Maybe we're reading

This post on a business website asks, Why does conservative media crush liberal media in terms of viewership?

All they do is pose the question, they don't really try answering it. But here are some suggestions:

♦ Liberals read more than they watch TV.

♦ Liberals spend more time exercising than conservatives do.

♦ Liberals garden and cook more than conservatives do.

♦ Old people do less reading, exercising and gardening than younger people, and tend to park themselves in front of the TV, and they tend to be more conservative.

♦ Younger people, who tend to be more liberal, are less likely to identify with the late-middle-aged personalities on conservative TV.

I mean, what self-respecting thirty-year old would park himself in front of Bill O'Reilly night after night? For fuck's sake!

Today's fake: Italian journo fabricated interviews with famous writers

Via Galleycat: An Italian journalist called Tommaso Debenedetti may have fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham. The fake interviews were published in Italian newspapers.

technorati: fakes, fraud, writers

An obscure annotation to 'The Savage Detectives'

I was dipping into The Savage Detectives today and re-read the long account of Mary Watson, one of the few pieces in the long middle section of the book (a section which consists entirely of first-person speeches, supposed interviews conducted by an unknown interlocutor) narrated by an English speaker. This section, labeled "Mary Watson, Sutherland Place, London, May 1978," is one of the longest "interviews" in the book, almost twenty pages long in the American trade paperback edition. It recounts a series of incidents centering around an unnamed night watchman of a campground in the south of Spain near Barcelona, a man whom narrator Watson becomes involved during a period of several weeks when she and a companion link up with a group of motley vagabonds, spending part of the time picking grapes in the south of France.

In the last paragraph of the piece narrated by Watson, she describes her return to Oxford, where she is studying, and says "A little while later I moved to 25 Cowley Road, Oxford..." Why so specific, I wondered. What is at that address? I looked it up on Google Maps. I don't know what was there in 1996 or so when Bolaño wrote the book, but now there is a Spanish/Moroccan tapas restaurant called Kazbar. From Google Street View, I can see that there is a residence above part of this restaurant, but the door is marked 27a.

So I wonder why Bolaño named the address of that restaurant. Is it significant that it serves Spanish food? Could Bolaño have made the acquaintance of the owner at some time, could he perhaps once have visited Oxford and had an enjoyable meal there, or at whatever restaurant, if it was different, that occupied the space at some point whenever it was that Bolaño visited? Did Bolaño ever even visit Oxford?

It would be nice if someone in Oxford were to do me the favor of going and asking the owner of the place. For all I know there's a photograph of him on the wall; equally possible, the owner may never have heard of Roberto Bolaño, may not even be Spanish or Moroccan. Like everything else in the book that tempts the reader to ask what part is true or why the author chose a particular detail, this will remain a mystery, as the honorable author is of course dead.

Later: A little more searching turned up the facts that the Kazbar is owned by a man named Clinton Pugh, who is said to own several Oxford restaurants, and that (according to the restaurant's own website) the establishment was "designed and developed in 2001" by Mr. Pugh. What was there before that, who knows.

Still later: Upon further consideration, I've decided that the most likely explanation has nothing to do with the coincidentally Spanish restaurant. It seems most likely that there was a house at 25 Cowley Road, one just like the house next door with the door marked 27a, and that at one point Bolaño knew someone who lived there, perhaps a writer with whom he corresponded, perhaps a poet friend who was in Oxford on a year's visiting lectureship or something. I'll leave the rest of it to Bolaño scholars. Obviously not, as I added something else below.

It also occurred to me that it would be great if there were a Bolaño wiki where fans could annotate Bolaño's longer works.

Even later: While continuing to surf around, I was reminded that the author Javier Marías, whose trilogy Your Face Tomorrow I am reading and which was recommended by Bolaño at various times, suggesting that Marías was a friend and correspondent of the Chilean, lived for some time in Oxford and set some of his novels there. So perhaps Marías was the one who lived at 25 Cowley Road.

technorati: Bolaño, Oxford, The Savage Detectives

'Between infatuation and love'

Q. Who are some writers that influence and inspire you?

Here I draw a line between infatuation and love. There are authors I am attracted to, whose books I read and enter into a kind of love correspondence with them, but only in few cases such infatuation transforms into love. I read and re-read such authors repeatedly, see them in my dreams; they seem to be my relatives. I even feel embarrassed naming the authors of the former kind: a love made publicly known rarely lasts long, as Andreas Capellanus would have it. The authors of the latter kind I name proudly: Pushkin, Nabokov, Brodsky, Tolstoy, Mark Twain. There is also a third category of attachment that one carries within like a wound that never heals. For me, two names stand for that: Anna Frank and Maria Shkapskaya. At times I feel my predicament is to write what the two have left unwritten.

-- from an interview on Molossus
with poet Vera Pavlova

Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again

From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.

