Helping David Blum
Today's David Blum New York Sun ball of crazy—about how the internet has created an environment of permissibility for anonymity which has lead to an upsurge in literary fraud, or something—asks more questions than it answers. We decided to try to rectify the situation.
- "Did anyone besides me catch the recent Lifetime movie 'Write & Wrong,' with Kirstie Alley as a washed-up screenwriter who hires her hunky young nephew to market her work in Hollywood as his own?" No. Get a life.
- "What could be crazier [than Antidote Films suing Laura Albert after finding that they'd purchased the rights to document the life of a nonexistent person]?" Um, lots of things. $2 cups of Mud coffee. The cost of healthcare in this country. The way Jay-Z's love has got Beyonce lookin' right now.
- "Is there anyone online who uses their own name to make their case?" Yes. Hi there!
- "How many men are pretending to be women on the Internet right now, or women pretending to be men?" Buttloads. Duh.
- " It was silly, of course, for [Peter] Hyman to have hidden behind a phony female persona, and in the end Gawker's gotcha moment seemed fair punishment. But can Mr. Hyman be blamed for his attempt at a viral marketing campaign for himself?" Yes. It's possible and often more effective to market oneself without lying (and then, for the record, lying about having lied! Jeez, Peter.)
- "Didn't Ms. Albert see that the deception had just as much juice as her phony fiction?" Yes, duh!
- "They also offer our culture's moral compasses an opportunity for outrage; who can forget Oprah's sputtering indignity over Mr. Frey's lies?" No one, because pointless flailing columnists will always have column inches to fill by rehashing and randomly mashing together bits of old news into sloppy column-casseroles. Okay?
- The Mother Of Reinvention [NYS]