Category Archives: Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times

Fake!

book reviews, New York Stories, Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times, writing/blogging/publishing related, , , , ,

“I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

—  Fielding Melish, Bananas

In an age when the “self” may have infinite online iterations and an “award winning” 16-year old novelist  can unapologetically admit to “mixing and matching” by mostly taking the words of a less well-known writer, and still get nominated for a prestigious literary prize, how do we even begin to define “fake”?

Millions of viewers tune in for the wedding a woman famous for nothing.  The marriage is over in 72 days, and it’s possible the bridegroom wasn’t in on the joke, yet the celebutante’s ratings and brand do not appear to have suffered.

Still, some fakes are roundly condemned. In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan wrote How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Viswananthan got a major book deal while a sophomore at Harvard.  The novel came out, and so did the accusations that she had stolen chunks from another author’s series.  Viswanthan claimed it was unintentional. When the extent of her cribbing made her excuses unlikely, she blamed her photographic memory, saying she must have “internalized” the other texts.  Her publisher didn’t see it that way and canceled her contract.

Fitzgerald aside, second acts exist in America., Kaavya went on to Georgetown Law School just like former “journalist” Steven Glass who had been famously fired from The New Republic for passing off fiction as journalism.

There are many infamous cases of straight out plagiarism and other literary fakery over the last ten years —  “fake” memoirs like A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.  Frey is best known for an oft parodied episode of getting reamed out  by an enraged Oprah.  There’s Margaret B. Jones, who published a memoir of gang life in South-Central, in which she claimed to have been a part-Native American foster child in South Central.  She turned out to be a white surbanite with the last name of Seltzer, who briefly went to a public high school.

Perhaps the condemnation of Frey, Viswanathan, and Jones/Seltzer has to do with their “success” at fooling the self-important.  You don’t mess around with Oprah, The New York Times, and big publishers.

I’ll admit to having sympathy for Laura Albert who wrote novels under the name JT LeRoy and even had a relative make public appearances as this persona.  She was convicted of fraud for signing legal papers using her pseudonym.  While she never claimed that her books were non-fiction, she gave her alter ego a backstory suspiciously similar to that of her characters — a childhood of abuse and neglect, sexual identity issues, prostitution, etc.  As Birdie Coonan in All About Eve might have said “What a story. Everything but the blood hounds snapping at her rear end.”

Readers who “believed” in JT LeRoy were very upset to find out that the “author” didn’t exist.  Yet, how does that change their relationship to “his” fiction?  In an interview with The Paris Review, Albert explained the origin of the JT LeRoy persona.  In her version, LeRoy was not invented to fool readers or sell books, but to protect the psyche of a writer who was filtering some difficult material, which in fact came from her own past.

Do we forgive Albert because the writing stands on its own and the motives, at least in the beginning, did not appear to be monetary ones?  Or do we condemn her because readers grew emotionally invested in an “author” who was in fact a creation?

Sometimes it’s difficult to spot a motive for fraud. Over the past couple of weeks,  The Hacker Hunter has become the talk of the town on Kindle related blogs.  This is a techno-thriller/spy novel, self-published in October that amassed 350 favorable reviews.  The problem was that none of them were real.  The “tells” for fake were abundant, and the numbers impossible. Even Amanda Hocking, the Queen of Kindle doesn’t have anywhere near that many reviews on a single book.  Readers complained and almost all the reviews on Amazon US were pulled.  As of this writing, they are still up in the UK. The book itself wasn’t just “bad” in a Jacqueline Susann kind-of-way, it was the Springtime for Hitler of books.

Fake reviewers are reportedly paid $10 a pop and the review mills may be paid twice that for setting them up more. That means the author of Hacker could have spent $7k on the fakes. Did he really think this would lead to big sales?  A movie deal? Why not just hire a ghostwriter?  Or at least a proofreader?  Why risk one’s own reputation and maybe even one’s business?

Pondering motives brings me to the curious case of QR Markham, aka Quentin Rowan, whose thriller Assassin of Secrets was published in November by Little Brown (the people who brought you Kaavya Viswanathan).  Secrets was getting rave reviews and all kinds of buzz.  Within two weeks of publication, readers had noticed the plagiarized passages from a number of other books, and Rowan’s entire oeuvre turned out to have involved a lot of heavy, unattributed borrowing. When caught, Rowan admitted the fraud, even though some bloggers offered a way out, imagining it could have been a brilliant postmodern hoax.

