The Olympics vs. The Orange-Hued Conman

        
I have a confession to make: I love sports. I love watching them, and I love trying to play them. Much of this love stems from my love for for following rules--few disciplines have such specific, rigid, and closely-monitored rules as sports do--and for watching elite athletes perform and even create something new within those strict rules. Perhaps more importantly here, though, I love watching sports because they are true (discounting rare exceptions and conspiracy theories). I can watch an entire baseball game or track race and not wonder if something was cut or changed for time or effect or deception. Katie Ledecky really finished a swimming race five seconds ahead of her nearest competitor on Sunday, breaking her own world record. Odell Beckham Jr. truly made that uncatchable catch in his rookie NFL season. The amazing things athletes do are visible and measurable and hard to fake.

The Olympics, therefore, are like my quadrennial birthday. I could watch nearly every event, even ones whose rules I am baffled by, like rugby and wrestling. The wins (and sometimes losses) can bring tears to my eyes even though I have no personal connection to any of the athletes and usually don't relate to their stories. I am awed by the combination of natural talent and sustained effort to improve that these athletes exhibit. I'm sure I'm not alone in this--why else would NBC and its affiliates run almost non-stop television coverage for two weeks? It's all a refreshing break from election news and other world crises (if problematic that we can ignore crises to watch someone pole vault).

News outlets, too, have suggested that The Olympics are a break for the Presidential candidates themselves from the spotlight, a way for them to rest and regroup before the big election push. Donald Trump, especially, seems to need a break after his last two weeks of attacking dead war heroes' parents, citing film footage that didn't exist, and throwing babies out of his rallies, among other headline gaffs. However, he continues to attempt attacks on Clinton, this time with the dubious claim that "many people are saying" that an Iranian nuclear scientist was killed because of her hacked emails. #manypeoplearesaying is now trending on Twitter, but this type of phrase has been a hallmark of Trump's campaign; he makes outlandish claims that can't be supported by fact and then places the onus of their truth vaguely on others. In this way he can say anything he wants without owning or verifying it, and if it is racist or false, he can blame it on others, whether they are specific others or vague, unnameable ones.

Rather than a welcome break from campaigning, The Olympics, I posit, will mostly highlight the  contrast that an unskilled, untruthful Trump makes with world-class athletes who are the pinnacle of skill and whose very skills are displayed, mostly unedited, to the world. Hillary Clinton certainly is not the pinnacle of truth herself, but one might well argue that she is close to a political pinnacle due mainly to her diligence and hard work. My guess is that the U.S. will return to the Presidential candidates from Rio with less tolerance for shoddy, fake antics.

Professionalism and Fraudulence

I recently learned of a television show, now in its second season on the Food Network, in which four contestants attempt to "con" celebrity chef judges into believing they are professional chefs. Its title, Cooks vs. Cons, was what first captured my attention, and is essentially all that continues to hold it, as there is very little difference between this show and any other cooking contest otherwise. Certainly the alliteration is likely the main reason for this choice of titles, but in the idea that non-professional cooks are automatically somehow "cons" (short for con-artists and not convicts in this case, thought the ambiguity is also notable), the show succumbs to the trend begun in the second half of the nineteenth century to turn skills and livelihoods into professions by increasingly requiring formal schooling and exams for entrance into a variety of fields. While some outcomes of professionalization have undoubtedly been positive (I'd like my doctor to have a measurable set of skills, for example), in many cases the trend has excluded already marginalized groups such as women, racial minorities, and the poor from entrance into fields now requiring expensive schooling and/or extensive leisure time. What also happens is an effective monetizing of skills--one must acquire set knowledge and skills through legitimate (paid for) channels in order to be considered a "professional" in a given field.

