#literary hoaxes

[leam1983]

On Goncharov

I can't say I'm impressed; not when the literary world's taken Tumblr's efforts and quintupled them in size, effectively proving without a doubt that book nerds are far, far worse than film nerds.

In 1950, a retired Royal Naval officer by the name of Frederick R. Ewing, would cook up a steamy historical romance along the same lines of Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, and would begin a round of press conferences across America and Europe. He never spoke in public, but the bandwagon was started by one Jean Shepherd, a radio host who had the honor of being able to talk to Ewing ahead of the book tour's American debut. The initial critics themselves weren't terribly flattering, but the more the tour lasted and the more people spoke out about Ewing and his work, and the more flowery and flattering their prose became. Before the end of the year, you had critics from TIME swearing up and down that Ewing's I, Libertine was a seminal piece of historical fiction, as important to the English literary canon as the works of James Joyce.

There's just one catch: Ewing never existed, and neither did I, Libertine. Jean Shepherd had wanted to host something of a trolling attempt on his peers in the critics' profession, and had used his position as a radio host to effectively crowd-source fake quotes, story details, a false development history - everything of importance, right down to Ewing's fictitious biography. All of it, to prove that critics were usually so helpless against their editors' expected deadlines that they, inexorably, resorted to bullshitting their way through entire submissions. Even today, it's a fairly common practice.

I've worked in the literary industry, and I've met several "journalists" who claim up and down that they read absolutely everything that gets published in their covered niche in a single year. I know the common saying is that none of us read enough and that we should be able to handle more than a handful of best-sellers a year, but there's a difference between skimming a work and going deep enough for the needs of an in-depth critique.

Most of those journalists I've met back when I was in the publishing sphere were lucky if they handled five or six books a year.

So - pulling a Goncharov and basing an entire critique off of liner notes or of someone else's account of the book is fairly common. Tumblr's just aping what's already prevalent in the field of movie criticism, which is that FOMO will drive muckrakers desperate for a quote absolutely fucking wild and that many end up misreferencing or misquoting what they saw.

If you DM me or reply to me saying that Goncharov is real, I'll probably just mute you for a few days - with all due respect, of course.

[batgovernor]

Odd poem: 'Sonnets for the Novachord (1.)' by the non-existent Ern Malley

Rise from the wrist, o kestrel Mind, to a clear expanse. Perform your high dance On the clouds of ancestral Duty. Hawk at the wraith Of remembered emotions. Vindicate our high notions Of a new and pitiless faith. It is not without risk! In a lofty attempt The fool makes a brisk Tumble. Rightly contempt Rewards the cloud-foot unwary Who falls to the prairie. ***** This sonnet is by “Ern” Malley,…

[firstsentence]

"After slight reflection I gave a willing assent to the bold proposition, which (strange to say) met with objection from the two seamen only." 🍵

[creature-wizard]

Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.

Since I'm seeing more starseed content being posted, I'm gonna make another post on why the whole starseed thing and the surrounding New Age belief system are... not good.

So for those who don't know, New Age mythology is essentially a hodgepodge of cherrypicked and distorted myths from various cultures, racist pseudohistory, and far right conspiracy theories. To put it very briefly, starseeds are supposedly here to help Earth resist the reptilians, a race of politics-manipulating, war-starting, media-controlling blood-drinking aliens. For those who don't recognize the tropes here, these are basically all antisemitic canards. The reptilian alien myth as most know it today comes from David Icke, who ultimately cribbed a bunch of his material from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Jews. He was also influenced by the work of people like Fritz Springmeier, a hateful crank who based much of his work on other hateful cranks.

(David Icke, by the way, also claims that transgender is an evil reptilian conspiracy. You'll never find just one form of bigotry with these people.)

There are supposedly numerous alien races out there, and one of the most prominent among them are the Pleiadians, AKA Nordics. While modern depictions of the Pleiadians give them more variety in skintone, there's no denying that older Pleiadian mythology basically pictured them as Aryans In Space, even associating them with the swastika.

