In the New York Times, Janet Maslin calls Chris Anderson “crass, reckless and lazy”

In today’s New York Times, Janet Maslin demolishes two books in one review– Chris Anderson’s Free and Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap. Here’s an excerpt:

Consider Ellen Ruppel Shell’s “Cheap,” Chris Anderson’s “Free” and the story of the one-cent Hershey’s Kiss. This story appears in both books, but the versions are different. Both come from the same source, but these two authors can’t even agree on what to call him….

Mr. Ariely did an experiment that used chocolate to dramatize the difference that a small shift in pricing could make. According to “Cheap” he offered his subjects a choice between the 1-cent Kiss and a 26-cent Ferrero Rocher hazelnut. At those prices the test subjects were divided 40 percent to 40 percent, with 20 percent opting for neither. Then the prices came down by one penny each, and 90 percent of the subjects took the free chocolate. Only 10 percent chose the higher-priced brand.

Off we go to “Free,” playing fast and loose with different facts and telling the story in somewhat zingier fashion. “Note: behavioral economists have limited budgets and limited time,” writes Mr. Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail.” “So a lot of their experiments involve a folding table, candy and random college students.”

In its “Free” version the non-Kiss candy is a Lindt truffle initially priced at 15 cents while the Kiss cost a penny; 73 percent of subjects chose the truffle and 27 percent picked the Kiss, with nobody abstaining. Then the prices were lowered by 1 cent each, and 69 percent of the subjects chose the free Kiss. Mr. Anderson doesn’t bother to account for the rest of the sample group, but he does use a quotation from Mr. Ariely to bolster the case that his “Free” makes: “Zero is not just another price, it turns out. Zero is an emotional hot button — a source of irrational excitement.”

Irrational is an apt word, what with the above-mentioned discrepancies. But what’s the upshot of either version of the experiment? And which book can be trusted? Bear in mind that Mr. Anderson has lately been called to task for making uncredited use of free Wikipedia material….

So neither author is entirely to be trusted. Neither was well-advised to use that chocolate story. And neither has written a book that is as sharp as its one-word catchy title….

Mr. Anderson peers into the future and aims his arguments at the business world. Here is what he means by “Free”: If you want to know what he really thinks, you’re going to have to pay for more than his book. He acknowledges that he is giving his book away online, as well as selling it at the not-free price of $26.99, so he can be hired for much more lucrative speaking and consulting jobs.

“I’ve got a lot of kids, and college isn’t getting any cheaper,” he writes. He is sufficiently crass, reckless and lazy to have had someone else read the science-fiction books he uses to illustrate the perils of scarcity and abundance.

Still, Mr. Anderson has come up with a lively conversation piece. Even when the particulars of his argument are easily assailable, the gist is clear: Now that a cornucopia of Internet material has been made available without fee, and in some cases without scruples, the smart business must find ways to adapt to that new reality….

But after beating the drum for giveaways throughout most of his book, Mr. Anderson eventually acknowledges that his idea is in fact not viable. Such are the perils of his sloppily constructed sweeping argument. No, he doesn’t envision an economy based entirely on giveaways. “Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one,” he says. He advocates the balancing of differently priced versions for different markets, acknowledging that this tricky balance is not easily achieved….

Here are links to my two previous blog posts about Chris Anderson:

“Can’t decide which is more embarrassing– failing to cite Wikipedia as a source or using Wikipedia as a source.”

“Laziness is not an excuse for plagiarism”

“Laziness is not an excuse for plagiarism”

There’s been a lot of commentary in the blogosphere about the “Chris Anderson plagiarizing from Wikipedia” kerfuffle. (See my previous post for a recap.) There are too many apologists for Anderson and his use (or misuse) of Wikipedia, and even some criticisms have missed the forest for the trees. Let me spell it out:

• It is simply not acceptable to quote or paraphrase from Wikipedia when writing a book or doing serious research. Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and a deeply flawed one at that. If high school students aren’t allowed to quote or paraphrase from Wikipedia or traditional encyclopedias, it is absurd to think that it’s acceptable for the author of a book to do so. It is not only intellectual laziness of the highest order, it ignores Wikipedia’s own warnings about its limitations and appropriate use. As I quoted in my previous post: “Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information… Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research. As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia’s content — please check your facts against multiple sources….”
• If you insist on using Wikipedia, you must track down the original reference sources cited and verify the information. Errors (including transcription mistakes) in the original Wikipedia entries that Anderson used are reproduced in his own writing, meaning he never looked at the original cited sources, and he apparently didn’t verify or fact-check the information with additional primary or secondary sources. [Note to Chris Anderson:  If you don't have the time to do the research and check sources yourself, you can hire a freelance researcher or journalist to either do it for you or check your work before publication.]
• It is ridiculous for Anderson to claim that he removed his footnotes because he was “unable to find a good citation format for web sources.” As I mentioned in my previous post, there are many authoritative citation standards which can easily be found in style manuals and websites. Even Wikipedia itself gives you nine different citation formats (including Chicago and MLA) for each entry. Anderson says his publisher insisted on a timestamp for each URL, which Anderson found “clumsy and archaic,” so he cut out the footnotes. WRONG!  And don’t even get me started on the whole “write-through” thing.
• Given Anderson’s background and his role as editor-in-chief of Wired, I find this all rather shocking, and it makes me wonder about the editorial standards of Anderson himself, his magazine, and his book publisher (Hyperion).

Yesterday Seth Simonds, in a delightfully snarky post titled “Laziness is not an excuse for plagiarism,” demonstrated (with screen shots and step-by-step instructions) what Anderson could (and should) have done to find a source listed in a Wikipedia entry. Here’s an excerpt:

Anderson took a last-minute 5th grade approach to writing. He found the Wikipedia listing for “Usury” and pasted the text into his manuscript…

5 Steps From Wikipedia To A Reliable Source…

Step 1: Find the citation link for the portion of the Wikipedia article you’d like to quote. (Don’t quote it. Not even if you’re a famous editor and you’re really busy.)

