YOU'RE A FUCKING IDIOT: A Critical Discourse on John D'Agata's "The Lifespan of a Fact"

 

Sandra: Andrew, just to start us off, why don’t you give a sense of why Fingal’s side was the one you agreed with?

Andrew: I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but: I don’t know where to start. I guess, in the spirit of the book, I should start by critiquing and redefining your terms. I wouldn’t call myself an exponent of Fingal’s side. His position seems to be something like “Hey, I’m just doing my job,” which a) isn’t really true (he was an intern, taking on this project for “fun”), and b) just isn’t that interesting. My position is that fact-checking makes journalism better. I should note that the implied modifier here is “usually,” not “always”; clearly, there are times when fact-checking makes a piece worse, in both avoidable and unavoidable ways. My claim is that the net effect is positive. Oh, and one other small caveat: I’m talking about good fact-checking. Like anything, fact-checking can be done badly, and nobody wants that. As for what “facts” are, what “journalism” is, what the meaning of the word “is” is, etc.—these are things I’m sure we will get into later in this discussion. Not to give away too much up front, but I think my basic stance on all that will be: yeah, sure, fine, maybe there’s no such thing as a fact. And maybe we’re all just brains floating in vats. I’m not being sarcastic—I have read enough Quine to think that’s all really maybe true. But ultimately, like, come on. We might be living in the Matrix, but we still have traffic cops. And we can have a fun discussion about “what is a fact?”, but we still have fact-checkers.

Sandra: First, and I say this as a fellow former Believer intern, it’s likely that he was assigned to fact check the story by an editor, a higher-up he wanted to please, and therefore was motivated to do the job as best he could. That said, that magazine’s culture of fact-checking is not comparable to your Harper’s, your Atlantic, true, and Fingal’s continued involvement with the project was undoubtedly his own doing (though as I understand it he went from being an unpaid intern to a compensated staff member at some point during those seven years). Second, I don’t think I disagree with your claim that fact-checking makes journalism better. I do disagree, though, that D’Agata’s essay is journalism. He states so explicitly and repeatedly in his discourse with Fingal. What D’Agata is saying, and what I agree with, is that the literary essay need not abide by the same rules as journalism. It’s a literary genre. It’s about the language itself. We don’t fact-check poetry, we don’t fact-check short stories and we shouldn’t, therefore, fact check the essay.

Andrew: Factual dispute: we do fact-check poetry and fiction. At least, we do at The New Yorker, where I work. (Disclaimer: I am not a fact-checker, I haven’t worked at The New Yorker for very long, and any opinions and/or misstatements are solely my own.) Of course, the rules for checking short stories are different than the rules for checking story-stories. A fact-checker assigned to a short story would never say to a writer, “You say Sally went to McDonald’s, but, um, I looked into it, and Sally doesn’t actually exist.” However, a checker might tell a writer, “Your story is set in 1977, and you have Sally eating chicken nuggets at McDonald’s, but the McNugget was actually first sold in 1983.” (I think this is an actual example, incidentally, but I can’t remember now. But what does “actual” actually mean, anyway?)

What does The Believer (a magazine I love, for the record) purport to publish? From their site: “The Believer is a magazine of exceptional articles, essays, interviews, and reviews.” What can a reader reasonably take that to mean? When I read a review, I expect that a) the reviewer has read the book, b) her opinion is her own, and c) she is not making up quotes or putting them in misleading contexts. When I read an interview, I expect that the two people actually exchanged the words I’m reading, with perhaps a few tweaks. (If, for example, I read the published version of this and find that you’ve stricken all my preceding sentences and replaced them with “Sandra is awesome,” I will not be pleased, nor would any reader who somehow comes to know what happened.) When I read something in a magazine that’s called an “article” or an “essay,” I expect that the reporter really went where she said she went, reported events to the best of her memory and ability, and did not make shit up. We don’t have to talk about “rules,” if that sounds too moralistic—these are conventions. By not stating otherwise, one allows the reader to infer that one followed them. It’s very nice for D’Agata that he can decide, without warning, that he is playing a different game. But inconveniently for him, conventions are not made unilaterally. When D’Agata is invited to a potluck, does he show up empty-handed and say, “Sorry—you might be having a potluck, but I have decided to attend a banquet,” and start eating everyone else’s food? That’s rude, and, more to the point, it’s logistically disruptive. There won’t be enough food to go around!

