Non-Fiction’s tether to the facts has always been frayed.  And we’re just now getting nervous about it?

A federal judge in Montana has saved the non-fiction writer’s proverbial ass.  (Not really!)

He has, for the foreseeable-future, allowed the authors of memoirs, essays and sundry ‘aboutnesses’ to ostensibly do what novelists and poets do all the time.  That is, tell little fibs.  That is, craft big ones through which we can see, but the gist of which we want to believe so desperately, we pretend there are no holes.  That is, fabricate the truth.  That is, construct a world in which the center may not hold.  That is, present the narrator as the legendary hero he, or heroine she, always imagined him or herself to be.

Yes, we have Sam Haddon to thank for the barrage of mythic forays to come.  The U.S. District Gavel-Swinger has thrown out the suit filed on behalf of a million (alright, four) non-fiction readers, a suit that may have required author, Greg Mortenson, to pay damages to those who understood his Three Cups of Tea bestseller to be entirely factual (and cough up $15 per disillusioned reader), a suit initially brought to bear by another writer, Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit… (Boo!  Hiss!  What a party-pooper!).

And so, where do we go from here?

I, for one, am not going to take this lying (down).  To my credit I have an entire half of a graduate course with Natalie Kusz, and the topic of embellishing on the events and adventures of our lives has been raised every Tuesday.  Tonight we’ll do it again.   We’ll say that we can’t make stuff up.  But what puts the Creative in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction is how we beautify the gory details of our fragmented days, weeks, months and years.   Then, of course, someone will wrinkle his brow and it will be assumed that in streamlining the crap of our experience we, as writers, have made everything up.  This is as it should be.

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Johann Strauss: German or Austrian?

We are in Vienna. Beautiful, grand, seductive Vienna. I had never given Vienna a single thought and now I’m a fool for the city.

Germany seems to get all the attention, and I wonder what Austrians think of that. It could, however, just be my problem. For instance, on this trip, I’m becoming aware of how many things I assumed were German when, in fact, they are Austrian. I thought I’d create a quiz so you could see how Austria-informed you are.

1)      Falco
a. German
b. Austrian

2)      Sigmund Freud
a. German
b. Austrian

3)      Johann Sebastian Bach
a. German
b. Austrian Read more »

A few weeks ago, Samantha Brick wrote an essay for the Daily Mail about the perils of being a beautiful women. But she has no idea what a tough life is really like:

On a recent flight to London, I was delighted when the attractive women seated beside me started rubbing my crotch.  “Will you need some help with that?” she coyly asked, when I glanced in her direction.  You’re probably thinking ‘what a great surprise’. But it wasn’t.  Not a surprise, anyway.  At least, not for me.

Since the age of twelve, I’ve had females of the species pursuing me.  There have been too many taps on the shoulder in bars from the admirer’s best friends to count.  The stack of high school love letters left in my locker would fill a studio apartment. And forget about the blatant propositions from college co-eds at frat parties—from shaking my hand and asking if I’d like a blow job, to just shoving their tongues down my throat, I’ve experienced it all.  I’ve taken it all in stride, and if I decide to get to know these women, I ask them what prompted their interest.  They all say it’s my handsome face, easy smile, and magnetic personality.

I’m not exactly Brad Pitt, but at 6’2’’, with a chiseled physique and ruggedly handsome features, my smoldering eyes are merely the icing on the cake.  I know I’m a fortunate one. But there are downsides to being such an Adonis.

If you’re a man reading this, you’ve probably already formed your opinion about me and it’s not a flattering one.  For while my overwhelming good looks and magnetic personality have given me many opportunities; as if in a cruel, Greek tragedy, they have also taken many away.

I’m very humble, and often think of others, but over the years I’ve lost countless buddies when they, if I’m merely in the same room as their significant other,  feel threatened by my raw sexuality. When their girlfriends—faces blushing, eyes adoring—actually got up the nerve to speak to me, a cold December chill would blow into the house. Read more »

I will not be the first person to smuggle discussion of video games onto Bark, but I will be the first to ask its readers to make them.

At first this suggestion will seem crazy. “But Andrew,” you say, “not only am I unable to program a computer, I also lack millions of dollars and furthermore, if I had that kind of scratch, I would pay off my student loans and buy a macbook made out of solid gold before creating a video game, because most of those are a simulation of man pointing a gun at a face and shooting it, over and over, until the end of time.”

