And here's Rant #2 featured on LLD EP4. Enjoy.

"Frey and Oprah: So What?"
by Jason Erik Lundberg

If you've been living in a cave, under a rock, with your fingers in your ears, you may not have heard about the newest literary controversy. James Frey wrote what he called a memoir, titled A Million Little Pieces, which details his addiction to drugs and alcohol and his recovery in a detox clinic. (I will give the caveat up front that I have not read the book.) It was published by Doubleday, and Oprah Winfrey picked it up for her book club. Because the cult of Oprah now includes millions of members, the book's sales skyrocketed. It and Frey became superstars.

Then at the beginning of January, The Smoking Gun, a website known for debunking myths and for reporting stories that might not show up in the mainstream media, released an in-depth investigation picking apart Frey's memoir and showing instances where he not only embellished the past, but flat out made stuff up.

Frey went on Larry King Live shortly thereafter to defend himself against the charges, and at one point, Oprah phoned in to reiterate her support for both Frey and the memoir. But apparently, Oprah soon realized that she was wrong. She invited Frey back onto her show to discuss this.

On January 26th, he appeared on her show and was slowly eviscerated by Oprah. She called him out on all his lies and fabrications, and announced to her millions of viewers that she felt intensely betrayed. She had put her good name on the line, and he had basically made her look like a fool, and she did not like that one bit, no sir.

Much has been made about this in the blogosphere, as well as the nature of memoir itself. Memoir, as opposed to autobiography, is based more on memory than on fact. A certain amount of embellishment is expected, especially with dialogue; unless you sat there with a tape recorder with every conversation you cite in the book, you're going to have to do some creative inventing. The feeling is more important than getting things exactly right, but there is still that line of truthfulness that is still expected as well.

I've only read memoirs by two authors, Dave Eggers and Frank McCourt. In Angela's Ashes, I don't worry myself over specific conversations that took place between young Frank and his family, but I am confident that he did live such a squalid childhood in rural Ireland. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I know that Eggers is playing a postmodern trick when he has metatextual conversations with his little brother, but I still believe that Eggers experienced having to raise his brother after the death of their mother. The essential truth is still there.

But that truth is called into question when many instances in a memoir are completely falsified. The grand statements about life and recovery that Frey may have made, which hold such resonance for his readers, are now unstable, and if the reader cannot trust the writer that made such an impactful observation, it's possible that the reader cannot now trust their own feelings on the matter.

As a writer myself, and on an intellectual level, I can appreciate the situation, and I understand how the trust can be broken. But on a more immediate, global level, all I can say is: "So what?"

Frey originally tried to sell his book as a novel, but then reclassified it as a memoir without changing any of the details. Memoirs are hot right now among the book-buying public, and I'm sure that both Frey and Doubleday (and Oprah, for that matter) knew that they could sell more copies if it was labeled as something that actually happened to the author. But would those truths that Frey imparts in his book have any less of the impact if it were actually read as a novel? Novelists are by nature liars, making up events and people that never existed, but there is hopefully an essential truthfulness underlying all that. It is what novelists strive for, to find that truth of the human condition. So why not read Frey's book as a novel instead?

But even more importantly, how did this really hurt anyone? My presumption is that Oprah lambasted Frey on her show more out of anger and fear that her book club may have been in jeopardy. It feels more like a business decision than a personal one, though I may be wrong about that. Oprah is welcome to email me and tell me differently.

William Shunn recently wrote about this in his blog, saying that "Oprah sets herself up for situations like this by setting herself up as the supreme arbiter of our national literary tastes, one who can't tolerate dissent. (Remember how Jonathan Franzen was turned into a villain just for saying the 'corporate' book-club label on his novel made him uncomfortable?)"

So Frey lied about how long he was in jail, or exactly how his girlfriend killed herself. I'll say it again: so what? His lies have the possible effect on book sales or on the vetting of memoirs by publishing houses in the future. The lies of George W. Bush have led to the deaths of thousands of American troops, and the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis. The lies of Ken Lay led to the loss of life-savings for hundreds of Enron workers. Why are we not more upset about these things than about a writer who lied in his memoir?

Clare Dudman, author of the novel One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead, reported in her blog the other day that she heard a casual report that experts think that the Greenland ice cap is on the verge of melting, and then the news went onto some governmental health care issue. And she wondered why people weren't jumping up and down and yelling about this. Why indeed? Greenland apparently contains one-tenth of the world's ice, but global climate change is melting that ice away. In the blog post, she shows two photos of the Kamarujuk glacier on the northwest coast of Greenland, one taken in 1930 by Alfred Wegener (the man responsible for the hypothesis of continental drift) and the second taken by Clare herself in 2001 from almost exactly the same spot when she was researching her novel about Wegener. It's terrifying to see the differences in ice level. And again, why aren't we screaming about this?

Why aren't we paying more attention to issues like global climate change or illegal governmental policy? Why is pissing and moaning about a memoir in Oprah's Book Club or discussing the newest person eliminated from Dancing with the Stars the prevalent mode of discourse in this country? Why do we insist on this escapist activity rather than doing something about the world we live in?

I've wrestled with these issues quite a lot lately, and I don't have any easy answers. I've tried to become more aware of social and political issues in the world, while at the same time creating my own fictional worlds that will really make no impact on the world at large. And so I've tried to incorporate what I've seen of politics and civil liberties into my own fiction so that people that only read fiction (a group of people of which up until recently I was a proud member) can be more aware of these things, and may start paying attention to the world around them. I'm certainly no preacher or didact, but I do want to at least contribute to the conversation. I want to make some kind of difference, even if it is a small one. (cf. Jeff VanderMeer's article "Politics in Fantasy" in the newest issue of Emerald City)

And hey, if my book does obscenely well, maybe Oprah will invite me onto her show, and I can talk to her audience about how this administration is slowly whittling away their rights, and that they are members of a global community, and that what we do in this country affects so many others around the world.

