Smeared Benjamins

Today this article appeared on major internet news sources. The article mentions that "$200,000" were found, but the discovery of a dozen reams of paper or a thousand prints of a work of art in an old car would make no headlines. Where the rarity as well as the quality of a work of art makes it valuable in monetary terms, it seems that money is made valuable simply by governmental regulation. Mammon, in The Faerie Queene, fingers coins no longer in circulation and thus having no exchange value. Mammon's real gold, because it is hoarded and not exchanged, is no more valuable than a wad of counterfeit bills stuffed into a car.

Minor Goddesses

While reading a Poe story, I came across the name of a Roman goddess that I had never heard before. Laverna, the goddess of ill-gotten gain, is celebrated by pouring libations using the left hand. I wonder what a goddess of cheats would look like. I was unable to find a satisfactory image of her, though her name seems to have been appropriated into various tarot decks and children's fairy stories. I'm also surprised I haven't heard of her before now. Surely the impostors and counterfeits with which I am so intrigued pray to her while doing their deeds!

What's the Opposite of an Impostor?

I notice that men tend to be impostors much more frequently (at least in literature) than women. This article from Psychology Today discusses a problem many people (mostly women) have
in which they feel themselves to be frauds, even when they are genuine successes. This is known as "Impostor Syndrome," and it strikes me as the exact opposite condition to the impostor himself.

On Puppets

After close consideration of fauxlebrity Heidi Montag's new look, I have determined that she is slipping into the uncanny valley. I cannot yet determine whether she is on the "moving" or "still" curve, since it's not certain whether she can move any longer. This is certainly an interesting sociological study!

I would like to see this film, about a man who pretended to be a doctor at the WHO for eighteen years before killing his family when they began to discover his lies. One may ask: "was he living a double life?" but he had no real job and no other wives or mistresses. In his copious free time, he mostly wandered the woods. The book of the same title, by Emmanuel Carrere, is bone-chilling and excellent.

Intellectual Fakers

While visiting the Stanford campus this weekend, I was reminded of Azia Kim, the girl who was able to fool dozens of people pretending to be a Stanford student for almost a full school year. For this feat, she apparently merits this Facebook fan page as well as, it is rumored, a book and TV deal. Do we prize fakers more than those with authentic merits? Or are we simply enthralled by people this brazen? I am one of a million Stanford rejects, but somehow I was able to rebuild my life and move on...

Appearance

Alan Watts would certainly have something to say about there being a larger "Appearance" section than Philosophy section in the local bookstore.

"My envy's not dangerous; it wouldn't hurt a mouse. I don't want to destroy the people -- I only want to be them. You see it would destroy only myself."
--Gilbert Osmond, Portrait of a Lady











Pictured: Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller, imposter.

Doppelgangers

Today my coworker called a bookstore and was greeted by a woman with a voice supposedly "identical" to mine. She said: "Thank you for calling Barnes and Noble, this is Lara, how may I help you?" I was put in mind of Spenser's "false Florimell," who, despite having hair made of golden wire and being animated by a demon-sprite, convinces everyone that she is Florimell herself. If the bookshop girl and I meet, one of us may disappear into thin air...

Monetary Value of a Forgery

Thorstein Veblen, pictured left, discusses the value of hand-wrought versus mass produced products:

the material of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or colour, and without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical serviceability; if a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever imitation of hand-wrought goods, . . . the utility of the article, including the gratification which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety percent, or even more.

In the United States of America Mr. Sinisterra had been a counterfeiter. During the investigation, he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisectionist in Tampa, Florida; and when this failed, he settled down to sullen grumbling about the Jews, earthly vanity, and quoted bits from Ecclesiastes, Alfonso Liguori, and Pope Pius IX, in answer to any accusatory question.
--William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Pictured: Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., great impostor