What Are Blogs For If Not to Rant?

It looks like we now get to add the late Chilean author Roberto Bolano to the list of folks who in the pursuit of fame or something like it choose to fudge or embellish, to create a fiction and call it fact. That people do this is not so astonishing, that people continue to be taken seriously after they do it is astonishing -- to me at least.

It has astonished me since about 1982 or so when I bought my first and only John Cougar album and on it found a song in which Mr. Cougar complained on disc about the record company making him change his name. "Making him?" The only time you have to do something you are told, I remember reading once, is when someone is holding a gun to your head. So Mr. Cougar was not forced to change his name; he chose to agree to have his name changed. I suppose so that he could pursue fame and fortune in the music industry. Fine, that's a legitimate choice, but it's a choice he -- a free man and an adult -- made. Nobody made him sign a record contract. And bit by bit of course, that fame and fortune arrived and bit by bit he reclaimed his name, first John Cougar Mellencamp and then John Mellencamp.

How about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, purporting to be non-fiction and in fact full of conjectures, imagined conversations and impossible to ascertain "facts." This is a work of fiction, yet for years it is listed and still sold as non-fiction. The book contributed to the concept in "non-fiction" today of composite characters -- people who don't really exist, but are put down on the written page with characteristics drawn from several different people for the sole purpose of enabling the author to make a point. There is another word for this practice, a more accurate one -- straw men.

And then there is flat out lying. Oprah got famously fooled, but what about Joe Klein, today an apparently respected political pundit. Some years ago when asked if he wrote Primary Colors, originally billed as by Anonymous, he baldly lied and said, "No." A few days later of course he was unveiled as the author -- how can someone who lies, plain and simple, ever be accorded trust again for anything he writes. A mystery to me.

But it goes on. Just a month or so ago, the non-fiction Holocaust memoir -- oops, it's fiction. No worries, we'll just repackage it and publish it anyway.

And now Bolano who, it turns out, was apparently not in Chile when Pinochet overthrew Allende, let alone detained. He may also have invented a drug habit. His supporters say, "oh, part of his artistry was blurring fact and fiction." Fine, but call it for what it is -- fiction and let the reader guess what fact is woven in.

In a world of great sadnesses, it's too bad -- although just a small sadness -- that instead of art having an impact on the inveiglers of the world, those purveyors of the inflated resume, the fake academic credentials, the official misinformation, their miasmic tendencies spread into art.