The Handicapper Kevin Depew Home

1/30/2006
My Memoir: A Cautionary tale of a certain type (Was: Publishers say fact-checking too costly)

My name is Sergei Alighieri(1) and I am a career criminal(2). You perhaps find the nonchalant delivery of this statement shocking(3). But it is, nonetheless(4), the truth(5). We each do what we can in this life(6). As fate(7) would have it, my career found me, and I gladly embraced her hand as she(8) led me to the prison cell(9) from which I now write.

Editor’s Notes:

(1) According to documents and materials uncovered in a routine editorial background check conducted just moments before publication, we have discovered that the author of this memoir, Sergei Alighieri, is actually a 26-year-old Kinko’s Manager from Columbus, OH named Steve Carrington.

(2) Official court records suggest that Mr. Alighieri (actually, Mr. Carrington) is not a “career criminal” in the full sense of the phrase, if by “career criminal” one means “having spent a career as a criminal,” including, but not limited to, proof of multiple arrests as the result of same said career, and as a broad indication of proof of criminal activity. He was, however, once arrested for public intoxication following an Ohio State – Michigan football game in which police records indicate he made an obscene gesture to a stadium security guard before falling through the bleachers and injuring his ankle.

(3) Presumably, “shocking”, as used here, is the author’s psychological projection upon the unnamed reader and not a statement of fact related to the actual feelings the reader may or may not said to be experiencing by virtue of the reading of this book, although “reading” is in our view an implicit contract between the author Serg... Steven Carrington, and you, hereafter referred to as “reader”, and we reserve the right to said feelings as they relate to the text in a positive manner, and accordingly all financial proceeds attributable thereof.

(4) Actually, it is not “nonetheless” at all, more like “not even remotely.” We regret this small oversight.

(5) OK, look. It’s just the third sentence. Give us a break. Ever head of the phrase “suspension of disbelief”?

(6) Does the word “life” here connote, specifically, reality, or is it a metaphor? And if it is a metaphor, then couldn’t this entire “memoir” be in some sense a portrait of the isolation and detachment so many of us feel in this cacophonous age of industrial speed and technology?(1A)

(7) Fate – literally, the author’s imagination.

(8) She – see also, without irony, my mom.

(9) Due to advancements in criminal justice technology, and the increasing popularity of home incarceration as a tool for sentencing, we have determined though editorial judgment that “prison cell” can indeed be used here without a qualifier.

Editor’s editor’s notes: (1A) After careful reading, we have determined that this footnote was largely plagiarized from a book called“Postmodernity: the Age of Dissonance,” by Robert Bart, published in 1972.

Kevin Depew is an editor at www.minyanville.com in New York City. In a previous life in Kentucky, he was a handicapper at the Daily Racing Form. In 2004, he gave up gambling on horses for a living in the stock market. "I still pursue the sport rigorously because in many ways it precedes the stock market in majesty, awfulness, despair, grandeur, indecency, scam artistry, forgery, disillusionment, profits, loss, deception and flattery. Or maybe, being a native Kentuckian, it simply precedes the stock market in the way it speaks to my heart and my ability to comprehend such things."e;