This television show, then, pits four people against one another, two of whom are professional chefs, and two who are not professional chefs, asking the judges to choose the best chef, who then reveals that she is either a "pro" or a "con" and wins $10k if she is a professional cook, and $15k if she is a "con." The idea is neither particularly new nor particularly complex, but the name of the show and the money involved speak volumes. Although the amateur cooks are not expected to win the contest (a chef knows another chef when he tastes her food, after all), the amateurs are rewarded monetarily for "tricking" the judges into believing that they are professionals; the additional money signals both that the odds are against the "con" and that he or she can potentially use it toward becoming a "real" chef. The nomenclature "con" gives the viewer trouble deciding whom to root for--should we cheer on natural talent and untutored success, or condemn the amateur because she has carried out a successful confidence trick, gone around the system that creates legitimate "professionals," and led us to believe a lie? It seems that the problem is all the more fuzzy because we are dealing with cooking here, a skill that a large percentage of the population has to some degree, and one some might argue doesn't necessarily require any professional training.  Ultimately only the celebrity chef judges have anything to lose, because a vote for the "con" works to de-legitimize their training in the suggestion that a barber might be just as good a cook as a culinary schooled chef, or else that the celebrity chef might not be the best judge of fine cuisine.  

Ill-Gotten Gains

The story of Senator John Walsh (D) of Montana's plagiarism surfaced yesterday in a comprehensive article by the New York Times found here. The senator and decorated military veteran, who was appointed to replace someone else as senator in February of this year, seems to have received many of his recent achievements in part due to the Master's degree he "earned" from the United States Army War College in 2007. It's now been revealed that Walsh plagiarized nearly half of the final paper he wrote for completion of the degree, both by "forgetting" to quote cited sources and by wholesale copying of chunks of other documents without attribution. In a further development after the story broke yesterday, Walsh commented, claiming, according to the San Jose Mercury News, that "when he wrote the thesis, he had post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran's recent suicide." He explained that the "place" his "head" was in was not "conducive to a classroom."

Where should I begin?

The PTSD explanation seems like a flimsy excuse for stupid behavior, which demeans both the disorder and the classroom. Why would a man whose "head" was not ready for an "academic setting" choose to pursue a Master's degree? Walsh seems to say that plagiarizing an academic paper is something different, less serious, from other kinds of cheating and ethical missteps, apparently arguing that the so-called "academic setting" is different from real life and thus subject to different rules. And indeed, the repercussions for stealing someone's intellectual property are generally much less severe than those for theft of physical property that has more obvious monetary value. I don't want to begin a digression on academia, but I do want to point out that during and shortly after the time in question, Walsh seems to have been wildly successful in all other aspects of his life, becoming adjutant general of the Montana National Guard, lieutenant governor, and then U.S. senator in quick succession. In fact, much of this success seems to have led directly from the 2007 Army War College degree, which at least played a factor in his appointment to adjutant general of the National Guard. Were academics the only thing Walsh's PTSD negatively affected? Snarky comments aside, I fear that Walsh is making light of the importance of intellectual thought while he exploits a serious and complicated disorder. I don't question that Walsh had post-traumatic stress, but I also wouldn't accept that excuse for plagiarism in my own classroom, in much the same way as a security guard wouldn't accept a shoplifter's diagnosis of kleptomania and send him on his way, stolen goods in hand. Because really, what we are talking about here are stolen goods--the goods reaped from the seeds of intellectual theft, at any rate.

I'm curious to see what happens next. I've seen only minor wrist-slaps (if that) to other plagiarists (Fareed Zakaria, anyone?) and expect about the same here, though the U.S. Army War College may attempt some reprimand that at least sets an example to future students. I'm not sure how likely it was for a Democratic senator to get reelected in Montana anyway, so perhaps that ship sailed before this scandal.

Fake Intolerance and Viral Giving

A week or two ago, a story surfaced about a young child who was asked to leave a KFC because her scars from being mauled by dogs were bothering other patrons of the restaurant. An outpouring of support for the little girl and scorn for the restaurant employees soon followed; thousands of dollars and offers of free reconstructive surgery were offered to the family of the child, and KFCs were boycotted and their employees assaulted by beverages in drive thrus. KFC even offered $30,000 for medical costs.