Rowan sat down for a virtual (honest) conversation with a blogger about his “career”. He  suggested that it was having a poem anthologized in Best American Poetry when he was nineteen years old that set him on his wayward path.  He thought he was “destined” to be a great writer, and when he started writing prose, he just found other people’s words more “clever” than his own and started to “swipe” them.  He compares this to other addictive or obsessive behavior that is not rational.  There’s something awfully self-pitying about those remarks.  “Poor me, if only I hadn’t been ruined by early success and had applied myself to my craft.  I could have been somebody.  I could have been a contender.” Or as Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine put it, regarding music, “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

Nietzsche said, “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.” Another cure for insomnia is schadenfreude.  Rowan is an investor in a bookstore, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg. I blame Williamsburg itself for sealing his destiny.  I used to live there once before it became a playground for trustifarians and the tragically hip.

This is a neighborhood about which a young musician recently told me, “It’s not enough to be an artist or a musician, you have to be the right kind.”

Back in the 80’s, when my friends in the East Village referred to Williamsburg as a suburb, when taxi drivers wouldn’t take me there, when it was still a real place, there were writers and artists even then, but they weren’t there because it was a “scene.”  They were there because it was affordable. Nowadays, I feel too old, too ugly and too poor to even get off the train at Bedford Avenue, much less set foot in its most chichi of bookstores.

Rowan wasn’t actually trying to be a writer.  He was trying to be “the right kind“, the “kind” who gets published in the right places, and owns the coolest shop on the coolest block, in the coolest neighborhood, of  the greatest great city in the world — even though it’s a world of appearances that are no more real than shadows cast on the wall of a cave.

Nothing Sacred — The DSK Case Falls Apart

Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times,

“It’s like a live action metaphor. The head of the IMF trying to **** an African. It’s like he’s posing for his own editorial cartoon”

— May 16, 2011, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

With questions about the alleged victim’s credibility, the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is falling apart, but in the beginning, Stewart nailed it. What a metaphor!

The story resonated with New Yorkers. It wasn’t just the IMF connection. It was about the privileged wealthy versus the poor and humble. New York has long been a city of economic contrasts, great — almost inconceivable wealth, tons of strivers, a struggling middle class, and of course the poor who we always have with us and even when some of them manage to lift themselves out of poverty within a generation or two, there are always new arrivals from third world slums.

Those of us born in this City who are well-educated and hold down good jobs — the teachers, the cops, the plumbers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, store owners, talk show hosts, financiers and so on, are often only a generation or two or three removed from poverty and oppression.

While the City does not have the kinds of gated community found in wealthy suburbs, there is often an invisible gate, hotels with suites costing several thousand dollars a day which an ordinary person may only enter through the service door, cooperatives with two laundry rooms — one for the tenants who rarely use them and another more crowded one for the servants.

There are millions of people at the lower rung who remain invisible to the wealthy or even the comfortably middle-class. These are the people that drive the taxis, work in the remaining (and sometimes secretly operating) factories, bus tables, wash dishes, and of course clean hotel rooms.

America prides itself on being, not a classless society, but a society where anyone with pluck and guts can arrive and thrive, a land of opportunity, freedom and upward mobility where the cab driver from Ghana, can dream of owning his own medallion and someday a fleet of cabs, where the bus boy may imagine opening up his own restaurant, where even a hotel housekeeper can plan a better life for herself and her daughter.

When the newspapers first reported that the head of the IMF had been taken off a plane, prevented from leaving the country and was arrested for sexually assaulting a hotel maid, New Yorkers weren’t just shocked, they were proud. The French may have been outraged watching Strauss-Kahn’s infamous perp-walk, but to New Yorkers it was a signal that there was equal justice, that even the most lowly could not be used like a toilet, and even the most powerful could not flout the law.

We were pleased that our prosecutors would pursue a case that could become politically messy. We admired our cops for believing the victim. Her story was and remains believable and supported by physical evidence. And most of all we admired the plucky maid herself, for coming forward, for standing up, for not allowing this to happen to someone else.

