Quotulatiousness

January 22, 2012

Transitioning from “shithole specialist” to ordinary journalist

Filed under: Humour, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke, have to cope with wrenching career changes:

After the Iraq War I gave up on being what’s known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for 21 years, in 40-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq.

Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I’d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I’m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you’re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport.

[. . .]

Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don’t seem to own any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. “Halt!” say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.

I say, “Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.”

“We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,” they reply.

This doesn’t work worth a damn with the TSA.

Then there’s the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he’s had. Personally — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It’s worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I’m annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I’m being crabby about it. Writers of travelogues are most entertaining when — to the infinite amusement of readers — they have bad things happen to them. I’m afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.

Paulo Coelho: Pirate my work!

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

Paulo Coelho finds himself on the opposite side of an issue from where he “should be”:

As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not.

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.

The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature.

The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

January 13, 2012

Continuators: heroes or villains?

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

“What’s a continuator?” I pretend to hear you ask. Those are the folks who pick up the fallen pen of other (almost always greater) authors to write endings for unfinished works:

There’s a long list of great authors who have left work unfinished, often because of illness or death. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, to name but a few. An industry has grown up around them, of so-called “continuators” — writers eager to finish the stories that they began.

There have been a number of continuations of Austen’s Sanditon, including efforts by Juliette Shapiro and Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series. Austen had only got 11 chapters in when she stopped, enough to establish the characters, but leaving the continuators plenty of room for manoeuvre.

But why would a writer choose to finish the work of another author, rather than create original work? Surely that leads to pastiche?

It’s dangerous territory, suggests Prof John Mullan, who is currently writing a book on Austen. “What we expect when we read the work of Austen, or Dickens, or Laurence Sterne, is a particular voice, and that’s terribly difficult to bring off.”

It’s a risky strategy for an author, but perhaps it speaks to a profound need in all of us. The literary critic Frank Kermode wrote in his book Sense of an Ending about our deep-rooted need to be rewarded with conclusions.

John Sutherland, emeritus professor at University College London, agrees. “Kermode famously observed that when we hear a clock go tick tick tick, what we hear is tick tock tick tock, because we like beginnings and endings. We’re hardwired, like lemmings going over a cliff.”

My experiences with continuators has been quite mixed. I’ve never been able to read anything by Spider Robinson since he “finished” a novel from Robert A. Heinlein’s very early period. I hated it so much that it actually diminished my admiration for Heinlein’s entire body of work (I eventually recovered). On the other hand, I quite enjoyed Great King’s War which was a sequel to H. Beam Piper’s Kalvan of Otherwhen. John F. Carr and Roland J. Green did an excellent job of writing in the same voice as Piper and took his characters in believable directions.

January 8, 2012

The Joyce Estate provides useful ammunition to those opposed to longer copyright terms

Filed under: Economics, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

The works of James Joyce have finally (re-)entered the public domain:

On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce’s work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate.

Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce’s work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate’s most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author’s grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times. His truculence (often verbal and colourful) towards those wishing to quote or publish his grandfather’s words dated from the mid-1970s, when biographer Richard Ellmann published some of Joyce’s “pornographic” letters to his wife Nora and some suggestive ones to a clandestine lover in Zurich. On becoming a trustee, Stephen was determined to prevent any further such revelations.

He outraged a meeting of Joyce scholars in Venice in 1988 by announcing that he had destroyed around a thousand letters to Joyce from his troubled daughter Lucia, as well as some to her from Samuel Beckett, the love of her young life. The following year he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. However, in 1991, the 50th anniversary of his death, Joyce’s copyright lapsed and for a time he could be quoted freely without permission. But in 1995 copyright in Europe was extended to 70 years, so the rights reverted to the estate.

[. . .]

The intention of the literary guardian is often not just to protect the reputation and prestige of an individual or family but also to safeguard the integrity of a work against experimentation, revision or trivialisation. Samuel Beckett, for example, refused to allow women to take the leading roles in Waiting for Godot, an indignant Orwell stopped his publisher publicising Nineteen Eighty-Four as a romantic thriller and the Joyce estate refused Kate Bush permission to include the final, seductive words of Molly Bloom from Ulysses in a song.

But there is also a certain power and prestige in being the literary executor of a famous writer. People pay heed to one’s words, come cap-in-hand to one’s door with requests, and the trustee of manuscripts is free to grant or deny favours with a lordly nod or dismissive gesture. It is a power jealously guarded and sometimes remorselessly implemented.

