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"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything," says Homer Simpson. "14% of people know that."

What Homer's getting at is my long-held belief that facts are overrated. They hinder the imagination, lead to games of trivial one-ups-manship, and they smell bad. I came to this conclusion over a series of internships - Soft Skull Press in Brooklyn, The Rake and The Onion here - all of which consisted of a good amount of fact-checking. Fact-checking sucks. And I'm not good at it. Maybe I don't care enough about details. Maybe because when I make phone calls to verify something I tense up and can't remember what information I'm trying to find out. And then all of a sudden my t-shirt is wet in the underarms. I'm telling you: facts smell bad.

For those who don't know about the practice and for some reason want to, John McPhee's "Checkpoints" in the current New Yorker provides a pretty decent history of fact-checking, what it entails, and why it blows so hard. Quoting from one of the magazine's former checkers:

"Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checkers imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick."

Reading that sentence gave me flashbacks to the "So Little Time" section of The Rake, for which one had to verify not just the dates and times of shows, but correct spellings of all the bandmembers' names, the band names, venues, and so on. Also we had to make sure the punctuation was correct - commas inside or outside quotes; words capitalized or lower-case after a colon. I imagine that checking a 150-word blurb about how Weezer was coming to town took about as much time as their actual set on stage. More than a couple times I somehow switched correct information to wrong information, I'm not sure how or why. To my former editors: I'm sorry.

Maybe it's something every writer should do, though, the way that all servers and bartenders agree that everyone should spend three months waiting tables, to know what it's like. Just sayin'.

McPhee's article is interesting not just for it's throwaway jokes - "A-Rod makes an occasional error, and so does The New Yorker"; "When I first worked at Time - in the year 957, during the reign of Eadwig the All-Fair..." - but because it's a glimpse behind-the-scenes, and in this age of reality TV and paparazzi and etc. etc. we all like a little voyeurism.

Magazines, we learn, often have fantastically anal-retentive fact-checking departments, whose members eat crap from authors and poop out legitimate information. Book publishers, on the other hand, usually leave it up to the author. "If material that has appeared in a fact-checked magazine reappears in a book, the author is not the only beneficiary of the checker's work. The book publisher has won a free ticket to factual respectability."  

So let's spend a minute with James Frey. Ready: go! Okay. So now we see why so many memoirs have turned out to be fictional. Which led perhaps to Chris Offut's fantastic definition of Creative Nonfiction: "Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir."

Which leads to Chris Offut's fantastic definition of Memoir: "From the Latin memoria, meaning "memory," a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer's parents for his current psychological challenges."

(Thanks, Jodi, of MNReads, for the link)

My last mini-anecdote: I work with a guy, Mike, who hates literature. Mike wants to be an English teacher. I'm still trying to figure this out. When the restaurant is slow, we have quiet arguments about whether or not fiction is valid. He refers to novels as 'just some shit that some guy made up.' Technically - if someone were to fact-check that statement - it might not be wrong. But I believe in something like the power of possibility. So I leave all y'all with two quotes:

From Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time:

"Each history in the sum over histories will describe not only the space-time, but everything in it as well, including any complicated organisms like human beings who can observe the history of the universe...If all histories are possible, then so long as we exist in one of the histories, we may [be able to] explain why the universe is found to be the way it is. Exactly what meaning can be attached to other histories, in which we do not exist, is not clear."

From Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities:

"So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach n o more importance to what is than to what is not."

Bladao.