Books: July 2007 Archive Page

A string of publishers failed to spot blatant plagiarism of one of English literature's most famous authors, in a cheeky test to see if she would have secured a book deal today, a report said Thursday.

David Lassman, head of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, sent manuscripts to 18 editors seeking a publishing contract, using only slightly disguised versions of chapters from the iconic novelist's most famous works.

But only one publisher spotted the fakes, which included perhaps the most famous line in all English literature, the opening sentence of her 1813 work "Pride and Prejudice".... which he renamed "First Impressions".

"Thank you for your recent letter and chapters from your book 'First Impressions'. It seems like a really original and interesting read," wrote Penguin. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling's agents Christopher Little said they were "not confident" of being able to place the work.

The only editor to spot the ruse was apparently Alex Bowler of Jonathan Cape. --AFP (Yahoo | AFP (will expire))

This story illustrates the level of attention paid to the "slush pile" -- the flood of unsolicited manuscripts that entry-level editors sift through. The editors would have had to take the extra time to write a personalized rejection letter, and my guess is that even the editors who noticed the prank didn't feel motivated to take that extra time.

It should be a great moment for the publishing industry, which for years has been limping along with flat sales. But amid this avalanche of commerce and pre-publication hype, the book business is ruefully taking note of a startling incongruity: Very few U.S. booksellers will be making big money from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." --Josh Getlin and Martha Groves --Harry Potter and the diminished returns (CalendarLive.com | LA Times)

But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn't sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott's beans, sour-grapes flavor.

Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party?

[...]

Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide. --Ron Charles --Harry Potter and the Death of Reading (Washington Post (will expire))

I have sampled the books, but as much as I enjoy the setting and the characters, I find nothing on any given page that stands out to me as being good writing.

My nine-year-old is reading the books on his own.

We thought our "Pimp my Book Cart" contest was a funny idea that would spawn a dozen or so entries. But it seemed to spark something, and we started hearing from folks all over the country. It even spawned a "Pimp my Book Trolley" contest Down Under in Australia (we're judging that one too).

Still, by last week we figured all the fuss had been just that, and that it was still going to be just a few contenders. But then a few days before the deadline, in a display of procrastination that impressed Bill, they started pouring in. We ended up getting over 100. --Pimp My Bookcart Contest Winners (Unshelved)

"The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags," says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year's International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.

"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased -- which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making." --From Rags to Riches, Or How Undergarments Improved Medieval Literacy (Alpha Galileo)

Filing this for a future "history of the book" unit. Via Language Log.

Sites like the Blake archive mark an important point of departure from expensive clothbound volumes available in university libraries -- and unique items in private collections -- to high-resolution facsimiles freely available to anyone with Internet access. Even the nonspecialist (like me) can easily spend hours appreciating Blake's aesthetic achievement beyond reading the unadorned transcriptions of his poems one might find in an anthology.

The editors have performed a great service for the general public, but what about the exacting standards of literary scholarship? Does the Blake archive meet the expectations of professionals?

[...]

Yes, young scholars, you may cite the Blake archive. --"Thomas H. Benton --Authoritative Online Editions (Chronicle of Higher Education)

'One approach to seeing the future is through scenarios -- carefully crafted "what if?" stories that let us imagine several different outcomes', the book says. It suggests holding a 'scenario party' (seriously) where you can 'pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends'. In short: we have no idea what the future will look like, but let's knock about some shocking 'what if?' scenarios over a glass of wine to make ourselves feel simultaneously terrified/terrifically important. It's the closest you'll get to a naked admission from the climate change lobby that its warnings of floods and pestilence and swarms of locusts are based on its members' own fevered, teenage imaginings rather than a scientifically revealed forecast of what is to come. --Brendan O'Neill --The planet's burning. Let's party!  (Spiked Online)

A snarky, class-focused review of The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook.

RUR Cats (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme.

In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as "automaton."

As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them "labori" would be too stuffy. His brother Josef, a cubist painter and author, muttered, "Then call them Robots," drawing on a Czech word meaning "menial labor" or "servitude."

The illustration is from a Josef Capek's children's book, A Doggie and a Pussycat: How They Wrote a Letter.

Okay, that was pretty obscure, but now I can get on with my life.

It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today's television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it's true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don't have the time to think, let alone to read. They are working harder and less efficiently than ever (and in many cases, for less money than ever). In this environment, there is no better delivery system than the image for themes which transport - because that's how our eyes work the rest of the day. The Sopranos does the imagining; our eyes need only follow.

And so we return to the central question: why is this television show referred to by so many literate viewers as a novel? --Has the novel been murdered by the mob? (Guardian Unlimited)

The last TV show I actually followed was Babylon 5, which ended in 1998, so all I know about The Sopranos is what I pick up from articles like this.

We prefer to take the money we would have spent on Cable TV and use it to buy DVDs that we really want to watch. Also, family members will sometimes fill up a videotape with shows like Zaboomafoo and Between the Lions, and the kids will watch them over and over. So we actually have a pretty big library of videos for the kids to choose.

My five-year-old is used to waking up at about 8am for a "show, drink, and a snack," and I typically include something fun-but-educational in the list of three or four suggestions I make when I let her choose what she wants to watch. Then, typically I will fall back asleep on the couch with her, or I might get my laptop out and check my e-mail. My nine-year-old son will often wake up before the movie is over, and usually they will start playing together when the movie is over. For one of his three daily lessons (7 days a week, year round, though we will count a family trip to a local historical site or ordinary kid stuff like piano lessons or swim classes), Peter will sometimes watch a documentary or a move set during the time period he's studying.

So I'm not pretending that the television set is not a part of my life. My wife does watch TV news on a regular basis, and she enjoys some of the late night talk shows, but I'm usually putting the kids to bed and sometimes falling asleep on the floor after reading the good-night story. We've been trying to find a good evening to watch Time Bandits together as a family, and I'm looking forward to that.

But right now, my five-year-old daughter has just finished writing a poem about snow, and I'm off to help her cut paper snowflakes. If I can find an index card, I'm going to cut a hole in it that's big enough for my children to crawl through.

The Goldmans own the copyright, media rights and movie rights. They also acquired Simpson's name, likeness, life story and right of publicity in connection with the book, according to court documents.

The Goldmans want to rename the book "Confessions of a Double Murderer" and plan to shop it around, Cook said. --Victim's family buys rights to O.J. Simpson book (CNN | AP)

An interesting twist in the story. This is the book that had been titled If I Did It.

I won't be stuck standardizing verb tenses in business documents my whole life. One day, I will copyedit the Great American Novel.

"Sure," you say, "along with every other detail-oriented grammarian in the country." Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and removing all of its grammatical and semantic errors. But how many of them know to omit the word "bear" when referring to koalas? How many know to change "pompom" to "pompon"? --Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel (The Onion (Satire))