Strap in, kids: it’s gonna be another long one.
When, a while back, I recommended fellow Tennessean Gas Guy’s blog, I had no idea it was so near its last days. If you’ve taken my advice and followed up on it, you know that the Gas Guy has finished blogging (at least under that particular moniker) and has outed himself as another academic and (gasp!) not a Tennessean after all.
The interesting bit is that there is a raging debate in the comments thread over at his place, pretty evenly divided between those who simply enjoyed reading his stuff and are happy to say so versus those who (I think illogically) take umbrage at the idea that they were somehow duped by what they read. (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t suspect them of merely being pissed that he’s actually a Yankee, but that’s a post for another day.)
People are going so far as to say that “writing is about truth” and that they only read non-fiction “because there is no higher purpose of fiction than entertaining the reader in exchange for a paycheck.”
All thinking people know this is nothing but complete and total bollocks. Seriously. Cry me a fucking river, chumps; you fell for the illusion of a representative medium: language. While fiction asks us to suspend our disbelief, non-fiction–more insidiously–tacitly assumes we are unquestioningly credulous. Your precious non-fiction is, however, far from objective. I’ll refrain from referring you to scholarly sources, so just reflect on it a while: objectivity itself is an illusion. Two people would never tell the same story the same way (unless of course it’s a story they agreed to tell the same way for some nefarious purpose, but dude, Vincent D’Onofrio would suss that shit out and don’t tell me he wouldn’t, but you catch my drift: nefarious purposes!).
I have waxed on before about the lie of language and of representation, and we’re all familiar with the Magritte painting. Here’s the real problem, though: why and how has blogging become the new “objective” medium? The new journalism? Don’t bother telling me about how it has trumped the “real” journalists on specific stories lately; that’s not what I’m on about. I don’t read the political blogs unless they’re written by friends (and all both of those are on the sidebar, so have at it). I am more interested in the “personal” or “humor” blogs. I would never assume that in telling a joke (or writing one) a person is swearing to tell the truth, nor do I take the diary-type blogs at face value. Most of us don’t use our real names or include pictures of ourselves, and those who do are likewise not bound to any oath of honesty. That pink typewriter? Totally isn’t even mine.
While what I am discussing is more related to the human desire to arrange elements of a narrative in the most beneficial fashion (adding, deleting, embellishing, re-ordering, emphasizing or de-emphasizing, even manufacturing at will), there is another sort of elephant in the room when it comes to writing. Let’s face it people; there is a pretty decent chance that I don’t actually live in Zembla. For that matter, I might not even be a twenty-seven year old female. On the internet, odds are I am an overweight man with a predilection for teenagers.
Caveat fucking lector.
*Title cribbed from a work I enthusiastically recommend on this issue: Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” There, I’ve done it; I’ve gone and recommended Nietzsche to you. I’m so, so sorry. Please forget about this.
i don’t know why everyone is acting so touchy… it was pretty obvious to me that he was a grad student, probably studying something akin to literature, for a while…
spekin for myslef im rely a bolnde bisexaul sority gril wiht big knockars.
by teh way. paltonicly ideal objactivety may be implosable but sois platicnoly ideal anyhtign. ok. so its axoinmatic taht youl awys get it worng. ok! wahoo! bfd! u can stil get it les wronger then teh othar guy. which is true of any feild you can name an its worth doign if uc an (er wel… if tahts ur goal of cuorse). if thare we’re no such thign as ‘knoweble truth’ their wuold be no such feild as ‘enginering’. or as ol sam johnsen put it ‘i rafute him thus’.
but anyhow i liek ur pnoit about teh line batwean ‘hoax’ an ‘fiction’ beign a slipary one. dunno about teh ethacla isue of hurtign poeples felings whan tehy fnid out theive bean snookared.
jesas taht was a lota pompuos hooey wasn it? blah balh blah.
i’m not a med student. i just play one on the internets.
but gas guy? seriously. it HAD to be fiction.
I’ve been reading Gas Guy for quite awhile and have always enjoyed his writing style. It saddens me that he is discontinuing that particular site, but it simply angers me that so many people have written such hateful comments. Weblogs are blogs are logs. They come, they go. Some will be missed while others will not. I, for one, will miss the Gas Guy.
On a different note, I’m happy to have found your space here, AtV. And frankly, I don’t care if your writing is truthful… it makes one think. And that, as Martha would say, is a good thing.
I wasn’t offended at all when GasGuy outed himself. His posts were still well-written and his observations still valid no matter who he really was.
OMIGOD!
The pink typewriter isn’t you and you’re really and overweight fat guy? What in the hell is the world coming to?