A. Click on citation link in the Wikipedia article.

B. Identify the key portions of the citation. In this case, author last name and date of publication.

Step 2: After finding the citation, launch a web search including the author name and original search term. Many bloggers would stop at the citation of Moehlman and use a “^Moehlman, 1934, page 7” attribution. As a professional editor conducting research for a print publication, I’m holding Anderson to a higher standard. Note: pasting from Wikipedia is a bad idea because you’re trusting a stranger’s transcription. Don’t be lazy…

“Can’t decide which is more embarrassing — failing to cite Wikipedia as a source or using Wikipedia as a source.”

From the Virginia Quarterly Review blog, a post by Waldo Jaquith titled “Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism”:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.

Examples of the passages in question follow. The words and phrases that are found in both Free and the apparent original source are highlighted…

Though reproducing words or original ideas from any uncredited source is widely defined as plagiarism, using text from Wikipedia presents an even more significant problem than reproducing traditional copyrighted text. Under Wikipedia’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, Anderson would be required to credit all contributors to the quoted passages, license his modifications under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, note that the original work has been modified, and provide the text of or a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Anderson has not done any of these things in Free.

Anderson responded personally to a request for comments about how this unattributed text came to appear in his book, providing the following remarks by e-mail:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups:

* Long passages of direct quotes (indent, with source)

* Intellectual debts, phrases and other credit due (author credited inline, as with Michael Pollan)

* In the case of source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia), do a write-through.

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place….

5:15 p.m. update: Hyperion has provided us with the following statement.

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

Hyperion says that they intend to have the notes online by the time that the book is published.

Make sure you also read the comments to the post, which are fascinating, especially the smackdown between Chris Anderson and Edward Champion.

Carolyn Kellogg, in the LA Times Jacket Copy blog, comments:

As citations for Web sources have been established for some time, this seems an odd explanation from Anderson, who is no publishing novice. His previous book, “The Long Tail,” was a bestseller, and he is currently editor in chief of Wired magazine…

The lack of attribution may indeed have been a combination of mistake and lack of oversight. But as one commenter on Gawker lamented, “Can’t decide which is more embarrassing — failing to cite Wikipedia as a source or using Wikipedia as a source.”

Wikipedia is one of the resources Anderson lauds — in “The Long Tail,” he called it a phenomenon. In this one, he writes, “there is the amazing ‘gift economy’ of Wikipedia,” later explaining, “Wikipedia makes no money at all, but because an incomparable information resource is now available to all at no cost, our own ability to make money armed with more knowledge is improved.”

The whole point of Anderson’s “Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price” is to explore what he calls “the paradox of Free,” in which “people are making lots of money and charging nothing.”

Anderson’s hardcover costs $26.99. Wikipedia is still free.

And within hours, Anderson’s Wikipedia’s entry had been updated — with attribution — to reflect the charges of plagiarism. Updates to “Free” are expected to take a while. Which proves Anderson’s point — I think.

Edward Champion decided to investigate himself:

Unfortunately, I have learned that the VQR’s investigations only begin to scratch the surface. A cursory plunge into the book’s contents reveals that Anderson has not only cribbed material from Wikipedia and websites (sometimes without accreditation), but that he has a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.

By the way, recent editions of style manuals contain detailed information on how to cite websites and online sources, most notably the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. (See my post “The writer’s bookshelf (part 3)” for more information on style manuals.)

Update 1: Today Chris Anderson posted an explanation on his blog:

First, as readers of my writings know, I’m a supporter of using Wikipedia as a source (not the only one, of course, and checking the original source material whenever possible). I disagree with those who say it should never be used. But the question is how to use it.

In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL… which struck me as clumsy and archaic… [I]n most cases I did do a writethrough of the non-quoted Wikipedia text, although clearly I didn’t go nearly far enough and too much of the original Wikipedia authors’ language remained… This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all. That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I’d like to extend a special apology to them….

This is totally lame. Somewhere Research Cat is crying…

Update 2: My husband pointed out that every Wikipedia entry has a link called “Cite this page,” which contains permanent page links and nine different citation styles, including Chicago, MLA, etc. Here’s the citation page for the Wikipedia article on Chris Anderson. Please note what’s written at the top of the page:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information — citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research.

As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia’s content — please check your facts against multiple sources and read our disclaimers for more information.

Unlike Jeff Bezos, I love the physical book

I live my life surrounded by books. My husband and I have thousands of them, old and new, in bookcases covering the walls of nearly every room of our house.

Our books are more than just texts. They are artifacts that express who we are and what’s important to us. They are time capsules that can take us back to a particular memory or moment in time. They are symbols of our relationships– with each other, with friends, and with the authors who inscribed their books to us. They are unique, collaborative works of art, a marriage of ideas, language, typography, illustration, and design.

Yes, physical books are heavy and sometimes awkward to handle in bed, but they do have certain advantages over ebooks. They can be read anywhere, anytime, without a special device– no worries about breaking or losing your reader or the batteries dying. There are no problems with formatting, DRM, technological obsolescence, or preservation for future generations. When I am finished reading a book, I can give it to my husband to read, donate it to my local library, or sell it and use the money to buy more books. When doing research, I can have multiple books open in front of me at the same time and easily browse through them.  (Browsing is very different from searching, and it often leads to unexpected and valuable discoveries. Format has an influence on the reading experience and the way we find and process information.)

I am not anti-ebook– I would love to have a Kindle DX if I could afford one. It would be a pleasure to travel with a Kindle instead of bag full of books, or to be able to download digital books instantly. But ebooks could never completely replace all of my physical books. I can’t replicate on a digital reader the experience of browsing through a facsimile of Shakespeare’s First Folio or a book with beautiful illustrations or photographs, or reading a colorful children’s picture book with my niece and nephew. I wouldn’t be able to share books I love or useful reference works with Matt unless we both have readers and there aren’t DRM restrictions on the works. And I just can’t imagine not having a bookcase filled with every different edition and translation of my husband’s novels, with their colorful and wildly different dust jackets, or the books inscribed to us by our author friends.

