Secrets of the City

Nick Coleman, the columnist for the Star Tribune, has started a blog. There’s not much to it yet — a YouTube video and a somewhat awkwardly formatted reprint of a emotive piece he wrote about the shooting of Alan Reitter at Block E a few years ago. But, as David Brauer points out, it’s worth bookmarking because “his longer-form voice should be heard more than once a week in the Strib.” Brauer also points out that Coleman once had some very pointed things to say about Bloggers: Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

Who here is a Coleman fan?

Fake memoirs seem all the rage nowadays. There was Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, the story of a teenage gangbanger in Los Angeles that turned out to be written by a middle class white suburban woman. Then there was Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, the story of a child Holocaust survivor who was tended to by wolves, which probably should have surprised nobody when it was exposed as a fabrication. And who can forget JT Leroy, who authored the tellingly titled The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, which told of his experiences as a transgendered teenage male prostitute, despite having been authored by a middle aged woman. Minnesota has already been involved in at least two forged memoirs: Most notoriously, James Frey’s fictionalized tale of Hazelden horror, a Million Little Pieces; Somewhat less known is my own fake memoir (not sure why it has never caught on; after all, I was kidnapped by mole men.) Now a Minnesota publishing house finds itself at the center of a new fake memoir controversy. Lerner Publishing Group published a children’s book about a true romance between a concentration camp inmate and the young woman who threw apples over the fence to him. The trouble? It wasn’t true.