In 2007, when I began this blog, I had the idea that I would eventually publish a book of mixed autobiography and biography, which I would also call Koreanish, and that the blog would be a place that I could sketch out some of the book. That book is about me and my relationship to my Korean family, who once sued my mother for custody of my siblings and I in an attempt to be sure we were raised “Korean enough”. I noticed some of the posts became very long, and when that happened, pulled them off the blog and put them into the manuscript—and did not publish them on the blog.

Gradually, as a result, I have kept writing that book apart from this blog, and this blog in the meantime became something else, something that looks like the shadow of that book.

In writing a book, you can gather yourself in secret from the public. Not so in a blog. There’s an arc to it all, though, and for not being aware of itself, it is somehow, well, differently honest than the sort of creature you’d make if you were trying to write autobiography. It is more cagey, here, yes, for example, less open, but only regarding the obvious: work complaints, complaints about the intimate circle, complaints of the kind that, well, will create instant conflict. And so while I’m not disclosing intimate secrets here, I’m also not guarding against the moods outside of those realms, more subtle ones, and the observations that go with them. I can’t, for example, lie to myself about how bad things are in the world.

What struck me, in other words, is that Koreanish the blog, is, if read narratively, something of a dystopic novel, in which a writer is living inside a country that is blind to its own destruction, a destruction it pursues relentlessly, to his increasing dismay.

The book is not about that so much. Or, it hasn’t been.

It was interesting, to read, say, about life moments before the Kindle appeared and changed publishing forever. But it was also depressing —and I actually found it too depressing, even frightening—to re-read my own blog this way, especially during the lead-up to the election of 2008. Mostly because I could see myself now sounding many of the same themes I was during the Bush administration, (though now I put my political links up on twitter, in case, you know, CNN will read them aloud…sort of kidding there). Back then I was worried about lies in the media being used to political ends, endless war, the destruction of the middle class, the creation of a permanent underclass, health insurance crises and the destruction of the environment. Still on those topics, much further in.

It was especially sad to read a post about the parties in the streets of Paris on the night of Obama’s election, and then to track how Obama’s presidency triggered an unprecedented attack on civil rights and the middle class, fueled by money from the country’s richest conservatives. Not at all what we thought we’d get from a president and congress that could deliver universal health care, green energy initiatives and an end to the wars. Worse still is this president’s habit of surrendering regularly to the GOP, first when he didn’t have to and now increasingly because he does.

What I see in the posts from 2007-2008 how I became really convinced that the problem was about the presidency, and could be solved by a new president. What I see now is that we could change presidents all day and the problems this country faces would remain, for how they emerge from a political process that is too easily subverted by money and lies in the media.

If anything gives me hope now, it is the honest spirit of political protest happening around the globe, from the Arab nations to London to the state legislature in Wisconsin. And that really is the other point to make—the problems in the US are the problems in the world, really—few countries if any are inoculated from being subjects to a global financial elite that has figured out how to make money from firings and layoffs, foreclosures, highspeed computerized stock trades and stockpiled cash. Yes, I could move to about 60 other nations and receive socialized medicine, for example (one bright spot—soon may be able to add “Vermont” to that list of places), but wherever I go, this elite is indifferent to these crises, and no longer needs the good will or even the general population in order to be rich. They make money off each other, in brutal raids and corporate takedowns. They’ve manipulated the markets to the extent that we need their good will in order to survive them. It’s as if they decided 30 years ago that the creation of a middle class was a mistake, and they’re pulling up the gates.

At some point, I’m sure, book and shadow will merge, more than they have. It’ll be interesting, to see how it all works out.

Oh horrifying new world, where every site I visit wants me to have a profile and to receive mailings. I have over 600 messages from them unread in my gmail account, and this is because I resent the time it takes me to even delete them. I don’t want to die thinking, “Good thing I deleted all those emails.”

Worse, with Facebook, events now send me emails. Events I never wanted to be invited to, from people far away, who believe networking and spamming are the same thing.

Yes, I am aware of your brand now. Your brand is indelibly marked in my mind as “annoying spammer”.

I continue to believe, meanwhile, that networking is what people who can’t make friends call their attempts to make friends.

2.