There are books you just want to read, and there are books you want to collect. Physical books and ebooks have different advantages and disadvantages, so there shouldn’t be a fight to the death between the two formats– there’s room for both. It would be great to always have both available and be able to choose each book in whichever format would be best for the individual reader. And I can see a lot of situations where I’d want both. I love the beautifully designed and illustrated first edition of Quicksilver that Neal Stephenson inscribed to me and Matt, but it would be great to also have a digital copy of the text to read on vacation, as his books weigh a ton. If I had a Kindle, the first things I’d download would be my favorite public domain works, like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and the works of Shakespeare, but they wouldn’t replace my physical copies. The real danger to someone like me is that the instant access Kindle gives me to thousands of books, old and new, would be hard to resist.

Why do Jeff Bezos and others who have fully embraced the ebook feel it necessary to dismiss or trash the physical book? Given the state of publishing and the rising influence of digital natives, I can’t help but worry about the future of not only the physical book, but also bookstores and author readings/signings, which help connect authors with readers, and readers with authors.

“We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…”

In honor of Bloomsday, today’s New York Times has an essay by Colum McCann about how reading Joyce’s Ulysses helped him come to know his grandfather, who died when McCann was 10. It’s a nice expression of the transformative powers of fiction:

The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom…

The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

“I am drawn to borderlands and to the people who inhabit them…”

The io9 website, in an article called “4 Authors We Wish Would Return to Science Fiction,” has interesting statements from Nicola Griffith, Karen Joy Fowler, Mary Doria Russell, and Samuel R. Delany about the role of genre in their writing. (I am a big fan of all three women and their books, but I confess I have not yet read anything by Mr. Delany.)

Here are some of the quotes I found particularly interesting.

Mary Doria Russell:

SF and historical fiction make similar demands on an author. They both require you to imagine as fully as possible a time and place that are not your own. In all my novels, there is an ironic and distanced narrator who knows a lot more than the characters about their past and future. And there is always an awareness of the contemporary limitations of technology and ideology, and of how those limitations affects lives…

[I]ntellectually, I am drawn to borderlands and to the people who inhabit them: marginal natives, newcomers, travelers, people who don’t fit and who therefore have an interestingly slanted view of the cultures they inhabit. Remember: I was an anthropologist long before I was a novelist. We are trained to seek out marginal natives; no one can give you a better perspective on aspects of culture that statistically normal people simply accept as, well, normal.

Admittedly: I have turned out to be kind of a genre slut. I will stand on the literary street corner and get into any genre that drives by and offers to take me to a good par-tay. And sometimes I don’t go home with the one who brung me to the dance…

So I guess what this all adds up to is: who gives a shit about labels? I write about what fascinates me, and I use whatever tools seem best suited to do the job at hand. What happens after that is marketing.

Karen Joy Fowler:

1) I don’t set out to write in any genre; that’s just not my working method. I start with whatever I have, some tiny incoherent image that I hope to make into a story. And then I take what I need to make that story work. Maybe what I need comes from science fiction, but maybe not. I won’t know until I write it.

2) I’m really interested in genre and draw a lot of energy from it. So even if the things I write aren’t, strictly speaking, genre piece, they all seem to be in conversation with genre in some way. (I like mysteries as much as I like sf, by the way.)

3) What I love most about science fiction is the short fiction. Almost all my short fiction spins around a science fictional idea even if the resulting story isn’t quite sf. Charles Brown of Locus told me once that I’m a science fiction writer because I think like a science fiction writer and I was enormously flattered and hope that’s true.

4) But even if it is, mystery writing with its emphasis on plot and sf writing with its emphasis on tech don’t really play to my strengths…

…I’m always writing for sf readers. Science fiction readers enjoy figuring things out and don’t mind being puzzled for long stretches. They read in a very active way. And that’s the way I read and those are the readers I’m trying to please…

Stan Robinson says we all live in a science fiction novel now and it’s clearly true. So I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do.

Nicola Griffith:

I’m a native of sf. You can’t leave that kind of thing behind. Just as everyone I meet in the US knows I’m English, everyone who reads my work knows I’m a skiffy geek. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been away; my English sf upbringing colours my accent, my attitude, my vocabulary. It’s who I am…

*****

These writers, like many of my favorites (including my husband), write across different genres so they can tell the stories they want to tell, in the way they want to tell them.

I remember there was a bit of controversy when Matt won the 2003 James Tiptree Jr. award (for works that explore gender in science fiction or fantasy) for Set This House in Order, as some people questioned whether the book was science fiction. Matt addressed this in his acceptance speech, first with a joke (”Is Set This House in Order science fiction? Or as Margaret Atwood might say: ‘Hey! Where’s the spaceship?’”), then with a detailed explanation of what he was trying to do with the book and why he believed that “though it may not be SF in the strictest sense, it is at least SFnal in its methods and its goals…”:

[The premise of the novel] lit up all the same enthusiasm circuits that a good science-fiction premise would have… I decided early on to write the book as a  “what if” novel: to simply accept certain premises as true, and focus my creative energy on exploring the implications of those premises. My goal was to tell an entertaining story that was believable and internally consistent. I’d take accuracy if and where I could get it, but the point was to provide food for thought, not definitive answers…

Another strategy, which I learned from science-fiction writers, is to write the speculative parts of the story in such a way that they remain intriguing even if the premises on which they are based ultimately turn out to be fantasy. As Ray Bradbury demonstrated with The Martian Chronicles, and as Mary Shelley demonstrated way, way back in the day with Frankenstein, the logic of dreams can remain compelling even after we have awakened….

