traitor, Jenny!" I said.
"Am not!" Jenny replied. "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." The New York Times reported that a lyrical passage on page 70 resembles the work of poet Walt Whitman: "My daddy's country place is a thousand acres," Buffy said.
"Oh, that's not so big," I said.
"Oh yeah? Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? Have you even reckon'd the earth much? Do you even know how to read?"
"Yes, I can read your face, and it says loser. You may be interested in real estate, but I'm a poet. Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?" Finally, the long sequence in pages 213-29, in which the title character is lost in a cave and menaced by a first-generation Indian immigrant named Joe is much the same as a passage from Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
A spokesperson for Little, Brown, Viswanathan's publisher, refused comment except to say "We thought the 'Indian Joe' sequence was a brilliant ethnic satire." Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Thursday, April 27, 2006
MehtaPhor -- end of Act II
 Kaavya Viswanathan has gone from a half million dollar book deal to being accused of plagarism, but her publisher has stood by her, saying things like what a fine young person she was.
Until now.
Courtesy Galleycat, a NYT story saying publisher Little, Brown has asked bookstores to pull Viswanathan's novel "How Opal Methta, Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" from shelves.
Stores will receive a full refund from the publisher. Man, that's got to cut into your royalties.
Meanwhile, a U.K. writer said never mind the plagarism charges, what about the utter crap the book is full of? The title of the piece: "Harvard should be worried."Labels: fakes, hoaxes
MehtaPhor
Courtesy Mediabistro, an AP story in which author Kaavya Viswanathan says she was shocked," shocked to see so many similarities between her book "How Opal Mehta..." and... well, you know the story. The NY Times has a nice piece on the "book packager," 17th St. Productions, now known as Alloy Entertainment. The piece contains the curious clue that one Claudia Gabel, a former editor of Megan McCafferty, author of the original books from which Viswanathan is alleged to have copied, then worked at Alloy during the genesis of "Opal Mehta." But Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, the publishing company that owns Crown, said Ms. Gabel, who worked at Alloy from the spring of 2003 until last November, had left the company "before the editorial work was completed" on Ms. Viswanathan's book.
"Claudia told us she did not touch a single line of Kaavya's writing at any point in any drafts," said Mr. Applebaum, who added that Ms. Gabel was one of several people who worked on the project in its conceptual stage.
Mm-hmm, yes. But did she hire someone who did -- someone like the author quoted in this Harvard Independent piece on 17th St./Alloy?
Then, courtesy Galleycat, a link to a report in the Harvard Crimson (which first broke the whole story, last Saturday) on a personal appearance by McCafferty, who refrained from commenting on the whole thing. No doubt she has lawyers with hungry eyes on Viswanathan's half-million dollar advance.
You know, I don't care about the young, rich and very attractive Ms. Kaavya Viswanathan or her book. It's just entertaining to watch her and everyone around her twist clowly in the wind on this thing.
Anyway, you're wasting your time looking to my blog for info on this. Read Galleycat -- they're on it like a rug. And for even more -- see this entry on Old Hag, with its link at the bottom to a Slate article... This story has legs, folks.Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Give me your tired Harvard sophomores
There's a whole mini-scandal going on over a novel by -- perhaps I should say "by" in quotes -- Kaavya Viswanathan, an attractive Indian-American Harvard sophomore. The book, with the cringe-worthy but marketable title How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, got a lot of attention because of its author's youth and because it got a half million dollar advance.
Unfortunately, it turns out the book contains many passages quite similar to novels by Megan McCafferty, of whose work Viswanathan now says she is a "big fan," and she must have "unconsiciously" soaked up McCafferty's prose. The story has now percolated ot the point where there's a NYT story.
Galleycat is all over this, so read their posts about the author apologizing for the "similarities" and especially this bit on 17th St. Productions, the "book packager" who may actually be the people responsible for getting Viswanathan into this mess. Backstory: Viswanathan originally turned in a "much darker" first draft, but after 17th St. got ahold of it, it turned into a fluffy teen-ready chicklit novel.
Previously: The Soy Luck ClubLabels: fakes, hoaxes
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Today's fake: LeRoy redux
We go once more to the well for some investigation into the J.T. LeRoy hoax. Today SF Chronicle writer Heidi Benson -- who first wrote that LeRoy's real identity didn't matter, and only weeks later, when the hoax was revealed by others, finally found it in herself to actually knock on the door of the Albert-Knoop residence, from which the principals had already fled -- publishes a long piece in which all the "clues" and background to the LeRoy farce are listed. Laura Albert -- author of the LeRoy tomes -- has a playwright mother. Geoffrey Knoop -- whose half-sister played LeRoy during photo shoots and live appearances -- has a filmmaker father.
