W.J. Elvin III - The Art of the Prank

May 22, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History

Here’s the fifteenth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History
By W.J. Elvin III
May 22, 2009

f24c7fa0c7119f749fa38e2cb0e57e5e-200 So you’ve got this American Revolution-era historical novel weighted toward the Iroquois point of view, written by four anonymous Italian guys who call themselves Wu Ming. Formula for a best-seller or what?

Let’s start with “or what?”

The English language version of Manituana isn’t out yet, though you can get in line for it at Amazon. So, not reading Italian, I can’t say if it really has the best-seller qualities mentioned by those who have read it. It may well be a page-turner of the Dan Brown sort, with the welcome added element of intellectual stimulation, as has been suggested.

Wu Ming has had previous successes under that name and other hits writing as Luther Blissett.

ArtofthePrank readers may recall Blissett as a collective counter-cultural commotion of the 1990s wherein artists, pranksters, protestors, writers and others identified themselves as Blissett.

Luther Blissett, a soccer player from Jamaica, was victim of racial slurs while playing for an Italian team. At first he wasn’t pleased with the craze surrounding his name, but eventually he got into the spirit of it. Some excerpts from his appearance on a BBC program can be found on a rather poor quality but definitely bizarre YouTube clip: Continue reading “LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History”

May 15, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #14: Detecting the Dark Side of Language

Here’s the fourteenth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #14: Detecting the Dark Side of Language
By W.J. Elvin III
May 15, 2009

wwiip6-200 It’s 2 o’clock in the morning in London as my email comes breezing in to interrupt John Olsson’s musings. Olsson interests us because he’s an expert at digging out the secrets of deceptive documents, anything from anonymous hate mail to plagiarized books.

My note found him puzzling over hidden clues in regard to the character of Bernard Madoff, the big Wall Street toad whose secret life involved scamming multi-millions from clients.

Might a keen observer have spotted what Madoff was up to, before it all fell down? Olsson pondered the name, “Madoff.” Odd, the wanderings of the mind in the wee small hours. “Made Off”¦,” he supposed. “Bernard made off”¦”

Well, John, maybe you’re on to something. And, believe me, you can throw LiteratEye readers a long one and they’ll be out there to catch it. But we better at least start a little closer to the line of scrimmage.

And so, down to business. In Olsson’s case, business is The Forensic Linguistics Institute and his studies are usually of a very serious nature. You can get a fairly good idea of what it’s all about from his new book, Wordcrime. Continue reading “LiteratEye #14: Detecting the Dark Side of Language”

May 12, 2009December 15, 2023

Somalia: Libertarian Paradise

Submitted by W.J. and David Elvin:

From Huffingtonpost.com, May 6, 2009:

The inimitable Andy Cobb is at it again, taking libertarians to task for their hatred of all things government. You know what has no government? Somalia. So Cobb and the Public Service Administration have made this video encouraging libertarians to vacation in the broken country maintained by “rational self interest and libertarian magic dust.”

Regulation Vacation Celebration!

Written and Directed by: Andy Cobb
Produced by: Mark Kienlen and Andy Cobb
Narrator: Marc Evan Jackson
Gal: Nyima Funk
Fellah: Andy Cobb

May 12, 2009December 15, 2023

Rome’s Talking Statues to be Silenced?

Protesting a Bit Too Much in Rome?
by W.J. Elvin III
May 12, 2009

462535-pasquino-200 A tidy-up campaign in Rome intends to halt the centuries-old tradition of posting satirical protest notes on six “talking statues” around the city. Begun when rulers restricted public speech, the tradition continues today with nasty notes that go up under cover of night. The notes often ridicule the antics of celebrity Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Other targets include dignitaries of the Church and societal elite.

The notes will be removed and the statues fenced off. While the project might seem, to anyone with a lick of sense, doomed to fail, authorities have concocted a brilliant tactic to counter any recurrence of the protests. They plan a web site where people can express their feelings freely. Hey, that”s gonna work.

It will probably work as well as efforts to stop the posting of love notes on the wall below the balcony at Shakespearian heroine Juliet”s house in Verona. Despite a ban put in force five years ago, the love notes are still posted, stuck to the wall with bubble gum. What next? They’ll probably tell people to stop rubbing the right breast of Juliet”s statue. That’s a popular custom thought to bring luck in love.

photo: discovery.mlogic.mobi

May 11, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye Extra: Hitler’s Fake Nefertiti is Real. Maybe.

Editor”s Note: W.J. Elvin III”s LiteratEye column about literary hoaxes is featured here, and only here, every Friday. This is a LiteratEye Extra:

LiteratEye Extra: Hitler’s Fake Nefertiti is Real. Maybe.
by W.J. Elvin III, May 11, 2009

nefertiti1-200 Adolf Hitler, world-class crazy-ass psycho with a fascination for the occult, apparently had a real thing for ancient Egyptian beauty Nefertiti, co-regent and central figure in a religion introduced by her Pharaoh husband. Hitler had big plans for a stunning bust of her housed in the Berlin Museum.

There was a problem, though. Egypt was demanding return of the artifact. So, rumor had it, Hitler commissioned a fake to give back to Egypt. Then the original was lost in the Second World War and so, it has been believed, only the fake remains.

But researchers from Berlin’s Imaging Science Institute at Charite Hospital recently made a series of CT scans of the allegedly 3,400-year-old bust and have pronounced it the real deal.

At the same time, however, a Swiss art historian, Henri Stierlin, who has studied the case for 25 years, insists it is indeed a fake. He maintains it was created by a German artist using ancient pigments, at the request of the archaeologist credited with the find.

“Stierlin is not a historian. He is delirious,” Zahi Hawas, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities told the news agency AlArabiya. Hawas is considered by many to be the world’s leading expert on ancient Egypt and its artifacts. Continue reading “LiteratEye Extra: Hitler’s Fake Nefertiti is Real. Maybe.”