Even IvyGate seems to be having trouble mustering the right degree of contempt for this guy. They excerpt his interview with himself, which is so illiterate as to defy my appreciation of the absurd. Oh, some girl told him his "spooge tastes like unripe bananas." (I guess he means "splooge.")

God, I hate this job sometimes. Like, I dropped out of college precisely so I could forget people like Matthew DiPasquale even existed and this is what I get. Fuck you, Matthew DiPasquale, just fuck you.

Related, what do you think are the odds US News added an "intenet buzz" category to its annual college rankings and kids like this guy and that other guy and Lena Chen are behind the recent restoration of its supremacy in that most venerable listicle? "Entirely too high" is the unfortunate answer to that question.

If there were no evolutionary benefit to fame, no one would chase it—or certainly not as doggedly as they do now. To be well-known gives many people (perhaps most people?) pleasure, and generally things that give us pleasure have their roots in something that at one point helped us. There could be no other reason for the proliferation and (exponentially accelerating) mass obsession with fame.

Professor Allison explains that people crave fame for its benefits ("the adulation, the sense of false familiarity, the reassurance that people you don't know personally will treat you well and help you out when you need something"), but sounds a note of caution on the new, low barrier to entry web-aided variety ("the anarchy which, at its most delusional, believes itself to be a meritocracy").

Prior to the internet, your options for achieving fame were as follows: acting, athletics, politics, royalty or sure, you could get a little attention by killing a few people in a dramatic way. Other than that, you were probably doomed to the dim twilight that knows neither MySpace nor YouTube.

Now, on the other hand, you need merely a T-1 line and a digital camera and three days from now, you could sit opposite Matt Lauer on the Today Show as 10 million people watch you give the director's commentary on your poorly lit, badly edited 3 minute viral video.

"Dynamic Fame" [Julia Allison]

I think about all the douche bags I see—puffing their chests out on TV, demanding Cristal and vanilla candles in their dressing rooms—and I wonder if they ever worried. There had to have been a first photo session, a first interview, a first dab of concealer, a first fluff of their hair. Did they worry then? Because I do. Because I don't trust myself. Because it feels good, this moderate attention, this occasional praise, and I worry I'll get hooked. "First one's free," says the crack dealer, and fame is the worst drug of them all. At least crackheads only urinate on themselves; fame addicts piss on everyone. And so I wonder if they ever thought, early on, "Uh oh." If they ever thought, "This isn't me, I don't want to be this asshole, I want to stay honest, I want to stay real, this is not me," and six months later they're wearing large white-framed sunglasses and fur coats and talking about themselves in the third person and asking to be photographed on their good side when every side of them is rotten.

Crime and Punishment [Nextbook]

"I don't like the tone of that," said one editor at a commercial house. "It suggests that it is the 'people' who have the problem, i.e. they need a 'clearer mind' in order to see the true value of James Frey's writing. The man is a liar and a fake. He may be a good writer—it's not like you have a be a good person to be a good writer. Actually, most writers are horrible people. At the same time, I would have felt icky about paying someone that shady 7 figures. Does morality have any place in a bottom-line business? I'm not sure anymore."

Another editor said, "Well, it sure helps that this is a novel and therefore he won't have the truthiness issue dogging him. So maaaaaybe people will read it, especially if it gets great reviews. But it'll never sell anything near what the memoirs did." She also said she thought that despite Nan Talese's protestations that she'd have loved to see the manuscript, neither Random House nor Penguin would have seriously considered the book, considering how badly they'd been burned.

One book publicist thinks that James has a shot at redemption. "I don't know if 'clarity' is the right word. I don't think people will look at him differently, I just think they'll forget how bad things were... And, as Oprah gets more and more general backlash, I think they'll remember how she laid into him like he was a child molester. I honestly do believe that all the king's horses and all the king's men will be able to [reconstruct James], provided he writes a great book." Hope not!

We'll give one seasoned fiction editor the final word. "I don't know—it depends if you're talking about editors (who are beside the point because the deal's done), the media (who either will have it out for him or will go with the redemption story but probably won't ignore it), or book buyers, who are still buying 'Million Little Pieces' in big numbers every week, you know?"

I bought Frey's book, before The Smoking Gun debunked so much of it, and I liked it. I'm a sucker for confessions. (Hey, even Gawker loved him on first sight, back in January of 2003.) I love writers who specialize in wide-open honesty; it's sort of my favorite thing, actually. My favorite writers—Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Ames, David Sedaris, Cookie Mueller, Sylvia Plath, Colette, Mary Gaitskill, Phoebe Gloeckner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Dawn Powell—are all expert confessors.

Oh, and here are the people whose confessions generally rub me the wrong way: Chuck Klosterman, Neal Pollack, Nick Hornby, Steve Almond, Julie Powell, Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephanie Klein. The people whose confessions often reek of bragging, even when—especially when—the bragging is along the lines of "look how disgusting/uncool/modest/bad at relationships I am." Or: "look at what a lame person I used to be."

But I liked A Million Little Pieces specifically because James Frey seemed to eschew that kind of self-mythologizing. There was something about the book that just felt... honest. True. Which means, I guess, that Frey is a very talented writer? Or maybe just a very, very talented liar.

Frey didn't just pull an Augusten Burroughs—it's not like the lies were "discrepancies" attributable to "we all have our own personal truths," though he did use nearly that exact lame line. He blatantly wrote about factual things that never occurred as if they'd happened to him, and in doing so, made his readers feel sympathy and vicarious pain. He toyed with our emotions, and when we found out we'd been lied to, we felt betrayed. I did, at least—and, hey, Oprah did! And everyone who said, "well, it's still a really well-written book" seriously has something wrong with them.

But apparently it's a big so-what. Our culture isn't into consequences. Shame is the new fame. What yesterday's news means is that James Frey's career will continue, and as it does, the story of the fraud he perpetrated on four million readers will drift further and further down the page in any profile written about him, until it's in the last paragraph, until it's in the last line, until it's not there at all.

George Saunders, in an essay about how reading Johnny Tremain changed his life, wrote:

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility, or something more diabolical; the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and most importantly, tells us what we really think.

You know that Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin Upton, the one who gave a retarded answer to a stupid question and became an instant YouTube sensation? Last week, the wire services were full of pictures of her, going to fashion shows and parties. She's famous now. In a few more weeks, no one will remember what she originally became famous for. They'll only know that they know her name.

From reminiscing about being a teen in teh 198s to chronicling a family Christmas complete with Jell-O shots, Hughes' tales are embarrassing but true. Hughes is a former writer and editor who lives in Gainesville.