Today, this article appeared explaining that the whole situation (except for the girl being scarred by a dog mauling) was fabricated by the girl's grandmother; no one asked the family to leave, and in fact the family was not even in a KFC on the day in question. What will be done now is unclear, but so many interesting/disturbing questions are raised by this particular "hoax," as the article terms it. The motivations for lying are fairly clear based on the facts: the grandmother's gofundme.com page had $600 before the "hoax" and managed to raise over $100,000 afterward. What is not certain is why the grandmother resorted to lying and false accusations rather than some more benign method to raise funds needed for her granddaughter's recovery. Innocent people were adversely affected by these lies even while one poor little girl was about to receive necessary care.

Do we respond more strongly to stories of injustice than other sob stories, and if so, why was facial disfigurement of a three-year-old not itself enough for us to open our pockets? Further, why is generosity not enough in these cases--why are people also tempted to retaliate, often ignorantly and indiscriminately, and sometimes violently, against those perceived as unjust? Is intolerance alleviated or simply perpetuated by a person like this grandmother who has fabricated intolerance and animosity where they likely did not exist before? What facts (or fictions) give us reason to be (or not be) generous?

High-Profile Fakes

It's been a long time since I wrote in this blog, both because I've been very busy and because I've been overwhelmed with the number of possible topics about which to write. I'm clearly just following a large-scale trend with my interest in frauds, and I cannot begin to keep up with all of the stories about them these days. However, this morning's story about the fake sign-language interpreter at Nelson Mandela's memorial adds yet another layer to my thoughts/questions about the motivations (and brazenness) some people have for putting themselves in a spotlight regardless of consequences. I am also increasingly interested in the lack of oversight that makes these kinds of impostures possible. I see two possible reasons to pretend you speak South African sign language in order to be chosen to "interpret" at a worldwide event: you cannot pass up the chance for worldwide visibility/fame, regardless of consequences, or you'd like to somehow critique or ridicule the event itself in an extreme, public way. Neither makes much sense to me, perhaps because I fear authority, crowds, and public appearance, but ultimately the whole situation is little more than an offense to a small group of people who are already underrepresented in media and government, both an offense in the sense that someone got on a stage and prevented the deaf audience from knowing what was being said, and offensive that the organizers of the memorial allowed him to get on the stage in the first place. How do we decide what is important enough to double-check and what is either so unimportant or so uncommonly fraudulent that it can be assumed or trusted without question? Do we still all assume that most people tell the truth, or do we just not care in some cases whether they do or not?

On the Trail of an Academic Forger

I have little to add to this fascinating story except to urge you, when you need a long break from doing something else, to read it.

The Sport of Lying

This week's news events seem to demand a post, though it is often difficult to add to what's already been said by dozens of news sources by now about either Lance Armstrong's belated doping confession or Manti Te'o's fake girlfriend, but perhaps there is yet more to consider. Lance Armstrong's confession by Oprah interview to taking illegal substances in order to win seven Tour de France races is a baffling move, explained in this article as a delusional attempt to make a clean comeback in cycling. Why would any cycling association allow a man who successfully hid his illegal doping for twenty years allow him to have any association whatsoever with any sport? Certainly delusion must be involved, excessive pride that becomes delusion given enough reinforcement. Perhaps sports should not affect their spectators so much, but many have been betrayed who believed that Armstrong honestly overcame all obstacles to become the world's greatest bicyclist, and were convinced that they could, perhaps, achieve anything with hard work.

Much of the above language is sappy and sentimental, but the sentimental is what made Armstrong a millionaire. Armstrong's story led directly to celebrity, endorsements, and the wild success of his livestrong organization. Of less obvious purpose is the other big hoax story of the week, the revelation that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o's deceased girlfriend never existed. Questions abound as to whether Te'o was complicit in fabrication of the tragic story, or was himself duped and actually in love with an internet fabrication. It is possible that the story, claiming his girlfriend and grandmother had both died within a few days or weeks of each other, helped Te'o gain national attention and eventually become a Heisman Trophy finalist, which might also answer some questions concerning why the nation is finding out about this now, only after the college football season and BCS championship game. If he was unaware of the hoax, what gain was someone else getting? Is national attention enough, especially when it is essentially anonymous? Or perhaps malicious manipulation of a semi-public figure is enough, even without national attention. I expect it will soon be revealed that Te'o helped concoct the story to help his own football career, but if not, the story is a bit more bizarre.  

