Category Archives: Politics and Culture

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.

My Most Popular Post

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I sometimes copy my posts to Open Salon.  I’ve made “Editors’ Pick” there a few times. Editors’ Pick puts posts in the center column, where anyone dropping by the site is likely to see them. The editors tend to pick posts with universal appeal or dealing with current events. My posts in the center column include ones on cyber-bullying,  on politics — or more accurately, political personalities, and one or two on life events. They are likely to be viewed by several thousand people over the day or two they hold the center.

On this, my rather eclectic, “personal” blog, I don’t get nearly as many hits. Still, a post I published almost two years ago continues to attract readers almost every day. Not large numbers, but usually several a week, whether I’ve published any new posts or not.

Is this one of the Sarah Palin-bashing bits of snark? Is it a serious solution to big social issue? No. It’s something I wrote about my childhood home in Sunnyside, Queens.

I have no illusions about the reason for its popularity. People around the world are not checking it out because of an interest in the early years of the author of Loisaida — A New York Story.

They are checking out the post because I stole the title. You can’t copyright titles, and I didn’t do it to purposely mislead people on the Internet. I named the post, I Used to Live Here Once.  I knew where it came from, a classic very short story by Jean Rhys. Rhys’ story is often anthologized. I’ve taught it in both community college and high school classes. It’s just about perfect.  Lazy students afraid to think for themselves are plugging the title into search engines, looking for somebody else’s interpretation, and that’s the reason for the “hits.” So if you’ve come here  for an easy answer, you can read my “hidden” synopsis, followed by a brief interpretation, but if you haven’t read the story itself, you really need to first.  You can do so here. I’ll wait.

A young woman watches children playing outside of her house. They don’t notice her, even when she calls out to them, shouting, “I used to live here once.” She remembers bits from her life. She finally remembers slipping on some stones in the river. The boy and girl who don’t hear her, suddenly get tired of their play, feeling a strange chill and they decide to go in the house. The last line of the story is: “That was the first time she knew.” The interpretation which even not so great readers get, having seen The Sixth Sense, and similar movies like it, is that she is a ghost.

Beyond the obvious, the story is haunting for other reasons. Rhys was a life-long outsider. A “white” Creole woman from Dominica, she lived and wrote most of her life outside of it. Her personal life was chaotic, married three times, once to a spy, once to a jailbird. At times, she depended on the kindness of male patrons and admirers, including at one point, Ford Maddox Ford. The story is sometimes seen as a metaphor for her own displacement.

So when I wrote a post about my sense of saudade when thinking of  home, I thought of Rhys’ story.

We never lose our childhood. The memories are centered in places that mean something, that haunt us. And I believe we haunt them as well. Certainly, in the months following my father’s death, I felt his presence in the house, looking over my shoulder as I packed the boxes, whispering in my ear as I spoke to potential buyers. He was in every corner, often checking in with me regarding my mother. Where was she? Was she safe? I had to reassure him often.

But it’s not just the dead that haunt. The living do as well. I’ve moved a lot, and sometimes I’ve passed up apartments that didn’t feel right, where the melancholy hung like curtains, even if the space was spacious and sunny.

And these days, going on six years since the house was sold, I still haunt the block on occasion. Walking past the gate, and thinking, “I used to live here once.”

Maizie is Still Not Dead

death and dying, Politics and Culture, true story, , , , , ,

(Originally posted: 10/30/2011 — See update at end)

Just wanted to follow up on the October 1 post, Whose Dog Life Is It Anyway, as I’m still getting occasional responses.

I’m writing the follow-up because dogs like humans are now living longer, but as with humans, extended life is not necessarily quality time, and may involve living with chronic debilitating conditions that require extensive and expensive treatment.  More owners of geriatric pets are faced with a dilemma.  Is it better to treat or to let nature take its course, and at what point is euthanasia the best option? So I’m going to review Maizie’s treatment, its outcome, and lessons learned, in case this is useful for other people with geriatric dogs diagnosed with Cushing’s, who come across this in their web travels.

Maize, a Jack Russell mix, is (probably) 15 years old.  While she had abnormal liver enzymes indicative of Cushing’s disease, she was asymptomatic until July when she began to drink excessive amounts of water and urinate all over the house.  She also could no longer hold her urine while sleeping or lying down and would wake up wet.

