The great Authenticity Hoax paperback giveaway

Hey! The Authenticity Hoax came out in paperback this week in the USA and Canada. They are identical, except that the USA edition has a fancy new subtitle. It's also my birthday. So to celebrate, I'm giving away five copies of the book: Two in Canada, two in the USA, and one to someone from a third country.

How to win?

Well, you might have noticed that things have been a bit quiet on this blog. Partly it's because we just had a federal election here in Canada, and I spent a great deal of blogging and writing energy on politics, most of which ended up on my blog at Maclean's magazine. I also started an Authenticity Hoax tumblr, which has become a repository for a lot of the pics, quotes, links, and other miscellany. It's probably a bad idea to split the readers' attention like this, but I thought I'd try it out.

At any rate, the upshot is that I haven't been doing much of the long-form stuff I want to do here. So here's where you, the dear and the gentle, come in. Send me an idea for something I should blog about -- a link, a picture, a book, a band. If I use it, you get a copy of my book. Easy peasy.

So let's have it. What's got your authenticity hoaxed?

email: jandrewpotter@gmail.com

twitter: @jandrewpotter

Contest Winner!

So I had a contest inviting people to submit pictures, links, stories, anecdotes or anything else that reeks of the authenticity hoax. I got lots of great submissions and it was hard deciding on the winner. But here goes:

Third place: Roger Collier  sent me a link to a story in the New York Times (where else?).  "The piece," Roger writes,  "is about reality TV contestants and how some, like American Idol singers, can be open about their ambitions (to be famous) while others, like Bachelor competitors, must surpress their ambitions (to be famous) and pretend to be looking for "love."":

Unlike contestants on Fox's American Idol, who openly express a desire to be pop stars, people who advance on “The Bachelor” have to dissemble their ambitions. They must pull off an acting trick, akin to one required of contestants on the old find-the-liar game show “To Tell the Truth.” They’re not on this reality show to promote themselves, which they must agree (or risk banishment) is despicable; they’re on the show to “find love,” which they must earnestly profess (or risk banishment) is noble. This demand on the players brings to mind Abigail Cheever’s fascinating new book, “Real Phonies,” about the American drama of personal authenticity.

Second place: Sean Stockholm sent this great video for Fender "Road Worn" guitars. Why play and tour for forty years to get your guitar looking and feeling distressed and broken in? Fender will add "authentic aging to the hardware" to make it look like all you weekend rockers out there look like you've been kicking out the jams since the sixties.

First place: Ultimately, no one could beat Edward Behr's argument in Salon about the need for something to replace "organic" as a way of defining quality in agriculture, in a way that can't be co-opted by corporations. He suggests -- get this -- the label, "authentic". How do you guarantee authenticity? "To have an "authentic" label, food would have to be sold directly by the person or family who grew it -- no middleman."

Where to begin? You could write a whole book about how brainless this is. A free copy of The Authenticity Hoax goes to Peter Snyder, who sent me the link. Thanks to everyone who sent me stuff, sorry if I haven't had a chance to properly reply yet.

Win a copy of The Authenticity Hoax

Time for a contest, I think. Inspired by Authentic Dining Week -- and especially by the use of the prefix "pre" as the definitive marker of the authentic -- I'm asking readers to send me authenticity-items that best exemplify or reflect the themes in the book. It can be from any realm of the culture -- art, music, politics, teh Internets -- and it can be on any of the main aspects of the authenticity hoax, viz: conspicuous authenticity, dopey nostalgia, reactionary politics, you name it. Send pictures, links, quotations, stories, anecdotes or whatever to me: jandrewpotter at gmail.com

I'll post the best entries here and give out a few books to the best ones.