You say the literary essay is “about the language itself.” But which adverb are you leaving out of that phrase? Is a piece of literary nonfiction partially about the language? Mostly? Entirely? Is it about language superficially, and to the exclusion of all else? Yes, of course, writing is about language. Yes, I want the articles and essays I read to be as well-written as possible. But I want that to happen within the tacit conventions, unless and until I’m told that something else is going on. Einstein said (apocryphally), “The truth should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” An essay should be made as beautiful as possible, but not more beautiful than possible.

Sandra: Note, though, that The Believer’s website doesn’t just say “Article” or “Essay” but includes both terms—they are, in other words, different things. You are conflating the two. I think that the role that fact-checking should play in the literary essay is akin to the role that fact checking, you’re right, does play in some poetry and fiction. That said, while your McDonalds example is charming (and mouth-watering), you of course realize that there’s a ton of poetry and fiction that purposefully places the proverbial nugget in a scene before its own real-world creation. We don’t fact-check John Barth. So while factual correctness may have a place in an essay, just as it may have a place in a short story or poem, it is a subordinated concern.

My point and D’Agata’s is that in an essay, just as in a short story or a poem, the primary mode is the literary one. (There’s your adverb,  princess.) That’s what I mean by the essay being primarily about the language, which is distinct from, though related to, something being written well. Literary works—including essays—are verbal artworks. I’m reminded of a passage by Eagleton, in which he argues that literature, poetry especially, in highlighting the always figurative relationship between actuality and language, “allows us to experience the very medium of our experience.” When I read an essay by Charles Lamb or Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace I am doing so for that reason primarily (which isn’t to say that there aren’t other, secondary, reasons). To call what they wrote “articles” is fucking blasphemous.

You’re right that D'Agata has violated something in distinguishing the essay as a verbal artwork, first cousin to poetry and fiction, but you are insane to say he has done so “without warning.” His whole career, all he’s done is warn. In 1997, while working for Seneca Review, he wrote an editorial on a new sub-genre which he called “the lyric essay.” The idea was to highlight the poetical mode in the essay (through formal innovation, e.g.) thereby countering the essay’s second class literary citizenship. In the years that followed, there were some awesome lyric essays written and a lot of garbage ones (written by those who mistook a push for formal innovation as license to produce obtuse and often gimmicky work) and ten years later he more or less repudiated the genre in that same magazine for that reason.

He did not give up. In 2003 he published The Next American Essay, the first of what’s eventually going to be three anthologies whose project is the same. From its first page, “…I know you are expecting facts from nonfiction. But henceforth please do not consider these ‘nonfictions.’ I want you to be preoccupied with the art in this book, not with facts for the sake of facts. … ‘There are no facts,’ Emerson wrote, ‘Only art.’ Let’s call this a collection of essays, then,—a book about human wondering.’” He’s published Lifespan of a Fact in order to make, yet again, and in a different way, this same point. I considered saying something about a pot-luck here but then gave up because it was such a dumb analogy. Ironic as it looks like some fact-checking could have saved you this embarrassing send up, Mr. Marantz.

Andrew: I guess now is as good a time as any to reveal that I was once like you. I understand and pity your delusions, because I once labored under them as well. Now I feel like a former member of a cult, sneaking back onto the farm and trying to coax the current victims into a police car. (Or is that a dumb analogy? If it is, you should let me know by just saying so, without bothering to substantiate your claim. Insults are more fun when they’re ad hominem.)

