Welcome to Litsy!

Really enjoying listening to this. Young covers a variety of topics in a scholarly but accessible way. So far, PT Barnum, Chatterton and literary forgers pretending to be Native American or having far more traumatic experiences than they did! Narrator is really good too, and it's making me research a lot of different topics in my spare time!

A fascinating and timely account of hoaxes (and related phenomena) through history and how they often serve to shore up white supremacy. Researched thoroughly, but with wit and wordplay of a poet. His argument could perhaps have stood out more if the book had been slimmed down a bit, but this is a relatively small critique.

“The plagiarist would rather thank a stranger than cite one. The crime here is vast, and personal: Wheeler went so far as to copy another writer‘s personal acknowledgements.”

Tradition is back in full force: this booknerd is traveling again.
#Booknerdwilltravel #Adventure

“When friend is merely a verb, not a person; when apocalypses too are computer based and costly, like Y2K, then turn out to be mostly paranoia, or worse, marketing; when you can fall in love not with television or through television but on television through a series of dates you couldn‘t really afford in a rented mansion that seems specifically designed for reality TV...then you have become as fictional as the world that you‘ve created.”

“The hoax uses memory‘s mysteries against it. The fake Holocaust memoir goes further, exploiting the gap between what we know and what we can understand or accept. ‘I wanted to know what other people had gone through back then,‘ the man who would become Binjamin Wilkomirski wrote. ‘I wanted to compare it with my own earliest memories that I carried around inside me. I wanted to subject them to intelligent reason...‘”

“The hoax is less a collaboration than a confabulation - mostly provided by the hoaxer, but the rest filled in by the viewer or reader, who‘s flattered following Barnum‘s lead, as expert. We might have to revise our view slightly from here on out: the hoax doesn‘t so much hold a mirror up to nature, or up to the hoaxer, as it holds a mirror up to its audience. And the hoax imagines that audience to be wide.”

“Good nonfiction reveals what happened; fiction what might have: the hoax instead undermines both art and the self, oddly reducing each to autobiography even as it performs its fakery. It often does this through the exotic other, or a dark double, all of which only reinforces the self as superior to all others.”

“Mutant Message represents a subtle but significant shift in our culture in which the art of fiction is less a mask or marketing tool than a concealed weapon. As JT LeRoy will, we shall learn soon enough, Morgan‘s ‘fiction‘ relies on alleged autobiography in every aspect of the hoax, from interviews to the writing itself - all while claiming otherwise whenever convenient or confronted. With Morgan, even her fiction is a fiction.”

Sunday brunch - eggs, beignets, an americano, and a good book. Then, off to the library!

“While Conan Doyle did acknowledge some of Houdini‘s debunkings, he claimed Houdini was genuinely a medium and simply lying about it. Still, the two improbably remained friends - even after Houdini‘s expose A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) that dared take on Conan Doyle - at least till Conan Doyle claimed to have communicated with Houdini‘s dead mother.”

“What was ‘It‘ and what could ‘It‘ be? Once upon a time the hoax tried to prove to the reader, or rediscover, a culture thought lost - or to shore up the worth of tradition. Join us, the hoax said. A lost Gaelic poet, fabricated classicism, an unknown Shakespeare play: such where the hoaxes of the eighteenth century in England, when the successful hoax confirmed a culture‘s wishes.”

“But perhaps it‘s less a sign of honor than of the modern hoax‘s horror that when the U.S. cycling team cheated - gulled, mystified, hoaxed - their way to their seven straight Tour de France victories from 1999 to 2006, they regularly referred to EPO, used in the vampiric practice of blood doping, by a code name: Poe.”

"For the hoax reminds us, uncomfortably, that the stories we tell don't just express the society of the self, they construct it."
#FooledYou #SpringIntoReading #tbr

I‘m about a quarter of the way through this and so far it is dense and poetic (as one would expect) and pretty close to perfect. Some may object to Young‘s fondness for puns, but they work. Trust me, if you care about truth, you need this book in your life.

While the writing can be meandering and confusing at first glance, stick with this and dig in. This is one of the more original books I've read in some time.
"You could go so far as to say the hoax is racism's native tongue. They both are things that don't really exist but stay with us despite our disbelief, revealing more than is meant. "

THIS BOOK, people.

This award winning book has a great premise, and I enjoyed most of the content (looking at the racial underpinnings of early American hoaxes and “fake news”), but I had a hard time following the way it was ordered. That could definitely be because I listened to this instead of reading it, but the book jumped continents and time periods rapidly. As a result, I struggled to identify what the author thought was causal and what was just correlated.

People are so interesting. This book was pretty great once I overcame my issues with the narrators voice. But wow...people!!

I think the author‘s only downfall was that in trying to include all major hoaxes, etc, it almost felt like the things that weren‘t included were more noticeable.

The in-depth talk about race was really interesting and made this book stand out from others on the subject.

#racism #hoaxes #nonfiction

Current audiobook, with some regret. This is over 20 hours and read by someone who draws out his words so I‘ve sped it up to 1.5x so it‘s a little more understandable, lol. Usually I can‘t process that, but it makes his voice more palatable.

Good things: lots of inclusion in POC experiences of exploitation, which is often missing from a lot of white told tales.

Not so good: so many tangential stories that it‘s hard to keep up.

#nonfiction

I mostly enjoyed reading Bunk but maaaaaaaan was it long and meandering. I kept thinking about skipping a chapter, but then something would draw me back in. So I learned a lot from this book, but I felt frustrated the whole time

Just got home from an amazing day of book events. Listening to David Grann, Kevin Young, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar talk about their amazing non-fiction books was definitely a highlight.

Really fascinating book. The beginning was a little slow and dense for me but once I got about 20% in it really hit a stride. I‘m excited to hear Kevin Young speak this weekend at the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Shaaaaaaaaaaade

“When friend is merely a verb, not a person; when apocalypses too are computer based and costly, like Y2K, then turn out to be mostly paranoia, or worse, marketing; when you can fall in love not with television or through television but on television [...]; when your first instinct at the sign of national tragedy is to tell your phone, not tell someone using that phone: then you have become as fictional as the world you‘ve created.”

#TBRtemptation post 1! This big, heavy book takes a look at hucksterism in American history. His observation is that such a practice has gone from entertaining side attraction to mainstream legitimacy. From P. T. Barnum & Edgar Allan Poe to JT LeRoy & Donald Trump. From pretend Native Americans to the made-up memoirs of James Frey, the award-winning poet and critic takes a look at a post-facial world of interpretations. #blameLitsy #blameMrBook 😎

I have this in my #TBR for the new year. Seems very timely! (The review is from the January issue of O.)

Especially good Rachel mail day.

Ooooooooooooo. 📚