Testing revealed it was indeed Cushings. The two most effective treatments are either Lysoderm or Vetoryl.  Lysoderm is the older treatment.  The medication itself is less expensive than Vetoryl, but dosing can be tricky.  Both drugs require frequent and very expensive monitoring in the form of invasive tests. The little research I did, led me to think Vetoryl would be a better choice.  The vet started Maizie on 60 mg a day, based on the Dercha’s (the manufacturer’s) recommendation for her weight.  Had I been paying more attention to the very helpful Canine Cushing’s forum,, I would have insisted they start her on less.  As one of the more experienced consumers later told me, despite Dercha’s recommendations, there’s “no rhyme or reason” to how dogs react to Vetoryl.  A big dog may do well on 10 mg a day, while a Chihuahua might need 30.  Within ten days the polydypsia and polyuria had abated.  Her first ACTH test showed that her cortisol level had come down.  A more experienced vet, might have noticed it came down too much and too quickly.  She didn’t and neither did we. The vet, at our insistence also started her on something for the incontinence that was still ongoing when she was sleeping. The medicine was called Pro-in.  This was another one I wish I’d researched more on the net.  Pro-in is the same formula as the old formula for Dexatrim, an OTC diet-pill for humans.  The formula was banned for causing strokes in humans.  Anecdotally, at least, the same problem is seen in dogs.  Maizie seemed to lose her appetite almost immediately upon starting it.  We lowered the dose and then stopped it within a couple of days.  In retrospect, the reaction may have been a coincidence, though who knows?  In any case, she was going downhill.  Her cortisol had crashed, and she was in an Addisonian crisis.  After prednisone, IV fluids, and an overnight at the vets, she came home, tapered off the pred and was once again symptomatic for Cushing’s.  More tests and she was restarted at 30 mg a day of Vetoryl and DES for the incontinence. (Yes, that DES). She crashed again. The second time was so bad that we couldn’t get her to take the prednisone and she had entirely stopped eating.  A two-day stay at the vets with more fluids, and more prednisone got her eating again.  The bill was astronomical.

She came home.  Again we had to taper her off the pred.  The vet wanted us to bring her back for an expensive test to see if she was permanently Addisonian.  We declined.  Clearly she wasn’t.  Her thirst, appetite and peeing were back.  She still had the Cushings.  Rather than start her on an even lower dose of Vetoryl, we made another decision.  I bought Wee-Wee Pads.  As we couldn’t live with the polyuria and were heading toward euthanasia,  this was a kind of a “hail-Mary pass.”  To our astonishment, she figured out what we wanted her to do with them within two days.  All it took was putting the pads over the areas where she was most likely to urinate, praising her when she went on the pads, and scolding her when she didn’t.  Suddenly, we weren’t slipping in urine puddles.  We weren’t upset.  She wasn’t nervous.  She still signals when she has to move her bowels or just wants the opportunity to troll the buffet that is Amsterdam Avenue.   We still walk her several times a day.

I wouldn’t have thought we could live with the pads, but here’s the thing — her urine is so dilute it doesn’t smell and the pads really do absorb ten times their weight in fluids. It’s easier than dealing with cat litter.

At this point the only medication she’s on is the DES, which is still working the way it’s supposed to and keeping her from wetting herself in her sleep. What she can’t do is hold out very long when she’s awake.

We are also giving her melatonin as a supplement, which may or may not be doing anything, but is touted by some as a natural alternative, and may slow down tumor growth.  We’ve also started her on wet food only.  This also may or may not make a difference, but she’s old and she likes it.

The take away for us is:  If we had known that the Vetoryl would bring her so close to death, and how expensive treatment would wind up being — not only because of the required ACTH tests, but because of the iatrogenic Addison’s, then we would not have started to treat her.  While Cushing’s is progressive, treatment probably does not extend life in geriatric dogs, and the high cortisol levels actually help alleviate symptoms of other age-related conditions like arthritis.  If we’d known how easy it would be to train her to use the pads, that’s what we probably would have done in the first place.

Because every case is different, I’m hesitant to give advice, but if your geriatric dog is diagnosed with Cushing’s, here’s what I would recommend:

1. Read the forum. The people there are consumers not vets, but some of them may be more knowledgeable  than your vet regarding treatments and side effects.  While I had looked at the forum, I didn’t realize how helpful it could be.  The people there will ask you to give them your lab results.  Give them the information and take their advice.  Ask them questions before making decisions.

2. Both Lysoderm and Vetoryl have some pretty severe side effects, including permanent Addison’s.  You might be better off finding out which medication the vet has more experience with and going with that. Also if your vet does not have extensive experience with Cushings, find one who does.

3. If the vet is using Vetoryl, insist they start at a much lower dose than Dercha recommends. They started Maizie at 60 mg.  If she’d weighed a couple of pounds less, it would have been half that.  I wish they had started her at 10mg.   Treatment protocols call for testing after 10 days, so if the low dose doesn’t work they can gradually raise it.  That does mean you’ll be living with the symptoms longer, but the cost to you and your dog will be less.

