This Column Is Real, But Not All Authors Stick to the Truth
Deja Vu, by Cynthia Crossen
Wall Street Journal
April 7, 2008

A popular choice for ladies’ book clubs in the early 1940s was a slim volume of poetry by a 10-year-old girl named Fern Gravel. Fern had written the poems about her Iowa hometown in 1900 and passed them along to someone who had preserved them. In 1940, Fern Gravel decided to publish her nostalgic rhymes under the title, “Oh Millersville!”

Two snippets: “My Sunday-school teacher/Is Miss Minnie King./She is not of any use as a teacher/But I love to hear her sing.” “The soap they use in the Commercial hotel/Is awful; it has a horrible smell./Sometimes we have our Sunday dinner there/And the smell of their soap I can hardly bear.”

Critics were enchanted. The Des Moines Register praised the poems’ “warm feeling of validity.” Time magazine called the author a “precocity in pigtails.” The St. Paul Dispatch said “Oh Millersville!” was marked “for immortality.” And the book became the profit center for its small Iowa publisher, Prairie Press.

Six years later, Fern Gravel confessed: She was really James Norman Hall, co-author of the “Bounty” trilogy. In a 1946 article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Mr. Hall described himself as “shame-faced and apologetic,” but claimed that Fern had come to him in a dream and dictated her poems to him.

Literary hoaxes are almost as old as literature. Some have been inspired by poverty, others are simply pranks. (more…)

Submitted by Allyn Harstein:

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’
by Sarah Lai Stirland
Wired.com
April 3, 2008

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.” (more…)

A Family Tree of Literary Fakers
by Motoko Rich
New York Times
March 8, 2008

When the news emerged this week that Margaret Seltzer had fabricated her gang memoir, “Love and Consequences,” under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, many in the publishing industry and beyond thought: Here we go again.

The most immediate examples that came to mind were, of course, James Frey, the author of the best-selling “Million Little Pieces,” in which he embellished details of his experiences as a drug addict, and J T LeRoy, the novelist thought to be a young West Virginia male prostitute who was actually the fictive alter ego of Laura Albert, a woman now living in San Francisco.

But the history of literary fakers stretches far, far back, at least to the 19th century, when a slave narrative published in 1863 by Archy Moore was revealed as a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth, and into the early 20th, when Joan Lowell wrote a popular autobiography, “Cradle of the Deep,” about her colorful childhood aboard a four-masted ship sailing the South Seas; in fact, she had grown up almost entirely in Berkeley, Calif.

Here follows a lineup of some of the past few decades’ most notorious fakes, with proof that in some cases, there are second acts in American lives. (more…)

The Whole Truthiness
by John Capone
MediaPost Publications
March 2008

Has the fake nightly news opened up a surrealistic media realm?

Nothing you are about to read is true, but it’s exactly the way things are. Trust me.

Who knows who Stephen Colbert really is? Who really cares? Certainly not Colbert himself. He was once a kid from Charleston, S.C., who grew up Irish-Catholic and graduated from Northwestern University with artistic pretensions. He is now such a muddle of refracted irony — a paradox of self-reference and false sincerity — and the work of teams of writers, that the actor has disappeared completely into the surrealistic world he’s created.

The persona is a media barrage. And this barrage has been embraced by millions — The Colbert Nation. This Nation is comprised of the people who watch his show, bought his book, made him a best seller on iTunes, read magazines (like this one) with profiles of their iconically ironic savior, and those who receive the news and advertising messages accompanying all of these media.

When Colbert addresses his audience on The Colbert Report, he’ll often begin with the salutation “Nation,” as if he were an earnest Cronkitian figure, but it is this Nation of fans he really means. Especially when he calls on them to vote to name a bridge in Hungary after him (which they did), change the Wikipedia definition of reality to read: “Reality has become a commodity” (which they did), or get him on both the Republican and Democratic presidential ballots in South Carolina (which they very nearly did).

Does all this add up to truthiness in journalism, canny social criticism, infotainment, pure entertainment or is it the high- (but ultimately unfocused) comedic art of an Andy Kaufman prank? The Colbert-cum-Tony Clifton–divisions run deeper than an actor simply taking on a role. (more…)

Editor’s note: Artist and pranks.com editor Joey Skaggs will be joining the online class the week of February 18. Check it out!

Tricksters and Pranks with R.U. Sirius - February 11 - March 23, 2008

Pranks and Pranksters, Tricksters & Tricks — the brilliant ones open up a space in the world for magic(k), ambiguity, and novelty. They encourage us to Question Authority and better still, they cause us to Question Reality.

