Over the years, people have occasionally asked me why I’ve never left Louisville to try and make it as a writer in New York. Or maybe they were just asking me to leave Louisville. I forget.
There are a couple of reasons. Foremost is that Pabst Blue Ribbon in a can costs like $6 in New York, and they drink it ironically. You drink PBR to get drunk, and if you pay more than a $1.50 you’re a chump.
A close second are stories like the one that emerged this week about Jonah Lehrer, a star writer at The New Yorker who resigned amid revelations published in Tablet magazine that he fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” One way it apparently works is to make up quotes.
According to the New York Times, Lehrer was already in hot water for borrowing from himself, recycling old stories from other publications and posting them on his New Yorker blog. Assuming that Lehrer isn’t mentally unhinged, I wonder if he succumbed to the kind of competitive big-market pressure that defines an unproductive day as abject laziness.
Lehrer, 31, responded to the initial allegations with an escalation of lies that led to his resignation. He has apologized but offered no further explanation for why he tried to put words in the mouth of someone whose every word has been scrutinized for 50 years.
I sent Bob a text asking for a comment and his reply was, “Some days you get the tarantula, some days the tarantula gets you. But don’t quote me on that. Adjust skidding. lol.”
I think that last part was auto-correct for “just kidding.”