Meanwhile, no one apparently told Rand Paul about the meth problems in Eastern Kentucky. But luckily, the entire state is pitching in.

3.

I took my new iPad to a meeting with my editor, and after accidentally erasing notes because of an unwelcome and unexpected “undo/cancel” prompt, she said, “You’ve basically confirmed for me the value of a pen and paper.”

This is also what it did for me.

So far, on my iPad, I can pay more money to watch Hulu than when I watch it for free on my Macbook. I can stream Netflix films instead of leaving the discs unmailed in my apartment for years. I can download extremely beautiful digital versions of some of my favorite comics. I can read Twitter like it is a poorly thought-out magazine (see under Flipboard). When the face isn’t glowing, it is usually a smeary looking thing, like a window in a children’s classroom after recess. I bought a special iPad issue of Mac Life that claimed to have 200 books on disc for free for me, and when I opened them, found them to be badly designed Gutenberg Project copies of public domain items. Misshapen classics. It was like I’d left them in my car’s back window and they melted (Book people! Do not do this!). The ban on Flash leaves you feeling like you are inside a gated community of some kind, banned from viewing things everyone else can see on their devices. I am glad ebooks are booming, especially given what I wished for back in 2007, but I feel like I’ve been sold something that, for now, does less than both my phone and my computer. I can’t make calls with it. I can’t visit sites with Flash and even know what is on there (this is many sites).

A friend asks me if she should get it for her husband for his 40th. Before I answer she says, “I feel like it isn’t special enough.” Yes, I tell her. It isn’t special enough. Not yet.

4.

As far as I can tell, the iDevices in general are designed by people who think of writing as something you for to create a text message. You cannot drop a cursor into the middle of a word on my iPad or iPhone except in their sad little Pages program on the iPad—instead, you must delete the entire word or hope the autocorrect dictionary offers the right word and that you do not accidentally erase it.

Relying on “autocorrect” is like relying on a unregulated corporation to do the right thing. It is soft paternalism applied to language.

5.

I found this over on The Morning News’ Editor’s Desk Tumblr* — Colm Toibin, on the Catholic Church after the sexual abuse scandals:

The idea that the Church authorities simply don’t understand what is going on was further emphasised when the Vatican last month outlined its opposition to the sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy and to the ordination of women in the same document, and threatened greater punishment for those who got involved in the latter than in the former. Indeed, the document went further in its unwitting indication of how deep the Catholic hierarchy is in denial. It made a change in the way allegations of sexual abuse would be handled, doubling the statute of limitations from ten years after the victim’s 18th birthday to 20 years. It is clear that the Church still believes that it, more than the civil authorities, has a role in handling such cases, and that its rules about the statute of limitations remain somehow relevant.

The Church now has a strange ghostly presence in Irish society. Its hierarchy still meets as though it represents something, including power; and to some extent it does still represent power. Catholic parish priests still control the majority of primary schools: they appoint the teachers and chair the boards of management, despite the fact that in the most recent opinion poll only 28 per cent supported their control of schools. Orders of nuns in Ireland still own convents and schools and have control over some major hospitals. This might seem amusing until you need to ask for advice about abortion in one of those hospitals, or seek genetic counselling, or, indeed, try to get promotion as a doctor who has spoken out on these issues. The bishops, priests and nuns are sinking, but have every intention of putting up a struggle before they drown.

*Tumblr, of course, is for when you need to say more than Twitter and less than wordpress. Be sure to check me out at mine, Rebellitor.

I will return to the Manga series shortly.

I was thinking of writing about Ford’s theory as I’m more of a fan of Ford than it might have seemed in the correspondence Maud Newton and I did this summer for Granta online. Ford in particular was one of the first writers to really try to figure out how one wrote fiction, and he came up with most of the principles by which we teach fiction today. “Show don’t tell”, for example is one of those rules that by now makes my eyes roll into the back of my head, but he is the one who set out to prove it is true (and this is why it is repeated).

Wolverine, mad at how his film went.

I went in anyway, wanting just some fast-paced, mindless escape. It was immediately clear to me, though, as I watched the wincingly awful beginning, with the montages and the scenes of childhood, that the film-makers had made what we call in creative writing classes “the mistake of verisimilitude”. They mistook a life for a story, in other words. And so I sat through what should have been a high-intensity action film that had been turned into a low-tempo biopic, and began restructuring the film with Ford’s principles in mind.