The only other new information in the piece is the fact that the first LeRoy bestseller, "Sarah," has been optioned by film director Steven Shainberg, director of "Secretary;" and some interesting details from a Vanity Fair photo shoot in which assistants to photographer Mary Ellen Mark were told not to engage "JT" in any way, even as they were doing "his" makeup, but to direct all statements and questions to "Speedie," née Albert. Mark says she read "JT" as a woman all the way, but didn't speak up; in addition, "JT"'s voice gave her away: "It was someone from a good family, not someone who came from any poor white trash" as "JT" was supposed to have done. It makes you wonder about how many other of the celebrities she has photographed are frauds and phonies about whom she's had to hold her tongue.
Benson does make one interesting point in the piece, where she creates a context for the LeRoy hoax in "San Francisco subcultures (which) don't just co-exist; they coalesce. From Polk Street1 to North Beach2, the Mission3 to SoMa4, the music scene overlaps with performance art, which overlaps with the erotica scene, which overlaps with the queer scene, which overlaps with the literary set. The same faces pop up at LitQuake, the Red Devil Longue, Burning Man and the Exotic Erotic Ball.
That synchronicity defined the mid-90s, when the LeRoy hoax incubated. Anyone with cultural aspirations was in a band, making a movie, staging a one-person show, organizing a festival or a fundraiser or all of the above. It was the height of DIY culture, part of the punk ethos that inspired zines (the blogs of the day) by the hundreds. In this milieu, Albert began faxing messages to editors and writers, starting with hipster novelist Dennis Cooper...
That's a very smart couple of paragraphs, for a couple of reasons. First, the "overlapping" she talks about is very real, and it describes me and most of the people I know. I did almost all the things she talks about, though I started in the early 80s and by the mid-90s was about done. I did performance art, wrote erotica, held benefits (though I never attended Burning Man nor do I know anyone who thinks the Ex.Er. Ball is for anyone besides tourists -- true freaks go to the Folsom Street Fair, while the Ex.Er. Ball is for straight people). Secondly, the notion that this subcultural ferment created a petri dish for the LeRoy hoax rings true. The overlapping demimondes of San Francisco have space for all kinds of weird ideas.
Finally, to her credit, Benson quotes two local writers, Susie Bright and Michelle Tea, who have expressed outrage at the hoax (unlike Mark, who takes it in stride, and Benson herself, whose original piece on the LeRoy hoax, coming months after initial reports, was inconclusive and did more to confuse the issue than to shed light on it). My favorite outraged take on the whole thing is still Violet Blue's; she nails the real issue, which is authenticity versus posing, not as a way to separate the in-crowd from the tourists, but as a way to judge whether someone's statements and work is of value.
One more time: this matters because of the war in Iraq. If Bush can lie about WMDs; if he can present himself as a folksy Texas rancher rather than the privileged child of millionaires; if he can pretend his actions are patriotic rather than the machinations of a bunch of rich indistrialists and investors who have taken over the government, then why should readers be any more discriminating about the provenance of purported non-fiction. The difference between truth and lies matters.
Much more interesting is the piece by Jack Boulware in Salon two weeks ago which revealed Laura Albert's backround in the subcultures of SF with much greater detail. Boulware's thesis -- that Albert embarked on the whole scheme because she wanted fame -- makes clear the most ironic element of the whole thing. Her works earned the author fame, all right -- but only in a way that meant she could never reveal her true identity. Instead she had to live vicariously as "JT"'s sidekick Speedie, listening to her husband's sister communicate in gruff monosyllables. That must have been a drag.
And when the truth was finally known, Albert was generally condemned for perpetuating the hoax. There are several people who say they admire its audacity and success, but there are more condemning her as the ultimate fraud. Yeah, she's going to do a tell-all, but honestly, you think the same people who thought it was cool to get "JT LeRoy" to write for "Deadwood" or the NYT travel section will think it's cool to get Laura Albert to do that? NFW.