I wrote one of the lyric essays you mention. John D’Agata himself wrote me a very nice note to tell me how much he liked it, and then he published it in the Spring 2006 issue of Seneca Review. I’d like to think it was more “awesome” than “garbage,” but I suppose I’m biased. I mention all this only to say: trust me, I understand what a lyric essay is. I’ve read all of D’Agata’s work. I loved Halls of Fame when I was in college; it was the sort of book I would buy multiple copies of, so I could hand them out to friends. I’ve even met D’Agata twice. This will shock people who only know him from his dickish persona in The Lifespan of a Fact, but he struck me as an impressive intellect and an all-around nice guy.

You say that for D’Agata’s whole career, “all he’s done is warn” us about what he considers the essay to be. As his dog in this fight, it might have been charitable of you to also give him credit for writing some original essays of his own, but no matter. I’ll grant that he has issued warnings, and that there are at least a few word nerds, you and I included, who picked up the January 2010 issue of The Believer, saw his name, and said, “Oh, D’Agata—isn’t he the guy who has a highly unorthodox view of what an essay is? I’ll be sure to keep that in mind as I read his piece.” But what about the normal reader, the kind who has never gone to Powell’s to buy a copy of Seneca Review (if they even carry it at Powell’s)? Obviously, that person would have no fucking idea who John D’Agata is, and no reason to suspect that even though the vast majority of humans mean “nine seconds” when they write the phrase “nine seconds,” John D’Agata uses “nine” metaphorically, to mean “eight.”

D’Agata was not shy about telling the world how he had decided to interpret the constraints of nonfiction. Unfortunately, in this case, “the world” means loyal readers of Graywolf Press, subscribers to Seneca Review, and a handful of students in Iowa City—in other words, a few hundred people. But we’re talking about a piece D’Agata wrote in a general-interest magazine. When I say he changed the rules without warning the reader, I mean, in this case, the unsuspecting reader of the January 2010 issue of The Believer. (I guess one of us should make the joke that readers of a publication by that name are liable to be more credulous than average, not less.) Since you’ve given us no choice, let’s stick with my pot-luck analogy, shall we? When D’Agata shows up to the pot-luck and gobbles up everyone else’s food, the host asks, “Look, John, why didn’t you just warn me that you wouldn’t be bringing anything? I’d have ordered a pizza.” To which John replies, “I did warn you! I wrote a dispatch in the Kalamazoo Gazette, and made several announcements on my ham radio.”

As you point out, D’Agata has spent much of his career making this argument. Why did he not make it again, briefly, in that issue of The Believer, thus cluing readers in to what he was doing? I’ll use another food analogy, just to bait you: I suspect it was a desire, on the behalf of D’Agata or The Believer editors or both, to have their cake and eat it. They wanted to be able to fudge the facts, but they didn’t want to diminish the impact they knew those facts would have on a reader who believed them to be true. Or maybe they wanted to start a controversy and get free press.

As for the article/essay distinction: I wasn’t conflating the two; I was saying they’re two species of nonfiction writing, both of which traffic in different sorts of facts. Lamb wrote before the advent of journalism as we know it — that is, he wrote essays more or less exclusively—but didn’t readers have a right to expect that he wasn’t making up new plot twists in his synopses of Shakespeare? Didion and Wallace both wrote many pieces in many magazines. Some of them were pieces of fiction, some were essays, and some were reported articles. Sure, their essays and their articles were different (though you’d surely admit the line is blurry), but I still say that, in both cases, readers thought they were reading something true. I can see how one could argue that the emphasis on facticity might vary from piece to piece; personally, I don’t care if Wallace actually had a diabolically skilled maid on his cruise ship, or if Didion’s headaches were really the perfect metaphor for the tumult of the sixties. But can you give me any reason why it’s “blasphemous” for me to assume that Joan Baez actually said those dumb things and Didion wrote them down? Is there some reason it’s naive of me to think that Wallace actually rode the Straight Talk Express? Can you honestly say it wouldn’t make a difference to you if those things never happened?