That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"?

technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism

'All that matters' in a film

The novel [The Shining, by Stephen King] is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters. ... There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I've never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people's attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story's realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality.

--filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in an interview
commenting on adapting the novel to film

technorati: cinema, Kubrick

Today's paranoid: Obama said to be jockeying for one-world presidency

From a Time story about a Virginia gathering of Congressional candidates sponsored by a Tea Party group:

Feda Morton, the only woman in the race, has been a teacher, a state-championship basketball coach, a school board member and a Republican organizer. A diminutive mother of five sporting a sparkling flag pin, she fidgeted as she recited the merits of her candidacy in an interview with TIME. When the topic turned to Barack Obama, she confessed deep fears. "I don't think the President really cares about our health care," Morton says. "He's not trying to lead America. He's trying to position himself to be a leader higher up, and the only way he can do that is to bring America into the whole one-world order concept."

Obama, she adds, belongs to a plutocratic cabal that manufactures crises for personal profit, foisting scams like health care reform and global warming on U.S. taxpayers to depress the economy. "Look at who his czars are," she says. "He's tied very closely to George Soros, European socialist organizations, Howard Dean. These people all play into this one-world order, one-world money system. And it's to make money for them."

Wow! I love the expression "his czars" -- it's like a combination of the concept behind Jesus's admonition that no one can have two masters, with some neo-Red Scare ideology. Here is her website.

technorati: paranoia, nuts, Tea Party

The desert 'love lost lawyer'

There is a body of internet practice called search engine optimization or SEO. It is the art and science of engineering a web page, or blog posting, to try to ensure the page floats to the top of the results dellivered by Google and other search engines when certain phrases are the subject of a search.

One look at this page and you'll see what I mean.  Titled "Twentynine Palms Wrongful Death Attorney, Lost Love Lawyer and People Search Attorney for Twentynine Palms -- Find Your Lost Love," the page features a 1325-word supposed article about a lawyer in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., a small town adjacent to both Joshua Tree National Park and the world's largest Marine Corps base. According to the article, a lawyer named Sebastian Gibson will attempt to "find your lost love or obtain compensation for you for the wrongful death of a loved one ... (using) the highest quality legal resources that can be utilized to find the person you are looking for."

In reality, this so-called article consists of repetitions of certain stock phrases, reworded into a variety of different sentences. The idea behind SEO is that you can't just put a bunch of phrases onto a page over and over again; you have to make it look (to the bot, at least) like an actual blog posting. This is where the art comes in: to cram as many key words as possible into something that looks like an actual article. 

Such an "article" begs comparisons to the compositions of certain dull-minded high school students with whom I made my acquaintance back when I was an English teacher. In each class I always had a couple of students who couldn't write at all, and who, when assigned to write an essay, would simply string together certain key phrases, usually drawn from the question itself. Asked about the character traits that make Atticus Finch so memorable, such a student might write, "Atticus Finch had very good character traits that made him memorable. These traits showed good character, such as memory and strengh. I thought Atticus Finch was a strong character and had a good trait." (Only they were actually more poorly written than that.)

Clearly the so-called article exists entirely to draw the attention of search engines to the law practice of Mr. Gibson -- and a search on his name reveals he makes something of a hobby of SEO. Or maybe it's someone in his office, or some internet SEO firm he's hired. It looks like he's getting his money's worth.

But what I'm interested in is the mythical qualities embodied in this picture. The lawyer in the remote desert town whose practice is, in part, the search for "lost loved ones." In between working on a few wrongful death cases, he trolls the internet looking for your old high school girlfriend -- or maybe, in the case of Marines returned from their third or fourth deployment in the war on terror, that foxy female tank mechanic they used to drink beer with in Tikrit back in  2005.

This cries out to be a movie, starring perhaps Jim Carrey or Woody Harrelson,  as a hard-drinking lawyer with a client played by, I don't know, Ben Affleck. The client is trying to find an ex, played by Charlize Theron (if this were the 80s she would be played by Nastassja Kinski, a la Paris, Texas). The film could be written as a straighforward comedy, but I like it better as a bittersweet film (again, a la Paris, Texas), the real subject being the fact that the lawyer character's life was wrecked when he lost the love of his life (played in the present by Helen Hunt and in flashbacks by, say, January Jones).

Related: The Lonely Brinks 'Stockroom' Man

technorati: SEO, films, 29 Palms

Today's fake: closeted Calif. state senator with anti-gay record arrested in DUI after leaving gay bar

Courtesy SFist: California State Senator Roy Ashburn, who represents a district starting in the lower San Joachin Valley and extending through the Mojave Desert, was arrested for DUI last night after leaving a Sacramento gay bar; he had a trick in the car with him.

The news angle? Ashburn has an anti-gay voting record, and is closeted. Not to mention the fact that he has a link to Mothers Against Drunk Driving link on the resources page of his official website.

technorati: fakes, closet cases, Republicans

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