Authentically Plastic?

Images of and stories about this "human Barbie" have been floating around the internet for a few weeks now, but today on the quality news source Yahoo!, this article considers to what extent the individual in question used plastic surgery or Photoshop to achieve the "Barbie" look. I have discussed women falling into the Uncanny Valley before, but what I find notable about this story is not at all that a Russian model wants to look like a doll. As the Yahoo! article itself says, Valeria Lukyanova is neither the first nor the only human Barbie in the world. Interesting to me is the fact that there is somehow a difference between the falsity of makeup (a minor, hardly noteworthy one), and the falsity of computer or surgical manipulation (much more fake!). The article accuses Lukyanova of "possibly manipulating the public in the process" of showing the world her Barbie-ness, apparently because she claims to have had no plastic surgery, though "experts" are sure that she has. Perhaps her insistence has something to do with common claims that no real woman could match Mattel's Barbie's proportions. At any rate, I am led to consider the difference between "honest" artistic embellishment (makeup, airbrushing, contacts) and "fraudulent" bodily manipulation (Photoshop or plastic surgery). Does it matter which Lukyanova has undergone in order to look more like a piece of plastic? And if it does matter, why does it matter? Is your "fake" different from my "fake?" Are both different from Lukyanova's?

The Science of Fraud

Two stories caught my attention in the past week or so, both about fraud in the scientific community. The first is this story about Annie Dookhan, who seems to be the major reason for " a burgeoning investigation that has already led to the shutdown of the lab, the resignation of the state's public health commissioner and the release of more than a dozen drug defendants." In addition to pretending to have a Master's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Dookhan now admits to having faked the majority of her tests for a Massachusetts state lab, most of which involved criminal narcotics testing. Perhaps thousands of accused were wrongfully convicted in the nine years in which Dookhan worked there. The article explains the situation better than I have, but makes only a feeble attempt to discover why Dookhan might have committed such comprehensive fraud, other than that she "wanted to be seen as a good worker."

The other story involves a larger fraud trend in the scientific community; according to a new study, fully two thirds of retractions of biomedical papers are due to fraud or suspected fraud. The study divides types of scientific misconduct into "fraud or suspected fraud (43 percent), duplicate publication (14 percent), and plagiarism (10 percent)." The report suspects that many other instances of fraud may go undetected to bring the numbers even higher.

The stories are not particularly distinct from others I have read, I suppose. It's quite possible that it was simply harder to detect scientific misconduct in 1975 than it is now, and that it has not actually increased "tenfold" as the study suggests. Annie Dookhan may be one of a series of impostors whose purposes for fraudulence will never be determined to anyone's satisfaction. I am struck by them, perhaps, because I still labor under the delusion that science is more objective, more factual than other disciplines. The forger of scientific data must be more brazen even than the literary forger, because he knows that someone will almost certainly check his data. In fact, Dookhan got around those checks by committing yet another fraud and signing others' names to her work. Does the fraud count on the scientific community to be lazier than he even is, or is his pressure to publish so great that he is scared and rushed into sending work out that is either not tested or not his own? Are similar trends happening in humanities publications, or is this type of misconduct not as possible there?  

Reviews and (Dis)Honesty

I bought a new car this summer, and before I had even signed the paperwork I was told that when the customer survey arrives I should try to give the seller "all 5s," and that if I couldn't, I should talk to him first to explain why. The ostensible reason to talk to the seller is so that he can improve on his performances in future, but my guess is that it is actually to guilt the buyer into giving the seller all 5s, either so she doesn't have to talk to the seller again, or because she is convinced that to not give him that score would be somehow unfair to him. I passively aggressively refused to complete the survey, despite at least semi-weekly requests to do so. I do feel a bit rude, but "if you can't say anything nice, say nothing at all," as they say.

In the world of internet book publishing, the customer review may be even more important than the silly auto survey I won't do. With the demise of both physical book stores and newspaper literary review columns, one must either magically come upon a book after an Amazon or Google search, or see some sort of online review of it in order to purchase and read it. The online review has become all pervasive--I can review not just my favorite (and least favorite) book, but my bank, bowling alley, and Brazilian restaurant with little effort. These items and places want me to review them, and they sometimes even give incentives for it.

