Our next series of 10 Questions delves deeply into the realm of half-truth and wildly imaginative history with John Hodgman, curator and host of “The Little Gray Book Lectures,” a monthly colloquium of readings, songs, and dubious scholarship. His book The Areas of My Expertise continues his work in dubious scholarship.

Areas of My Expertise

P&P: Do you really know all the stuff in your book or did you "borrow" some of your "facts" and "chapters" from Stephen E. Ambrose?

JH: I confess that I did occasionally turn to sources outside my own brain while writing my book. THE PEOPLES ALMANAC had a large section on Utopias that influenced my own (although they strangely elided all mention of Panasonic Farm, the Iowan community of religious anachronists famous for their handcrafted wooden air conditioners. I have corrected this error). 1885's WORLD OF WISDOM proved instructive in diseases of the horse, while my "55 Dramatic Situations" is an improvement upon cataloguist Georges Polti's "36 Dramatic Situations (by some 52%).

But to answer your question about Ambrose, let me just point this out, from the very first page of BAND OF BROTHERS:

"The men of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, US Army, came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country. They were farmers and coal miners, mountain men, and sons of the Deep South,,,, One came from Harvard, one from Yale, a couple from USCLA. They were citizen soldiers. And they all had hobo nicknames. Here is a list of 700 of them."

Now who is ripping off whom here?

P&P: How were you able to condense so much knowledge into one book?  Was it through the use of some machine?  How can I get this machine?

JH: We have a technique called a "Fictive Triple Layering Process" by which one level of fake trivia is grafted to the page via application of high heat, and then joined to a layer of true trivia, and then overlaid again with a semi-transparent layer of fake trivia, all bound together with two conducting layers of molybdenum film. These three interactive layers of truth and falsehood allow the book to contain, paradoxically, more truth than those one layer books that are merely factual. And also those books tend to be made out of vinyl, which warps and chips easily.

You can have the machine if you pay to have it carted away.

P&P: Who are your favorite scholars, dubious or otherwise?

JH: Harold Bloom, Robert Farris Thompson, Irving Wallace/Amy Wallace/David Wallenchinsky, Jonathan Coulton, Dr. Bronner.

P&P: Do you ever wake up wishing you had been born Jorge Luis Borges?

JH: I am glad to say that I am sufficiently happy as a writer, husband, and father in New York City that I have escaped that common male fantasy of wishing I was an elderly blind man in Argentina. However, I am certainly an admirer of his work, and I should probably have put him up in the dubious scholar category. Take out Coulton and put him in instead.

P&P: I, like 65% of Americans, own a copy of How to Write a Best-Selling Novel in Two Weeks.  After 33 rejections of David's Choice in the Time of Cholera, I'm beginning to question the merits of this book.  Maybe you could offer some advice.  Of the fifty-five dramatic situations you list in your chapter "How to Write a Book," which is most likely to produce the Great American Novel?

JH: The story of America is the story of exploration and the wild, so I would suggest something from the "Man v. Nature" category, such as "Wilderness becomes crucible in which asthmatic learns to grow a beard"

But keep that title. It's awesome.

P&P: Let's talk about hobos.  Did you feel you had a social responsibility to educate Americans about their hobo history and the hobo government that almost was?  What I mean is, was this book a moral act?

JH: My book is a history of the half-forgotten facts that everyone already knows, but which history glosses over to the point of it all seeming to be a dream: that our presidents belong to secret fraternities; that Yale University was the birthplace of the Submarine; that our nation was crossed by 2 million hoboes who truly were seen as a serious destabilizing threat to America's landed way of life. My book merely reminds readers of these actual facts, and then takes advantage of their poor memory of them to tell jokes and write stories that resonate, I hope, with a different but equal kind of truth. In other words: it puts the hooks on the presidents' hands.

P&P: Who would make a better President?  Hombre Lobo, the hobo "Medicated Shampoo" Jonah Jump, or the eponymous Ampere Angstrom Alfredo Sauce?

JH: It is futile to comment on their suitability. They all would fail. Hombre Lobo is a northeast liberal. Ampere Angstrom Alfredo Sauce is simultaneously too ethnic and too sciencey for mainstream America. And "Medicated Shampoo" Jonah Jump has lice.

P&P: The Mall of America was one of those places Americans flocked to after 9-11 as a national symbol, providing catharsis and nachos.  I found no mention of this in your chapter "Secrets of the Mall of America," a glaring omission.  Please respond.

JH: My comment on the Mall's self-congratulatory 9-11 fetishism comes on page 68. Sorry for the confusion.

Editor’s note: The following passage was excerpted from pp.67-68.

Day 6

My last interview is with a Minnesota woman who just opened a pastry shop using her grandmother’s original cheesecake recipe. Her store is called Granny’s Squeezecakes.

I ask her if she’s tried the deep-fried cheesecake on a stick the Egyptians serve at Minnesota Picnic. She just smiles in an ominous way that makes me think she knows their days are numbered, and soon she will be cheesecake queen.

“Working in the mall is a little nerve-wracking,” she confides, “because as the largest mall in the United States, we are a prime target for terrorism.”

P&P: Have you received many responses from the people of Hohoq regarding your entry on their great state?

JH: I have received via my post office box (PO Box 1618, Cathedral Station, NYC, NY) one very nice post card, but it was from Binghamton, NY. But who knows? As the 51st State called Hohoq is a great plateau that moves mysteriously across the continent, it could be anywhere.

P&P: Softball final question: Are you a dog person or a cat person?

JH: Insert author photo here. It should answer this question, and perhaps many more.

I thank you.

That is all.