Joyce Carol Oates award shortlist (I can’t imagine having an award named after you while you’re still alive…. it’s like they’re rushing you out the door);
You know, when I was running this damn thing from 2003 – 2011, posting about Oprah and her army of unblinking terracotta warriors (aka viewers/readers) at least weekly, I used to look wistfully to a future in which I’d be free of this nonsense. Sadly, children, life doesn’t always work out the way you dream.
Like it or not, she holds the delicate testicles of the publishing industry in the vice-grip of her lifestyle empire’s fist, so hopefully she does some repairing;
I am basically going to find a way to use this image as much as possible in the future.
As to borrowing one’s own words from oneself, rather than from one’s subjects – surely this cannot be accorded a great crime? My late friend the journalist and critic Elizabeth Young once said to me that what we jobbing journalists do (by which I mean those of us who have plied our trade being prepared to write about more or less anything, for just about anyone, and to any length) is to provide our readers with a form of “mental bubble wrap” that they can sit at home popping with their psychic digits. It’s a fair point, but it prompts the question: is it short-changing readers to offer them some re-inflated bubble wrap they just might have popped before?
It’s surely axiomatic that the greater the prolificacy of the writer, the greater his or her capacity for self-plagiarism. This has to be one of the principal reasons why we admire such productivity rather less than classical economics implies we should; another is embodied in Mark Twain’s witty cynicism: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. At certain times during my freelance career, I have been filing anything up to a quarter of a million words a year (I include books in the estimate), so is it any wonder if I’ve repeated myself – and sometimes knowingly? For years, my rubric for self-plagiarism was this: in my fiction I tried to create new conceptual space, coin fresh metaphors, bend and warp language in surprising ways – the books had fewer readers than the newspaper and magazine work, so it seemed perfectly legitimate to transplant images, riffs and coinages from this sequestered word-garden into the brighter but more ephemeral light of the daily and weekly press.
Well, as noted yesterday while it was breaking, Hachette workers at imprint Little, Brown (publisher of Ronan Farrow’s #metoo book Catch and Kill) walked off the job in protest of another Hachette imprint buying his estranged father (and accused child molester) Woody Allen’s memoir. Before anyone cries censorship, I’d point out a few things: 1) protesting is not censorship, 2) it’s a publisher’s prerogative to publish or cancel what they wish based on market forces (both externally and internally) and these people who are invested in the success of their employer are illustrating what sort of response this book is going to get (ie, any given book or author has no “right” to be published), and 3) imagine working for a company that is so faceless and unconcerned about its authors that it can publish a book from the guy who allegedly abused one of their family members. And remember that part of the issue here is they did this secretly, hiding from Farrow that they were planning to acquire this title so he’d continue to publish and flog his bestseller with them. Underhanded. Writing is a solo endeavour; publishing, however, is a cooperative affair. The relationship between author, editor, and publisher is as messy and intense as any three-way (more like an orgy, given how many hands are involved — just hands), and having fun within it relies on trust and goodwill. Hachette has squandered that here.
(Photo by Brad Barket/Invision/AP)
The publisher said Monday that Allen’s book, titled “Apropos of Nothing,” would come out under its Grand Central imprint on April 7th. It described the book as “a comprehensive account of his life, both personal and professional,” that would cover “his relationship with family, friends and the loves of his life.”
But the announcement drew criticism because of the allegations that Allen molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. He has denied the accusations and wasn’t charged after two investigations decades ago. A Hachette spokeswoman said in an email Thursday evening: “We respect and understand the perspective of our employees who have decided to express their concern over the publication of this book. We will engage our staff in a fuller discussion about this at the earliest opportunity.”
An employee at Hachette who participated in the walkout estimated that more than 100 protesters eventually gathered in Rockefeller Plaza, outside the publisher’s New York offices. The employee said that while the protesters were outside, others at Hachette met with Michael Pietsch, the company’s chief executive, to make three demands of him: to cancel the publication of Allen’s book; to publicly apologise; and to recognise that Hachette employees have the ability to speak up about books they disagree with without fear of reprisal.
