I think it's because there are so many great Indian basketball players.

At least they're not pretending to be Native Americans.

Because "Indians" aka Native Americans don't have as many representatives in the mainstream press who can out them in 10 minutes, like African Americans do. @LolCait: Well noted, sir.

No one makes movies like Dancing With Wolves anymore.

I heard she has a dildo shaped like Mahatma Gandhi.

She keeps it handy so she can honestly tell people, "I've got a little Indian in me."

Most freshman university english classes have a required assignment where you have to write an essay from the perspective of an elderly indian man. If you can conjure up a character that resembles the crying indian from the 1970's anti-pollution commercial you are sure to get graded on the top end of the curve. Margaret Seltzer probably just elaborated on a variation of this genre.

@MisterHippity: Oh, honey--no.

@MisterHippity:
"Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well. And above all, have an extra set of AA batteries on hand." - Mahatma Gandhi

@In Other News...: I need to tighten up the subtitle to my autobiography. Would you mind taking a look?

This Book Is A Fake Autobiography: I Am Not A 16 Year Old Runaway Hooker Taken In By Wolves On the Outskirts Of Glendale California.

"...the gang-violence-reduction foundation that Seltzer claimed to have founded, called Brother/SisterHood, is now thought to be fake as well. ..."

Of course we said as much in this forum *days* ago.

After Sigerson quikly tracked down Peggy's websites, I believe I called the International Brother/SisterHood Foundation nothing more than an expression of Peggy's "inchoate longings."

I'm hoping the L.A. Times will go the extra mile and interview Madd Ronald, because I love him unconditionally.

Also, it would be nice if we could find someone who can tell us whether Peggy's pit-bull tattoo is real.

@uncle_wiggly: That is grim. Talk about ripping off culture.

@belltolls: "For Thee: The Mad Life of BellTolls (as told to Pliny the Elder)"

@Dickdogfood: Too late.

@uncle_wiggly: The last of the Learning Annexans?

@In Other News...: Thanks! That certainly takes it in another direction.

@belltolls: A better one, and certainly not off a cliff.

I've been shopping around White Like Me: My Struggle to Assimilate Aboriginal, Native American, Korean, and Tamil Cultures, Or, How I Once Ate at Indian and Mexican Restaurants in the Same Week, thus far to no avail.

I don't know about California, but in Eugene where Margaret Seltzer actually lives, there is good charity help for families with children. Help is very thin if you don't have kids involved, but that is not the case she presented. I find it very difficult to believe that kids would be cooking up crack to help the family pay a water bill.

Also, I'm sure the white kid in a black neighborhood has that great man bites dog appeal that makes a story particularly desirable, but it also makes it very easy to check. She would have stood out so dramatically, it seems like it would have been pretty easy for someone to verify that she actually lived there for 12(?) years. How about a copy of her high school annual?

This whole creepy scandal makes me queasier every time I read about it. The whole appropriation of black culture with a thousand cliches, ugh. Has anyone been able to talk to Seltzer directly? Where is she and what is she thinking now? And her poor kid?

Sometimes I get the impression that all the publishing industry cares about is selling books.

Gee, while the memoir genre is hot, I'll join the Frey and pimp out " how my previous Memoir of Fabrication is a lie because I never wrote one with lies in the First Place- a true story

"If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one's spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse's neck and head would already be gone."

-Franz Kafka, "The Wish to Be a Red Indian" (1913). Muirs' translation.

@Hamud:

I have really appreciated your efforts in all of this.

Do you think Madd Ronald is real? I so want to believe. This story is just outrageous and beyond the pale. No pun intended, of course.

Motoko, have you seen the piece I just wrote for the NYTimes book section called"A Family Tree of Literary Fakers?" I swore I left it on my desk, Motoko, where'd you go, Motoko?"
I was just about to go over to the Brother/Sisterhood Foundation to get me out of gang life, but Mad Ronald never put the address on the website. Guess I'll head over to the Scientology Celebrity Center for help. I'm a friend of Bill's, I mean Tom's.

@karion:

You're welcome, Karion.

But to the extent I've toiled, I've toiled for Gawker, for America, and because I, too, am hostage to the hope that Madd Ronald is real.

I believe with a sincere heart that someday Madd Ronald will be made manifest unto us, either bodily, or in transfigured, exalted form that will know neither death nor dawn.

@trojanhorse: no-no-god-that-can't-be-right-profit-at-the-expense-of-integrity-and-ethics-oh-god-no-i-won't-hear-this-no.

there's a bit from me that sure as hell nobody has to fact check to see it for the bull-droppings it is.

What is more American than stealing from the Native Americans? It is kind of our founding story isn't it? If they did it self-consciously it could be brilliant. (Although only Kafka could have done it in a sentence.)