Sandra: I’m unclear, though, where you’re drawing the line here. D’Agata hasn’t put words in the proverbial Baez mouth; he hasn’t invented the proverbial McCain busride. As I think his discourse with Fingal animates, the sorts of details Fingal would have him change aren’t crucial as your examples were to their respective essays. To use your analogy (which, like the British-accented, non-Downs inner monologue used for Becky on Glee, I find to be so pathetic I do not know whether to be insulted or enraged by it), D'Agata isn’t gobbling down his fellow pot lucker’s dishes for the sake-of. He’s taken liberties he has for the sake of his prose, for the sake its art, for the sake of his project of having people recognize the artfulness of the essay.

Understandably, then, he gets upset when Fingal is so zealous in his desire to fuss and he may come off as you say “dickish.” And full disclosure: I know him well. (Met him twice you have, pish posh!) So I could sing lots of praises about John D’Agata the man (and his generosity, and his seriousness about this genre question) but who the fuck cares whether he is a dick in real life. What matters is whether he can write and yes, I didn’t mean to imply at all before that he’s not an amazing writer. (DFW agreed, called him “one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.”)

At risk of wasting the energies I should be pouring into proving that you are a fucking idiot on proving that someone else is, I do want to briefly address Laura Miller’s review of Lifespan of a Fact. In it, she accuses D’Agata’s authorial personae of being “preening and self-important”—to the extent that she found his work unreadable—but didn’t supply even a single example of what she found so off-putting. Her main point, though, is that fact checking abets rather than hinders writing: “Mostly, however, fact checking—not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it—makes you pay more attention to the world around you.” Is that assertion fact-checkable? No. It’s subjective experience reported as fact. Just one of the multitude of half-truths that exist all the time, and happily, in nonfictional prose. And of course it may; it’s a review and that’s the convention of a review. A review is distinct from an article. All D’Agata’s trying to do is point out that an essay is distinct from both. Miller ultimately sasses D’Agata’s “magic carpet ride of Art.” The essay can never be Art?  How does this woman who doesn’t believe in Art review books for a living? What would her bookshelves look like if we tossed out all works that intended to do so? What would they look like if we tossed out works by writers whose voices she found to be “self-important”?

As Lifespan of a Fact as a whole makes clear, what counts as a “fact” is often slippery. In publishing it, D’Agata is saying that rather than get bogged down in attempting to create some line where it cannot be drawn, let us change the conversation altogether. We should not fact-check the essay, he is saying, because the essay’s intent is not the same as the article’s. The article intends to inform. The essay, as a literary genre, intends to take us on a proverbial carpet ride. I’m fucking all about carpet rides. When he’s listing details about Las Vegas’s suicide rates, he does not intend to educate us. That he has altered details in service of the literary effect is therefore not reprehensible. And fortunately people interested in researching suicide in Las Vegas wouldn’t turn to The Believer for such information because it is a literary magazine (or something literary magazine-ish).

At one point Fingal reprimands D’Agata for having used his “imagination” (42) in his writing. Isn’t that what works of literature are, verbal constructs of the human imagination? As D’Agata states, “My job is not to re-create a world that already exits, holding up a mirror to the reader’s experience in hope that is rings true. If a mirror were a sufficient means of handling human experience, I doubt that our species wold have invented literature” (22). It almost seems like you’re arguing that just because this wrong hasn’t already been redressed he should not attempt to do what he is doing, and has been doing for many years. You’re arguing that he shouldn’t even try. Sí se puede.

Lamb wrote before journalism, you point out, as if this means the essay as Lamb or Montaigne wrote it was killed off by journalism’s rise; it wasn’t. It’s an old form, the essay, older than the novel, and, though struggling, surviving. As Virginia Woolf said, “but the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair.” And it’ll continue to be so so long as the likes of John D’Agata or John Jeremiah Sullivan continue writing it.

