Perhaps, like me, you’ve heard about Claire Hoffman’s “interview”:http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_hoffman?yrail with Prince in last week’s Talk of the Town, even if you haven’t read it yet. The one where, tapping a Bible, he’s “all”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/punctuation-update-new-yorker.php, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ” (Okay, now I’ve read it, to get the real quote.)
Feel free to keep it meta with this “interview”:http://www.brianmpalmer.com/clairehoffman.html of Hoffman by Brian Palmer, a rangy discussion of Hoffman’s techniques and the journalists she counts as influences, at _The New Yorker_ and elswehere. About her Prince interview, she reveals that he “wouldn’t let me use a tape recorder or my notepad. I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don’t have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff.” (Wow. I interviewed someone on the phone last night _with_ a notepad, and I’m not sure it will yield a chunk as long as the quote above.)
This revelation of Prince’s tape-recorder prohibition puts a new angle on the claim, reported by “Perez Hilton”:http://perezhilton.com/2008-11-17-prince-was-misquoted-the-singers-camp-claims, by “Prince insiders” who say that Prince was misquoted and point to the fact that Hoffman…didn’t record the interview.
Now, if I was doing this right, I’d interview Palmer, and then maybe someone would interview me….