But the authors are obviously not brilliant. And brilliance doesn't sell books. The publishing industry wants memiors from people of color that write sentimental narratives about overcoming oppression and finding your true self (I am strong. I am beautiful. etc.): books that can be described as "moving" and "touching." And they have to be memoirs not fiction. Because fiction is hard. And brilliant writers might do things that are unfamiliar and/or complicated.

I don't feel bad for the publishers or readers that are fooled by this. Their appetite for this crap is what makes it possible for the imposters to succeed. They get what they deserve.

@AndSheSaid: Well, first, it isn't only American. From what I know about other cultures, it's pretty universal to slurp up the memoirs of the poor of whatever country, at least nowadayws. And stupid sells in books as well as TV and movies. That said, no excuse for big US publishers lapping up pathetic cliche-ridden crap.

I am shopping a memoir about a confused mid-20-something extremely attractive Manhattan-based sex columnist/TV talking head who shows her tits and ass to the world on her Tumblr site and then suddenly stops blogging for like 10 minutes after her ex-boyfriend demonstrates for everyone what an idiot she is. Working title: Nitwit Girl. The publishers aren't buying it.

@uncle_wiggly: I've never heard of anyone giving this assignment and I'd be curious to know where they do.

@SarahHeartburn: Well most people think "it sells" is a decent enough reason for producing and promoting crap. These days even university presses are expected to make a profit. There are societies that think that supporting the publication of new knowledge or great literature is important. Ours is not one of them.

Well, this might get me booted out. Nothing
like a lecture on a weekend.
Just found out Mata Hari was not from Java, but the Netherlands, and a double agent spy.

This is a non-credit lecture, and will not be on the test.

Laura Browder. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. 312 pp. $49.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

When the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot slyly warned, "If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic,'" he might have been cautioning against the authenticity touted on advertisements, flap or back copy, and reviews of many of the best-selling "ethnic impersonator autobiographies" that Laura Browder studies. Her cast of "slippery characters" includes Mattie Griffith, the abolitionist creator of The Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857); Lillian Smith, a "voluntary Indian" renamed "Wenona," who starred in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1880s; the "imaginary Jew" Elizabeth Stern, whose I Am a Woman--And a Jew (1926) was penned by the illegitimate child of a Welsh Baptist mother and a German Lutheran father; Sylvester Lance, the son of former slaves who "transformed himself into the internationally famous Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance" and composed the memoir Lance Long (1928); Ben Reitman, a Jewish lecturer and Chicago fund-raiser whose Sister of the R oad: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (1937) became a 1972 film about hobos directed by Martin Scorsese; John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, the passers who recorded their cross-racial impersonations in, respectively, Black Like Me (1960) and Soul Sister (1969); Asa Carter, the KKK racist whose The Education of Little Tree (1976) "sold much better than any other Native American autobiography published at the time"; and Danny Santiago, whose Famous All Over Town (1983) was praised for its rich portrayal of Chicano street life until, the secret behind the pseudonym revealed, he was replaced by the social worker Daniel James, a graduate of Andover and Yale.

The figures Werner Sollors calls "ethnic transvestites" demonstrate to Laura Browder that "the tradition of American self-invention," inaugurated by Ben Franklin, enabled a number of self-fashioners to apply the hegemonic logic of the "fluidity of class identity" in the United States to "the porousness of ethnic identity." With scrupulous detail, she examines not only each of these literary and social events, but also their reception so as to demonstrate that "ethnic passage from one identity to another is not an anomaly" in America. Following in the steps of such scholars as Eric Lott and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who work on whites masquerading as people of color, Marianne Torgovnick, who studies Anglos imitating Native Americans, and Michael Rogin, who analyzes Jews blacking up, Browder proves that what historically has passed for authenticity may simply be a re-inscription of stereotypical and biologistic attitudes toward racial and ethnic identity. At the heart of this study stands the paradox that success ful racial and ethnic imposters have to master the racial registers they deploy, and so they may restrict rather than expand, re-inscribe rather than subvert their readers' assumptions about identity. For this reason, according to Browder, not so much the act of passing but the exposure of the impersonator offers the possibility of liberating readers from fixed ideas about race and ethnicity.