The video game literati will be happy to inform you that there are plenty of games not about face shooting or about bird flinging, that are about more sophisticated things or at least slightly less embarrassing ones. These games are good, but these games also cost millions of dollars to make.  But what I’m actually here to talk about is how it is now possible to make a video game with no programing skill and no money, and how, because of that, people are now starting to make games for and about people who would otherwise have no interest in video games. There are very few of them, and they are hard to find, but they exist, and they are doing wonderful things. They tend to have names like  “Space Marine Pet Shop” in which you guide a hulking video game protagonist on a journey to buy a kitten without dying on too many spikes, or “A Soul-Crushing Drive Through the Bowels of Kotzebue, Alaska” which is the most accurate portrayal of a soul-crushing drive through the bowels of Kotzebue, Alaska ever created. Read more »

A couple years ago, Sam posted a link to the youtube video of this strange, jolly guy singing. The internet has christened him Mr. Trololo or Trololo Guy, and he has achieved the revered status of meme-hood. This weekend he made a holographic guest appearance at Coachella, alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, to the delight (or terror?) of all the stoned people there. Tupac, apparently, also dropped by.

(I can’t seem to make the video embed correctly since it’s not from youtube, so I’m linking it above and embedding a video of a stoned person at Coachella instead. The video below is probably funnier anyway).

Next Time You Have to Speak in Public, Picture This

While watching bumper cars at a German carnival, I wondered how I’d give a presentation on superlatives for my new boss the next day using only questions. I was resentful that I had to worry when people around me were eating giant pretzels stacked with cheese, ham, and pineapple; being jerked through the air on the Devil Rocker; careening through Dämonium, “the most innovative haunted house amusement park ride  in the world”; or crashing into each others’ rubber bumpers.

Fortunately a vision saved me from my own self pity: A man with feathery, close-cropped hair, a button down shirt, a pointy nose, and an expression always within a hint of a smile, shared a sparkling teal car with his 6 or 7-year-old daughter. He was letting her drive—except for when they got into horrible pile-ups. Then he would place his hand on the wheel and back up or make a hard turn. He seemed relaxed, pleased with his daughter’s driving skills. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Read more »

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman sounds like an interesting book:

“Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like “vomit and banana.” […}Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep—and sometimes frightening—insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more.  –JoVon Sotak

Thinking, Fast and Slow received some good press (selected as one of the best books of 2011 by New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal), which means more people searching Amazon for the book. Except they might find something else by accident.

Thinking, Fast and Slow was published on October 24^th, 2011, the same day that Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels became available on Amazon. Read more »

We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write.
When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.

–Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, p. 64

There’s an institution, which shall remain nameless, whose H.R. Dept. has asked for a philosophy of teaching.

I thought I’d offer the readers of Bark both the ‘Erasure’ version (followed by the thing that I submitted for the job)…

Thinking The Other

Commodities want
to know
shelter with flesh.

You ask the kind
of reward
virtually.  Through-

out we are known, feel
exposed, full of
weeds worth even more.

The what splintered

too and filth-strewn
glitz grammar

seek partners already
exhausted

and roll.

Why:

To Cultivate Critical Thinking and Imaginative Engagement with The Other

Not all questions are equal. In North America, for example, we often pursue answers like commodities, as if we’re constantly in the market for the idea or the semblance of thought that will make life easier or more convenient. Other answers are born into the marriage of curiosity and vulnerability. We want to know something that matters, that persists throughout generations, a thing that binds us to their pursuit of truth and makes it our pursuit too. Moreover, we feel exposed to the social vicissitudes of life and death without at least trying to find shelter with other flesh and blood participants. Where, you ask, do we find such shelter?

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“I don’t like science being used to manipulate people,” one of my Russian students said about the reading we had done from The Culture Code, by Clotaire Rapaille.

Rapaille, who is French, has a doctorate in psychology and was working as a psychoanalyst before being invited to help Nestlé market coffee to the Japanese. What Clotaire found in his first focus groups was that Nestlé needed to create a positive coffee imprint in Japanese children in order to create a viable market for instant coffee. In response to Clotaire’s discovery, Nestlé began selling caffeine-free, coffee-flavored sweets to children. These sold well and eventually the instant coffee market also increased.

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Get Lit! was an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help this quiet ennui that’s crept up on me since it ended. I met and heard some spectacular authors, writers who who’ve inspired me, artists that I never dreamt could all inhabit the same 30-mile radius without imploding or summoning the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And it’ll take me at least a fortnight to absorb all of the wisdom I gained during the past few days. I learned so, so much.

It’s like seeing your favorite band for the first time live. Leading up to the event, you’re a manic wreck, sporadically blurting out the band’s name in daily conversation, listening to their records over and over again, making sure that you’ll know all of the words so you can sing along and not miss a beat or a word. You become what Steve Almond calls a Drooling Fanatic. You start to lose your grip on time. The closer the event comes, the faster time goes. And then it’s here. Your favorite authors, the people who inspire you, the books you owe something to, they’re all around you and it’s tough to take in. You don’t realize what’s just hit you. Read more »