4.  Consider NOT treating.  Most people begin treatment only when the polyuria becomes a problem.  Treated or not, most dogs with Cushing’s are dead within two years.  The Cushings may be masking other problem like arthritis, especially in geriatric dogs, and per the earlier information the medications can be pretty nasty.  If your dog is NOT symptomatic and Cushings is only suspected because of tests, consider starting some safe alternative treatments like melotonin and/or flax seed oil.  Melotonin may slow the growth of the tumors that causes the cortisol to rise, delaying your dog’s becoming symptomatic. If your dog is symptomatic, consider whether or not these are symptoms that you and/or the dog can live with. In Maizie’s case the main symptoms are excessive urination and excessive drinking. The drinking isn’t all that excessive. That is, she doesn’t seem to be dying of thirst, just drinking about two or three times as much as she used to.  The urination was making us all nuts until she learned to use the pads. We are all happy now.

5.  If you aren’t blessed with a house in the country that features a doggie door, buy Wee-Wee pads.  Even without Cushings, as your dog ages, she or he may need more walks than you can reasonably supply.  They are far superior to paper, and as stated earlier, training and clean up are simple.

——-

Update: 7/15/13 — Maizie crossed the rainbow bridge on Saturday, July 14, 2013. Euthanasia was a tough decision as there was no one “This is it” moment. She’d been having gastrointestinal issues for a while and losing weight. It finally reached the point where medication wasn’t helping to stimulate her appetite, and her sense of smell and taste were diminished to where she would reject anything that wasn’t loaded with sodium. Basically, her last week, she was eating only Chinese take-out duck, and chicken-shack rotisserie chicken, and even those reluctantly, with coaxing, and not enough. (Yes, we tried healthier alternatives including homemade foods.) At the same time, she seemed hungry, and we knew that must have been torturous.

She died of age-related conditions, that weren’t related to Cushings. Again, this is only our story, but I would urge anyone whose dog has been diagnosed to learn everything you can, find a vet you can trust (We changed vets after we decided to take her off Vetoryl) and consider both the age and temperament of your dog. In Maizie’s case, the stress level of frequent vet trips for the testing the medications require would have killed her even if the drugs themselves didn’t. We hope we gave her the best possible quality of life in the two years since her diagnosis, and are sure we made the right choice in taking her off the anti-Cushings meds.

Sequel and Sensibility

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PD James at 91 is about to publish her novel, Death Comes to Pemberly, a mystery-murder sequel to Pride and Prejudice.  No need to worry — Wickham, seducer of teenagers and the rake you love to hate, is the one who gets it.

James has stated she always wanted to do this.   Godspeed.  Short of murder, ninety-one year olds should be able to do whatever they’d like.

But how do we (myself and anyone who cares to comment) feel about this? Is this, as Martha Stewart would say, “a good thing”?

In principle I’m not against sequels, prequels, and reboots written by authors who didn’t write the original, but I have my own rules for which ones interest me.

There are sequels that happen because readers can’t let a character go.   This seems most prevalent in detective fiction, with authors continuing to write books featuring Sherlock Holmes, or in the case of Perchance to Dream, Philip Marlowe.  Have any of these ever surpassed the original or even come close?

Perchance to Dream by Robert S. Parker was officially sanctioned by Chandler’s heirs after Parker had completed Poodle Springs, Chandler’s unfinished last novel.  Authorized sequels may work for hardcore fans but they box writers in.  Parker said he wouldn’t do another because he “didn’t want to spend [his] life writing some other guy’s books”

There is also, of course fanfiction which doesn’t enter into the “official” canon, and is often written by amateurs.  This is more prevalent when the originals were  television series or even comics as opposed to novels, and almost always when they are of a particular genre, especially science fiction and fantasy.

Another example of the authorized sequel is Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCraig. Authorized stories bring with them restrictions. McCraig had to maneuver around the overt racism and defense of chattel slavery embedded within the point of view of the original, which would not sit well with modern readers, while at the same time not  wavering too much from its conception of its characters.  He chose to ignore the storyline imagined in the previous continuation, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley, a bodice ripper, set after the original, in which Scarlett goes to Ireland, where race is not an issue.  McCraig downplayed the love story, and focused instead on deepening our understanding of the protagonist. The book  received a decent critical reception,, but didn’t do well with hardcore fans. While Ripley’s sequel was panned, it was a commercial success, giving readers what they wanted, more than eight hundred pages of  Scarlett.

Sequels authorized or not, that stay close to the intent and perspective of the original, are primarily written to please fans and sell books.  They don’t bring anything new,  except possibly an ending in cases where the writer didn’t finish the story, or a resolution to a part of the story the creator left hanging.  By their nature, they  do better if they are offering more of the same.