“The small details of common life give actuality, aliveness, and thickness to a historical story…”

John Crowley, the author I blogged about last month, has written an excellent essay for the Powell’s Books website on doing historical research for his new novel, Four Freedoms. Here’s an excerpt:

How much did a condom cost in 1944? What did the package look like? Where could one be bought? Were there machines in the toilets (we called them toilets) of bars, as there were in the late 1950s? I was writing a novel about the U.S. home front in World War II (Four Freedoms, just out), and I needed to know. Why not just skip the detail, and say, “He bought a condom” or “He produced a condom”? Because the small details of common life give actuality, aliveness, and thickness to a historical story in the same way they do to a present-day story. The difference is you have to go find the details of the past; you can’t just draw on experience.

The writers of historical fictions, just like real historians, do (or ought to do) a huge amount of research before beginning on their works, and then continue doing research until the very end. They are, however, often looking for different stuff. The reasons for things, the reasons that people believed they had for acting as they did, the forces pressing on them that they dimly grasped or didn’t, a chronology that puts cause before effect — that (I imagine) is what the historian spends her research time looking for. Except when tiny details of action matter very much (at exactly what hour was that telegram sent?), the minutiae of dress and dinner, how a character spent his morning or evening, the maker of her gown and how much it cost, aren’t the goal. The fiction researcher’s work is the opposite, or mirror image (as historical fiction is the mirror of history — the same stuff but not). What the fiction researcher wants is masses of actual detail, whether pertaining to his characters (if his characters are historical) or to others like them. He cares less what everybody did, or what masses of people did, than about what was possible to do. He cares less about what an actual person did than what any person could have done: could someone like the one I am imagining have thought this thought, owned this gun, remembered this event, worn this hat? He needs the stuff to help him make a world of the past that is as believable as one made out of the present.

Of course, writers of fiction can be more or less conscientious about their research. (Though, they can’t be exposed as frauds if they get the details, or even the big picture, wrong; they start out as frauds.) Some care a lot, others less; Walter Scott, who in a sense invented the historical novel, often footnoted his stories, to back up his inventions with evidence. Fiction writers can always claim that detailed research is unnecessary or peripheral to their work — but they can no longer claim that it’s too hard. I don’t know if the Internet in all its glory and some of its shame has changed things utterly for professional historians — if it has, they may not be telling — but it has made research for a writer of historical fiction a piece of cake: that sweet, that delightful, that filling.

And it’s not only Google and Project Gutenberg and JSTOR. I used those tools almost every day, following leads from place to place and having strange adventures with collectors, memoirists, visionaries, merchants, and obsessives (try writing anything about old cars, railroads, airplanes, World War II, or comic books, without turning them up). But I also had the help of the readers of my blog (John Crowley Little and Big on Live Journal), who are an inordinately smart bunch, I think, and ready to go look things up and bring them in. We’ve had some wonderful interchanges — like the time I needed to know how much a condom cost in 1944…

The great danger in all historical research, for the lover of trivia and oddity, is distraction; it’s one of the rewards, too….

You can read the whole essay, titled “The Accu-Thump of Googletarity,” here.

Are you a Bad Monkey?

“So in your job with Bad Monkeys,” the doctor asks, “what is it you do? Punish evil people?”

“No. Usually we just kill them.”

My husband, Matt Ruff, has just announced via his blog that the movie rights have been optioned for his most recent novel, Bad Monkeys. (WOOT!)

You can read more about the book (including the first chapter, reviews, and Q&A) on the Bad Monkeys page of Matt’s website.

“That’s one of the many reasons I love writing historical fictions. The research is fun.”

The fabulous Justine Larbalestier has been blogging and answering questions from readers about her research and writing processes. She’s currently working on a novel set in 1930s New York City, so she’s been immersing herself in historical research and having lots of fun (well, except for the Lindy Hop situation).

Here are links to a few of her posts for your reading pleasure:

• On Research (posted today, May 14th)
• Researching NYC in the early 1930s
• A most excellent research tool
• JWAM reader request no. 20:  Research
• Here’s the link to her collected writing process posts, including her excellent series of “January is writing advice month” posts
• Here’s the link to her Writing FAQ

I really enjoyed Justine’s last YA novel, How to Ditch Your Fairy, and she has a new YA novel coming out in September called Liar.

“I just love looking at old pictures of people who are now dead.”

My thanks to Gwenda Bond for the tip about the fascinating interview with author John Crowley in the current issue of The Believer magazine.

John Crowley has been a major influence on so many writers (including my husband, Matt Ruff), and he’s written nearly a dozen novels, including The Translator, the four-book Ægypt cycle, and Little, Big, one of Matt’s favorite books, which he described as  “a sprawling family chronicle that William Faulkner might have written, if he’d written about fairies.”

Here are some of John’s comments on research from the interview:

BLVR: So many of your books have a strong research element to them, whether it’s written into them with characters who are themselves researchers, like Pierce Moffett, the main character of Ægypt, who scours the world finding materials for his own book, or simply because the novels themselves are obviously the result of meticulous, extensive research. What’s the relationship, if any, between research you do for your novels and doing research for documentaries? Do they feed off one another in any way?

JC: Maybe I just have a taste for research. Most of the films that I have worked on and enjoyed doing have been based on archival footage. And I’ve found that I just love looking at old footage. I just love looking at old pictures of people who are now dead. There’s something intensely attractive and gripping in looking at these pictures of people who are gone…

I don’t know whether this research actually combines with my writing, but I do know that there is a real thrill to it. I’ve completed a book [Four Freedoms] set in the 1940s about people who are building a bomber in a war production plant, and the research I’ve done for that offers the same kind of fascination with the lives of ordinary people. You can find lots of memoirs of people who worked in these factories, especially women, how they felt about it, what they did every day, how their husbands viewed it, how scared they were to go to work, how they learned to do things they thought they never would. It’s enormously touching.

BLVR: Did you dig through even older materials for the Ægypt quartet? Did you look at old manuscripts? Was there any tactile element to your research?

JC: [Laughs] Not really. I did handle a few old books but I never went into it to that degree. There was never the kind of experience that I ascribe to some of the characters in those books, where they actually go in and palpate old books and turn old dusty leaves and things like that. Most of that, I have to say, I constructed for them to experience. Most of my research for those books came out of secondary sources; a lot of the books I read are full of printed reproductions of old imagery and texts, and I enjoyed looking at those. But I never did the kind of deep manuscript research that might have given me that kind of a thrill. Somehow I felt I was doing enough just creating all the universe around them!

John has more to say on research, genre, his books, and other subjects, so read the whole interview.

By the way, John has a blog, and his new novel, Four Freedoms, will be published at the end of this month. Matt and I heard John read from the manuscript when he came to Seattle last year, so we are very excited about reading the book.

Google and antitrust and censorship, oh my!

Lots of interesting book-related news, articles, and posts over the last week or so:

• A Publishers Weekly article about reaction to the news that four members of a library board in West Bend, Wisconsin, were dismissed last week for refusing to remove controversial books from the library’s young adult section.
• MobyLives summarizes this week’s news about the Google Books settlement:  the judge postponed for four months the opt-out deadline for authors and publishers and rejected an attempt by the Internet Archive to intervene, and the Justice Department is investigating the antitrust implications of the settlement.
• The New York Times article about the antitrust inquiry into the Google Books settlement.
• A DigitalKoans post rounding up links to foreign opposition to the Google Books settlement.
• A PC World blog post summarizing 5 pros and 5 cons of the Google Books deal.
• Cory Doctorow’s latest BoingBoing post about Google Books, in which he links to Pamela Samuelson’s essay “Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement.”
• An AP article about which authors’ books are not yet available as e-books, and why.
• A DigitalKoans post reporting major budget cuts to important research libraries.
• Steve Kolowich’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about “Archiving Writers’ Work in the Age of E-Mail.”
• Suvudu’s Q&A with five science fiction and fantasy book reviewers about the future of newspapers and book coverage.
• Author Lynn Viehl posts the royalty statement for her New York Times bestselling paperback and explains the cruel realities (and creative accounting) of the publishing world.

“Let the wild rumpus start!”

Here’s a cute video of President Obama reading Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to a group of children at the White House on Easter:

Wouldn’t it be great if Obama could do this every week? A Presidential book club for kids!

Thanks to MobyLives for the tip.

Amazon acknowledges its “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error”

On Monday afternoon, Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener released this statement about the AmazonFail fiasco to the LA Times and other media outlets:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Various sources are reporting that rankings have been restored to some of the affected books. I just spot-checked the specific titles I mentioned in my last blog post, and as I write this some have had their ranking restored, but most have not. Let’s see how long it takes to fix them all. Fixing the damage to Amazon’s reputation and restoring the trust and goodwill that’s been lost will take a lot longer and require more than just this PR statement. That Amazon has not handled this well is a monumental understatement. It would help if they issued an actual apology that showed some understanding or acknowledgment of why the Internet and Twitter exploded. It may have been an unintentional error, but the results and implications of that error and Amazon’s late and inadequate response caused pain to authors and readers alike and felt like a betrayal to those of us who’ve been Amazon customers for years. You can fix this, Amazon. Please try. Hard.

I’ll leave you with one last link for now: Kelley Eskridge’s great post on her Humans at Work blog about the management lessons to be learned from Amazonfail.

Update: On Monday night the Seattle P-I posted “AmazonFail: An inside look at what happened“:

I’ve spoken to an Amazon.com employee who works closely with the systems involved in the glitch… On Sunday afternoon at least 20 Amazon.com employees were paged alerting them that items, possibly many, were incorrectly being flagged as adult. The employees also received links to the Twitter discussion AmazonFail. Thousands of people were angry that gay-themed books had disappeared from Amazon’s sales rankings and search algorithms…

By this time, Amazon.com had upgraded the problem to Sev-1. (Amazon.com breaks down its operational issues in terms of severity levels. Sev-3 means a problem affects a single user. Sev-2 is a problem that affects a company, or a lot of people. Sev-1 is reserved for the most critical operational issues and often are sent up the management chain to the senior vice president level.)

“People got pulled away from their Easter thing when this whole thing broke,” the employee said. “It was just a screwup.”

Amazon.com employees are on call 24/7, and many began working on the problem from home. It didn’t take much digging to realize that there was a data error.

Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as “adult,” the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from ‘false’ to ‘true.’)

“It’s no big policy change, just some field that’s been around forever filled out incorrectly,” the source said.

New Update (April 14): All of the books I listed in my original blog post have had their sales ranking restored.

Amazon sets the blogosphere on fire

Thanks to Cheryl Morgan, I discovered that Amazon.com has done something ridiculously stupid and offensive– it has stripped the sales rankings from many books (fiction, nonfiction, and academic) with gay or lesbian subjects or characters, and it is excluding this “adult” material from some searches and bestseller lists.  People are posting lists of books affected online, and I did some quick author and title searches myself, so here are just a few of the books now missing their rankings:

• Fiction:  E.M. Forster’s Maurice, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, and books by Nicola Griffith, among others.
• Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs:  Randy Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, Dan Savage’s The Committment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family, Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, and Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote.
• History: David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization, and Tin’s The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience.

Mark R. Probst raised the alarm in his blog and posted Amazon’s response to his inquiry about this:

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system? Many of us decided to write to Amazon questioning why our rankings had disappeared. Most received evasive replies from customer service reps not versed in what was happening. As I am a publisher and have an Amazon Advantage account through which I supply Amazon with my books, I had a special way to contact them. 24 hours later I had a response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage

The Meta Writer blog has a link roundup and has starting compiling a list of notable books that have had their sales ranking removed. Strangely, the Kindle editions of GLBT books still have their rankings– for now.