December 19, 2011

Brendan O’Neill: Hitch was no Orwell

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

As the most common comparison of the late Christopher Hitchens is to George Orwell, it seems inevitable that Brendan O’Neill would find fault with that:

Since Christopher Hitchens’s untimely death, his impressively less talented imitators in the Liberal press and blogosphere have been singing the praises of his Orwell-style arguments against tyranny. At a time when some sections of the Left are happy to snuggle up with weird-beards and dictators, we need more Orwell-inspired, Hitchensesque intolerance of authoritarianism, they tell us. It would indeed be a good thing to see some proper Left-wing liberty-mongering. However, there are two important differences between Orwell’s anti-authoritarianism and that practised by his modern-day acolytes in the Hitchens and post-Hitchens sets.

The first is in the use and abuse of the f-word. Today’s Orwell wannabes use the word “fascism” with gay abandon. For them, everything horrible is fascism. Four idiots from the north of England carrying out a terror tantrum in London? Fascism. Saddam Hussein? Fascist. Gaddafi? Fascist. Three men and a dog in a bedsit in Karachi fantasising about destroying the world? Fascists. Hitchens himself suffered serious bouts of this ahistorical Tourette’s syndrome (branding everything from Thatcherite policies to Islamic militants as fascistic), though not on the same level as his fanboys, who, lacking Hitchens’s linguistic flair, just come across like whiny teenagers railing against their parents when they bandy about the f-word.

September 17, 2011

Decoding book review language

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

Have you ever bought a book on the recommendation of a book review, then found it didn’t match up to your expectations? Here is a useful guide to what the reviewer is actually saying:

“absorbing”: “makes a great coaster” @DonLinn Don Linn, publishing consultant

“accessible”: “not too many big words” @MarkKohut Mark Kohut, writer and consultant

“acclaimed”: “poorly selling” @BloomsburyPress Peter Ginna, publisher, Bloomsbury Press

“breakout book”: “Hail Mary pass” @BookFlack Larry Hughes, associate director of publicity, the Free Press at Simon & Schuster

“brilliantly defies categorization”: “even the author has no clue what he’s turned in” @james_meader James Meader, publicity director of Picador USA

“captures the times we live in”: “captures the times we were living in two years ago” @mathitak Mark Athitakis, critic

“classroom-friendly”: “kids won’t read it unless they have to” @LindaWonder, Linda White, book promoter at Wonder Communications

August 18, 2011

This is so true

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

By way of Cory Doctorow’s post at BoingBoing, the wonderfully accurate Muphry’s Law:

Muphry’s Law is the editorial application of the better-known Murphy’s Law. Muphry’s Law dictates that:

  1. if you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault in what you have written;
  2. if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
  3. the stronger the sentiment in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; and
  4. any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

Muphry’s Law also dictates that, if a mistake is as plain as the nose on your face, everyone can see it but you. Your readers will always notice errors in a title, in headings, in the first paragraph of anything, and in the top lines of a new page. These are the very places where authors, editors and proofreaders are most likely to make mistakes.

It always pays to allow for Muphry in anything you write, or anything you are checking.

June 15, 2011

Daily link roundup

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:16

More links that don’t quite make it as separate blog entries.

  • North Carolina shipwreck officially recognized as being Queen Ann’s Revenge, the flagship of the infamous pirate Blackbeard. “The Queen Anne’s Revenge, a captured French slave ship, was part of a four-vessel pirate flotilla when it ran aground in 1718 beside the inlet leading to Beaufort and was abandoned. The wreck was found a little more than a mile off the beach in 1996 by Intersal, a private salvage company. The location precisely matched historical accounts of the grounding, and the ship appeared to be the right vintage and size and was armed to an unusual degree. And from the first, the artifacts brought up fit the origins of the ship, the crew and the places it was known to have visited.”
  • If more reporters (and bloggers) followed John Rentoul’s list of forbidden words and phrases the internet would be only a few megabytes in size (really, those phrases seem to appear in every article and blog post lately). “The original Banned List was, of course, George Orwell’s in 1946: dying metaphors (“Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed”); verbal false limbs (“Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of”); pretentious diction (“Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilise, eliminate, liquidate”); and meaningless words (his examples included “class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality”).”
  • Significantly different approaches by Canadian and British militaries to dealing with “operational security” over Libyan operations. “It is interesting to contrast the amount of information the Canadian Forces releases on its missions in Libya. It talks about the war in general terms but CF spokesman Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette claims that detailing the type or numbers of bombs dropped on targets (or even naming specific targets) would violate operational security.” The British, in contrast, are eager to tell how many bombs (and of what type) were dropped from which aircraft and which Royal Navy vessels were involved in combat operations.
  • I was happy to see that Rogier van Bakel is now working with some co-bloggers at a new URL. Here’s the round-up of who, what, and where.

June 2, 2011

Pity the poor, over-used em-dash

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Noreen Malone — who admits to being an em-dash abuser herself — makes an appeal for everyone to just leave the em-dash alone!

