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

Praise the Lord and pass the sniper scopes

Trijicon, a Wixom-based supplier that has a $660 million multi-year contract with the Marine Corps and additional contracts with the U.S. Army, inscribes coded references to New Testament Bible verses on its ACOG high-powered rifle sights sold to the military.

-- news stories

Outlining your novel using Post-Its

Trying to finish the first long section of the novel I've been working on since around April, I had to resort to the technique of writing scenes or bits of conversation on post-it notes and moving them around. It's nice to have a surface like a mirror, a window, or a whiteboard for this exercise.

Readers may recall a previous post from 2.5 years ago when I showed the results of using the same technique for a different book.

technorati: writing, post-its

Dream of Acker

I had a dream that they were making a biopic about Kathy Acker and she was being played by Mary Woronov.

Hubris repaid

A Canadian man who won a lengthy legal battle for the right to keep "exotic" pets was mauled to death by his pet Siberian tiger yesterday.

Previously:

• Michael Jackson's tigers telepathically informed of his death
  
  
• SF Zoo tiger attack nearly a classic SF story

Uh, happy new year

I didn't mean to stop blogging. I've just been paying as much attention as possible to the novel I'm working on. But something occurred to me over the holidays, as I became aware, in the back of my mind, that it had been a long time since I last made a blog entry. I realized that I'm just not paying attention to pop culture the way I had been, in the period from 2002 to 2007, when I would put up as many as five or six posts a day about politics, pop, and the "bad behavior" I used to take such pleasure in recording and making snarky comments about.

I'm no less sarcastic. I'm just not paying as close attention anymore, because I'm putting as much attention and energy and thought as possible into my novel. Writing a novel doesn't give you as much instant gratification, but it's the only possible thing I'll ever be remembered for writing, so I'm giving it my best shot. Not that there's anything wrong with blogging, which I'll still do. In fact I'll probably do it twenty times this month. Or two. Whatever.