You see what's going on here? "Good" swastika-loving Aryan aliens versus "evil" Jewish aliens? Sound familiar?

Racism isn't just a tangential part of the starseed myth, either. It lies at its very core. It's inextricably tied in with the ancient astronaut hypothesis, which has a history of racist motivation behind it. The TL;DR is that a bunch of white people couldn't believe that non-white people had built a bunch of things they couldn't figure out how to build themselves (EG, the Great Pyramids), so they proposed that the real builders were anyone from Atlanteans to aliens. (Atlantis, by the way, never existed; it was a literary device created by Plato.)

One supposed purpose of starseeds is to help the world "wake up to the truth," which basically just means "convert people to New Age spirituality." New Age believes that world peace is contingent on a majority of the world being converted to New Age belief, and that resistance against their belief system is ultimately the work of the aforementioned reptilian aliens.

To put it another way, New Agers think they understand other cultures' spiritual traditions better than the actual members of said cultures, and think that anyone who disagrees with them is being manipulated by the conspiracy, or is an agent of the conspiracy. This includes Indigenous cultures which are already endangered from white Christian colonialism.

Essentially, endangered cultures cannot speak up for themselves and resist New Agers' efforts at cultural assimilation without being labeled a problem and an enemy. It's basically white Christian colonialism repackaged as "spiritual, not religious."

Again - if you heard from these people that some ancient text or myth describes extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet for one reason or another, you heard misinformation. They twist and misrepresent literally every myth and text they get their hands on. For example, you may have heard that the vimanas from Hindu traditions were actually alien spacecraft. They were no such thing. Or maybe you heard that the Book of Enoch describes aliens performing genetic experimentation on humans. It literally does not. At best, all of the stories they cite just kind of sound like aliens if you ignore most of their content and pay no attention to their cultural contexts.

The starseed movement preys on alienated people, especially autistic people and people with ADHD. You can look up nearly any list of signs that you're supposedly a starseed, and many of them will align perfectly with characteristics associated with autism and/or ADHD, or that people with these conditions commonly report. Some people within the movement even go so far as to claim that ADHD and autism don't even exist, but were actually made up by the conspiracy as a cover to suppress and control starseeds, which is some yikes-as-hell ableism.

So basically, people are being told that if they have these certain characteristics or symptoms, that means it's their job to spread New Age spirituality to defeat the conspiracy and help others ascend to the fifth density.

And what's the fifth density, you might ask? It's supposedly humanity's next evolutionary level, because New Age is also based on biological misconceptions. Supposedly once everyone's DNA "upgrades," they'll essentially morph into an aetheric form. Supposedly, this is preceded by a number of "ascension symptoms," including depression, headache, gastrointestinal issues, and any number of other symptoms that could indicate almost anything, including stress.

What many of these people don't realize is, this prediction has already failed. Back in the 2000s and 2010s, experiencing "ascension symptoms" was supposed to precede ascension to 5D beginning December 21, 2012. One lady, Denise Le Fay, was convinced that the hair loss she was experiencing in 2008 was an ascension symptom. As we can see by looking her up, she's very much still with us on the 3D plane these days, repeating the same tired old scripts New Agers recycle endlessly.

By the way, everything you near New Agers saying today about old systems being dismantled, dark forces being arrested or kicked off the planet, and new economic systems on the horizon? They've been recycling these scripts for years now. Take a look at this page written back in 2012. You got stuff about the complete dismantling of an enormous network of sinister forces," "the arrest and removal of a world-wide cabal," and a "new economic system."

("Cabal," by the way, is a dogwhistle term for "Jews.")