News of this is raging across the blogosphere, and there are more blog posts about it than I can link to, but here are a few more from Booksquare and Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith. Amazon should quickly reverse itself or else this is going to grow to a public relations disaster of epic proportions.

Update:  Sunday evening news flash from Publisher’s Weekly:

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy.

“Wakefulness of mind”

At the Convention on Modern Liberty, held yesterday in the UK, the keynote speech was given by Philip Pullman, author of the fantastic His Dark Materials trilogy. There is much to like in his speech, which ends: “We are a better people than our government believes we are; we are a better nation.” But the part I liked best was about intellectual curiosity, or “wakefulness of mind”:

Another virtue that a nation needs is intellectual curiousity. Wakefulness of mind, one might put it. A nation with that quality would be aware of itself, conscious of itself and its history, and every separate thread that makes up the tapestry of its culture. It would believe that the highest knowledge of itself had been expressed by its artists, its writers and poets, and it would teach its children how to know and how to understand and love. We have to be taught how to love, how to love their work, believing that this activity would give them, the children, an important part to play in the self-knowledge and the memory of the nation.

A nation where this virtue was strong, would be active and enquiring of mind, quick to perceive and compare and consider. Such a nation would know at once when a government tried to interfere with its freedoms. It would remember how all those freedoms had been gained, because each one would have a story attached to it, and an attack on any of them would feel like a personal affront. That is the value of wakefulness.

My thanks to Cheryl Morgan and Cory Doctorow for their blog posts about the Convention, which led me to Pullman’s speech.

Richard Hugo House needs an Executive Director

Richard Hugo House, a nonprofit center for the literary arts in Seattle, is searching for a full-time Executive Director.

About Hugo House:

Richard Hugo House is a home for writers and readers. Our mission is to provide writers of all ages and backgrounds with the resources they need, connect audiences with the world of writing, foster the creation of new work and promote the literary arts as a vital part of our culture.

Richard Hugo House offers classes, residencies and events. Through our classes, including our flagship program, Hugo Writing Classes, we provide opportunities for writers from age eight to eighty to practice and build their writing skills in supportive, creative and stimulating classrooms. Our residencies offer established writers stipends and/or space to support their work; in exchange, these writers hold office hours and consult free of charge with anyone in the city and region who seek their expertise. Events include our annual Hugo Literary Series, which invites established and up-and-coming writers to create new work and debut it here; the Hugo Writers Fund, a granting program that provides new and emerging writers with space and/or honoraria to produce their own events and premiere new work; and the Hugo Zine Archive and Publishing Project, which maintains a library of over 11,000 handmade and independent publications.

They are looking for someone with the following qualifications:

• A demonstrated passion for the arts and a love of literature;
• A proven ability to lead and mentor staff with integrity, enthusiasm and a commitment to results;
• A minimum of four years of progressively responsible management and supervisory experience;
• Strong communication, listening and relationship-building skills;
• A demonstrated ability to raise funds from a range of sources, most notably individual donors and foundations;
• A solid grasp of human resources and financial management practices and concepts;
• An understanding of marketing, outreach and communications concepts;
• An appreciation for collaborative decision-making processes coupled with the ability to be decisive when required;
• Knowledge of nonprofit board structures and principles of governance;
• The ability to work a flexible schedule to accommodate the organization’s schedule of events; and
• An appreciation for community-based organizations and the organization’s relationship with the greater Seattle community.

Follow this link for the full job description.

Hugo House commissioned a story from my husband, Matt Ruff, for the October 2008 Hugo Literary Series event on the theme “Road Trip.”

I will be teaching a “Research for Writers” class on May 9th for Hugo House’s spring quarter. I’ll post the details and registration information soon.

1000 Novels

This week the Guardian newspaper’s website has been publishing a series called “1000 novels everyone must read.”

The books are briefly described and appear in lists divided by category (science fiction & fantasy, state of the nation, family & self, comedy, crime, love, war & travel). There are also special lists within each category, such as the best novels about madness, the best dystopias, etc.

I’ve only just started to browse my way through the series, but already I like the fact that I’m seeing books from the 17th through the 20th centuries.

My thanks to Cheryl Morgan for pointing the way.

Update: The Guardian has posted an explanation of how the books were chosen, and they compiled the titles into one long list for easier browsing. They are also accepting reader nominations of books left off the list.

Obama’s “appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading…”

There’s a fascinating article about Barack Obama’s love of reading and the books that influenced him in today’s New York Times:

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world….

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry….

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance” — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition….

This makes me very happy.

Good advice from writers to start the new year

Welcome back. Now that we’ve all finally escaped from 2008, I wanted to start 2009 with some good advice from interesting and talented writers.

In September 2008, Nicola Griffith posted on her blog her list of “twelve daily deeds of delight for health and happiness.” Here are a few highlights:

• eat a piece of fruit (I mean fruit, a whole something you could pick from a tree or vine: an apple, a nectarine, a pear; not juice; not sorbet; not a disgusting frozen pie; a plump ripe luscious piece of mouth-watering fruit grown without herbicides or pesticides)
• have a conversation (I don’t mean an information exchange about who’s cooking dinner tonight; I don’t mean a shouting match or politely modulated torment about politics; I don’t mean an angsty confession about childhood trauma, or a monologue about javascript; I mean a relaxed, lively, back-and-forth exploration of what gives each of you joy; maybe combined with eating vegetables and drinking wine)
• get out in the fresh air (walking from the office to the car doesn’t count; I’m talking about the park, the beach, the city at one o’clock in the morning: breathe deep of cool, living air)
• look at something with attention–a bird or a beetle, the back of your hand or a glass of water, a shoe or a pencil–until you see something new (newness is all around us; trust me, this one puts a sparkle around your day for hours, and it’s a must for beginning artists)

For those of you who like to make New Year’s resolutions, I suggest that you read her original blog post and either incorporate her list into your daily life or make your own list to live by.