1 - Polk Street is the downmarket street for gay male culture and ground zero for tranny and boy hookers; tricking on Polk St. was supposedly part of the "LeRoy" bio
2 - North Beach is the traditional home of the Beats and is still regarded as a place where literature and writing are cherished
3 - The Mission is the new generation's North Beach, where housing is still relatively cheap and where there are tons of bookstores, galleries, bars and performance spaces
4 - SoMa is a sort of second-rate copy of the Mission District; it's always had fewer bookstores, galleries and such, but it is the home of the sex demimonde, with all the leather bars and leather accoutrements stores. JT LeRoy, Mary Ellen Mark,Heidi Benson, hoaxes, fakes Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Monday, February 06, 2006
Hoax's End
BREAKING: Geoffrey Knoop -- whose half-sister Savannah Knoop was revealed last month as the public face of "JT LeRoy" and whose girlfriend Laura Albert was the prime suspect as author of the JT LeRoy novels and hoax -- has come forward to confirm details of the hoax.
Knoop's confession included the detail that the controversy -- overshadowed by the James Frey imbroglio -- had broken up his 16-year relationship with Albert, and "If you're feeling more and more suffocated by the complications and lies, it's not worth it." hoaxes, JT Leroy, Knoop, literary hoaxes Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
High-profile agent's favorite new client has 'no persona'
Stung by recent literary hoaxes, fakes, and general wool-pulling, agents and publishers are a little gun-shy, AP writer Hillel Italie reports. The story quotes JT Leroy's erstwhile agent as speaking in favorable tones of a new client: I have a nice relationship with him, I like the work and he's not telling me that he's an HIV positive, drug-addicted prostitute. There's no persona. He's just an average person not pretending to be anything. See? Boring is the new interesting.
The piece makes an interesting point: They have fact checkers at The New Republic and the NYT, and that didn't stop Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass from making stuff up. hoaxes, agents, literary hoaxes, JT Leroy Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Dept. of fakes
In an interview on Book Standard, a Vanity Fair photographer who took a picture of "JT LeRoy" (i.e. Savannah Knoop who, it has been revealed, merely played the non-existent author in public) says she knew it was a girl all the time, and furthermore could tell the person she was photographing was not the product of the troubled background as told in the "LeRoy" bio.
In other fakery, the publisher of an upcoming children's book will not release the book after all, since early readers discovered the author lifted the title and part of the text from a 1983 book. Strangest thing? The author and publisher are the same person. JT Leroy, Savannah Knoop, hoaxes, fakes, plagarism Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Friday, January 27, 2006
It's Bad Behavior Friday™!
First (Courtesy Rachel Kramer Bussel) , some hot librarian type with glasses finds Moby Dick highly erotic: I'm going to make a bold statement here: a bunch of dudes on a whaling boat is even sexier than a bunch of pirates on a pirate ship. ... I mean, pirates are awesome and wear rad outfits and are swashbucklingly violent and all, but whaling dudes are all butch, they get filthy, their skin gets all tough and leathery, and they thrust their harpoons into the whale again and again, in and out, until its hot quivering flesh is still. See what I mean?
I think my semester will be a hell of a lot more interesting if I can spin erotic fantasies around all of my assigned reading. I mean, I'm interested in the reading already, but if I can masturbate to it I can reduce my porn-viewing time and increase my time spent on reading. Everybody wins! Especially Herman Melville!
Now she would be a good subject for my What Are You Working On series. I don't believe her name is really Audacia, though. It sounds like one of those spambot names I was talking about yesterday. And, also courtesy Rachel K-B, A Million Little Penises. Worth it for the graphic.
You know, about that whole Oprah-Frey episode we've just lived through -- could there be anything possibly more satisfying? Not only is a too-full-of-himself, falsely humble millionaire author humiliated on national television and in the national media, but he's practically emasculated (as Virginia Heffnan put it in today's NYT) -- and by a black woman. Imagine her taking Abramoff apart on that off-white couch. Imagine Cheney under "her whip hand," as Heffernan -- obviously worked up by the whole thing -- also put it.
More fakes: As the sun sets on James Frey, it's rising on the less well-known but possibly even more heinous "Nasdijj" (that's two j's if you're keeping score at home). Galleycat has the latest, including links to proof that the self-described Navajo writer is really a white bisexual leatherman named Tim Barrus who wrote several gay male porn books. Badger, a Bay Area blogger with friends in the leather community, explains why the PEN award-winning author's cultural appropriation is even more shameful than the wool-pulling perpetrated by Frey and the JT Leroy scammers. james Frey, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Moby Dick, Audacia Ray, Chris Genoa, Oprah, Virginia Heffernan Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Today's Big Fake: Nasdijj
Not content with the James Frey and JT LeRoy imbroglios or the firing of SF Weekly's 'The Infiltrator', LA Weekly has uncovered -- the right word, since the book was published in 2000 -- another memoir hoax. Courtesy Mediabistro.