Furthermore, people in this movement are often encouraged to try and access past life memories through dreams or hypnosis, which makes the whole thing feel even more real to them. But the thing is, you can have incredibly vivid experiences about literally anything you put your mind to - the people in the reality shifting having vivid experiences of living another life in the Harry Potter universe are a great example of this. Just because you have vivid experiences, doesn't mean they have any bearing on anything happening in this reality.

So yeah, the starseed movement and the larger New Age movement are both extremely harmful. They promote racist pseudohistory, medically-irresponsible pseudoscience, conspiracy theories that target numerous marginalized groups, and functionally target aliened people with ADHD and autism to convince them that spreading its beliefs is their job.

[lizardsfromspace]

One thing that's interesting about Dr. Phil is that his show is a spin-off of Oprah and one thing I've discovered, that's interesting, is that it's virtually impossible to find footage from Oprah's show. Go looking and you'll find it hard to find uncut clips of even well-liked famous moments; instead they're all intercut with commentary on the event. Interviews watched by tens of millions of people now exist only in twenty seconds of clips interspersed with talking heads telling us how to feel about it. Over 4,5000 episodes, almost all of it vaulted

Remember Oprah platforming anti-vaxxers and all kinds of alt-med scams and literary hoaxes? Uh, no you don't, prove it. She doesn't even let people see uncut footage of the Good Moments of her show (since she seems to be deeply embarrassed by literally all of it?) so of course she's burying any Bad Moments.

In conclusion the Rainbow Parties segment is one of the few full clips you'll find online intact, somehow. Enjoy.

[weirdlookindog]

Charles D. Gardette and Edgar Allan Poe - The Fire-Fiend and The Raven: The Story Behind a Literary Hoax. (Gerry De La Ree, Saddle River, New Jersey, 1973). Cover art by Stephen Fabian.

[incomingalbatross]

I think Tumblr should know that in 1956 Jean Shepherd (probably best known as the writer and narrator of A Christmas Story) used his late-night radio show as a platform for starting a crowdsourced literary hoax about a "bestseller" that did not exist.

It started, apparently, with a discussion of how easy it was to manipulate bestseller lists by creating false or inflated demand for books, and in order to demonstrate this Shepherd suggested his audience should all go to their nearest bookstores and ask for the same made-up book. He provided a title—I, Libertine—a basic plot outline, and on top of everything else it was supposedly banned in Boston. The hoax worked so well, thanks to his audience playing their parts, that it is at least rumored to have ended up on the New York Times Best-Seller List purely from customer demand. Despite not actually, you know, existing.

In the end Ballantine Books was interested enough in actually selling (a version of) this book that they got an outline from Shepherd and hired Theodore Sturgeon to write it within the year. So it's a real book.

[thecreaturecodex]

Umishika

Image © Matthew Meyer, accessed at Yokai.com here

[Perytons do not exist. I mean, even more than usual for the monsters covered on this blog. Rather than being a folkloric or mythological creature, a heraldic beast or a misinterpretation of a real animal, the peryton is a literary hoax perpetuated by Jorge Luis Borges in his book The Book of Imaginary Beings. Borges wasn’t particularly subtle--he claims that the manuscript describing the perytons dates back to Atlantis--but the peryton has been adopted as a semi-popular monster regardless. Borges wasn’t the only one to have thought that “what if a deer was scarier” was a good monster concept, as this sea monster from Yakushima folklore indicates.]

Umishika CR 4 CE Magical Beast This creature has the upper body of a stag and the lower body of an eel. Its teeth are canine and sharp, and its rack of antlers is keen.

The umishika are aquatic kin to perytons, and are believed to have been created in the same arcane disaster that made those savage chimeras. Umishika combine features of deer, eels and seals, and are just as savage and violent as perytons are. They are more social, however, gathering regularly into shoals in order to gang up on prey and drive competition away. They eat mostly fish, but view fishing vessels as competitors, stalking them and climbing up onto deck at night in order to kill and eat their crews. 