Who knows. Stranger things have happened.

As promised, here is one of the rants featured on LLD EP4. Enjoy.

"Just Put Down the Pizza Already"
by Jason Erik Lundberg

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

My wife Janet and I attended the Lunar New Year celebration last weekend in Cary, NC, organized by the Triangle Area Chinese American Society. It was held at the Colonial Baptist Church, a huge brick fortress of a building that I had previously mistaken for a prison. The building is located on a 34-acre campus, and features a central courtyard, two classroom buildings and a multi-purpose building totaling 85,500 square feet. Needless to say, the place was enormous. The parking lot could rival any shopping mall.

Inside, in the foyer, were rows of tables for people to find out about mahjong or Chinese chess, to join TACAS or the NAAAP, to bid on items in the silent auction, to learn calligraphy or fan-making, or to shop for trinkets and souvenirs in the small bazaar. In the main worship hall (which was, again, huge), an entire day's worth of events was planned. Among these were dancers of different troupes (from traditional to Sinkiang), musicians (including a youth orchestra and a guzheng / di zi duo), singers of Chinese folk songs, Chinese yo-yo demonstrators, and operators in both the Dragon Dance and Lion Dance. Between groups of acts, door prizes would be drawn and announcements made. It was extremely well-planned.

Down the left side of the worship hall was the room with all the food, with vendors selling lo mein and other noodle dishes, vegetarian lunches, curry chicken, Dragon Whiskers candy (which was made by hand, right there in front of you), bubble tea, coffee, and . . . well, Domino's Pizza. And here's where the ranting comes in.

Why the hell would you choose pizza over traditional food at a cultural festival like that? Plenty of people chose to eat Chinese or Vietnamese food, but the pizza table also did a brisk business. Why why why would you do that? You paid your five or eight dollars to get in the door to a celebration of the Chinese New Year, and then you eat pizza. You willingly drove yourself to the big brick fortress in order to join in the most important Chinese holiday of the year . . . and you eat pizza.

Am I missing something? I just don't understand it.

Yes, I realize that there is a certain demographic of people who would rather eat pepperoni pizza than fried bean curd or chicken curry, and the people selling the pizza at the festival were counting on this. But why do it? Why not leave your bland American appetites at home and try something new for a change? Why not give up the safety of familiar comfort food and take a risk on the unknown? Why not actually share in the cuisine of the culture you came to celebrate?

I was at a lunch recently to send-off a friend and coworker who was moving to Colorado. The restaurant was run by a Lebanese family and sold Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food items. I don't remember everything I ordered (I think hummus was in there somewhere), but it was all delicious. Some of the food there overlaps the Greek food that I grew up with, in particular dolmades, which are stuffed grape leaves, and baklava, which is a sweet dessert. I hadn't eaten there in over a year, and they had made some significant renovations to the place, increasing the dining area and adding a completely separate market to the other side. It's called Neomonde Bakery and Deli, and if you're ever in Raleigh, you simply have to go there.

Anyway, while we were eating, I was talking to Dave (the coworker who was leaving) about Dalat Oriental Restaurant, the Vietnamese place that he had introduced me to during my first week on the job; he was nice enough to take me out to lunch and welcome me to the company, and the food there was so good that Janet and I have been regulars ever since. We talked about some of the other Asian restaurants in the area -- like the Korean place on Hillsborough Street, the Thai place in Cary, the Indian place at the nearby mall -- as well as the Grand Asia Market where Janet and I often shop. One of the women who works in our group heard this and chimed in with, "Wow, you certainly like ethnic food, huh?" And the comment struck me as strange in a couple of ways.

One: I hadn't ever really thought of those restaurants as "ethnic." (You can't see it but I'm making Dane Cook rock-and-roll quotes in the air.) I just thought of them as the Vietnamese place, or the Indian place. When Janet and I are discussing where to eat dinner, we don't say, "Hmmm, I'm in the mood for some ethnic food. Let's do that!" I suppose the term is technically true, that kind of cooking is specific to a certain culture or ethnic group, but then the flip side is, "What would American ethnic food be?" Would it be hamburgers or hot dogs or our old friend Mr. Pizza, which were all imported from other countries? In a nation that consists almost entirely of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, do we truly have a national ethnic food culture?

The second thing that struck me was the implicit statement that eating foods from different cultures -- not just as a special treat, but as a regular occurrence -- was somehow out of the societal norm. It was "weird" (here are the quote marks again). And why is that? Are Americans conditioned to see ethnic food as "that other stuff?" Is our diet so bland and pedestrian, filled with fast food and processed snacks, that we see the native food from other cultures as an adventure?

I have to admit that my tastes were fairly tame until I met Janet. My big excitements for the year would be the annual Greek festival at the state fairgrounds (where I could indulge in the food of my ancestors), and my birthday dinner at Tripp's where I could order chicken cordon bleu (a sinfully tasty dish where a chicken breast is stuffed with ham and swiss cheese, with a hollandaise-type sauce drizzled on top). But since meeting my wife, my culinary tastes have exploded, since this is all food that she grew up with in Singapore. We try all kinds of different foods now, in restaurants and in our kitchen at home. Janet's a phenomenal cook, and she has slowly increased my tolerance for spicy foods with her curries and chili dishes. She makes clay pot rice enough for three people, but there are rarely leftovers.

So please, do your tastebuds a favor and explore some foods that might seem different or even a little scary. Expand your culinary horizons and try something new. Give the pizza and hamburgers and fast food a break. You'll be a better person for it.