Andrew: You say Laura Miller “accuses D’Agata’s authorial personae of being ‘preening and self-important’...but didn’t supply even a single example of what she found so off-putting.” Firstly, and quibblingly, she actually uses “preening and self-important” to describe his persona in “What Happens There”; his voice in The Lifespan of a Fact she calls “dickish” (the very quasi-neologism I used, strangely) and “overblown.”

Secondly, and more importantly, you say Miller didn’t supply examples. I don’t know how to respond to that, other than: um, yes she did. Here’s one: D’Agata “grandstand[s] about how today’s readers don’t ‘have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,’ and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?)”

Then you accuse Miller—again, without evidence—of arguing that “the essay can never be Art.” I don’t see where you got that from. She never made that argument, explicitly or implicitly. Laura Miller does not think art is bad. She just thinks your boy is a bad artist.

I can’t be the first person to tell you this, Sandra, but you have a serious straw man problem. Every time you catch yourself typing a phrase like “as if this means...” or “it almost seems like you’re arguing that...” you should stop writing and start thinking. Do I think D’Agata should stop trying to write whatever he wants to write? Of course I don’t. Do I think the essay was killed off by journalism? I’m not even sure I know what that would mean. (Though I will admit that I am thrilled to see anyone refer to “journalism’s rise” in any context.) If you want to critique my views, please try to limit yourself to things I actually said. Or maybe you’re perpetrating some kind of exercise in performativity, trying to demonstrate (by making me “experience my experience” or whatever) how frustrating it is to live in a world without objectivity, where anything can be true just because someone says it is. If that was your goal, consider it accomplished. Now can we end the meta-debate and just have a standard debate, wherein we at least share a common set of assumptions and—yes—facts?

Let’s try to put all this article/journalism/essay squabbling to bed. For some reason, whenever the word “essay” comes up, members of your cult get all edgy and start babbling about etymology and Emerson. The distinction, as I see it, is really quite simple. A journalist is someone who, before writing a piece, goes out and observes or participates in something—a cocktail party, a series of interviews, a cricket match, a town. This is called reporting. The journalist’s observations about said thing then form the basis for her piece of writing. An essayist, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with her own thoughts and arguments; the content of her brain is the primary fodder in her “search for meaning,” as D’Agata puts it. I’ve pointed out already that the boundaries between genres are always porous. Every piece of writing, journalism very much included, is filtered through the brain of its creator, and a good article will contain, often explicitly, a writer’s thoughts and feelings. (At least, this is obviously true of articles in magazines like The Believer and The New Yorker; I would make the case that it is also true, to a lesser extent, of standard newspaper articles, but that’s a separate discussion.) Conversely, essay writers often use reporting to help them build their arguments. (You might not be familiar with this technique, Sandra, but writers of persuasive prose sometimes opt to use quotes, or observations, or something, to support their assertions.) A lot of pieces nowadays fall into a hybrid category that has been called the reported essay (some recent cover stories from New York magazine are good examples of the form).

You may dispute those definitions. (I mean, I’d prefer you didn’t, because I think we have more interesting things to talk about, but it’s a free country.) But using the words as I understand them, it is clear to me that “What Happens There” is a piece of journalism, regardless of what D’Agata calls it. He seems to have vested “essay” with all sorts of magical properties, as if printing that word at the top of his pages makes him a direct successor to Francis Bacon, whereas working under the “article” rubric would make him just another hack in a smoke-filled newsroom. But in what way is “What Happens There” more like an essay than it’s like a piece of narrative journalism? D’Agata was clearly moved to write the piece because he had ideas about adolescence, about Las Vegas, about suicide. He could have expounded those ideas essayistically — by spending most of his time citing suicide statistics, engaging with debates in social psychology, building an argument based on his own thoughts and book learnin’. That would have been an essay, in the Lamb/Emerson/DFW (sometimes) sense. Instead, D’Agata gave voice to his ideas about suicide by going to the Stratosphere, writing down what he found there, interviewing Levi Presley’s parents, and reconstructing the story of Levi’s death. This makes “What Happens There” a piece of journalism, plain and simple. And not even a particularly experimental one.

