This book review would be so much easier to write were you to fool around by John D'Agata's rules. So let's try it. (1) This is not a book review; it's an essay. (2) I'm not a critic; I'm an artist. (3) Nothing you say can be used against me by a subjects of this essay, nor may any a single reason me to account re facts, law or any contract you have supposedly entered in to with you, a reader. There have been to be no objections. There have been to be no letters of complaint. For you have been about to have have been you ready? a "genuine knowledge with art."
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT
By John D'Agata as good as Jim Fingal
123 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. Paper, $ 17.95.
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Riff: The Fact-Checker Versus a Fabulist (February 26, 2012)
Margaret Stratton
From left, Jim Fingal as good as John D'Agata.
This is so liberating!
Under care in this letter is "The Lifespan of a Fact," that is less a book than a knock-down, drag-out quarrel in between dual tenacious combatants, over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, mental recall as good as forgetting. In a single dilemma is Jim Fingal, who as an novice for a good read magazine The Believer in 2005 (or it competence have been 2003 sources disagree) sealed upon for what he contingency have suspicion would be a candid task: fact-checking a 15-page article. In a alternative dilemma is D'Agata, who suspicion he had made a deal with The Believer to publish not usually an letter but a work of Art an letter already deserted by Harper's Magazine since of "factual inaccuracies" that would find a approach! to imit ation unmolested by any plea to a veracity. "Lifespan" is a scorecard from their bout, a facsimile of their association over a course of 5 (or was it seven?) years of fact-checking.
The book presents, line by line, D'Agata's strange essay, as good as Fingal's staggeringly meticulous annotations. The essay, finally published in 2010 as good as threaded in to D'Agata's book "About a Mountain," tells a story of a child named Levi Presley who in 2002 jumped to his genocide from a observation rug of a Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas. D'Agata used that part to meditate upon ideas about, among alternative things, suicide as good as Las Vegas, a stories Vegas tells about itself, a stories visitors discuss it themselves about Vegas, as good as what a city built upon artifice competence discuss it us about a human condition.
"You do not want to come in contact with being when you're here for a fantasy," D'Agata quotes a Nevada state senator as saying. "Lifespan" flips that commonplace upon a conduct as good as asks: Do you want to come in contact with anticipation when we're here for reality?
From D'Agata's initial sentence, that says that during a time of Levi's genocide there were "34 protected strip clubs in Vegas," Fingal detects trouble. D'Agata has granted The Believer with a source suggesting a city had usually 31 such clubs. Fingal asks D'Agata how he arrived during "34." D'Agata replies in dubious fashion: "Because a stroke of '34' works better in that judgment than a stroke of '31.' "
The discrepancies mount. The "Boston Saloon" becomes a "Bucket of Blood" since " 'Bucket of Blood' is some-more interesting." The name of Levi's propagandize is changed since a strange is "too clunky. It has a comma in it; that's ridiculous." "Tweety Nails" becomes "Famous Nails" a real mystery, for with a too-good-to-be-true name like "Tweety Nails," why tweak it? A swift of dog-grooming vans described in D'Agata's records as "pink" become "purple," since "I indispensable a dual beats in 'purpl! e.' "
Minor fibs? Maybe. But alternative fabrications have been decidedly not. Another suicide-by-fall that occurred upon a same day as Levi's is remade in to a suicide-by-hanging, "because you longed for Levi's genocide to be a usually a single from descending that day. you longed for his genocide to be some-more unique."
Jennifer B. McDonald is an editor during a Book Review.
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