A Ford Madox Ford manuscript page.

The theory of Ford’s I speak of here is Impressionism in the service of Modernism. This is not as widely taught as it could be but it is widely practiced, though… not as well as it could be. Ford was trying to both understand how writing was done, and to move novels towards being artifacts of consciousness, stories that resembled the ways we think–and we don’t remember our stories, the ones that happen to us, chronologically–we move through a map of impressions.

This map of impressions was the source of one of Modernism’s hallmarks, defamiliarization, and this, used indiscriminately as an aesthetic choice, may be the real issue I have with so many novels.  And this may be why Modernism’s imitators takes a beating here a bit—I’ll never deny that Modernism matters to us as writers, not the least for how it brought the vernacular into our literature, something that has yet to happen still in many world literatures, or is happening now—my problem isn’t so much with Modernism as its imitators, a group who have turned what was a literary avant gard into an orthodoxy with high priests.

Impressionism as a technique in the service of Modernism is this: the writer creates a surface that gives off the impression of a life but this is the surface to a story with a plot. The reader is guided through what seems to be the casual accrual of detail into the story, and if it works, the ending seems fated and inevitable, the only possible outcome, but is hidden from the reader until the ending. Nearly every contemporary novel written now and in the last century was done with this method whether the author knew it or not. And whether the author was able to pull it off or not.

Most people, though, don’t know this is what they are doing and as a result much of it goes wide—especially in student writing, where the student tries just to create the casual accrual of details and thinks that is a story. But it is not. Most of us recognize the student who reads Hemingway and begins using casual conversations that go nowhere, instead of casual conversations that only appear to go nowhere, which is what Hemingway did. Hemingway who was Ford Madox Ford’s assistant for a while. Standing in parties at the back, with the very quiet Jean Rhys.

Part of this technique—Impressionism in Service to Modernism—involves what Ford called the “time jump”, which we now know of as the space-break: a leap through time and/or space usually that accomplishes what exposition cannot and removes from the story an unnecessary walk through the quotidian details of the character’s life (ahem, Wolverine).

Herewith, Ford, applied with extreme force to Wolverine:

Begin not at the chronological beginning but with a dramatic scene that draws the reader into the story’s action, at a distance from the beginning.

Bolt, played by Dominic Monaghan, a human electrical generator, is a carnival worker off-duty, sipping a bourbon in his trailer. Bulbs he can light as he just thinks about it hang along the roof of his trailer. Sabretooth, played by Liev Schreiber, appears at his door. They have a short conversation, in which it is clear that Bolt has been expecting a visit of some kind from his past. A potentially lethal visit.

Bolt: You know, I’ve never said anything, to anyone, about what happened.

Right away, if this was the beginning scene, the whole thing would pull taut. In a way the film never managed to do.

You can watch the scene here in a somewhat clipped form.

This method, of beginning near the middle, is in widespread use*, perhaps never more so than in any episode of anything J. J. Abrams has put on television or film. Most episodes of Lost rely heavily on this technique.

This is also a structure that is used to exhilarating effect in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, for example. The narrator picks up the night prior to Giovanni’s execution, and moves back in time in his reminiscence to his first encounters with men, his childhood, and then to meeting Giovanni, until both streams of time come together at the end. In any case:

Go back in time next, to  the beginning of the situation of the dramatic action and explain what the reader has just seen and identify the characters. Bring the reader up to the moment right before the scene that began the fiction.

Bolt: I always thought it would be Wade.

Victor: Wade’s gone.

And so the next scene should begin with the formation of Weapon X, the program Bolt, Wade and Wolverine escaped from, the program Victor seems to still be in–a black ops group with questionable motives at best. Move up through the departure of Wolverine from the group and the further disbanding of the group, and conclude this background section with Wade’s “death” at the hands of Victor and then perhaps show Wade’s body being brought into Weapon X’s lab, for his transformation into Deadpool, who appears at the end to battle Wolverine and Victor both.

Develop the story through to its climax and end.

I find the word climax abhorrent and yet I won’t act like there’s another word.

