Have you ever been misquoted in a newspaper article or blog post? It's very annoying. I try to quote only what I hear or clearly remember in my circus blogs, but still get complaints from an occasional person that I have misquoted them completely. Believe me, it's never intentional. Still, in the interests of fair play, I hereby present an article about me that is full of misquotes and even made up information -- when I initially read it I was livid with wrath and intended to sue the reporter. But now I've mellowed out -- after all, as P.T. Barnum said, why should I care what they write about me as long as they spell my name correctly!
It's from the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper, by a reporter who goes by the initials C.J. That should have been a dead giveaway that the telephone interview she was doing with me was going to be more fantasy than fact. It's why I refuse to do any more telephone interviews today. They're too easy to embroider according the reporter's agenda.
Poet and retired clown Tim Torkildson has gotten revenge on me via the NY Times.
“You came down to Nicollet Mall when I was working there as a clown and you did a video of me, about five or six years ago,” Torkildson refreshed my memory Tuesday. “After that I decided, ‘I’ll just send her everything I do.’ I did flood you with poetry and most of it was bad, so I don’t blame you for e-mailing me back, saying, Please stop.”
NY Times business reporter Rachel Abrams handled Torkildson’s poetry in a different manner.
“I sent her several over the past couple of years. Finally she e-mailed me back: Why do you do this? What is your purpose? I e-mailed her, ‘This is what I do. This is who I am.’ We arranged a telephone conversation. I explained, I’m semiretired right now and love reading newspapers. I’m obsessed with poetry. I write a lot of it and it’s always based on a story from a newspaper or magazine. When something tickles my funny bone or outrages me I’ll write about it.”
In Monday’s NYT, Abrams wrote about Torkildson, in a little behind-the-scenes feature, citing this one:
I eat magnets all the time:
the reason ain’t redactive.
If I eat enough of ’em
I’m sure to be attractive.
(Abrams declined my attempts to fact-check but condescended to note, via e-mail: “Just so you’re aware, we don’t intend to write anything else about him.”)
Torkildson taunted me via e-mail Tuesday: “Now my poetic work is being recognized in the New York Times. My revenge is to share that article link with you today. (nyti.ms/1A8ewEQ)”
By phone I told Torkildson that he was not the first reader whose poetry I had discouraged but that I had always intended to get back to him, to follow up on an e-mail he sent about how my video landed him a job in Asia.
“I sent the link [of the video] to all my friends. One of them lived in Thailand and he was concerned that I was reduced to panhandling as a circus clown to get some money together. He talked to a friend of his who owned an English school. I spent the next four years teaching English in Thailand. It was a great part of my life.”
Osteoarthritis, which has the Roseville resident wintering in Utah, brought Torkildson’s clown days to an end. That just means more time for poetry, and, since Torkildson owes me, I gave him assignments for two upcoming interviews: with a clown and a poet.
(The original article can be seen here.)
If you'd like to read another example of a reporter's hatchet job on me and the truth, try this one from the Glasgow Daily Times:
http://bit.ly/2rrH4kx