An umishika’s shadow behaves strangely. It clings close to the monster, and when underwater distorts the umishika’s appearance so that it resembles the outline of a large fish such as a tuna or dorado. Umishika use this ability to approach close to prey with relatively little fuss, and may even attract predators or fishermen to them before the tables turn. An umishika’s teeth are sharp, but it uses them mostly to process food after puncturing it with horns and hooves. Although they branch like antlers, the horns of an umishika are not lost seasonally, and are found on individuals of all sexes.

Umishika            CR 4 XP 1,200 CE Medium magical beast Init +7; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low light vision, Perception +8, scent Defense AC 17, touch 13, flat-footed 14 (+3 Dex, +4 natural) hp 42 (5d10+15) Fort +7, Ref +7, Will +3 DR 5/magic Defensive Abilities shadow shroud Offense Speed 20 ft., swim 60 ft. Melee gore +8 (1d6+3/18-20), 2 hooves +6 (1d4+1) Special Attacks horrific critical Statistics Str 17, Dex 16, Con 17, Int 11, Wis 14, Cha 12 Base Atk +5; CMB +8; CMD 21 Feats Athletic, Improved Initiative, Multiattack Skills Climb +10, Disguise +3 (+11 as mundane fish), Perception +7, Stealth +8 Swim +18; Racial Modifier +8 to Disguise as mundane fish Languages Aquan SQ hold breath Ecology Environment any aquatic Organization solitary, pair or shoal (3-9) Treasure incidental Special Abilities Horrific Critical (Ex) An umishika’s gore attack threatens a critical hit on a roll of 18-20. If an umishika kills a humanoid foe with a critical hit, it can tear out the victim’s heart with its teeth as a free action. Any creature that witnesses this must succeed a DC 13 Will save or be shaken for 1 round. This is a mind-influencing fear effect, and the save DC is Charisma based. Shadow Shroud (Su) An umishika has concealment when it is underwater.

[transsexual-homunculus]

fucking eviscerate them

[urban-vyaas-blog]

My wife threw the book almost into the dumpster fire after reading half a page. The impression exists that only accomplished philologists are able to read Finnegans Wake. All the other ones have to relay upon heavily annotated versions. So I took it upon me to merge Finnegans Wake with the most beautiful book ever printed (the Kelsey-Chaucer), replaced all the foreign language idiosyncrasies with their English equivalent and streamlined Joyce's sibylline prose. Here Comes Everybody's Karma (isbn 9781737783299) will be released on June 11, 2024 in Dublin at the Bloomfestival. After that, everybody will be able to judge if the book is the most elaborated literary hoax ever, or the work of a genius (OK, I admit, I have dumbed it down a little). I'm currently releasing excerpts on my website www.maharajagar.com and reviewers can obtain an ARC by using this link

[suzannahnatters]

Flash Fic: Strange the Living

Some time ago in the City of the Dead was a man who believed himself to be alive.

The first sign of Matthew Strange’s delusion was his arrival upon my doorstep at one o’clock of a stormy November evening: hatless, rumpled and soaked from the rain.

I welcomed him into the hall, where he stood shivering although there was no wind to stir him. “It is so cold!” he said.

Strange had for some time been studying the prospect of resurrection. That evening, having retired as usual to read in his library, he found himself distracted by unfamiliar sensations. He took to the streets, yet his agony only became more intolerable as the evening progressed. At last, happening to pass my house, he sought my counsel.

I saw nothing to suggest that Strange had undergone resurrection. His cheeks were pale and withered, his feet so worm-eaten that he was compelled to use a walking-stick. He therefore explained that he felt. His throat was parched, his bones rattled from cold, and his feet ached. Most alarming of all was a bitter pang originating from no particular source, which he said caused water to stream from what was left of his eyes. I studied his face, but the moisture might well have been the rain.

“Forget these chimerical pains,” I told him. “Make up your mind that you are quite dead, and do not spend your days trapped in a delusion.”

Strange only sent me a despairing look.