The next scenes should be Logan and his love, Silver Fox, off in the Canadian woods, and then confronted by first the boss of the Weapon X operation and then the film can move, more or less unchanged, to its end.

Which, in the end, is what’s so sad about what happened. It just needed a tweak.

In closing…

When you are trying to create suspense in the reader or viewer, you reach for what’s called Dramatic Irony, which puts the reader in a place where they know less than the author about the story, but more than the character they’re watching. This even allows for creating stories that are not for the characters—the much-reviled epiphany. If you are working with Dramatic Irony, no one has to realize anything, ever, in your film or novel, except the audience.

I don’t really know why a widely known dramatic structure such as this was somehow unknown to writers with credits like Troy, but all I ask is that, as a fan of these films, please: DO NOT make more Origins films per the biopic structure. Give us a plot.

*The structure inherent in this approach has been described in the book Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott (and she gives Ford credit), as the Story Alphabet: ABDCE: Action Background Development Climax End.

I read this as many of my students kept talking to me about it and I wanted a frame of reference. This is, over time, the single idea that stayed with me from it.

Note: I also went to support the American film debut of Daniel Henney, one of the Koreanish stars featured in the post that has, since it appeared, been my top ranked post for traffic.

[Press play, then read]

The silence was full.

The old monk let himself float down the river on the current, staring at the sky, anxious to be alone. He waited until he made out the old mine’s shadows. He paddled to the shore and pulled off his wet clothes, wringing them over the river and then hanging them off the rocks. He stood letting the wind move over his wet skin, drying it.

I’m not done, said a voice behind him, a voice he knew too well. He turned, to see a young doe on the hill over the mine’s buildings.

He looked to see if she cast a shadow, but the clouds overhead made it indistinct.

She moved with careful slowness and then came to a stop in front of him, ducking her sleek head towards his hand. He shut his eyes. Her tongue licked his thumb.

I’m not done. Not done with you, my love. A hand moved over his cheek.

He opened his eyes. His wife stood there, naked also, the doe gone. Fear filled him. A river spirit, he thought. Or, a fox. But not her. And yet it was the scent of her, even her habit of taking his hand to her mouth with a sly smile and kissing the tip of his thumb.

The other monks began shouting his name. There was no time. He gripped her face in his hands, leaned in for the kiss.

———————————-

We’re playing consequences, where a series of writers writes 250 words, set in an abandoned landscape, each using the last line of the previous writer. I’m the 8th. Next up:

Previously: Sam J. Miller, followed by Jade Park, Jane Voodikon, Lisa Silverman, Anna Shapiro, Mark Krotov and Wah Ming Chang.

A truly slavish adaptation would have been better, if 4 or 5 hours long—and would have included the Black Freighter story, released as a kind of special feature the week the film went out, and which had no intrinsic value on its own. “Am I supposed to bring it into the film and watch it on my hand-held at the appropriate moments,” I remember complaining to a friend who understood, and shook his head at the idea also. The film that came out was anything but a slavish adaptation—it was a hammy, unironic imitation of what the book meant to critique. The Watchmen wasn’t supposed to be a spectacle on the scale of last year’s Iron Man, and so I knew there was a problem when it was billed to us as if it would be. The original comic pulls the very idea of Iron Man apart critically, even as it reaches towards a very earnest ending.

To be clear, the Black Freighter storyline, in the comic, functioned as a narrative intervention that also enlivened the narrative at the same time. In the comments section of various reviews, people arguing about this have complained that The Black Freighter takes them out of the story but…it’s supposed to, as a way to make the story about something larger. The Watchmen as a comic is a fragmented narrative, and the purpose of fragmenting a narrative is to break the it into pieces so it can fit around something much larger than what a facile whole narrative can contain. It implies more than it describes as a result, and the reader, when this is successful, feels the touch of something greater than the story can provide otherwise.

With this fragmentation removed from the story, the satirical aspects collapse and fall away, and the faux-naive story it became comes forward. And thus, all was quite literally lost.

Also, in all the noise from critics about how being so slavish to the book the film was destroyed–a conversation that tried to pin what was bad about the film on fanboys instead of on the people who actually made the film–what went missing was that the film was actually another case where Zack Snyder evacuated the book’s content and inserted a narrative that is about his love of the male figure and his anxiety about openly gay men.

