Maybe this is all why I like taxidermy so much. No one would ever mistake a mounted animal for a live one, no matter how intently the taxidermist tucks his eyelids and paints his nostrils. No matter how lifelike the pose. I mean, which—to borrow a phrase—is the authentic animal? This: Or this?
I’ve been a fan of pro wrestling for a long time. Not the inspiredly named NES game pictured at right (about which I can only recall that The Amazon, part-snake, part-man, was unstoppable—at least when wielded by my friend Darrell), but the spectacle that’s now marketed as Sports Entertainment. I shouldn’t be a fan of [...]
There are more than two ways to look at falseness. One of my favorite documentary films is The Cruise made in 1998 by Bennett Miller, who went on in 2005 to make Capote. The Cruise is made perpetually watchable by its perpetually listenable subject: Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, who guides Grey Line Bus Tours of Manhattan [...]
In a “Talk of the Town” piece from this week’s New Yorker, Richard Rayner writes that beloved historian Stephen Ambrose essentially lied about the access he was given to President Eisenhower: Is it possible that Ambrose met with Eisenhower outside office hours? [Son] John Eisenhower [said] that such meetings never happened: “Oh, God, no. Never. [...]
Two things: I. A couple weeks ago the Times Book Review complained that a book of nonfiction conflated two dates into one. This week, it reviews David Shields’s Reality Hunger, and has this to say, paraphrasing Shields: After all, just because the novel is food for worms doesn’t mean that fiction has ceased. Only an [...]
John D’Agata writes books in and about nonfiction that get me very interested in and excited for the genre. After the first generation of “New Journalists” who just decided to get out and write great, engaging, personal, subjective nonfiction without dickering over the name of this genre, and then after their 2nd-gen acolytes who made [...]
