March 2008
The Verdict Is In: Saddam Had No WMDs!
13.03.08 | 19:37 • Filed in: News
Montgomery Mall (Hommage to Ragubir Singh)
Framing—what else is street photography about? Windows within windows. Rectangles within rectangles. A grid of views. A bento box of subjects.
Raghubir Singh, who took the above picture, is my favorite Indian photographer. He made a great book of pictures called A Way into India, which featured the Ambassador, India's ubiquitous version of the VW, as object and frame for his peregrinations through his colorful homeland. Check out some of his pictures here.
Invented Memoirs—A Million Little Pieces Redux X 2
First a holocaust memoir turns out to be a total fabrication (Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years), now an L.A. gang orphan story turns out to be fiction as well. Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences fooled a lot of reviewers for the best reasons: it was well written and compelling. In Defonseca's case, she was not found out until the book was already a bestseller and a movie. For Jones, we'll see how her career fares, especially since the publisher has cancelled her book tour and is recalling the book. (I wonder if you can sue for the mental anguish caused by memoir deception--WRITERS: a possible short story idea?). It's amazing how well a book can sell when it's labeled as a memoir, but when it's fiction, it's assumed to bear little resemblance to reality and is given much less attention. Reality sells. Though I haven't read her book, Defonseca's supposed raised-by-wolves childhood was probably no less vivid than a great book of powerful fiction thought to be based on some version of the author's youth: Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird.