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Thursday, January 20
Scrapbook
- The Morning News announces "The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books Champion."
- Rushdie is again confirmed to be a mahdour al-damm mortad. In case you can't tell, that's a bad thing.
- Birnbaum chats with Russell Banks, author of, most recently, The Darling.
- Dartmouth prof researches Amazon.com's customer reviews, "a virtually untapped wealth of information" providing "insight into what shapes opinions and cultural preferences." (Insight no.1: a wide spread of ratings suggests a high 'index of controversiality.' So far, I'm unimpressed.)
Uncurious George and Other Non-Classics
Blue State or
Red State,
Aged Five Years
Or Two,
Your Parents' Party
Has the Right Book
For You.
Ypulse has the details:
Red State,
Aged Five Years
Or Two,
Your Parents' Party
Has the Right Book
For You.
Ypulse has the details:
- One new book is titled Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! It tells the fictional tale of two boys who try to run a lemonade stand, while liberals keep showing up, taking half their money in taxes, and forcing them to remove the photo of Jesus that hangs on the stand.
- A left-leaning children's book No, George, No! depicts a "Truth Fairy" showing a cartoon Mr. Bush the errors of his ways on issues from the Iraq war to the environment. The book is designed to teach children "to be people of integrity, unlike our president."
Judging Covers, Covered
The Chicago Tribune's recent profile of Jessa "Bookslut" Crispin included a little addendum by the name of "Crispin's guide to judging a book by its cover," which boiled down to this: if it looks good, it is good. "It seems like the more attractive it is, the more edited it was, the more people cared about the book. Someone was paying attention to it."
Sometimes, though, things just don't go that way. From the Telegraph's review of The Pope's Daughter by Caroline P. Murphy:
Sometimes, though, things just don't go that way. From the Telegraph's review of The Pope's Daughter by Caroline P. Murphy:
Alas, she has reposed too much trust in her publishers, Faber, who do not appear to have used a spell-checker, let alone a proof-reader; the caption to a crucial painting makes a nonsense of Murphy's painstaking analysis of it, and she is saddled with a dust-jacket worthy of a romance by Jean Plaidy.
Normally these criticisms would fall into the traditional category of minor quibbles; but The Pope's Daughter is a masterpiece and deserves better.
Paris Review ousts editor Brigid Hughes
"Her contract expires March 31 and we will not renew it," said Thomas Guinzburg, president of the magazine's board of directors. Guinzburg declined Wednesday to offer specific reasons for not retaining Hughes, but expressed general concern about the Paris Review's future, saying it needed more subscribers and a more businesslike approach.Later in the USA Today article, Guinzburg adds that the magazine's finances are "solid," but that "the informal managerial style under which the Paris Review long operated no longer works."
He continues: "We've always counted on word of mouth, the whole Plimptonian style, but we'd like to get things under solid management."
Does Dan Wickett sleep? Eat? Do anything but update EWF?
Wickett's newest addition to the Emerging Writers Forum is a panel-style interview with "founders, editors and managing editors of 8 Literary Journals of varying age and size."
Wickett comments, "As a great deal of fiction writers, poets, and creative non-fiction writers get their initial exposure to the public from these types of journals, I thought I'd see if some wouldn't be willing to open up to their thoughts on various processes in the publishing world." On that note, here's Kyle Minor, the editor of Frostproof, on some new writers to start looking out for:
Wickett comments, "As a great deal of fiction writers, poets, and creative non-fiction writers get their initial exposure to the public from these types of journals, I thought I'd see if some wouldn't be willing to open up to their thoughts on various processes in the publishing world." On that note, here's Kyle Minor, the editor of Frostproof, on some new writers to start looking out for:
Newcomers we've published from the slush include Kevin Wilson, Benjamin Percy, and Liz Mandrell, all of whom are likely to become known as major short story writers in the next five years. Since we first accepted Kevin Wilson's short story "Tunneling to the Center of the Earth", his work has appeared in One Story, Carolina Quarterly, and Ploughshares, and has been accepted for the forthcoming edition of Best New Stories from the South. Since we first accepted Benjamin Percy's "The Indian Way", he has won the Idaho Review Prize for Fiction and had work appear in too many journals to mention here. Frostproof Review was not the cause of these things, but we were fortunate enough to watch the extraordinary rise of these writers, and to play our own small part. Good work rises to the top.