The next thing you know people will be believing that I’m actually omnipotent.
Oh wait, I believe THAT!
This is why I love reading your site, even if it makes me feel a bit dense sometimes. :)
I enjoyed the Gas Guy . . but then I was convinced that Belle-de-Jour was Martin Amis in drag . . .
Vincent D’Onofrio?
Wasn’t he the no good boyfriend of one Beverley D’Onofrio, the woman whose published biography Riding In Cars With Boys was made into a less than successful film starring Drew Barrymore as the protagonist and that funny scrawny man as the aforementioned Vincent?
No?
never-mind then
i suppose i just didn’t read back far enough, but i had just assumed that the gas guy was a student of some sort working at the gas station to pay the bills. i have known several people who did this, much to my chagrin…i mean, do you know how often those places get robbed? it would have been a much better ending if he had posted the last post as gas guy’s next of kin, telling the world that he had been offed in a robbery gone bad at the gas station. then nobody bitches, they just feel bad and move on.
I’d never heard of Gas Guy until now, so I don’t mourn his passing much. My first ever job was that self-same thing, except I was called a “forecourt attendant”. We sold gas too, but that was just so that people could refill their lighters.
mel - noooo they wuldn just feal bad an moave on. theyd tak up a colectoin an somboddyd track im down an the whoal deal would blow up inta a hidously embarasign shambles for all consernd.
h.b. - wel uor cars ovar here dont burn petrels.
Thanks, Alfina, for a better-worded defense than any I bothered to write myself. But (this might take a minute) I’m going to take a shot: The Greeks, as you know, reduced rhetoric to the credibility of the speaker (ethos), the exhortative emotional value of the message (pathos), and the detached mathematical appeal of the argument (logos). I’m oversimplifying the model, which, like all models, is itself an oversimpllification, but bear with me.
Gas Guy being other than Gas Guy changes his emotional and logical appeal not a whit–none whatsoever. The words are the words regardless of wether a Catholic nun or Somali warlord had penned them. Readers that can detach themselves from preconceived notions of the writer, then, think, “Oh well, it was a fun read; I could care less who this guy is.” But the Greeks recognized very early that many readers/listeners/whatever cannot do this, and this is why the masses cheer JFK and Reagan speeches that those guys didn’t write a word of: people are incapable of seperating the rhetor from the rhetoric. So a lot of people thought that I was “like them,” i.e. a smart guy in a low-wage job, a fellow Nashvillite, whatever, only to have me redefined in their minds as “not like them.” Neither of these ideas has much basis in reality, but this isn’t–writing isn’t–about reality. It is about effective presentation, and so I presented my story as effectively as I could. But in altering the story, I jettisoned the ethical appeal that Gas Guy had for a few people. And that’s hurt their feelings a bit.
So it’s not like I denied the Holocaust, or told them their parents were dead when they aren’t, or some real, horrible lie. I just changed my city and left out a fact about my other activities. But I understand how attached people become to ideas, so I am only a little surprised by the wild reactions. It’s actually been, in my moments of scientific curiosity, an awful lot of fun to watch.
this situation reminds me of that devo schmevo twat who took such offense to your post about philosophy.
how anyone, considering the current state of the world, politics, media, etc., could take anything they read to be the objective, unadulterated truth (which, I will agree with you Vague, just does not exist) is beyond me.
back to why this reminds me of philosophy twat. that guy took himself way too seriously. he will die early and slowly, chewing his lips as he does so. Jeremy, tell the haters to grow a sense of humor or cease and desist surfing the internet, watching television, reading newsprint, and breathing.
i enjoyed your blog. sorry to see it end. and it doesn’t bother me a bit that i thought you were really a gas guy in tennessee.
No, no guys! Vincent D’Onofrio is Martin Amis in drag, and Gas Guy is actually Belle-de Jour. I am a detective; I know these things. (Unless I am lying, which is likely).
I think Jeremy is right in saying that the realization that he was “not like them” was what did it, at least partially. Anyway, it was fun while it lasted, right?
A blanket big fuzzy thanks to you guys who insist on saying such nice things to me, by the way. (Aww)
BoS–Yeah, that movie was less than stellar, but I did kinda like the awkward skinny man (Steve Zahn). No idea about a possible Vincent/Beverly connection, though.
And HB, you were a “forecourt attendant”? Dang, man, everything sounds better in English!
Yo Gas, I looked at your “blog”. Lotta words there! They in any particular order?
For me the big “reveal” makes the Gas Guy that much more interesting. I think I had something else borderline intelligent to say but it’s one of those days…