At bottom, I don’t see why these genre distinctions have to be contentious, or why they’re important at all. An essay can be made, start to finish, from inside a silent room; a piece of journalism cannot. Or, if you prefer, we could throw out my definitions and use yours, which seems to be, roughly: essay good, journalism bad. But I repeat: both articles and essays are supposed (by most humans, at least) to be made up of things that are not demonstrably false. You called one of Miller’s statements non-fact-checkable, and you’re right. Of course not every sentence is fact-checkable. But some of them are. So, whether it’s a fact you looked up in a book or something you witnessed and wrote down in a notebook, why not try to verify it? You might fail, but why not try? I find it strange that you, who would seem to be a proponent of innovation and genre-bending, are so stuck on dichotomies. Journalism “intends to inform.” Essays are Art. One is low and common, the other high and profound. Isn’t it old-fashioned to care so much about categories? Why can’t a piece of writing be informative, entertaining and beautiful all at once?

After all this, our central question remains unanswered: why does D’Agata believe his intention to make Art absolves him of the responsibility to strive for accuracy? Maybe I’m dense, but I cannot understand why the rhythm of “thirty-one” strip clubs is better than “thirty-four,” nor why an authorial voice that makes unsubstantiated generalizations about Koreans is preferable to one that does not. D’Agata’s only self-justification that makes the slightest bit of sense to me comes at the end of the book, when he writes, “I’d say one of art’s jobs is to incite shit storms.” It’s one of the only times that D’Agata drops his disingenuous pose (Why is this fact-checker even bothering to write to me?) and comes closer to the truth: that he’s chosen to eschew the fact-checking process in order to piss people off. If that’s his thing, fair enough. As Fingal says, “the inner punk in me” thinks that’s kind of badass. But the writer in me thinks it’s a cheap trick.

Your first point is a good one: I don’t know where to draw these lines. I think some facts are more urgently in need of checking than others, and I think Fingal is sometimes way more zealous than he needs to be (though I suspect this was by mutual design, and for comic effect; I’d be surprised if Fingal didn’t use book advance money to fund his trip to Vegas). I agree with you that some details are crucial, while others are peripheral. I’d rather have D’Agata change “Vegas Lights” to “Vegas Candle” than have him get his main character’s gender wrong. But is any detail so unimportant that its truth value is of absolutely no consequence? Is the “Vegas Lights” detail so peripheral that the writer may simply alter it to suit his needs (in this case, the need to make a stupid pun)? This is a narrow question, but it leads to a very broad one, namely: why do nonfiction writers bother to stick to facts? D’Agata mocks those who “[pretend] that nonfiction writers have a mystically different relationship with ‘The Truth’ than any other kind of writer.” But empirically speaking, D’Agata is the one assigning himself a special relationship. The vast majority of reporters behave more humbly: we limit ourselves to what we’ve seen and heard, whether it mangles our puns or not. In some cases, the benefits of this approach are obvious. As a person, I don’t want to be embarrassed, or sued. As a writer, I want my readers to know that I’ve worked over my words, both their form and their content; being wrong about my main character’s gender would undermine my authority. But in the more peripheral cases, the cases where no one is likely to notice or care, the attachment to The Truth is less easily explicable. Why should I cling to “Vegas Lights” simply because that’s what I wrote in my notes? I could mount a whole bunch of arguments, but ultimately, I don’t really know. I only know that when I go somewhere as a reporter, my attitude toward the things I see and hear there is damn near reverential. Later, when I turn my experiences into a piece of writing, I’m not going to write about what I wish I had seen, or about what one might think I would have seen. I’m going to do my best to write about what happened there.

