Posted by sek8 at January 28th, 2006
Recently there have been multiple celebrity sightings in the West-Village area…. Is Durham the new SoHo?
The Author OR Tamara Hope a.k.a. the Stepsister from Planet Weird?
Keith’s Brother OR Tyson from Beauty and the Geek?
Play of Kid N’ Play OR A Guy that lives in my building?
Posted by sek8 at January 26th, 2006
vs. 
In the last few days, everyone has been up in arms about the apparent deceit perpertrated on the public by James Frey in his ‘memoir:’ A Million Little Pieces. Oprah added the memoir to her book list in 2005, after which it became a best seller (of course). After the website www.thesmokinggun.com published a investigation into the accuracy of the memoir, everyone has been questioning its status as such. After intially supporting the author, saying “What is relevant is that he was a drug addict … and stepped out of that history to be the man he is today and to take that message to save other people and allow them to save themselves,” Oprah regretted her comments explaining that she gave an improper impression that the truth was not important. Now the point is, what is worse: what Frey has done, i.e. exaggerating parts of his life and still claiming truth by publishing his work as a memoir when perhaps it should have been a novel OR what novelist Dan Brown has done by putting a note to readers at the beginning of his novel claiming that the Priory of Sion is a real secret society and that “descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate”? (I have it on good authority that the Priory of Sion is in fact generally regarded to be a hoax, and that many descriptions of artwork/surrounding history in The DaVinci Code are not only inaccurate but flagrantly so…) Outside of the art-history world I have not heard of many people having a problem with The DaVinci Code, as it seems that its ‘novel’ status protects its prevarications from the public both legally and morally…. And so I wonder: are these crimes of literature equal? Or does presenting fiction as fact only hurt when you break the letter of the law?
Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/26/D8FCK8IO7.html
