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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, January 09, 2006

I don’t need drugs.
I’m high on hoax.


Hoax is UD’s amphetamine, her hyperstimulant of choice, her own personal rush machine. Others take note of hoaxes, tsk, and move on; UD hunkers down and gets happy.

UD gets more out of a hit of hoax than Hunter Thompson got from a hundred grams of heroin. Hoax:UD as Opium:Thomas DeQuincey. Hoax: UD as Hooch:Malcolm Lowry. Hoax: UD as Absinthe:Alfred Jarry.

And when the hoax is literary! Then Ossian’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.


No doubt there are dark - very dark - Hostel dark - reasons why UD responds to the Million Little Pieces hoax (to take the more high-profile of two recent examples - here‘s the other one - make what you can of it) with irrational exuberance. But let’s not go there. Let's go to the tape.


The website Smoking Gun decided to establish the veracity of James Frey’s tell-all memoir of his “vomit-caked years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal,” and couldn’t get anywhere. There was an odd absence of cooperation from the author, who eventually got a lawyer to write SG a threatening letter. Almost none of the jails, hospitals, and rehab joints listed in the text checked out, or checked out in any way resembling Frey‘s description of events there. The book’s French priest incident, in which, during a p’tit promenade to throw himself off the Eiffel Tower, Frey ducks into a church and encounters a penis-pinching prelate, began to look flaccid.

'When recalling criminal activities, looming prison sentences, and jailhouse rituals, Frey writes with a swaggering machismo and bravado that absolutely crackles. Which is truly impressive considering that, as TSG discovered, he made much of it up. The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond.'


One familiar feature of literary hoaxes - the death of anyone the author ever knew - also appears in Frey: “[A]lmost every character in Frey's book that could address the remaining topics has either committed suicide, been murdered, died of AIDS, been sentenced to life in prison, gone missing, landed in an institution for the criminally insane, or fell off a fishing boat never to be seen again.” Still, a few witnesses to Frey’s lying survive, and their testimony is devastating.

The story of this latest trick played upon credulous people titillated by details of extreme degradation is now everywhere - the New York Times, the Washington Post. The only spectator sport that remains - for the true hoax enthusiast, like UD - is watching Frey, his editors, his publishers, and the screenwriters at work on a hagiographic film about him, squirm.

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UPDATE: As with the play Frozen, good literary critics, in this hoaxy age, are more important to the culture than ever. Via Maud Newton, I note that the excellent Chris Lehmann of Slate saw Frey's bullshit well in advance of the Smoking Gun. This is from Lehmann's review in April 2003:


But there's nothing new or compelling (let alone heroic) about this pose: It is, in many ways, the classic arc of the genre Frey claims he's boldly renovated—the conversion memoir. From St. Augustine to Rousseau to Dave Eggers and Elizabeth Wurtzel, readers of memoirs are invited to marvel at the incorrigible badness of a narrator as a sort of trust-exercise: Surely someone who conceals so little of their unpleasant behavior can't be lying.


...Indeed, sentimentality is often the enchanted mirror into which the practiced nihilist preens. After all, the nihilist worldview holds that most things are beneath the self, and the sentimentalist concludes that most things are about the self—the point being in either case to keep the narrating ego at center stage. So, while Frey begins the vast majority of his flat, pain-ridden sentences with the word "I," many of them resolve into emotional set pieces reminiscent of Victorian melodrama.


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Kudos also to James Browning of The Village Voice, who wrote this in April 2003:

His suffering is both incredible (using so much "bittersweet peppermint gasoline"–scented crack and meth and speed and PCP that he vomits and blacks out seven days a week for years) and simply not credible (undergoing a root canal without anesthesia because patients at his rehab clinic aren't allowed drugs of any kind).

...The plotting—a sign of trouble when a memoir brings this word to mind—is stilted and conventional.