The newspapers didn’t create a hagiography of the victim. We did. All the elements were there — she was New York, a hard working immigrant, who came here for a better life. We didn’t know her name, but we knew her struggles. She’d come from far away. She’d seen some terrible things. We knew she was granted political asylum. She was a Muslim and wore hijab to work. Could she even do that in France? Her courage inspired us all.

And then we found out there was a lot we didn’t know. It shouldn’t surprise us. The poor can’t always afford to keep their hands clean. We know she lied to get political asylum, including a lie about having been gang raped. We’re told she claimed someone else’s child as a dependent on her taxes — though we are not told if there were any extenuating circumstances like whether or not she actually cared for her friend’s child, and spent her own money — a not unlikely scenario. We know that there were multiple phones and bank accounts in her name and this may (or may not) have something to do with her connection to a man now in jail facing drug charges.

While none of this means she wasn’t assaulted, all of it will be used by the defense if the case goes forward, a possibility less likely by the hour.

No one should be surprised that a poor woman would have a conversation with her boyfriend in jail wondering if there was any way she could cash in on pursuing charges. The bar for being a credible victim should not be perfection, but somehow we all feel a little duped, a bit conned because the maid isn’t the humble saint we created.

The whole episode I’m sure will be a movie someday. Probably one that like Reversal of Fortune or Bonfire of the Vanities explores issues of great wealth, masters of the universe who play by different rules, and lawyers who sell their services and maybe their souls. But the movie it reminds me of is the 1937 screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred. That’s the story of Hazel Flagg, a young woman from Vermont, who worked in a watch factory and was diagnosed with radium poisoning. A New York newspaper offers her a spree in New York and puts her up in a swell hotel. New Yorkers take her tragic story and courage to heart, celebrating her with girls’ clubs and many honors. But Hazel is not really dying. She found out she’d been misdiagnosed before she accepted the newspaper’s offer but she kept that secret and took what she could get. She hadn’t set out to lie, but she’s not who everyone thinks she is. She’s played by Carole Lombard, and we, the audience, are on her side the whole time. She was simply an opportunist, and what is more American than that?

Something happened between Strauss-Kahn and the housekeeper in that hotel room. No one is disputing that. It was either consensual or it wasn’t. There’s physical evidence that supports assault. We can ask ourselves which seems more likely, that Strauss-Kahn somehow “seduced” the housekeeper or that she was, as she has said attacked, My own belief is that it was more likely it happened the way the maid described it, but in Strauss-Kahn’s mind this may be a seduction. He may believe that he is irresistible, or that no means yes, or that certain kinds of woman are insatiable, or that all women are whores. That the alleged victim had a conversation about whether she could benefit financially from pursuing charges, does not make her less credible. Like Hazel Flagg, it makes her more American.

Better Than Sex — What Weiner Really Got Out of It

New York Stories, Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times, , , , ,

Many people are mystified that a smart man like Anthony Weiner, who did his job well, and seemed to have everything, could blow it so spectacularly.  But what he did had nothing to do with intelligence, or even with lust in its usual form. (One-handed surfing could have satisfied that need easily.)

The New York Times reports that Weiner knew he was being followed on Twitter by right-wingers suspicious of his activities and eager to catch him in the act.  There’s evidence that the Congressman was playing a game of cat and mouse with them, and in an interview he had three weeks ago, Weiner spoke about the risks of social media.   Even after numerous political “sex” scandals, including the recent resignation of Congressman Christopher Lee, who was also caught sending a shirtless photo, Weiner did not curtail his activities.

People who think that this was “about” sex, another example of monogamy’s being outmoded, have it wrong.

Bill Clinton’s getting a blowjob in the White House was about sex.  The most powerful man in the world was at heart an awkward adolescent who still could not believe that some pretty (albeit zaftig) young woman really, really, wanted him, and he was going to get some!  Right there in the Oval Office!  Like something JFK would have done!  He hadn’t asked for it.  He knew it was wrong, but when confronted with this gift, despite the risks, he couldn’t say no.

In Weiner’s case, there was no oral sex.  He’s a newlywed who was likely still getting laid at home, by a beautiful woman.  According to one of his virtual companions, there was some “sex chat” on the telephone.  Hardly close to the real thing.

Sex like drugs is a rush.  But where was the sex in this scandal?  And if not sex, what was he doing it for?  He’s not excusing his behavior by claiming to have been drunk or high.  He seems as bewildered as anyone.