Coming up next, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World promises to be one of the best comic-to-film adaptations yet. Directed by Edgar Wright, the director of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, two of my favorite films ever, the story is in basically the most perfect hands it could have found. The Scott Pilgrim comics are a meatloaf of everything you could think of in pop culture: indie music, kung fu films, video games and D&D. Scott runs into “save points” at various times throughout the book, has to fight and defeat his love interest’s 8 evil exes in order to date her, and when he wins these battles receives mysterious piles of spare change, much like how in a video game you receive points you can spend as money after vanquishing a foe. At one point, a bonus is a Mithril Skateboard, which vanishes when Scott lacks the skills to use it. The Scott Pilgrim story is also drawn like a Manga comic, and yet features such real-life crises as room-mate drama, and what to do when you don’t have enough money for the bus. Or how to handle it when  your evil ex-girlfriend becomes a huge star.

Scott Pilgrim also does what The Watchmen did–uses superheroes to comment on the human condition–but it does so with humor, not moralizing, and the result is that amid what seem like colossally vapid stories, some hilarious and yet breathtaking truths about life emerge. When I teach The Watchmen, I teach it to my students as a forerunner, something that at the time was a pioneer, and that in retrospect seems a little leaden. And part of the problem with how posterity treats such things is that you can’t imagine what life was like before this or that book altered our consciousness forever. The terrible irony of the Watchmen film now is that something made during the Iran-Contra era and meant to comment on it–especially the idea that millions of human lives could be the “cost of doing business”, or that national security programs often leave us less safe rather than more so–comes out at a time when it is both most needed and least wanted as a vision of how we live now. And so the glossy toothless apparition is dismissed, and the message of it, lost to the audiences who only ever will see the film. But it is also true, I think, that the Scott Pilgrim comics are the wacky great-grandchildren of The Watchmen.

Next up for Wright is… Ant-Man.

He is older, with a paisley hankie headband wrapped around his head. He has what I think of now, after briefly living in LA, as the East Coast pedicure (this means, none–I also have this pedicure right now). He was at the desk downstairs when I arrived, arguing the price of the class–and I don’t know why I care or why it annoyed me. But this of course is why I’m here. I have become a series of judgmental projections and I need to drop this and get on with my life. So, yes, I thought the class was cheap to begin with, at 12 dollars. But it wasn’t any of my business if he didn’t, and many people are cheap and are still completely great people. The economy is, after all, like an oil freighter that has caught fire and we are all mostly standing on the part that is still above water.

I prepared to let it go, though, and then in the room, as I sat on the mat waiting for class to start, he entered and I thought, Don’t sit next to me, but I didn’t say it. And then he sat his mat down beside me, with a bristling defiance.

As if he could hear my thoughts and decided to mess with me.

This, of course, is part of why I stopped going to yoga classes.

There’s more to it than yoga, of course, or the lack of, though I know, as the class begins, this man is simply a screen onto which I’m projecting the aforementioned series of resentments that have mostly to do with how I am what Men’s Fitness would call “deconditioned”. This refers to a pair of APC jeans of mine with a 31-inch waist, that I’ve not worn since 2004.

In 2004, I left New York and moved to a series of places that required a certain amount of driving. As I was no longer on what I thought of as the Bataan death march through New York that was my life before, I started to puff up. By the time I moved to Rochester in 2005, with a boyfriend who cooked desserts three and four nights a week, and spent a winter there watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes with him to console ourselves over leaving our respective civilizations (me, NYC and LA, him, Atlanta), I had become the bear version of myself. My friends have mostly been polite about it, and some have been what I would call enabling. And then there’s the woman I ran into at a reading, who said, “You look kind of like Alex Chee.”

To which I said, “I am Alex Chee.” To which she said, “Oh, you’ve put on some weight.”

The universe was sending me messages.