Kelley Eskridge posted on her blog an excellent essay for aspiring pro writers.

Justine Larbalestier has been writing an entertaining series of blog posts with her advice on writing.

In February 2008, John Scalzi wrote a fantastic blog post titled “Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money.” This should be required reading for every writer, artist, freelancer, or self-employed person.

This year you’ll get more advice from me on research and related subjects, and tips for aspiring writers from my husband, Matt Ruff.

Great news about Google Book Search

Like everyone else, I use Google dozens of times a day. Their web search engine is still the best I’ve found, but Google also has a number of more specialized search functions that I like and use regularly. By far my favorite is Google Book Search, which is not one of the main functions listed on Google’s home page, but it will appear if you click the “more” link.

Google Book Search enables you to search the full texts of all of the books stored in its database, which is made up of books scanned from the collections of cooperating libraries (including Harvard University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library, to name a few) and digital book files submitted by publishers. For books in the public domain (published in the U.S. before 1923), you can read as much of the text as you like online, download a PDF file of the entire book, and print as many pages as you want. For books still under copyright, if the author or publisher has given permission, you may be able to view a limited number of pages (though you cannot print or copy any of the text), but most books are restricted to only a few lines or no preview at all. Google displays detailed information about each book, and you can see a list of libraries that have it or buy a copy from an online bookstore.

I love Google Book Search because it helps me discover extremely useful and interesting books of all kinds– old and new, in-print and out-of-print, primary and secondary sources, and valuable sources of information long neglected or forgotten. I love having instant access to complete works in the public domain that are out of print and not available through my local libraries. I love being able to search the texts of millions of books simultaneously for words or phrases– names, places, dates, subjects, titles, historical events, etc.

Google Book Search has always been controversial because it scans books still under copyright without obtaining permission from the authors and publishers, and Google has been sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over it. The great news is, according to Publishers Weekly, the lawsuits have been settled, and everyone wins– millions of books under copyright will be searchable online, there will be a way to purchase full online access to many copyrighted works, the full texts of out-of-print books will be viewable for free on library computer terminals, authors and publishers will control whether or not their works are included and share in the revenue generated through online access to their works, a nonprofit Book Rights Registry will be set up, etc. As both a researcher and the wife of an author, I am thrilled.

Here are excerpts from the AAP statement detailing the settlement:

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search….

The agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web. The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.

If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books — Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books — Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online — Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries — Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works — Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

Under the agreement, Google will make payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. The settlement agreement resolves… lawsuits [that] challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.

Holders worldwide of U.S. copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.

Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford have provided input into the settlement and expect to participate in the project, including by making their collections available. Along with a number of other U.S. libraries that currently work with Google, their significant efforts to preserve, maintain and provide access to books have played a critical role in achieving this agreement and, through their anticipated participation, they are furthering such efforts while making books even more accessible to students, researchers and readers in the U.S. It is expected that additional libraries in the U.S. will participate in this project in the future….

“It’s hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it,” said Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild. “As a reader and researcher, I’ll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world’s great libraries. As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense.”

“This historic settlement is a win for everyone,” said Richard Sarnoff, Chairman of the Association of American Publishers. “From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rightsholder.”

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. “While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips.”

Updates:

Here is Google’s blog post about the settlement.

Here the future changes to Google Book Search resulting from the agreement are explained.

“Girls lean back everywhere…”

In honor of Banned Books Week (September 27th through October 4th), I thought I’d recommend an excellent book on the subject of literary censorship and obscenity prosecutions in the United States, written by a First Amendment lawyer:  Edward de Grazia’s 1992 Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. The title is taken from a quote by Jane Heap, who (with Margaret Anderson) was prosecuted in 1920 for publishing episodes from James Joyce’s Ulysses in their magazine, The Little Review:

Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere–seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom–and no one is corrupted.

This work describes in detail the publishing histories and obscenity trials of the most controversial books of the 20th century, including Joyce’s Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, as well as later trials involving the monologues of Lenny Bruce, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the lyrics of 2 Live Crew.

What makes this work particularly entertaining are the extensive quotes from the authors and publishers involved. As de Grazia notes in his introduction:

I wanted to find out, and describe, how the persons who were most immediately affected by literary censorship–authors and publishers–responded to and felt about it, and to present their reactions as much as possible in words of their own. I also wanted to say what I could about the nature of the legal and constitutional process that has framed the struggle against censorship in our country….

Visit the American Library Association’s website for more information about Banned Books week, including lists of the most frequently challenged authors and books, descriptions of notable First Amendment court cases, and information on how to fight censorship and deal with challenges to library books.

“…a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…”

As most of you may know by now, author David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th at the age of 46. 

My husband and I did not know him, nor had we ever quite gotten around to reading our copy of Infinite Jest, but we were both stunned by the news, especially coming so soon after 9/11. He was only a few years older than us, and he had achieved the kind of success (both critical and commercial) most authors can only dream of, with a MacArthur “genius grant” as the icing on the cake. I can’t help but think about the wife he left behind and the books he’ll never write, and I fear the way he died will eclipse his talents as a writer and teacher.

In my first “Writer’s Bookshelf” post, I highly recommended the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. David Foster Wallace was one of the contributing editors, and it was he who wrote the word note for “utilize” (”This is a puff-word…”) that I quoted to illustrate the style of the work. These are the other word notes written by him:  all of, beg, bland, critique, dialogue, dysphesia, effete, feckless, fervent, focus, hairy, if, impossibly, individual, loan, mucous, myriad, noma, privilege, pulchritude, that, toward, unique.