Of course, no one is supposed to buy favorable reviews, because money makes people do things they might not otherwise, like lie, saying they had the best meal ever when it was actually lukewarm and bland. Of course, just because no one is supposed to doesn't mean no one does. A recent NYT article discusses just this subject: a man started a business in which he sold favorable book reviews, often multiple reviews for the same book, to fledgling authors who wanted to become noticed online in order for their books to sell. Some authors purchased the service saying they didn't need the reviews to be positive, but most expected to buy positive reviews. The author explains that
Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

We know that advertising exists to sell us a product, and most of us can see the falsehoods in claims advertisements make. A review, on the other hand, is not created by a marketer and is not automatically positive, so we are doubly swayed when we see a positive review. A problem arises, though, when the reviews are not only falsely positive but also based upon nothing; Todd Rutherford appears to have fabricated reviews for clients of books he had not read, in essence scamming both the consumer and his client. Rutherford explains that “Objective consumers who purchase a book based on positive reviews will end up posting negative reviews if the work is not good,” but he apparently has no problem selling those objective consumers the bad book in the first place. We've all read a bad book, and few will go hungry over the cost of that book, but I think I might feel rather betrayed by a terrible book with overwhelmingly positive reviews. 

Plagiarist Suspended!

According to this article, renowned columnist and public intellectual Fareed Zakaria has been suspended from Time and CNN after it was discovered that several of his recent pieces are stolen from others. Discuss!

Faking Your Death: Harder than it Used to Be?

I have no statistics on rates of success with faking one's death for insurance money and/or to escape debt, but a recent story suggests that it may not be too easy these days. A New York man, apparently aided by his son, went "missing" off of Jones beach two weeks ago but was located a few days later when he was issued a speeding ticket in South Carolina. It sounds as though the scheme may have been half-baked, but with today's surveillance and electronic tracking methods, far more elaborate preparations would be necessary than this man and his son evidently made.

I'm reminded of a film I watched (pictured above), in which a man (played by the always satisfyingly creepy Anthony Perkins) miraculously and secretly survives a plane crash for which he has purchased flight insurance and terrorizes his estranged wife (Sophia Loren) until she agrees to fraudulently collect the insurance money and split it with him to be rid of him forever. In this case, a man simply faked his death because the opportunity presented itself; he used luck to his advantage and was (nearly) successful in acquiring the insurance money. It is surprisingly easy for Sophia Loren to collect it; further, Anthony Perkins can presumably chuck his passport and live incognito in Europe. Raymond Roth is probably a desperate idiot, but I can't help but wonder if he could have disappeared off Jones Beach if he had lived fifty years ago.

On (Creative) (Non)-Fiction and Accurate Facts

In this article from Slate Magazine, Dan Kois reviews the book The Lifespan of a Fact, which involves the fact-checking of an essay written by John D'Agata and includes the essay, the comments by the fact-checker, and D'Agata's responses to the fact-checker (Jim Fingal). As if the book itself weren't confusing enough, Kois includes his own story about meeting Tim O'Brien in this review, and subsequently fact-checks the review here. Although the majority of Kois's review seems to imply that D'Agata is a jerk for fudging facts to suit the aesthetics of his essays, his own fudging of facts in his review suggests that the exact truth is undesirable in a creative essay, if not impossible. Kois takes both sides in the argument for truth in non-fiction, and leaves his reader (or at least this reader) suspicious of all authors' veracity, not simply that of D'Agata.

D'Agata's argument in terms of his essay's lack of truth is that "it's called art, dickhead," but why write in a nonfiction genre and then make things up? Why was it important for Kois to pretend he had interviewed D'Agata and Fingal rather than simply read their book? I understand that the non-fiction writer wants to arrive at a particular, perhaps essential, truth with his essay, but changing the facts in order to point to this truth seems to me to undermine everything. Furthermore, what's the point of having a fact-checker at all if you simply don't plan to write facts in your work? People want to read essays and memoirs because they purport to tell true stories, amazing or poignant or moralizing, but true. No one's preventing D'Agata from writing fiction about teen suicide and tae kwon do, and this type of realistic fiction would certainly sell. Maybe these little manipulations of fact don't matter, but if not, why manipulate facts at all?

