Literary Hoaxes - The Art of the Prank

June 26, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #19: Had It With Airport Hassles? Grab a Rug and Go!

Here’s the nineteenth 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 #19: Had It With Airport Hassles? Grab a Rug and Go!
By W.J. Elvin III
June 26, 2009

flycarpeta Last week we looked into imaginary destinations so it seems reasonable to follow up with a look at imaginary transportation – from the perspective of literary hoaxes, of course.

This “hoax,” as it is now known, comes from Australia, though you will now find it scattered around the world-wide web as genuine. It claims to report new findings regarding flying carpets, also known as magic carpets.

Australia sometimes seems a hotbed for literary mischief. It’s probably no hotter than any other bed, just a society engaged in a struggle for cultural identity that makes for a climate more sensitive to fakery. Here in America such things are a bit of yawn. We’ve had fifty years or so of journalists educating us to the fact that our culture is a gob of scandal and artifice, so that today, who cares?

But back to Australia, thinking back to the spinning globe on a brass or wooden holder that decorated the high school geography classroom, maybe it has to do with how Australians walk around upside down. You don’t see as much literary foolery coming out of, say, Canada, where people are more straight-up. Continue reading “LiteratEye #19: Had It With Airport Hassles? Grab a Rug and Go!”

June 19, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #18: Fakers Find Flaws in Open-Access Free-for-All

Here’s the eighteenth 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 #18: Fakers Find Flaws in Open-Access Free-for-All
By W.J. Elvin III
June 19, 2009

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

– Excerpted from a heap of gibberish accepted for publication by a well-known science journal. As this column explains, the promise of the “open access” movement in scientific and scholarly journals is not without problems.

russiatoday Who owns knowledge? One way to get a clue is to try to access research papers published in expensive, exclusive scientific and scholarly journals. Can’t do it with a simple Google search. To pick that lock, you’ll need a credit card.

However, the open access movement is changing that.

The open access movement strives to make scientific and scholarly studies available to all, free. That’s the bottom line. Naturally there’s a more complicated explanation, so, if you want to explore the finer points, check out the Open Access Overview.

Anyway, what a great idea, specialized knowledge accessible to all, minus the usual sky-high price tag.

And you figure these big-hearted publishers of elite and prestigious journals that have been raking in astronomical subscription prices and hefty pay-per-view fees are just opening the gates to the rabble?

Sort of. Continue reading “LiteratEye #18: Fakers Find Flaws in Open-Access Free-for-All”

June 12, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #17: Travel Guide for a Dream Vacation

Here’s the seventeenth 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.

[Editor’s note: This piece brings to mind ComaCocoon. In 1990, Dr. Joseph Schlafer (aka Joey Skaggs) offered the world’s first comprehensive dream vacation package. Its purpose being to combat the ever increasing risk involved in traveling away from home, as well as the negative effects of tourism on native environments.

Utilizing the revolutionary and totally safe pioneering BioImpression(tm) computer system, the company would, at its New York City facility, provide a state of total suspended animation and intensive, concentrated regeneration through anesthesiology and subliminal programming. The resulting subpoenas added a layer of reality to this dream vacation. Read more about it here.]

LiteratEye #17: Travel Guide for a Dream Vacation
By W.J. Elvin III
June 12, 2009

the-wizard-of-oz-200 Don’t know about you, but I figure to be spending summer vacation in my head. It’s not just a matter of economy. There are lots of advantages to head travel. Like, you get back home without neat souvenirs like swine flu, STDs or bomb-fragment tattoos.

Of course, unless you’re relying on private visions, you’d probably need a guidebook. The best guidebook I’ve found, far and away, is The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (Expanded Edition) by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. This is a big, hefty book, rich in text, illustrations and maps.

The editors put some boundaries on the scope of their work. After all, fiction is chocked full of imaginary places. They do not, for example, include realms from the future. They left out real locations in disguise, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. But they also put fun ahead of rigid rules, so some locations are in there just because the editors found them fascinating.

As with a conventional travel guide, from time to time there’s helpful advice to the traveler. You get tipped off if you might run into pirates or cannibals. And, just so you don’t lose your head in some far off corner of the dream-world, it’s advised in one locale to show respect for royalty by rubbing your nose on the ground. Continue reading “LiteratEye #17: Travel Guide for a Dream Vacation”

June 5, 2009December 15, 2023

LiteratEye #16: Missed the Long Slide on the Slippery Economic Slope? It’s Not Too Late to Fake It

Here’s the sixteenth 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 #16: Missed the Long Slide on the Slippery Economic Slope? It’s Not Too Late to Fake It
By W.J. Elvin III
June 5, 2009

poyaislandgrant1834vig-200 Why be everyday poor when you can easily fake upscale, major-league financial ruin? For a few bucks you can be in the game in grand style. When your happy hour pals crank up the wailing and lamentation, you can jump right in, waving evidence of really big losses.

Name your poison: EnRon? WorldCom? DrKoop.Com? Kmart Corp.? You’ll find stock or bond certificates for all of those and many, many more catastrophes at Scripophily.com. That’s where dead stock and bond certificates go to be recycled as collectibles.

My personal favorite, the one I’ve been lusting over for months, is a bit more pricey than most. But then, it’s also a true rarity with a lot of history and drama behind it. It’s a Poyais land grant certificate, selling on Scripophily for $495.

I’d been reading up on the exotic tropical paradise of Poyais but didn’t realize it’s senior ranking in the lore of scandals and scams. Then, one morning not long ago, I opened ArtofthePrank.com and there it was, listed right up in the top ten hoaxes of all time. Continue reading “LiteratEye #16: Missed the Long Slide on the Slippery Economic Slope? It’s Not Too Late to Fake It”

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”