In this course, we will discuss the history of pranks and pranksterism in the contemporary world. We will examine mythical and world historic tricksters like Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Crowley, Puck, Heyoka, Papa Legba, Lucifer, and more. And we’ll explore and discuss the role pranksters and tricksters play in cultures. I will also discuss some of my own pranks and tricks and legendary pranksters Mark Hosler of Negativland and Joey Skaggs will be dropping in on the course to answer questions.

Finally, we will plan pranks, make pranks, and maybe even leave the course with a dedicated prankster cabal. No fooling.

For more information visit the Maybe Logic Institute. If that link doesn’t work, go here.

Related links:

Submitted by William of FORA.tv:

FORA.tv presents Joline Blais, in cooperation with the Long Now Organization, discussing the artwork of the Yes Men’s internet pranks that focus the world’s attention on big corporations and global political entities.

Joline Blais is co-author of At the Edge of Art with Jon Ippolito.

Related links:

From The New Press Web site:

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore

For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are coopted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?

Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market—and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.

Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenol’s indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at what’s happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is the co-editor of Punk Planet, the Best American Comics series editor, and the author of Hey, Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People. She has written for Bitch, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, The Onion, The Progressive, and Chicago Public Radio WBEZ’s radio program 848. She lives in Chicago.

To get more of a sense of what this book is about, check out Rob Walker’s very interesting interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore from his blog Murketing.

First, a simple explainer as to the issues causing the Writers Strike, from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) via Ellen Sandler:

The Writers Strike: Why We Fight

Thanks Erin. Now, a look at the world of television without writers:

Writers Strike Means Reality Boom Times
by Lynn Elber
AP Television Writer
November 27, 2007

Los Angeles (AP) — For five years, John Langley tried and failed to sell a cinema verite-style TV series tracking police officers on patrol. Then came the 1988 Hollywood writers strike.

“That’s when Fox bought `Cops,’ because a series with no narrator, no host, no script, no re-enactments sounded very good to them at the time,” recalled Langley, who just marked the show’s 700th episode.

The nearly five-month ‘88 Writers Guild of America walkout that started in March didn’t unleash a flood of reality, because filming on sitcoms and dramas had largely wrapped and because alternative shows had yet to become a trend.

But the current WGA strike fell smack during production as well as the Age of Reality, putting the brakes on scripted shows and giving networks a quick fix for schedule holes. It remains to be seen how viewers - or the reality genre itself - will withstand the onslaught.

Networks have readied a slate of nearly 40 shows that are stacked up like jetliners over Christmas Eve runways awaiting the go-ahead to land. (more…)

Consuming War
An exhibition curated by Barbara Koenen
November 4 to January 20, 2008
Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell Avenue
Chicago, IL 60615

Featuring works by Lynda Barry, Wafaa Bilal, Mary Brogger, Adam Brooks, Burtonwood & Holmes, Michael Hernandez de Luna, Fred Holland, Harold Mendez, Michael Rakowitz, Ellen Rothenberg, Edra Soto, Paula White and Dolores Wilber.

Focusing on the U.S. conflict in the Middle East over the past 10 years, Consuming War addresses the ways the American media and consumer culture have manipulated and influenced our perceptions of war, often turning it into a spectacle for American consumption. While war is an underlying theme in all the works, each addresses the concept of war, and our relationship to it, from a variety of angles, creating pieces that range from political cartoons to sculptures that recreate the archeological artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq and large suspended papier mâché bombs made from sale advertisements. Timely in its subject matter, Consuming War offers an innovative platform in which the complex and multifarious connections between war, capitalism, American consumer culture, and our everyday lives can be re-situated and critically examined.

Related links:

image: Proposed work by Burtonwood & Holmes, 2007
via Art Threat

A film review by Shane Lavalette /Journal, November 10, 2007:

Orson Welles is generally known for his 1938 radio broadcast of the science fiction novella War of the Worlds. If not for that, then for co-writing, directing, producing and starring in Citizen Kane (1941), commonly referred to as “the greatest film ever made.” Orson Welles is, however, not so known for his last major film, F For Fake (1974) – a pseudo-documentary and playful meditation on “art, experts and fakery.” Here’s a quick synopsis taken from The Criterion Collection (released the film on DVD in 2005):

Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles’ free-form documentary F for Fake, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career—the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of world-renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying cinematic journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes—not the least of whom is Welles himself. Charming and inventive, F for Fake is an inspired prank and a searching examination of the essential duplicity of cinema.

(more…)