Memoirous

  Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News Kevin young, Greywolf Press 2017 I was really excited about getting my hands on this book. I’ve mostly known Kevin Young for his poetry. His publishing creds are impeccable, and the above title was longlisted for the National Book Award in non-fiction. It was a busy holiday spent hanging out and when not hanging then reading. I finished a couple heavy-hitter books. With more holds piling up on the shelves at the library. So with Bunk I started with the back and read around, eventually starting at the beginning. Maybe because of this “pecking” it felt like a couple different books to me. Part Six: Unoriginal Sin was about appropriating and misappropriating material and culture not part of one’s milieu. What I appreciated most was Young’s narrative voice. Have you ever wished while reading non-fiction for the author to interject—yo! Now it gets serious, or any number of observations...

Remember the old days? Before the internet—I used to read physical books. Read poems that shook me to the core. I’d go to the back of the anthology and read the 2 – 3 line bio and if possible there might be an entry for them in the World Book Encyclopedia. Maybe not, if they weren’t white or mainstream. Of course I didn’t need to know someone’s gender (Evelyn Waugh is a guy? S.E. Hinton is a woman?), or their orientation (hello! Go Tell It On the Mountain James Baldwin), or if they were black or white. Countee Cullen was REALLY confusing. I got the work though. O nce riding in old Baltimore,     Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean     Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small,     And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out     His tongue, and called me, "Nigger." I saw the whole of Baltimore     From May u...

I really enjoyed reading this piece on-line at Vulture: The Strange Experience of Having My Memoir Turned Into a Movie I’m sure we’ve all fantasized about who would play us in the movie of our life. In a world of reality TV sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between reality and what is scripted. There are days when it all feels fake. Now we all take poetic license even if we’re not poets. Same with memoir. As this blog states: what’s important is how we think it happened. I’ll be the first to admit that to make a good flash memoir I have to conflate events, narrow down the cast of characters. Often I nudge reality by giving it an arc. I end up with quasi fiction/quasi non-fiction. A blended remembering. This same notion can be applied to film adaptation. That’s why most movies with novel titles usually have a disclaimer of sorts: based upon . . . A Jane Austen movie is not a Jane Austen novel. Movies and books are not apples and oranges, more like apples ...

Who knows how the mind works, but this past weekend I suddenly remembered that funky movie Go Ask Alice . Reading a Wiki summary of the story it is impossible to believe the impact this movie/book once had. Its message scared me to death. In the early 70s I was in middle school—a time fraught with great unhappiness. It wasn’t hard to imagine the main character’s insecurity, fear of failing, having to navigate the troubled waters of friendship. Looking back now, Go Ask Alice is laughable, full of about every fear-mongering cliché one can think of concerning drugs, the bad guys who do drugs, and how easily one is sucked down, held in the vise-like grip of addiction. It was seemingly written as an object lesson. The diary format gave the book an authority it didn’t deserve. It seemed so real. Of course I didn’t know any better. Almost immediately the book’s authenticity was questioned. It was written by Anonymous. Now it tops the list of faked memoirs. http:/...

Me and my girlfriends have a joke about sending our husbands to do something and 1) they come back empty-handed because they forgot or 2) they come back with the wrong thing or 3) they come back and say they couldn't find the thing that was RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR NOSE. We call this man's disease. sorry about 1/2 the population or what is it now--about 51% of the population because of gender selection, women are becoming a minority--something I've noticed for a long while--anyway! But come to find out it isn't just man's disease, but a characteristic of just being human. NPR Radio did a story not too long ago, a story that as I listened I thought--geez can this get any worse, and then it did, I listened more and it got even MORE worse. Here's how it goes: Officers in Boston got the report of man down, one of their own had been shot. The bulletin went out and many officers arrived at the scene. One of those who responded was a black undercover officer weari...

snips from The Rumpus   The Heroic Lie: A Brief Inquiry into the Fake Memoir Steve Almond     ·  April 20th, 2011   When I was about ten years old, I hit my older brother in the mouth with a baseball bat. We were standing around in a field, hitting pebbles with the bat, and I got him on my backswing. There was a lot of blood. Although the blow was technically a mistake, I’ve always felt that I was seeking revenge for his bullying. My brother remembers it differently. He was told not to step into the path of my swing, but ignored the warnings. Memory is not a recording device. It’s the past as filtered through the emotional needs of the present. In this sense, memory can be thought of as a creative act, though, crucially, an unconscious one. *** You will have heard, by now, of the curious case of Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea . As documented by the author Jon Krakauer, among others , Mortenson appears to have falsified vas...