This one's about a supposedly Navajo writer who called himself Nasdijj and got Houghton Mifflin to publish a book called The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams. That ring any bells? Didn't think so. Nevertheless, it shows how eager publishers and readers are for stories of struggle, suffering and redemption.
More bang for the buck (ouch!): In the SF Chronicle today, cartoonist Don Asmussen suggests JT Leroy was actually Carol Channing. hoaxes, literary hoaxes Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Monday, January 23, 2006
Upcoming LeRoy film 'based on a true story'
Leroy redux: upcoming film 'based on a true story'? Perhaps the people most unhappy about the uncovering of the J.T. Leroy hoax -- an event which has reached sufficient infamy as to no longer require a referential hyperlink, just as you don't have to hyperlink a general reference to 9/11, the 2000 Florida recount, or other infamous events -- is the company which is about to release a film based on the "Leroy" novel 'The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things' -- and hey, wasn't that title, in retrospect, really just a cry for help?
That WWD article says Palm Pictures is the film's distributor, but I can't find any reference to the film on their website, though the film does have its own site (somewhat NSFW graphic there); there "MUSE Productions" is listed as the producer. There the film appears on its annoying Flash-created website.
Well, this is all going to be an excellent test of the dictum "There is no such thing as bad publicity." Though they might want to change the poster's tagline BASED ON A TRUE STORY. As BlackBook says, "How about 'based on a complete and utter lie?'" BlackBook, JT Leroy, Muse productions, Palm Pictures, hoaxes Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
'Other writers latched onto JT Leroy as career move'
I asked a writer acquaintance who also works for Last Gasp, JT Leroy's publisher, for a reaction to the protests by writers and editors who feel ripped off, either psychically or professionally, by the JT Leroy hoax. Without commenting on the question of whether Last Gasp's star author does or does not exist, he responded in part:
If people worked for free for someone else, shame on them. Every minute that I've worked for JT has been on the clock. (...)
Do you think people were really trying to show support to a troubled youth? Maybe 6 years ago, but up until the last October, they were hounding me to get to him. People latched on to him to try to forward their own careers. That's who's really upset.
"Last October" is when the article in New York by Stephen Beachy ran, exposing the Leroy hoax. The reason I asked this guy at Last Gasp is that in November 2004 he invited me and several other writers to participate in one of those readings of Leroy's work -- a book launch in which the author does not show up so local literary figures take turns reading from the book. (Susie Bright described one such event.) At the time I did not question the concept of an author not appearing at his own book launch and having others read in his stead; my only concern was that I had a prior engagement. My writing group was meeting that night, so I decided to say no. But to be honest, if I had been able to, I would have participated enthusiastically, partly because of the reason my contact cited: to forward my own career by appearing in a reading with other more famous people. It certainly didn't occur to me to question whether or not the author actually existed -- why would it? If someone emails me and says "We're having a book release for JT LeRoy's Last Gasp book, Harold's End," I have to understand there's a person named JT LeRoy -- there's no other way of understanding the sentence. If someone asks me to come to a potluck birthday party, I can be pretty sure the word "potluck" means everyone is going to bring some food to share, not some nutty meaning you might find in a New Yorker cartoon showing two explorers standing in a cannibal's kettle with one saying to the other "When you said it was potluck I thought you meant...." JT Leroy, Last Gasp, hoax Labels: fakes, hoaxes
Monday, January 09, 2006
'Dupe Club'
Courtesy Supernaut, here's a post by Susie Bright on being duped by the J.T. Leroy hoax. In it she admits being fooled by the complex hoax until a week before the Stephen Beachy piece appeared in New York magazine, she was late-night phone-called by the person whose voice she knew as "LeRoy's."
What's interesting about Susie's post is how much it resembles the statements, or ramblings, attributed by journalists to Leroy: at the same time it reveals a personal, embarrassing tale, it's full of references to her own fame and career.
Of course, Susie has the right to be upset about feeling personally ripped off, in a psychic if not literal way, by the frauds behind the Leroy persona. But as I said in my last post, I think the real outrage is that the Leroy hoaxers are exploiting public sympathy for people with AIDS and transgender people as a way to explain or excuse their own sloppy stewardship of the Leroy persona -- namely the appointment of an inarticulate amateur fashion model, whose command of English has no similarity to Leroy's written prose, to pose as Leroy in public. Just look at the comments of Ira Silverberg, "Leroy's" own literary agent: People were deceived in a brutal way: playing the AIDS card to elicit support, money, connections. That is simply unacceptable. It is morally reprehensible.
J.T. Leroy, Susie Bright Labels: fakes, hoaxes
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