Translation and Truth

I've been thinking a lot about translation lately, perhaps because I've been reading a lot of fiction translated from other languages (mostly French). Several times in the class in which the translated work was read, we have glanced over or mostly ignored the problems that must arise when this highly stylized experimental French or Italian fiction is rendered into English. A Spanish language edition of William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic has also just been announced and reviewed, and this translation of one of my favorite authors into a language I also (mostly) read makes me further consider the necessity of and problems with fiction and poetry translation. I have no doubt that translators are extremely skilled and often brilliant to be able to capture the ideas of any writer in a language not his own, but are they often brilliantly inventing their own works of art?

Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler somewhat whimsically tackles some issues that arise with translations. In the novel, you, the Reader, read parts of almost a dozen different novels translated from various languages in search of the ending to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler. The enigmatic "translator" of the novel, Ermes Marana, is the character who could perhaps best be called its villain because he produces fraudulent and unauthorized translations of books with no apparent concern about their authenticity whatsoever. This character is an abuser of both good faith and ignorance, but is he also the closest of all of the novel's characters to being its true author? As the fringe groups searching for him ask, is there an absolutely true Ur-text, or an absolutely false one, and what's the difference? Furthermore, what am I to do with the fact that the entire novel has been further translated for me to consume?

As Good as We Pretend to Be

A few days ago, this story appeared on Yahoo! (and very likely elsewhere), about a senior admissions official at Claremont McKenna College who has been falsifying SAT score reports to U.S. News and World Report and other places for several years. The inflation of scores was apparently not extreme (10-20 points), but may have increased the liberal arts college's desirability and (perhaps) ranking among other colleges, leading to increased revenue for the school. The official has resigned and the school has launched a formal investigation.

Though not as severe, the case is reminiscent of the Atlanta Public School scandal that unfolded last summer, when it was revealed that "at least 178 teachers and principals in Atlanta Public Schools cheated to raise student scores on high-stakes standardized tests." One wonders what kind of incentive students have to do well, when officials will fudge things to make both themselves and the students look better. In both cases the cause probably involves money, but there also seems to be a sense, at least in the Atlanta case, that the teachers were acting for what they believed to be positive ends. I won't start the argument about the (legitimate/illegitimate/high/low/) importance of standardized testing in secondary school, but all of this does seem a lot of time wasted that could have been spent actually teaching students. Perhaps no one attended Claremont McKenna because of its students' test scores, but the school will certainly have the stain of dishonesty on it for several years now.

Quentin Rowan and the Pathology of a Plagiarist

The story of Quentin Rowan, serial plagiarist, is now several months old, but as I was mired in Mark Twain and Frederic Jameson a few months ago, I will discuss it now! The story is as follows: Rowan, slowly rising to success as a poem and short story writer, published the spy novel The Assassin of Secrets in late 2011 with the reputed Little, Brown company. A few days after its publication, readers (including novelist Jeremy Dun) began to see significant similarities between it and several published spy novels. The Huffington Post has an excellent synopsis of the story here. After a brief silence on the subject, Rowan revealed all in a "Confession" where he describes plagiarism as an "addiction" and (sort of) explains why he did it. He says that plagiarism was a substitution for his earlier alcoholism, and encourages the public to see plagiarism "if not as a disease, at least as something pathological."

Rowan's confession is fairly persuasive in its buildup of pathos ("I first tried to get sober when I was 18") and insistence that he confessed to the plagiarism right away once caught (as though one can successfully deny it). I will not call him the names that he says others have called him, but I am suspicious of the addiction explanation he gives. Perhaps I don't understand addiction pathology, so I cannot begin to see how alcoholism would translate into stealing writing from others (literary kleptomania?). However, I do know that there is very little in the way of apology to Rowan's victims: not the authors whose works he stole, not the publishing company, and not his apparently savvy readers. I suppose it's great that he wrote a confession, but shouldn't there also be some contrition?