This yoga class is something I wouldn’t have respected in my old days, which is to say, when I was a yoga teacher in New York and could fall backwards into wheel without much thought, doing what I then called “Stupid Yoga Bar Tricks”. I would have thought it was too easy, not hard enough. But this morning it feels okay. In those days, I went to class sometimes twice a day, studying with a severe teacher in a Soho loft studio who didn’t even want us to use props. I spent my weeks running between a host of yoga studios, most no longer open (Bhava and Shiva Shala, for example, both deeply missed). I taught a class at Atmananda and had private students also, and was proud of how yoga teaching allowed me to support myself in some small part. But my at-home practice suffers of late, to say the least, and this morning I decide it’s completely fine to use something as shallow as my teacher’s relative attractiveness to get me to go to class regularly. This is something my old teacher would refer to as Bhakti, which I used to scorn, but now understand, as I watch the teacher.

Which is to say, today’s teacher is the one from the other day here at the gym. He is a very good teacher, though the class, which is supposed to be a “flow” class, stops after every pose while he explains it. By the end I feel both educated and interrupted.

Downstairs, a woman from the class says to me, afterwards, I think next week will be more vigorous. I nod. It’s a class of mindreaders, it turns out. Some of them are nice and some are not.

I wave off my new friend, collect an assortment of reading materials from the magazine wall and march in place on an elliptical trainer to an assortment of paces and inclines that will, according to an article in Men’s Health this month, help me get in shape for this summer. I have gone on what I’d call an Atkins-style diet (Atkins plus fruit?) and am working out 6 days a week, and so far, since Sunday, have lost 5 lbs.

On the trainer, I read my friend Mike Albo’s column in the Critical Shopper, about Aloha Rag, and think again about how his columns always accurately reflect my thinking about material culture, which is to say a deep ambivalence born of being drawn to pretty, flashy things and repulsed by the idea of spending ludicrous sums of money for them. I think of him often anyway, for being a little north of Springfield, where he grew up. I also read an article from O Magazine about bad friends, specifically, the ones who are all take and no give, and how to either change the dynamic or drop them and move on. I take the quiz as regards a very specific friend and wonder if I’m being fair or if I’m under the influence of the magazine. I reach no real conclusions, then realize this is something the magazine warned about, that prolongs the abusive friendship, and then my time on the machine ends and I’m done.

Many, including me, see a lot of positives in the digitization of art, don’t have a lot of sympathy for the RIAA when it complains about its dwindling bottom line—and laugh out loud at folks like Richard Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, who presumably had a straight face when he said “If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And the corporations won’t be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create.” As if money was the reason artists create. But many writers, including Alexander Chee, see the digital paradigm shift as directly linked to other, direr developments.

“In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the rise of Limewire, the Napster thing, that ‘code revolution’ for DVDs that unlocked their content. But did anyone bother to mention how in the same time period, the richest 5% of the country became much richer than the rest of the country? Millionaires in America now still have to have dayjobs. Vietnam doesn’t even want US treasury bonds. We’re not a good investment for Vietnam. We need to wake up.”

I was ranting about how the code revolution was misplaced class rage, which I still think it is. Instead of being angry at the people who took all the money, so the average American can no longer afford to buy DVDs and still eat and get gas for the car, and then doing something about it, this person ‘revolts’ by stealing content. It feels like revolution, but it’s not the same as being aware of what’s wrong with the country and the structure of the conglomerates economy, and taking action there politically.

Because it feels like revolution, the thief celebrates by using the content, and forgets to go change the world. Thus playing into the hands of the people they hate.

The next time you have the urge to steal content, pause. Do something else. Sign a petition, write to the FCC, your congressman, your senator. Don’t take your feeling of political and economic disenfranchisement out on an artists.

]]> http://koreanish.com/2008/03/08/the-money-quote/feed/ 0 koreanish http://koreanish.com/2008/03/05/your-questions-answered-why-dont-the-fake-memoir-writers-write-novels/ http://koreanish.com/2008/03/05/your-questions-answered-why-dont-the-fake-memoir-writers-write-novels/#comments Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:46:20 +0000 koreanish http://koreanish.wordpress.com/?p=347 Continue reading →]]> Q: Why would someone like Margaret Seltzer try to publish a fictional story as a memoir?