Here are a few more quotes from David Foster Wallace’s word notes:

dysphesia

This is a medical noun with some timely nonmedical applications. Educated writers already use aphasia to refer to a brain-centered inability to use language, which is close but not identical to the medical meaning. Dysphesia can be similarly extended from its technical def to mean really severe difficulties with forming coherent sentences. As anyone who’s listened to our current president knows, there are speakers whose lack of facility goes way beyond the range of clumsy or articulate. Our president’s public English, like that of his father before him, is dysphesiac.   

impossibly

This is one of those adverbs that’s formed from an adjective and can modify only modifiers, never verbs. Using these sorts of adverbs–impossibly fast, extraordinarily yummy, irreducibly complex–is an upscale educated speech tic that translates well to writing. Not only can the adverbs be as colorful/funny/snarky as you like, but the device is a neat way to up the formality of your prose without sacrificing personality; it makes the writer sound like an actual person, albeit a classy one. The big caveat is that you can’t use these special-adverb-plus-adjective constructions more than once every few sentences or your prose starts to look like it’s trying too hard. 

pulchritude

A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote…. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.

 

Unforgivable

I read Lee Israel’s book, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger, and no, I can’t forgive her, and neither should you. I hesitated to even buy the book and thus indirectly reward her for her crimes, but my curiosity was piqued by the glowing review in the New York Times Book Review (which called it a “pretty damned fabulous book”), and I knew one of the autograph dealers in the story. I have a wicked case of buyer’s remorse.

From 1990 to 1992, Lee Israel created over 400 forged typed letters “signed” by Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Noel Coward, Edna Ferber, Louise Brooks and others, she sold them to over thirty different autograph dealers, and she stole authentic letters from libraries and replaced them with her forged copies. Throughout the book, she takes great pride and delight in her crimes and her cleverness, and she gloats over the fact that two of her forgeries were published in 2007 in The Letters of Noel Coward: “For me, this was a big hoot and a terrific compliment.”

She was at one time a successful biographer but explains, “I was imprudent with money and Dionysian to the quick… Over a period of about three years, I plummeted from best-sellerdom to welfare.” Instead of going to work, when she needs money for her sick cat (no, I’m not making this up), she steals from the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. “So I stole three Fanny Brice letters, slid them into a small notebook, ducked into the ladies’ room, and planted them gingerly between my socks and my Keds…. I felt no guilt about the letters. They were from the realm of the dead. Doris [her cat] and I were alive and well and living on the West Side.” She sells the letters to the Argosy Book Store, and when she discovers that interesting content will bring more money, she buys an old manual typewriter and begins composing and selling her own Fanny Brice letters. She quickly moves on to forging letters from other writers and celebrities, buys more typewriters, steals old paper and stationery, and throws herself into her new business.  

When suspicions are eventually raised about some of her forged letters, she begins stealing real letters and replacing them with her fakes, and she hires a friend to sell the originals for her. Her only qualms surface in her dreams: ”I was surrounded by the celebrity subjects of my forgeries, who were not on this occasion such good company: all nattering about how bad my typing was, how inept my punctuation. Dorothy Parker sniffed at my use of serial commas, which she compared to serial killers.”

She is finally caught after an autograph dealer calls the FBI. While waiting for her court date, she visits an autograph shop, asks if they have “something in a Dorothy Parker,” and finds they have two of her forgeries. “This one was priced unframed at $2,500!… Delighted as I was at my letter’s being experienced as Parker pure, I was nettled. I was going on trial as people were still making a great deal of money from the fruits of my labor. The extreme markups, which I’d not been aware of until this time, also annoyed me. Since the autograph business is gossipy and incestuous, I wondered how any dealer could not have known about the spurious pedigree of the letters.”  Instead of telling him directly that she forged the letters, she leaves the shop and writes a letter to the dealer as Dorothy Parker: “Poor wayward Lee Israel received only eighty-five dollars a pop when she sold them originally.” 

Getting caught didn’t change her attitude at all. ”I did the usual bullshit… voluntary community service, as impressive to the Court as discovering Jesus as personal Lord and Savior… Meanwhile, my lawyer… was doing a marvelous job bringing the numbers down on the federal sentencing guidelines, writing letters to the Court stressing my distinguished past and the badness of the patch that had driven me into a life of crime.” She tells the judge, “I feel and have felt over the past year enormous guilt and anxiety. I feel that I have betrayed really my community of scholars, a citadel of culture.” She never serves a day in jail for her crimes– she is sentenced to five years probation and six months of house arrest.

She ends the book with a token pretense of remorse, as if her editor told her she should at least pretend to be sorry. ”I had spent a good deal of my professional life hunting and gathering in annals and archives, and messing with those citadels was unequivocally and big-time wrong…. I suffered and I paid by being barred from the libraries that I had plundered…. My guilt over the original thefts is mitigated somewhat by the gathering in of the epistolary diaspora. I cooperated with the FBI, and the real letters… were so far as I know all recovered and returned safely to their archival homes. I have never experienced strong qualms about [the forged letters... They] were larky and fun and totally cool… Any remorse I experience about this phase of my life in crime has nothing to do with the money various dealers might have lost.”

This very short book (129 pages, many of which are reproductions of her forgeries) has received a disturbing amount of positive media attention, and the writers of the reviews and articles about her, with very few exceptions, seem rather amused by her “adventures.” I was not amused. Her writing didn’t impress me either, as she comes across like a sociopathic Dorothy Parker wannabe, overly impressed by her own wit and quite pleased with herself for getting away with it.   

Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the long tradition of glamorizing and minimizing crimes involving rare books and autographs. Book thieves and autograph forgers rarely serve jail time or pay meaningful restitution. But these aren’t petty or victimless crimes– they are not only crimes against literature and culture, they are also crimes against the very people, businesses, and institutions dedicated to discovering, documenting, promoting, protecting, and preserving for all time the valuable and often irreplaceable artifacts of our civilization. The fact that these types of offenses aren’t taken seriously by the media, the law, or the public is the real crime.