Recently, there’s been an invasion, of horror-parodies, pioneered by Quirk Books. These include Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters and The Meowmorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant adorable kitten.  I will confess to never having read any of them and having no interest in doing so.  A five-minute sketch or YouTube video I could see, but they are stunts, not novels.

Another kind of continuation, taking place in what Lost fans might call the “sideways-verse” is a bit more interesting.  These books deconstruct the original, recounting the story in a way the original writer never could have imagined.  A great example is Jean Rhys’  Wide Sargasso Sea, which brings us Jane Eyre as seen through the eyes of  the madwoman in the attic herself and her keeper.  A fully realized tale of Rochester’s first wife, Wide Sargasso Sea is set partly in the West Indies and deals with racism, colonialism, and the powerlessness of women to control their own destiny.

There is also a very unauthorized  take on Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone,  by Alice Randall, tells the story from the perspective of a completely “new” character, Scarlett’s slave half-sister — the child of Mammy and Scarlett’s father.  Randall’s story gives us a different take not only on the characters we know from the original, but on the ones we barely see — the house slaves who have their own agendas.  The problem with Randall’s book when compared to Rhys’ is that Rhys parodied a true classic still taken seriously, while Randall looked at a story so dated by its racism and nostalgia for the “old south” that one wonders if a parody was even needed. In terms of readership, Rhys was offering something new, a way to examine issues around feminism, race, class, and colonialism by hearing from characters who didn’t normally get their own books — Creole women, British servants. By the time Randall’s book came along, we already had original stories about the ante-bellum South told from the point of view of slaves.  Who was her readership?  Fans and apologists for GWTW wouldn’t be interested, and she’s not telling people who dislike the original anything they don’t already know.  To pull off the deconstruction model, you have to be deconstructing something that serious people still take seriously.

And so back to James.  Will Death Comes to Pemberly be a success?  Commercially, I predict it will be a smashing one. I’ll buy a copy.  James is not Austen, but she’s no slouch as a stylist. She knows how to tell a story, especially a mystery.  She has a huge audience even without the Austenites, and the Austenites won’t be able to resist.  She admits to having had a lifelong passion for Austen’s work.  She’s writing, in a sense, professionalized fanfic — not authorized, not the same genre, but told with  love and respect for the source.  Most likely, she’ll present the characters as we know them.  Darcy will not have turned into a wife-beating philanderer. Elizabeth will still be Elizabeth.  And if Mr. Collins is a less than passionate husband, or Mary has never married, but has chosen to set up housekeeping with a female friend, we won’t delve too deeply. Will it have the reverence of an authorized version?  I suspect it will, to the extent that it will strive for historical accuracy and won’t veer far from our expectations of how characterize will behave.

Will it tell us anything about Austen’s world that Austen herself was unable to perceive?  Doubtfully. If Darcy’s money comes from plantations in the West Indies, we won’t learn about the conditions of the workers..  The servants at Pemberly will continue to be mostly invisible.  The resolution of the mystery will not reveal a larger rot at the core of society.

Yet, by bringing in murder most foul, won’t something change?  This is to be a mystery, not a love story or one that ends, like most of Austen, in a marriage. Then again, perhaps an announcement of Kitty’s engagement will come in the final chapter,  assuming of course she isn’t exposed as a murderer and hanged for killing her brother-in-law.

Quiz, kids: Free e-book if you can answer me this.

New York Stories, Politics and Culture, writing/blogging/publishing related, , , , , , ,

I was having a discussion with my better half about Spalding Gray, the late great storyteller/performance artist. There was a story about him in this week’s New York Times Magazine even though he died in 2003.    There was also a documentary about his work made in 2010.

Back in the 1980′s and until the early 90′s I saw him perform many times in lower Manhattan, and once after I moved to Vermont when he was “on tour.”  His death hit me hard, in fact it seemed like it hit the whole City hard.  He disappeared one night, and was thought to have jumped off the Staten Island ferry.  His body wasn’t found for a while, so one could imagine him off on another adventure, the soon-to-be subject of a monologue. Sometimes, I still daydream that it was a mis-identification.  Spalding Gray is alive and well, in hiding, gathering some new material.

There’s a reference to him within the first 10% (the Kindle sample) of my novel Loisaida — A New York Story, which is set in the late 1980’s. He isn’t named, but there are several clues that it’s him.

Here’s the quiz, kids:  The first 5 people who can correctly (1) pinpoint the reference and (2) tell me which of his performance pieces it is referencing will get a free e-book copy of Loisaida in any e-book format, gifted to them or the person of their choice.

I’m figuring if you can get the reference or are even interested in trying, you probably are the audience I’m seeking and will enjoy the read.

DO NOT POST YOUR ANSWER as that will ruin it for everyone, but leave me a comment below letting me know you know. I will then email you giving you my email address and you can send me the answer.