A: The novel in the West owes a great deal to the fake memoir, dating back to such classics as Moll Flanders. It was long held in disrepute, for that reason. However…

Nonfiction today makes more money than fiction. It also sells more copies. Plus, nonfiction, memoir in particular, appeals to the mystique of “getting a true story”. Someone said to me a while ago, and I think it was the writer J. S. Marcus, Americans always want their narrators to be their best friends, in describing why the untrustworthy narrator was more of a European tradition than not. People buying memoirs like “A Million Little Pieces” are buying “into” it, they’re buying friends, basically, and looking to lose a little loneliness. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but it puts publishing houses in the awkward position of finding readers lots of wacky, funny, people who’ve gone through untold hardship and have landed right-side up. Lots of new friends, in other words.

In an economy where increasingly all we can afford is to watch life instead of be in it, memoirs and reality tv are the “cheap seats” to life. We’ve long ago moved to a sort of entertainment culture where people are encouraged to perform themselves, display themselves, and market themselves as product, and what is useful to life is what allows this, and what does not allow this is considered a new evil, and harmful. And so it is made invisible, and the visible becomes the surface of the story and is thought of as the truth, at the cost of what is hidden. If this is familiar, it’s because it is a recipe for narcissism. It’s also, though, something that says content doesn’t matter as much as the “authenticity” brand. Whatever’s inside is great because it’s “authentic”. And it makes authorship into a puppet show.

That these memoirs are so often faked or that reality tv is written and scripted at below-market rates for writers’ work, this, under the “authentic” brand, becomes not immaterial, but rather, very material, if also beside the point. In doing so, it points simply to the difference between what people say they want (true stories) and what they want (a story about a world they prefer to this one).

The funniest or saddest part, and it might be both, is that the same people who will accuse a novelist of basically writing what happened to them and then making up the names, will turn right around on a memoirist and ask, “How did you remember all of those conversations?” We would be right to corner these people and just ask them what they’re really getting at by playing both sides of the issue. But I think the answer is, they ask that question when they are near waking up.

Also, as Edward P. Jones said, Fame doesn’t change you. It unmasks you. Margaret Seltzer somehow really believed she was going to pull this off.

While I weep, make breakfast, etc., live my life, here’s an excerpt I was reading on one of my many open pages, from this week’s Media Matters column by Jamison Foer: a very cogent look at MSNBC’s record of sponsoring the “conflict” that John Stewart has covered as driving news stories. The news channel has been providing an open forum for hate speech of all kinds, except the kind directed at white, straight men (as a group–certain white straight men catch it full on).

After Elizabeth Edwards responded to Coulter’s description of her husband, John, as a “faggot,” MSNBC Live host Chris Jansing asked Edwards, “There are people who support your opinion, I’m sure you know, who say, ‘Why even dignify it with a response? Why give Ann Coulter more publicity?’”

Why give Ann Coulter more publicity? That’s a question that should be directed to Steve Capus, not Elizabeth Edwards. As the president of NBC News, Capus may be more responsible than anyone else on earth for giving Ann Coulter publicity.

In August 2006, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann said of Coulter: “[W]hy she has not been banned from this network, I do not know.” That’s a good question, and one Capus should answer — but it is also too narrow a question.

MSNBC is the channel that hired Coulter in the 1990s, only to fire her after her controversial comments to a disabled Vietnam veteran; that hired Michael Savage in 2003, then had to fire him for telling a caller to “get AIDS and die”; that hired Don Imus, then had to fire him for making sexist and racist comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. This is a cable channel that has, for years, been a welcome home to highly questionable comments about race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation.

Chris Matthews has said Republicans “have a right to fear” seeing a “majority Latino population”; when his guest defended America’s “tradition” of welcoming immigrants, Matthews retorted, “Do you live in a Mexican neighborhood?” Tucker Carlson used his MSNBC show to call the NAACP a “sad joke that should be shut down” and has attacked Barack Obama’s religion, saying of Obama’s church, “[I]t’s hard to call that Christianity.” Joe Scarborough says that pollster John Zogby, an Arab-American, “may be biased” on the issue of the Iraq war and “the Middle East situation.”

Before Don Imus was fired, his executive producer told MSNBC viewers that Obama has a “Jew-hating name”; Imus himself referred to the “Jewish management” of CBS Radio as “money-grubbing bastards.” MSNBC apparently didn’t have any problem with those comments; it would be months before Imus was fired.