From that date the madness of Matthew Strange only increased. He shut himself into his empty house and hung crepe from the knocker of his door. On the rare occasion anyone saw him, he was clad in deepest mourning.

“You look well preserved,” I greeted, upon meeting him in the street one gloomy evening. “I take it you have gotten well again?”

“I am well,” he said, with a rather wild laugh. “It seems I am the only one who is.” 

I decided to humour him. “Why, what do you mean?”

“Just this: that I have found others who claim to be living. But it’s all a hoax, my friend. They are as dead as anyone else.”

“That seems uncharitable.”

“But they do not feel,” he said. “Snow falls, and they do not shiver. Fresh dead arrive each day, and their hearts do not break. They cannot smell their own corruption. They are dead, or next to it.”

“Naturally; but why spend your days in seclusion? One cannot always be mourning.”

“A dead thing cannot weep at all,” he said. “But I live, and therefore I mourn them.”

Strange’s words disturbed me, for as I hurried away, I began to understand them. Surely the thought of death had once been terrible to me! Was it not dreadful to be infested with worms and bloated with stinking gases? Perhaps Strange was right to mourn! Perhaps there was something wrong—unnatural, even—about this city! –The sensation was intolerable. I was glad when it passed.

----

I wrote this flash fic for the Pilgrim Artists' Festival, a small Christian festival of art, music, and words which runs every year in Tasmania's Huon Valley. The theme for the 2021 festival was "The Lord's Prayer", and I spent a lot of time contemplating what I wanted to write in response. I was most drawn to the petition, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" and this is my meditation on those lines.

Until 2 September, the 2023 Pilgrim Artists' Festival is open for submissions of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, and music from Christian, Nicene-Creed-affirming artists, including children and adults, anywhere in the world. This year's prompt is "Beauty in the Everyday" and there is a 500 word limit on literary entries. There are also dozens of prizes available - check them out and submit here.

Other Pilgrim Artists' Festival flash fic: The Gardens of Hades

[frankensteincest]

A large portion of Vonnegut’s oeuvre has been concerned with metafictional issues that arise from the creator role of the author. Vonnegut constantly makes his readers aware of his position as author and the constructor of the tale he tells. Sometimes he does this by making reference to his own writing. At others, he uses gimmicks such as the starring of names of characters who are shortly to die, as he does in Galápagos. Breakfast of Champions features ‘Vonnegut’ sitting in a bar surrounded by and manipulating his own characters, even revealing himself to Kilgore and telling him outright that he is a creation in Vonnegut’s fiction. Vonnegut’s unique mixture of autobiographical details—or rather the acknowledgment of his autobiographical detail—with his fiction, and his insistence on using an ambiguous ‘I’ persona in most of his novels, has meant for both him and his readers that they continually confront the artifice—and reality—of fictional creations.

Throughout Galápagos, Vonnegut deliberately undermines human acts of creation, art among them. When, for instance, Vonnegut writes that science fiction is just another ‘arbitrary game’ that the human brain plays, he impugns both his profession and his novel. Moreover, the symbol of human art in the novel, the handheld computer Mandarax which acts as a repository for all the literary quotations thought worth saving for posterity, can offer only ineptitudes which are of no practical value at all. Vonnegut’s last word on it is emphatic: he has a great white shark eat it. Such undermining isn’t unique to this novel, but he goes one step further in Galápagos when Leon reveals that he has ‘written these words in air—with the tip of the index finger of my left hand, which is also air’. The reader already knows that human beings of the future are unlikely readers; not only do they spend most of their lives in water, but they also no longer have the big brains or the dexterous fingers needed for reading.

So who is Leon writing for? If he is writing on air with air, his story—and Vonnegut’s—will, quite literally, disappear into thin air, a conceit which Bo Pettersson has rightfully described as Vonnegut letting ‘man, in his regained innocence, forego much of what makes him unique.... The end of evil must entail the end of human creativity’.