Big news. Still happening. I’m sure there’ll be more to post tomorrow.
BREAKING: Employees at the Little, Brown imprint of Hachette Book Group have staged a walk-out in protest of the company’s acquisition of Woody Allen's forthcoming memoir. This story is developing.
Take the following passage, in which Buys leads his gang of outlaws into an attack “like a horde from Hell more abhorrent even than the fire and brimstone land of Christian Reckoning, skirling and shrieking, clothed in smoke like those phantoms in regions beyond certainty and sense where the eye wanders and the lip shudders and drools.”
Here: McCarthy, on a similar approach from a Comanche ambush: “Like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
To discuss the concept of plagiarism in art is to grasp for something very slippery. Most crucially, it should be noted that a wide range of intertextual manoeuvres are fundamental to creativity. Mark Twain famously wrote to Helen Keller – who stood accused of plagiarising a short story – that “substantially all ideas are secondhand”. Curiously, the application of these tactics to prose literature is frequently deemed worse than when applied to poetry, music or the visual arts. Literary genius is oddly considered sui generis. In answer, we can take Jonathan Lethem’s marvellous essay The Ecstasy of Influence, which deconstructs ideas about originality by forging an argument made almost entirely from fragments, taking to the very limit a line from Montaigne’s essays: “I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.”
In this comedy of errors bromance for the ages, Hans Christian Andersen was the one who loved too much, and Charles Dickens the one tired of being loved. This strikes me as a great movie for someone. Maybe that centre-focus, pastel colours guy who did the Grand Budapest Hotel. Get on it, Hollywood.
Hans Christian Andersen, pictured here in John A. MacDonald cosplay
They had a friendly conversation—afterwards, Andersen wrote a letter to his friends in Denmark, ecstatic that Dickens had lived up to his hopes. Andersen apparently made a good impression on Dickens, too, because a few weeks later, Dickens sent him a package containing some of his books, and a personal note.
Perhaps a little too encouraged by this gesture, Andersen sent Dickens regular letters for the next nine years. Annoyed by the correspondence, in 1856 Dickens insincerely and curtly mentioned (in a letter laden with the kind of weird flattery that often conceals petty meanness) that Anderson would be welcome to stay with his family, if he were ever in the neighborhood. Which, he absolutely, definitely did not mean.
But in March of 1857, Andersen earnestly wrote to Dickens to say that he was traveling to England, for no more than a fortnight, to take Dickens up on his offer. And so, in June of that year, Andersen showed up to Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s country estate in Higham, ready to become roommates with his hero. “My visit is for you alone,” he wrote. “Above all, always leave me a small corner in your heart.”
(If it weren’t for the fact that Andersen seems kind of cluelessly sweet, this would sound like horror movie. I’ve definitely seen this horror movie.)
Well, children, gather round and let me spin you a tale of how life works: my back USED to be hard and muscly, but now its soft and feels like it’s about to give out at any momen—–wait… is this about why publishers print hardcover books before printing paperback books? I suppose. But I think my innumerable age-related aches and pains are far more interesting. Suit yourself.
“While a hardcover book is more expensive to print than a paperback, the publisher does traditionally make more money on that edition, allowing them to earn back the author’s advance and the costs they incurred for printing, shipping, marketing, and distribution,” Dinah Dunn, a partner at the book packager Indelible Editions, tells Mental Floss.
Hardcovers may be more expensive to produce than paperbacks, but they still cost just a few dollars to print. Publishers can then sell them for upwards of $30 and rake in enormous profits.
Cheaper paperbacks are more popular with consumers, accounting for roughly 80 percent of all print book sales, but when a book is still new, sellers can count on certain readers to pay more for the hardback. “An author’s fans are willing to pay the higher price in order to get the book when it is first published,” Dunn says.
The times are a-changing. Sarah MacLachlan is leaving in June and someone named Bruce Walsh who seems to have moved around quite a bit is taking over. Semareh Al-Hillal leaves Groundwood to step up to president of Anansi and Karen Li joins as publisher of Groundwood.
Bookninja 