The answer to the question “why” is simple. Danger was the drug of choice.  Weiner wasn’t pursuing women online in order to get off despite the risk. He was getting off because of the risk.  Risking it was the rush.  Gambling is a recognized addiction.   It might have started off with just joking around and flirting, but at some point knowing “they” were watching, waiting for him to slip up, made the stakes higher, and the game a whole lot more interesting.  You could lose everything with one click, but he kept on winning.

As he became even more known for his passionate political style and biting sound bites, there was more to lose and it was irresistible.   Marriage and the very real possibility of achieving his goal of becoming the Mayor of New York City, added to the thrill of possibly destroying it all every single time his thumbs got itchy and he’d grab his phone.

But he was playing too well.  His opponents couldn’t catch him.  He was too smart for an army of them.  And that must have felt like cheating death itself.

This was even better than sex with a goddess who happened to be the love of his life.   Here he was risking even that, risking his very existence, yet surviving and triumphing, again, and again and again.

Finally, like any gambler losing his streak, like any junkie who winds up on a slab, he screwed up.   It didn’t take one of his “conquests” setting him up.  His own thumb betrayed him as he publicly tweated the infamous underwear shot. Was it on purpose?  Maybe, in the same sense that someone hovering by a cliff long enough, will eventually slip.  Why they were hovering in the first place is the question.

And then he tried one last bluff — telling the press, he was hacked.  But it was over.  His heart wasn’t in it.   He knew he was done.  No finger wagging with a definitive, “I did not have sexts with that woman.”  Just a bewildered man, who knew enough not to ask his wife to accompany him when he stepped out to meet the press.

Some people worry about his mental state.  They’re right to do so.  Donald Manes was once upon the time Queens Borough President. He was accused of corruption and killed himself while under indictment.  Manes may have been bi-polar.  Bi-polar people are most at risk of suicide after a manic episode when they come back down to earth and see the consequences of their actions.  Weiner isn’t bi-polar.  He’s never been accused of the type of graft that Manes was indicted for. But like Manes, he is now, as a result of his actions facing a different future than the one he was looking at yesterday.  Weiner is a successful man, and successful people often aren’t very skilled at failure.  It hits them hard.

This isn’t about whether or not he should step down.  I leave that to the chattering classes and people at the water-cooler or the dinner table.  I would suggest that those who are his friends, however betrayed and angry they might feel, show him a little compassion, and those of us watching on the sidelines still snickering, we might find better uses for our time.

Some Things to Consider Before Peddling Your Prose on Kindle

Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times, writing/blogging/publishing related, , , ,

God might not be calling his elect up today, but something truly extraordinary is taking place.  The gray lady herself, the esteemed New York Times, has an essay in the BOOK REVIEW section extolling self-publishing.

Neal Pollack who describes himself as “midlist, midcareer” finds that for a writer in his position, “self-publishing seems to make a lot of sense.”

He plans to put out a novel that he doesn’t believe would be the “easiest proposition for mainstream publishers” as the theme doesn’t involve vampires, but Jews and basketball and the length is short.  He plans to charge $4.99 and believes this will quickly earn him the equivalent of a pleasant advance.

He thinks there may be expenses including of course cover art and plane fare if he decides to do “readings and on-the-ground media in New York and Philadelphia where the book is set.”  He mentions a “modest print run.” Good luck with that, Neal.

Neal references Amanda Hocking (of course).  He writes of Stephen King’s e-book experiments, but he seems to have no real clue about what savvy self-publishers already know.   He writes, for instance, that he wouldn’t recommend self-publishing to a “first time author.”  Yet, several first time novelists who found the gates closed on traditional publishing have done quite well on their own.

I’m not an expert, nor am I Amanda Hocking for that matter.  My own experiment with self-publishing has yielded only modest results, but I know enough to know that Neal might want to do a little more research before setting out.  If you happen to have stumbled onto this, Neal, might I ask you to examine a few of your assumptions and assertions:

Price point:  $4.99? Yes, that’s half what Amazon is charging on Kindle for your book, Never Mind the Pollacks, The Literary Music of Neal Pollack which is not exactly flying off the shelves, but $4.99 is still considered a lot for a self-published e-book even by a previously published author.  Stephen Leather and JA Konrath have turned their back-lists into gold at 99 cents a piece, and even the New Yorker’s Susan Orlean who will be entering the fray with a short work to be published with some hoopla by Amazon, will be charging no more than $1.49.   Yes, you have a following, but maybe not at the Kindle Store yet or for the type of book you are planning.  Most of the bestsellers on Kindle are genre novels — mysteries, thrillers, and those “teen vampire” books you make fun of.  Books like the one you are writing don’t appeal to publishers because the market is small, not non-existent, just modest and the gamble on a print run may be not be one publishers can afford.  E-books cost less to produce.  But there’s a glut of high quality, self-published books selling for less than $4.99, on Kindle. You may find your market there, but it won’t be huge and you’ll have to work for it.  Your competition won’t be the $9.99 bestsellers from mainstream publishers, but the already known “independents” selling at 99 cents to $2.99 a pop.

Are you really in a position to give advice to first-time authors? You advise first-timers not to try self-publishing, lest they wind up in a “virtual slush pile.” Have you read anything about how difficult it is for someone, even someone with previous publishing credits to get a contract on a first novel these days, especially something like the one you’re publishing — a book with no vampires or zombies? The gates are shut.  Yet, if you look at the top hundred Kindle sellers in the US and UK Kindle store, you’ll see many “indie” writers unknown to publishers.  And if you take a peek at the genre lists, you’ll see even more.  I’m no insider, but I am actual virtual friends with three “first-time” writers who are bestselling authors. Lexi Revellian’s book Remix, was in the top 100 in Amazon UK for months.  It’s now down to around 126, but her new one Replica is holding at 50.  Jake Barton’s Burn Baby Burn is #26 in the UK, and he has two others that aren’t doing badly.  Dan Holloway’s first “indie” literary novel, Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, got some good reviews but didn’t take off.  His thriller, set in Oxford, The Company of Fellows is holding its own in the top 50 in the category of “mysteries and thrillers.”

Think about that “modest print run” you propose and find some alternative uses for the print books you don’t sell — doorstops, kindling, etc:  Print runs cost money.  Many successful independently published writers aren’t even bothering with them, especially for shorter books.  Those that do, generally use print-on-demand.  Traditional printing is less expensive for a run of a thousand books or more, but it’s still going to be both a huge risk and a substantial out-of-pocket expense. I hate to break this to you, but getting your independently published book into bookstores is going to be difficult.  Prepare for rejection like you’ve never seen it.   As for your plan to do “on the ground media” in New York and Philadelphia, there are tons of local authors trying to get readings at stores and to get their books onto shelves.  It doesn’t sound like you’ve thought through the pitfalls, including the 55% discount and return policies that online and brick and mortar bookstores demand.

I’m not trying to be discouraging, Neal.  This isn’t an exclusive club. Nobody needs an invitation.  Granted, you have experience that many first-time self-publishers lack.  You’ve done book publicity before, you have a name and a following, and you are a professional.  But this is still a new game, and you’ll play better if you learn the rules before you jump in.  Your essay in the Times implies an access to media that most new independent authors lack, but I hate to break this to you, the readers of The New York Times Book Review aren’t necessarily the biggest e-book buyers or purchasers of the self-published. Your potential readers are in places like Big Al’s Books and Pals, Kindle Boards, and RedAdept Reviews.  Ever heard of them?  If the answer is no, you have a lot to learn.

BFTJ — Tony Kushner Banned from Receiving Award from City College

Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times

If you can’t figure out what “bftj” refers to, just skip this post.

I’m in a mood.  The brilliant playwright, and proud member of the tribe, Tony Kushner  has been denied an award that was to be bestowed by John Jay College of the City University of New York. Rather than try to retell the gory details of this sad episode, I’ll simply refer you to the source article.  Go read; we’ll discuss later.

Okay.  I really don’t have much to say other than as a tax paying citizen of New York, I’m disgusted that a Board Member gets to hold everyone hostage in this manner, and I not only think it’s bftj, but also bad for intellectual and academic freedom, freedom of speech generally and even (dare I say it!) bad for Israel, because if the only permissible viewpoint is “the likud right or wrong” than Israel is pretty much doomed.

Tony Kushner, they deny an award to?  Tony Kushner, maybe the most brilliant living American playwright?  What is wrong with these people?  I don’t even blame the millionaire who started the mess.  It takes a whole board of wimps to vote someone down.  Do they all completely lack balls?

Rant over.  Feel free to comment.