So there is a suggestion of another kind of apocalypse here: that of the worlds that the written word creates. It may be that Vonnegut means to imply that art, like everything, is ephemeral, or even that it is itself in the process of evolving into a new form. Certainly, Vonnegut’s distinctive style—brief paragraphs, doodles, and catch-phrases such as ‘And so it goes’—could be interpreted as an evolution in novel form. But what seems more likely, given the eschatological and evolutionary timbre of Galápagos, is that he intends to place human art in its proper anthropological and apocalyptic context.

Todd F. Davis argues that ‘At no time does Vonnegut become comfortable with the notion that humanity represents the highest achievement of some mythical creator’. In the evolutionary and anthropological sense, art is no more or less permanent than the species which makes it. Leon shrugs off the impermanence of his words, saying, ‘my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air’. Art merely creates another ‘comforting lie’ that humans can tell to make their world a better place in which to live.

But as a postmodernist, Vonnegut is playfully engaging in a paradox here. While Leon’s work will disappear within the fictional confines of Galápagos, it lives on through Vonnegut’s work in the real world. Moreover, it is our big brains that allow us to read and consider Vonnegut’s point about the uselessness of big brains. Because of this paradox, Peter Freese describes Galápagos as ‘a hoax, a verbal game built upon the premise of its very impossibility’. Great art will endure as long as humans do, Leon says. Its impermanence matters little if the ‘lie’ it creates makes our lives better while we are here.

ELIZABETH K. ROSEN, Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination

[firstsentence]

"The inflation was commenced very quietly at daybreak, on Saturday morning, the 6th instant, in the courtyard of Wheal-Vor House, Mr. Osborne's seat, about a mile from Penstruthal, in North Wales; and at seven minutes past eleven, every thing being ready for departure, the balloon was set free, rising gently but steadily, in direction nearly south; no use being made, for the first half hour, of either the screw or the rudder." 🍵

[creature-wizard]

LOL, you shitheads again? You must really love getting your asses kicked if you're coming to me, of all people.

For anybody unaware, the Satanists behind the website mentioned in this ask are a bunch of openly antisemitic conspiracy theorists appropriating Eastern traditions, and they've been trying to advertise themselves and increase their SEO by sending asks like these. Each ask is tailored to appeal to whatever they think your beliefs might be, but they all follow a similar template that goes something like:

What do you think of [URL redacted]? They claim to follow [insert gods here], they [something about supporting abortion], and they're the largest [insert group here] group in the world."

The spirituality promoted on this website is rooted in deeply antisemitic conspiracy theories and pseudohistory. If I addressed every single claim they made, I'd be here all day, so I'm going to stick to a few examples:

They claim that Satanism isn't a reaction to Christianity, but is in fact older than Christianity. This is straight-up pseudohistorical bullshit.

They claim that Jews have perpetrated a grand conspiracy to conceal true spiritual knowledge from the masses. They outright cite The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Czarist hoax created to justify violence against Russian Jews in the late 19th century. They claim that Christianity is a Jewish tool of world domination and mind control.

They claim that "Jewish ritual murder" is a thing. This is blood libel, an old conspiracy theory used to demonize Jews.

They claim that Jesus was a fictional creation made out of tropes "stolen" from various pagan gods. There is no actual evidence for this; it's another conspiracy theory. For a scholarly look at what most probably happened, I recommend How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Erhman. Or if you can't get your hands on the books, just look into Dr. Ehrman's videos/lectures on the topic on YouTube.

They push the extremely racist ancient aliens bullshit, claiming that the pagan gods were actually aliens.

They claim that the serpent actually represents human DNA, life force, and kundalini. This is a conspiracy theory that disregards the diversity of lore about serpents in various belief systems and traditions around the world, and culturally appropriates from Eastern traditions.

Their idea of what constitutes genuine Satanic practices is basically New Agers' bastardized versions of Eastern concepts and practices.

