About pretending to read

Karen Joy Fowler: 

I made a New Year’s resolution to stop pretending I had read books I hadn’t. This necessitated a crash course in all those I had already pretended to have read.

Except that often the pretence is so deep and wide that I forget whether or not I really have read the book, so I wouldn’t know which ones I need to catch up on, surreptitiously or otherwise. (See my Gatsby confusion; and, as always, wonder whether or not Pierre Bayard was joking.)

About reviews

Many years ago, I offered a (possibly tongue-in-cheek) defence of the journalist who wrote a review of a Black Crowes album, having listened only to the first track. The shocked response from the readers suggested they thought this might be an isolated incident.

Ah, the innocence. Dylan Jones, until last year the editor of GQ magazine, has revealed that his motoring correspondent had a similarly relaxed attitude to the process of reviewing a product:

When the cars were delivered to his house in Islington, the car company always made a note of the mileage, something that is standard practice. The mileage would also be noted when they came to pick them up again. And on more than one occasion — OK, on many, many, many occasions — the mileage was precisely the same. So I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Who on earth was this conniving, fraudulent hack? You may well ask.

...and statistics

A CV is not a document of one's employment history. According to the winner of The Apprentice, it's a conversational tool.

Discuss.

And thanks to Mrs Peel for directing me to this: someone has devoted 22,000 words to the last scene of The Sopranos.

This much is true

I've always been quite envious of the one-time NME hack and now Radio 2 DJ Stuart Maconie (and I can remember a time when such a career trajectory would have seemed beyond the realms of feasibility) who was responsible for creating the urban myth that dapper game show supremo Bob Holness played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street'.

In retrospect, it was a brilliantly crafted porky, not least because Holness has several genuine claims to fame, what with him being the first radio James Bond and the father of one of proto-Girl-Power combo Toto Coelo and all; with a CV like that, one more wacky attribute could easily slip through unnoticed. But I can't believe that the story was crafted as a result of such cold-eyed reasoning; it was just the random collision of two cultural phenomena, creating a stopover on the spectrum that links 'surreal' with 'idiotic'. And it happened to work. Actually, I was more impressed by his story that Roxette had to change their name in the Philippines, because it means 'constipation' in Tagalog, but that one didn't have the same sort of sticking power.

You see, in the world of creative fibbery, you just can't tell what's going to last. Which is why my attempt to secure a similar level of vicarious fame has to be a tad more far-reaching. Which is where you come in, people. I'd like as many of you as possible to go to Wikipedia. Select the entry for a random individual, and insert the following piece of text in an appropriate slot:

"He/she was also one of the alien voices in the Cadbury's Smash advertisements in the 1970s."

I suppose it would make sense to restrict yourself to people who were alive at the time, but that's not compulsory. If you like, you can come back and tell me who you've done, but again, you may wish to maintain an air of mystery about the whole thing (which will also make it harder for the Wikipolice to track things down). Please feel free to get your friends, virtual or otherwise, into the project; the more attempts we make, the more likely one is to slip through the Jungian bullshit detector and become a fragment of reality, or the nearest we get to it these days.