Some of the chapters in Slippery Characters veer away from ersatz autobiographies to discuss, for instance, theatrically staged performances at P. T. Barnum's racial exhibits; Helen Hunt Jackson's best-selling novel about Native Americans, Ramona (1894); Israel Zangwill's influential play The Melting-Pot (1908); and the "revolutionary blackface" performed by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the nineteen-seventies. Although Browder recognizes "the transgressive quality of an outrageous joke" in the racial impersonations she records, humorous and playful episodes are often eclipsed by the acts of racial violence and dispossession that she records. In large measure, too, Slippery Characters tends to focus on the ethnic impersonator autobiography, which is now "a genre on the verge of extinction." According to Browder's last chapter, where she glances at recent works like Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice and Gregory Howard Williams's Life on the Color Line, "a deconstruction of racial categories" h as begun and contemporary memoirs tend to dramatize not temporary racial passing so much as sustained processes of racial re-definition. On her last page, Browder summarizes her findings about what the tradition of the autobiography--which, she believes, is "uniquely suited" to America's mythologies--tells us about racial history: "While race may be a construction, it wields tremendous power in the lives of most people, for whom racial and ethnic categories are far from abstractions." Such a conclusion does not substantially enliven current thinking about race; however, Slippery Characters contains an ample archive of cross-racial masquerades in American cultural history.

COPYRIGHT 2002 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

@gimmeabrake: All of that and no ISBN? You've obviously never worked in a bookstore or library.

Also, tldr.

Can I advertise my books here free?

@gimmeabrake: Ha ha, I read every word of that summary, and was left to wonder if the kind of ethnic masquerade the book describes is a uniquely American phenomenon, or if there are exactly parallel cultural activities in Europe, India, China, etc. that sprang independently of the American versions.

@Hez: @

Why would you want the ISBN if it's too long to read?
BTW no one in a bookstore or library actually works.
ISBN-10: 0807825468
ISBN-13: 978-0807825464
Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.6 x 0.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces

@trojanhorse:

when you write one

@Dickdogfood:

the ethnic masquerade is universal, but the reference to Franklin is important considering his brother established America's first independent newspaper, he establishmed numerous printing presses throughout the colonies, and wrote under the pseudonyms of Mrs. Silence Dogood and his Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America.

www.franklinpapers.org

Yes, Ben Franklin was our first native born published Indian Wannabe.

@gimmeabrake: The book sounds like it covers interesting material although I can't say I'm too surprised by the thesis that people who masquerade as other races tend to reinforce stereotypes.

And it isn't new to say that America is well suited to the genre of autobiography because of the ethos of self-reinvention. Coming out of Augustine and Pilgrim's Progress and Rousseau, the autobiography is also shaped by Christianity and Enlightenment ideals about the rebirth of the self. As is America.

Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona is one of the great 19th century American novels. It is a romance so the prose is a bit purplish for modern tastes but the descriptive passages about early California are quite good. It deals with the transition from Spanish to Anglo California, the situation of Native Americans (news flash: not good) and the problem of miscegenation. Jackson never said the story was true but it was so popular that every town in California had a Ramona pageant, there were at least three movies made, and most California towns have a street named after the character. You can still visit the tourist sites for places like Ramona's "wedding chapel" etc.

It's really lunatic: how much people want stories to be true.

@gimmeabrake: O ye of little faith.

@trojanhorse:

I believe in you, and will be the first in line to buy a book signed by trojan horse.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

+ Watch video

@AndSheSaid:

"It's really lunatic: how much people want stories to be true."

I suppose this is a not-so-sly dig at my sincere, if misplaced, hope that Madd Ronald is real.

May I please state in my defense that I believe in the power of metaphor?

Even if Madd Ronald doesn't exist in the empirical sense, he remains a powerful symbol that continues to comfort and inspire us all.

Please see my paper on this subject, "Bling and Nothingness: The Phenomenology of Madd Ronald."

@AndSheSaid:

I agree with what you said, she said.
Can I come over so we can read together?
You will be Ramona and I, Alessandro, till I go mad and get shot, then miraculously become Felipe, and we will go live in Mexico.
Your Kafka quote got me aroused, damn.

@Hamud:
I'm more of a Kant person, but I would very much like to see your paper.

I think you should write Madd Donald's autobiography, in the spirit of Alan Sokal's 100% bullshit pomo piece that so delighted the editors of Social Text; that is, until Sokal gleefully announced he'd snookered the clueless dipshits.

That's off the record.

@gimmeabrake: I've published 15. Could we arrange your purchase by mail?

"A former fashion writer for The Times of London, [Emily] Davies had signed a contract with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write a memoir tentatively titled "How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion's Front-line." But according to Publishers Weekly, the book, acquired by Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead Books who shepherded Ms. Seltzer's "Love and Consequences," was canceled when a story in Women's Wear Daily discovered numerous fabrications and plagiarized passages in the book proposal."

This reminds me of when that guy's memoir of being a Gawker commenter: "Snark In The Name Of Love," was exposed as an absolute fiction. In reality said author was a loyal Perez Hilton fan, so dedicated he was First not once, but the times!!! So braziliant!!:):):):)