Bissell and the ULA, Part II
[Read Part I]
Reviewing the email I received on Tuesday from King ("née "Karl") Wenclas, the ULA's Publicity Director, I blame myself, again, for not reading Wenclas's words more carefully.
Wenclas's original email read,
Having now had the chance (and ability) to read and reread Wenclas's allegations, it's clear that Bissell's alleged plagiarism amounts to one semi-filched sentence, not seven. (The sole allegation-worthy sentence is also Wenclas's first example.) The other examples consist of Soviet maxims, anecdotes, and jokes; Bissell, in other words, is guilty of having read some research.
As for the ULA's guilt: If Wenclas really wanted to know whether his allegations were "unfair," he should have mentioned the reason the ULA had taken such an interest in Bissell -- because, while I shouldn't need a reason to read any blog post carefully, an omission that large makes Wenclas's interest in fairness seem disingenuous.
In retrospect, I also consider the omission perversely confessional; while one can review allegations of plagiarism without knowing the motivation behind them, the fairness of an allegation is factual, while the fairness of a motivation is moral. An unfair motivation is different from an unfair allegation but also, somehow, worse. And I think the ULA knew that if it revealed its motivations, Bissell's (already quite trivial) plagiarism would pale in comparison.
(Here's a caveat, though: if the ULA were to use Bissell's "plagiarism" to illustrate how points Bissell made in The Believer were wrong-headed, the ULA's motivations might seem more appropriate. But the ULA doesn't even explain why plagiarism is "bad," and, in light of essays like this one by Malcolm Gladwell, conservative ideas about plagiarism are becoming less convincing.)
Related Reading:
Wenclas "outs" the bloggers who haven't posted about "Bissellgate."
Thoughts on the ULA from The Reading Experience
GC's September posting re: the ULA
Reviewing the email I received on Tuesday from King ("née "Karl") Wenclas, the ULA's Publicity Director, I blame myself, again, for not reading Wenclas's words more carefully.
Wenclas's original email read,
As a check on whether I'm being unfair to Tom Bissell, I've posted examples of his alleged plagiarism on my www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com blog (also can be accessed via www.literaryrevolution.com).Unfortunately, instead of offering Wenclas my opinion, I excerpted his post and breezily commented that the ULA might have suddenly acquired some sense-making abilities. Moreover (as in, more unfortunately), my comment was only based on reading the post's first example of "plagiarism" and trying to read -- but, eventually, only skimming -- the post's seven other examples. I'd been up the night before coughing, still recovering from the flu, and -- in retrospect -- chose to report Wenclas's accusations based on a series of not-very-good criteria.
I'm asking leading bloggers, editors, and other literary folk for public comments about what I've posted. I'd like them to tell me if I'm off base.
Thank you in advance for your input.
-Karl "King" Wenclas, Underground Literary Alliance.
Having now had the chance (and ability) to read and reread Wenclas's allegations, it's clear that Bissell's alleged plagiarism amounts to one semi-filched sentence, not seven. (The sole allegation-worthy sentence is also Wenclas's first example.) The other examples consist of Soviet maxims, anecdotes, and jokes; Bissell, in other words, is guilty of having read some research.
As for the ULA's guilt: If Wenclas really wanted to know whether his allegations were "unfair," he should have mentioned the reason the ULA had taken such an interest in Bissell -- because, while I shouldn't need a reason to read any blog post carefully, an omission that large makes Wenclas's interest in fairness seem disingenuous.
In retrospect, I also consider the omission perversely confessional; while one can review allegations of plagiarism without knowing the motivation behind them, the fairness of an allegation is factual, while the fairness of a motivation is moral. An unfair motivation is different from an unfair allegation but also, somehow, worse. And I think the ULA knew that if it revealed its motivations, Bissell's (already quite trivial) plagiarism would pale in comparison.
(Here's a caveat, though: if the ULA were to use Bissell's "plagiarism" to illustrate how points Bissell made in The Believer were wrong-headed, the ULA's motivations might seem more appropriate. But the ULA doesn't even explain why plagiarism is "bad," and, in light of essays like this one by Malcolm Gladwell, conservative ideas about plagiarism are becoming less convincing.)
Related Reading:
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