The eXile
When I linked to Toestubber yesterday and recommended following through to John Dolan’s Finest Book Review Ever Written, I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the site the review was on. The eXile is a fascinating place: apparently a couple of American expatriates in Moscow started an English-language newspaper there, in the style of the Rolling Stone if it were run by Hunter S. Thompson.
John Dolan reviewed Frey’s other book, too, and came to the same conclusion (with less research) that the Smoking Gun did:
“And I have this funny feeling that there is no truth in them at all. Thanks to the Net, you can check out people’s criminal records these days. And from what I’ve found in several days of looking, James Frey, who has become a millionaire celebrity by boasting about his bad-boy past, has--gasp!--no criminal record at all. Could it be true? Could this rugged survivor be no more than a trust-fund boy with a gift for woofing?”
He repeatedly compares Frey to another writer, Eddie Little. While suggesting that Frey may have used Little’s story•, lightened it up and made it palatable for “pious hypocrites”, Dolan makes me want to read Little’s books. Unfortunately, unlike Frey’s, Little’s first book is out of print--despite having had a movie based on it• several years ago.
Dolan is generally great fun to read. Even his review of The Lord of the Rings, which I mostly disagree with, was brilliantly funny. The only really bad spot was reading his take on Fahrenheit 9/11 which, like most sympathetic takes on the movie, never actually says anything about the movie. Even there, however, I’m almost inclined to believe that the article is a satire of such reviews, especially after comparing Dolan’s lack of concern over Moore’s deceptions with Dolan’s concern over Frey’s deceptions. (Almost inclined. Moore, like, apparently, Frey, has the ability to get otherwise intelligent people to short-circuit their bullshit detectors.)
So, take a look at eXile. Take a good look through their cover images as well.
In response to Why Frey’s fakery matters: Seth Mnookin explains why James Frey’s “embellishments” are a disservice to his readers and to recovering addicts.
- The eXile
- “The eXile is a Moscow, Russia-based English-language bi-weekly newspaper that was launched in 1997 by American journalist Mark Ames. He was joined soon after by Matt Taibbi. The newspaper quickly gained fame and notoriety, including a 4-page spread in Rolling Stone, a 1-hour CNN documentary, and various other media, which the eXile foolishly failed to properly exploit.”
- A Million Pieces of Shit
- “A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.”
- Frey’s Fall
- “The whole notion of fiction, the idea that we’re Coleridgean arbiters of quality as we read-so dear to the Professors’ guild-is pure self-serving crap. We read like the Calvinist Ulster creeps who infested the New World and bequeathed us their vicious, anti-Enlightenment hysteria.”
- Frey’s Fairy Godfather
- “Frey’s stories depend on reader belief. If they’re not true, they’re fake sob stories. Don’t try to tell me about ‘fiction’ and ‘suspension of disbelief’; I literally wrote the book on that subject (Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth, Palgrave Press, London, 2000). So truth matters, more than any other consideration, in these memoirs.”
- The Plagiarism of James Frey Revealed
- “Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little-specifically, Frey looted Little’s great debut novel, Another Day in Paradise.”
- Another Day in Paradise•
- This was a movie in 1998, but the book is out of print. “At age 13, Bobbie leaves the violent, abusive home where he was raised, and this book details his following year...” I haven’t read it, but it comes recommended by those few who have.
- Another Day in Paradise (DVD)•
- I haven’t read the book or seen the movie. The book I had no knowledge of; the movie just didn’t look interesting, as much as I enjoy seeing James Woods.
- Backstabbers!
- “Here is the problem in a nut-shell: the Left is dominated by recoiling squid like Cohen, whose ink-squirting instinct is only triggered by the sight of someone who might actually help the cause. So he inks Michael Moore, skirts away, hides under a rock and hopes that the Moore never comes back.”
- Bad Hobbit!
- “At the focal point of all this kitsch is the actor Jackson offers us as Frodo: an epicene waif who looks creepily like Winona Ryder in Little Women. His one schtick is looking troubled, opening his huge, empty eyes to an extent seen only in the heroines of Japanese animation.”
- Fahrenheit 9/11 Reviews Show Restraint
- Reviewers of Michael Moore’s latest work appear to have learned their lesson: don’t put anything you learned in writing, because it is probably wrong. The first rule about Fahrenheit? Don’t talk about Fahrenheit.
- A Hero of Our Time Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005
- “We make the Hollywood Commies of the fifties into heroes for refusing to grovel or snitch, but that’s only because Commies don’t matter. Try to think of a hero who stood up to the drug-cops and the medieval insanity they unleashed--a hero who never denied using drugs or enjoying them, never denied that they helped him enormously in his work, never backed down, even at the peak of the witch hunt. It’s a list of one: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.”