According to the Associated Press Stylebook — Slate‘s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related — there are two main prose uses— the abrupt change and the series within a phrase — for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon — and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot — or so I have observed lately. America’s finest prose — in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels — is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.

What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask? — or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options — sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment — in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash — if done right — let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?

Nope — or that’s my take, anyway. Now, I’m the first to admit — before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments — that I’m no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn’t want to make just a bit longer — and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times‘ associate managing editor for standards — Philip B. Corbett, for the record — wrote a blog post scolding Times writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. “Reminded me of our battles over long dashes,” he wrote — and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t on the anti-dash side back then. But as I’ve read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit — I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible — and so I’m trying to quit.

Bloggers (some of us, anyway) tend to use the em-dash a bit too frequently, and that’s one of the downsides to being one-person shows — there’s no kindly editor to strike through the excess punctuation with a red pen.

January 16, 2011

Hey, aspiring fiction writers! Don’t enter this contest!

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:02

John Scalzi does you a big favour by pointing out how insane you’d need to be to want to enter this writing contest:

. . . from an outfit called First One Digital Publishing. Why? Because it costs $149 to enter, and because of this little gem in the contest fine print:

All submissions become sole property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned. By submitting an entry, all entrants grant Sponsor the absolute and unconditional right and authority to copy, edit, publish, promote, broadcast, or otherwise use, in whole or in part, their entries, in perpetuity, in any manner without further permission, notice or compensation. Entries that contain copyrighted material must include a release from the copyright holder.

So, to be clear: These people want you to sign away all the rights you have to your own work — and they want you to pay them to do it. That’s just very special.

You pay them to enter. You sign away all your rights to the work you submit (they can do whatever they like with it, including publishing it themselves). They agree to judge your work, but do not guarantee that any prizes will actually be awarded. Oh, and in submitting your piece, you also agree that you have no legal claim against them. Just breathtaking in its audacity.

November 18, 2010

QotD: On the quality of writing, mediated through technology

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

I own a computer. I don’t use the Internet very much. I’m not a technophobe. It just doesn’t help me very much. Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?

P.J. O’Rourke, “Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2010-11-18

November 16, 2010

The plagiarism market

Filed under: Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

If what “Ed Dante” writes is true, lots of writers are missing out on a rich — unethical — opportunity:

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. …

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you? …

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

November 4, 2010

Chutzpah, or the new Cook’s Source plagiarism service now open

Filed under: Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Did you know that the internet is not public domain? The editors at Cook’s Source apparently thought it was, because they printed an article without the permission of the original author, and then told her that she should be happy they didn’t bill her for editing it. (It’s an article on medieval cooking, with original spelling preserved from the source texts: of course it would look weird to a modern eye.)

The exchanges between the original author and the editor make for amusing reading:

After the first couple of emails, the editor of Cooks Source asked me what I wanted — I responded that I wanted an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine and $130 donation (which turns out to be about $0.10 per word of the original article) to be given to the Columbia School of Journalism.

What I got instead was this (I am just quoting a piece of it here:)

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

H/T to John Scalzi for the link.

October 27, 2010

The surplus of “steampunk” in SF

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

I have to admit that “steampunk” never really made it onto my regular reading list. I rather like some of the artwork and created artifacts, but the actual stories don’t grab me. Charles Stross isn’t a fan, either:

I am becoming annoyed by the current glut of Steampunk that is being foisted on the SF-reading public via the likes of Tor.com and io9.

It’s not that I actively dislike steampunk, and indeed I have fond memories of the likes of K. W. Jeter’s “Infernal Devices”, Tim Powers’ “The Anubis Gates”, the works of James Blaylock, and other features of the 1980s steampunk scene. I don’t have that much to say against the aesthetic and costumery other than, gosh, that must be rather hot and hard to perambulate in. (I will confess to being a big fan of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius.) It’s just that there’s too damn much of it about right now, and furthermore, it’s in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist’s work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)

We’ve been at this point before with other sub-genres, with cyberpunk and, more recently, paranormal romance fang fuckers bodice rippers with vamp- Sparkly Vampyres in Lurve: it’s poised on the edge of over-exposure. Maybe it’s on its way to becoming a new sub-genre, or even a new shelf category in the bookstores. But in the meantime, it’s over-blown. The category is filling up with trashy, derivative junk and also with good authors who damn well ought to know better than to jump on a bandwagon. (Take it from one whose first novel got the ‘S’-word pinned on it — singularity — back when that was hot: if you’re lucky, your career will last long enough that you live to regret it.) Harumph, young folks today, get off my lawn ….

October 20, 2010

The daily Orwell

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:09

A few years back, on the old blog, I mentioned that the Orwell Trust was publishing George Orwell’s diary in blog form. It’s now up to October 1940:

19.10.40
The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

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