Calvin Trillin spoke at Stanford the other day and, once again, proved that he should do more Benchley stuff like giving funny speeches and acting in plays and short subjects, not just going to restaurants and writing. The Stanford Report reports:

Facts are messy and inconvenient, and nonfiction writers are obliged not to clean them up, writer Calvin Trillin said in a campus conversation last week that touched on topics as diverse as the ethics of nonfiction writing, barbecued mutton in Owensboro, Ky., the deployment of National Guard troops in Iraq and the writer's childhood dog.
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Trillin was interviewed at Stanford by Alan Acosta, associate vice president and director of University Communications. Acosta, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a former editor at the Los Angeles Times, had spoken with Trillin before, Acosta reminded the writer. In the 1980s, Acosta had been Trillin's waiter at a restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York City, where Trillin resides. ("You spilled the soup," Trillin deadpanned.
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Trillin also addressed the recent debate over memoirs, including James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which was marketed as a memoir but contains fictionalized accounts of events. "Now, in order to write a memoir in the U.S. that will sell and will show your redemption, it has to be pretty horrible. This kid was a middle-class druggie—they're a dime a dozen," Trillin said. "I was in jail longer than that kid."