Blogging on Meds

Today’s Reads
1. Hillary Calls Herself Pathetic on Jon Stewart
Hillary’s got a great sense of humor, or so says those who know her best. On the trail, however, she’s been a sober realist. Last night Jon Stewart asked her why, on the night before her last stand in Ohio and Texas, she was appearing on a mock news show.

“It is pretty pathetic,” she quickly snipped. It didn’t seem scripted, and was LOL. Hillary has to win Ohio and compete in Texas for her campaign to go forward. And her face looked stressed on the Daily Show.

2. SlateX2
‘Topher Hitchens, on Slate, wishes the words really did matter:

CLICHÉ, NOT PLAGIARISM, IS THE PROBLEM WITH TODAY’S PALLID POLITICAL DISCOURSE…

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and “We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America” would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible…

All that Obama had lifted from Patrick was the old-fashioned idea that “words matter,” and all that one can say, reviewing the present empty landscape of slogan and cliché, is that one only wishes that this could once again be true.

Slate has a double whammy today, sending literature editor and poetess Meghan O’Rourke to Austin. Here’s her last paragraph edited into a sweet poem by me:

For all these reasons, though,
Obama is susceptible to the larger counternarratives
being used against him—that he is a Muslim, a Communist,
and (with more grounding)
that he has little practice at policy-making.
In the coffee shop in San Angelo—a city
anchored by its Air Force base—
where I’ve been working,
a conversation broke out
about whether Obama is a Muslim, and, if so,
whether it matters.
Last night,
lightning flickered along the edges of eastern and central Texas,
bringing with it thunder and hailstorms.

Kate Hudson says Vote Obama.

3. New New Yorker
Ariel Levy has left New York Magazine for the New Yorker. Levy wrote many great stories for NYMag, none more memorable than this epic, tough, and druggy Dash Snow profile. Now Remnick’s hired her and she released this statement:

After college I worked briefly for Planned Parenthood, but they fired me after just one week because I am an extremely poor typist. Almost immediately thereafter, I was hired at New York magazine. As a typist. I kept typing there for twelve years. In 2008, I became a staff writer at The New Yorker.

She a lesbian, son, so don’t even think about it…

The New Yorker also hired the Times’ music brotha Kelefa Sanneh. Good news: I don’t have to read his annoying Times stuff anymore. Bad news: I have a New Yorker subscription. Sanneh’s pop sensors were often two months late or totally wrong. At least now that he’s at the New Yorker I can skip his stuff altogether. At the Times, Sanneh was the only dude (unless Jon Parles felt like checking someone out) on the rap beat.

Rumor has it the New Yorker has already snatched him up as a staff writer covering culture

3. Riverhead, seriously, hire a fucking fact checker!
Busted. Again. After James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” memoir was deemed fiction, you’d think Riverhead would have improved their vetting process. Nope. This time, it was Margeret B Jones’ “Love and Consequences,” a memoir from a white chick about growing up a gangster in all-black South Central, LA. Ok? Uber-red flag: White people don’t live in South Central. But hold up, here’s the backstory.

Two weeks ago Michiko Kakutani, the Times’ book queen, wrote a razzle dazzle phosphorescent review of Jones’ “book.” Upon reading the review, Penguin/Riverhead publicists shat themselves, then helped cook up a Times’ Home and Garden story.

(At home with a liar, by Susan Seubert.)

Of course, Jones’ sister didn’t read Kakutani’s review—who reads book reviews buried on E7, right?—but she did see the Home and Garden story. Compelled by the lies, Jones’s sister called the Times and reported her sister’s name was actually Margaret Seltzer.

Today, Motoko Rich, the Times’ publishing beat writer, gets the paper’s cover with the news of the fraud:

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Ahahahaha. In the story, readers learn that Jones’ editor at Riverhead was Susan McGrath, daughter of Times’ writer Charles McGrath and sister of New Yorker staffer Ben McGrath. It’s possible that the McGraths are America’s most fact-checked family. The Times and New Yorker uphold the highest standards, and what father-son duos print as many words as Ben and Chip? Still:

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.

“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.

Three years and it never occurred to anyone to ask for some pictures?

I cowrote a memoir for Penguin Press, who are under the same Viking-Penguin hardcover umbrella as Riverhead. Penguin Press editor in chief Scott Moyers was pretty up front about lying or expanding on truth: Don’t even think about it. We supplied Moyers with pictures and video. Penguin Press had a lawyer go through every single line of the book, picking apart each anecdote. It took three weeks just to be “legally vetted.”

Somewhere during production questions should have been raised. Ron Hogan at GalleyCat is the best at covering faux-memoirs. He points out:

Which, although the Times doesn’t mention it outright, has got to be doubly awkward for her publisher, Riverhead, since they were also the publishers of James Frey’s My Friend Leonard.

Why would Rich leave that out her story? Nonetheless, Riverhead, a premier imprint, should be ashamed.

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/