Pro-Plagiarism and Postmodernism

I've just read Kenneth Goldsmith's intriguing article about what he calls "uncreative writing" as the future (or even present?) of literary output. Rather than attempt to create something totally original, which is impossible anyway, Goldsmith suggests that the most cutting-edge literature may be that which includes cutting and pasting, harvesting, "copying, and appropriation." He also, however, distinguishes between this literature and famous memoir frauds (Frey and LeRoy), suggesting that a difference in intent makes all the difference to quality and reception. Goldsmith spends little time on this point, but I see it as the crux of his argument. The work Goldsmith acknowledges to be plagiarism I myself consider to be as original as Shakespeare or Joyce (not that I necessarily say it's all as good). We never believe that the 900 page book made verbatim from the New York Times is new writing, and its "author" doesn't pretend it is. Pretense and fraud are not apparent in the works Goldsmith describes, though one could technically call them "plagiarism." Computers perhaps make this issue more interesting because it is now so easy to copy something and appropriate it wholesale, but it can't be a new one. We also come around to the perennial "what is art?" question, which may actually be more relevant to this article than the "what is plagiarism?" one. Is a shark in formaldehyde art? Is a bound book of credit card offers art, or even a novel? Can everything be argued into art status?

Quick Note on Outlaws

I've just come across this update to the Butch Cassidy story I wrote about a few weeks ago, which claims that the writer of Cassidy's biography was not, in fact, Cassidy himself, but an impostor who had pretended to be Cassidy and was in prison at the same time as Cassidy. It appears, then (according to this information), that instead of Cassidy impersonating William Phillips/Wilcox, Phillips/Wilcox actually spent most of his life impersonating Cassidy impersonating Phillips! It sounds, perhaps, as though Phillips/Wilcox might be a better topic of study in terms of fraud than Cassidy is, and more or less debunks the theory that Cassidy did not die a violent death in South America.

Based on a True Story of Impostors and Lies

I have written before about Frédéric Bourdin, the Frenchman who for several months successfully passed himself off as a kidnapped American teenager, living supposedly undetected with the boy's family. Yesterday I saw the feature film based on this story, The Chameleon, which was almost exactly what I would have expected based on the story I had already read. It raised all the same questions about this story that I've read (and asked)before: how on earth could an entire family mistake a 25-year-old Frenchman for their 16-year-old relative? If they couldn't, why were they pretending to? Whose lies were worse, the impostor's or his adopted family's?

I, like the film, am pretty certain that at least some members of Nicholas Barclay's family know what happened to him, but I was surprised to see this "review" on Netflix:
This movie is based on my family and is a far cry from the truth of what really happened. Based on real life??? Not really! My family is against this movie.

The review is not signed, so we have no way to know whether it was really written by a family member, but I wonder what parts the family member objected to most. Did Bourdin resemble Nick Barclay more than the film and news article suggest? Were the family's character flaws fabricated for entertainment purposes? Despite Netflix's description of the film, it was in no way a "thriller," and exhibited few characteristics of a typically highly manipulated "Based on a True Story" film. I'd love to know what its inaccuracies are; that knowledge might give this bizarre story some closure!

On Women and Fraud (first of a potential series)

I was excited to see the title Confidence Girl as an option to watch instantly via Netflix, because I've rarely found a film in which a woman was running a con or perpetrating fraud on her own. I probably should have expected less, because despite the film's title, the titular character seems in no way to run anything and is decidedly not on her own. In fact, if anything, she is the movie's moral redemption, and her only independent actions involve giving herself up to police. We could dismiss Confidence Girl as a typically sexist 1950s Hollywood film ("she'll take you for all you've got and you'll love it!"), but I suspect ther is more to this than socially-sanctioned sexism.

In fact, I suspect there is a lot more. Though women seem to lie, cheat, and steal as much as men do, there appear to be far fewer famous female forgers (say that five times fast!) and impostors than there are male ones. I'm so far afraid to conjecture a reason for this and I don't even have stastistics to prove it, but I've been mentally developing a project (dare I say paper or even dissertation?) that will help realize some of my ideas. Stay tuned for updates!