Sandra: Oh that in nearly the same breath with which you accused me of having a Straw Man problem, you had not included one yourself: “Or, if you prefer, we could throw out my definitions and use yours, which seems to be, roughly: essay good, journalism bad.” Not only did I not write “essay good, journalism bad,” I don’t think it. If you wanted to get “Succinctly Speaking” about it: my point is “essay thing, journalism other thing.” One intends to be Art, the other intends to inform. Most essays also inform, and journalism can certainly be artful. I don’t follow why distinguishing between the two is an “old-fashioned” thing to do; persons like yourself don’t seem to grasp the difference.

I agree that “An essay can be made, start to finish, from inside a silent room; a piece of journalism cannot.” (Look I used a quote to substantiate my claim! Just like I did in my previous response! You can distinguish when I did in fact quote something by noting the presence of quotation marks, which look like this “ ”) In your opinion, though, if an essayist leaves her room and does reporting—attends cocktail parties and cricket matches, and I’m just interpolating, but yachting regattas, dog and pony shows and philharmonic benefit galas as well—she cannot then write an essay about it? She cannot write a work of literary prose wherein “the content of her brain is the primary fodder in her ‘search for meaning’’”? Why not exactly? On that logic, if I use reporting techniques and then write a poem from what I’ve learned, I can’t call what I’ve written “a poem” because the fact of having done reporting somehow interferes with my intention to create a literary work. That’s bogus, obviously, as is your calling D’Agata’s essay “journalism.” It’s not journalism because it’s an essay.

In answer to the remaining central question you asked: members of your cult seem to think there’s only one sort of accuracy. D’Agata’s essay is certainly experimental because of its large reliance upon techniques that resemble journalistic ones and yet its ultimate fidelity to essayistic or artistic accuracy above factual accuracy. You may not hear the benefit of “thirty-one” and “thirty-four”. You, like Miller, might just not see the Art in D’Agata’s work—that’s fine; that’s a matter of taste and has nothing to do with this debate about whether or not we should fact-check essays. D’Agata’s point is that it’s the domain of the essayist to switch “thirty-one” for “thirty-four” if that’s what he feels makes the art better; in the land of art the artist is king. People who conflate journalism and the essay subject essayists, who are artists, to fact-checking, and this distinction needs to be made so that quibbling about factual accuracy doesn’t hold-up the publication of good work like D’Agata’s. That, I believe, is D’Agata’s very not “cheap” intent in stirring up some shit.

I realize I am arguing in vain. You won’t be persuaded to see things my way. I likewise will never agree with you. Perhaps we should just agree that the other is a fucking idiot and end this thing? I’ll go back to my carpet riding and you to your cubicle?

Andrew: But Sandra, I don’t work in a cubicle. I work in a knarr, or what you would call a Viking merchant ship. You might look at my workspace, see three low partitions and a fold-up desk and an absence of rigging, and think: cubicle. It’s a totally understandable confusion, because the shipwrights who built my knarr relied upon techniques that resemble cubiclistic ones. But, you see, I decided long ago, based on my highly selective reading of Norse epics, that journalism isn’t really a kind of writing. It’s more like a mode of conveyance, allowing readers to travel mentally where they are unable to go in the flesh. (Have you ever noticed that the word “journalism” sounds suspiciously like the word “journey,” and nothing at all like the word “cubicle”? Or did you think that was a coincidence?) I’ve made my views clear for many years now, and yet you wouldn’t believe how many people still say stupid things like “You’re not allowed to install oar locks in your cubicle,” or “Fine, go ahead and refer to your piece as a Meginhufr, I guess, but I still need it by Thursday,” or “Stop pillaging your office mates.” Some people will never learn, I guess. But I just go on trying to be the best captain I can be. Someone has to deliver the walrus pelts on time.

Sandra: Now I don’t have the perfect memory faculties of, say, a journalist, but did I catch you babbling about etymology at some point back there? (Amidst whatever that was...was it intended to be funny?) In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Sandra is awesome.”