They claim that the "Tree of Life" is actually a stolen pagan symbol that maps the human soul. Again, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that disregards the actual significance of trees within the various traditions that involve them.

They claim that the Pentateuch was ripped off from the five suits of the tarot, and that tarot has ancient origins with alchemical significance. Tarot was actually invented in the 15th century for playing games. Mystical symbolism was applied by occultists in the 18th century.

The creators of the site apparently believe that the Simon Necronomicon is a genuine translation of older documents. It's not. The Necronomicon was a literary device created by HP Lovecraft; every text purporting to be a translation of the Necronomicon is a modern creation.

If you get an anon message like this in your inbox, do not post it. These people want you to share their URL to get more publicity and spread their antisemitic conspirituality. Don't give them what they want.

[cheerstotheelites-if]

Well, now you got me curious about your poetry, so Poetry 🖋️: Give us a taste of your writing with a literary technique (rhyme, descriptive language, alliteration, etc)... Please? 👀

Ask list

Oh hell yeah definitely! :DD

(Also check out their IF it's gucci. Y'all won't regret it.)

I don't write poetry as often as I used to, since I'm busy with IF's now, but I do dabble in it when I can.

This poem was written a few months (September 2022) after a long term friendship has ended back in July 2022. This was me reminising and missing it.

a pair of glasses

i recall the day a friend told me about the glasses i wore, they were second hand glasses, dirty, hinges a bit worn, but now mine and still mine,

you told me the blue light filters its lens hold, don't help at all, a hoax, if i can recall, as a person wearing glasses himself, he was certain,

i didn't believe him, i believed the glasses can help me, lessen the headaches from the screen, despite i, myself, don't really need glasses,

we would debate about it, if these "blue light filters" are fake or not, from the perspective of a person needing glasses, and from a person "needing" glasses,

i still wear them, even after the friendship has ended, a sudden end to things so lovingly warm, i regret that it was and is my fault,

the conversation always come back to me, every time i wear or look at these glasses, i can't help but laugh at the fun, and i can't help but long for it again.

[kevrocksicehouse]

American Fiction.

D: Cord Jefferson (2023).

American Fiction, like the great Percival Everett novel that it adapts (Erasure, buy it), grounds an outraged literary satire in an utterly prosaic family drama. Jeffrey Wright (In a peerless performance of bemusement underlaid with bitterness) plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison a professor (on enforced sabbatical over his refusal to teach Flannery O'Connor without using racial epithets) and novelist whose latest book (“The Phoenicians”) is being rejected for not being “black” enough. While at a literary seminar in Boston he walks into a reading by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) whose novel “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto” (“YO! Sharonda! Girl you be pregnant again?”) has become a best-seller by pandering to urban black stereotypes. Affronted, he writes his own novella, (under the name Stagg R. Leigh) called first “My Pafology” then “FUCK” (“just to rub their noses in it”) which to his even greater disgust becomes a publishing sensation. 

 At the same time a family tragedy leaves him a caregiver for his elderly mother (Leslie Uggams) who is sinking into dementia, without much help from his brother Clifford who has recently come out as gay, and even more recently went through a nasty divorce (Sterling K. Brown balancing hilarious fecklessness with pathos). Cord Jefferson’s script and direction is able to merge the can-you-top-this escalation of Monk’s hoax with the quieter story of his struggle to reconcile with his family (the kind of universal struggle, it is implied, that literary culture denies to “black” characters). I wish the film was longer so as to contain more of the book’s ironies (a few more dramatizations from Monk’s parody book might have helped – the one we see is a pip). And some of the depictions of (white) literary mavens skirt their own easy-target stereotypes (though a member of a literary panel talking about connecting with black culture while ignoring the only black panelists brings one of the film’s biggest laughs). At it’s best, the movie suggests a William Baldwin determined to beat Preston Sturges at his own game. Recommended.