The Shia LeBeouf plagiarism scandal has gone completely off the rails. He has now been caught stealing content from multiple authors and even from multiple apologies.
I feel I should comment on this, because no one seems to be getting to the ultimate cause of this and other plagiarism scandals in literature, science, and politics. The disease behind these symptoms is the polite Western myth that we are all creative equals, a myth which manifests in a variety of forms. Continue reading
Co-review by John Leith of j.nelsonleith.com and John Austin of Fresh Pulp magazine.
The habit of writing and talking politics in a coffee shop is beyond cliché. And writing or debating deep issues while drinking—even if not actually in a bar—is also a well-established tradition.
There’s a reason why there’s a drink named after Hemingway.
But, there’s a new trend in America that also has great potential to create a salon atmosphere, not only for writing but also for discussing literature, politics, religion, culture, science, and personal life. It’s an old Middle Eastern tradition, dating at least from the 1500s, that has recently begun to take off in the West. We’re talking about the narghile, the qalyán, the shisha, i.e., that waterpipe most commonly called the hookah.
And we have found a fantastic place to partake: Andalusia Hookah Bar and Lounge in Crystal City, Virginia.
So …
You guys know I’m not a Franzen fanatic, but I feel compelled to share my thoughts on his recent interview at Scratch.
The consensus seems to be that it was a great back-and-forth, and I agree. Straightforward questions, frank answers. What an interview should be.
Here are my thoughts on the the highlights, starting with the stuff with which I agree and saving my only disagreement with Franzen for last.
Editor and former literary agent Mary Cunnane recently took a swipe at publishing pros who publicly wallow in the disdain they feel for writers, using social media to broadcast “the sins of yet another supplicant who failed to contact her in the preferred manner, didn’t read her submission guidelines, or asked her to be friends on Facebook and then sent her a publishing pitch. The nerve.”
As you can guess, Cunnane’s take is less than sympathetic. She tells of one publishing pro whose tweets detail “how exhausted she is from her many travails: manuscripts to read; rights fairs to prepare for; dinner parties and literary festivals to attend … #Queryfail, though, is what seems to send her over the edge, scrabbling for the smelling salts to ward off the vapours.”
In fact, her main point is to scold her colleagues for their arrogance and cruelty:
The tone of exasperation, irritation, and sometimes even downright anger is telling. Someone is trying to get the attention of a publishing professional and is breaching the rules and/or being unrealistic and/or totally clueless. Those folks are the outsiders, the others are the insiders. God help the first if they annoy the second… SlushPile Hell, rejection, #queryfail – all signal an air of entitlement and a sense of besiegement, the last perhaps a sign of the anxious, proverbial-over-tea-kettle state publishing has been in since 2008. But without writers, publishers are nowhere: should they therefore be made to feel they must storm the battlements in order to get even a look-in?
(Of course, I would add to Cunnane’s jeremiad that, in many cases the gate-keepers of traditional publishing create their own barbarians by broadcasting encouragement to every Tom, Jill, and Mary that they should write a novel.)
And, to be clear, Cunnane is not talking about the gentle, head-shaking, “what was this person thinking?” type of after-action humor we all engage in. She admits to having “tweeted about a silly query, e.g. ‘To The Mary Cunnane Agency. Dear Sir’.”
What’s she’s talking about is public shaming, essentially a relational aggression tactic: establishing a brute-force pecking order that conveys, even to good writers, how they had damn-well-better behave if they know what’s good for them.
But, what struck me most about Cunnane’s literary finger-wagging was how vividly it reminded me of what might have been the best dating advice I ever received in my life.
Not much to post today, since it’s a fairly significant holiday.
I’ve updated the Short Stories page to include a few that were somehow left out of the line-up. This weekend I plan to do the same for the Serialized Fiction page, in order to make this a more upfront and interactive part of the website. I’ll go further into the reasoning later, but the spark of it was the realization that I write far more than I let people read, and that’s not a generous or winning strategy in any light.
But for today, let me just say Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers, Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish readers, Happy Ascension Day to my Bahá’i readers! Instead of a post on literature, I’ll repost this Thanksgiving message from a now-defunct political blog:
Those who read my analysis of two decades of dualistic films (from Dante’s Peak and Volcano to Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down) might be looking forward to the next few months with some excitement … or dread.
We have two films that might be characterized as “dragon-oriented” flicks. December’s The Desolation of Smaug is the obvious first installment in the possible duality. And, although it is not entirely clear how important the draconian climax of the classic Sleeping Beauty will play in May 2014’s Maleficent, we can reasonably expect some dragon-fire from Disney’s film as well.
The real question, of course, is whether these two films can be said to fit the pattern of “realistic vs. cartoonish” that the other dual films in my analysis had. After all, both are developed from what are ultimately children’s stories. Both are fantasies.
Both dragons, on the other hand, are fairly menacing and to be taken seriously. Smaug, with his Old Testament self-veneration, might have the slight edge as the more serious dragon. Despite Jolie’s expert handling, I fear that Maleficent might stumble into hubristic absurdity as Snow White and the Huntsman did despite Charlize Theron’s genius.
Can’t wait to see how it turns out!
On the eve of NaNoWriMo, the 50k novel-writing marathon, it might be a good time to talk word count.
Now, those familiar with this website know that I have a lot of gripes about this stuntfest. However, I’m not here to pick on NaNo this time, but defend it, because one complaint lodged against NaNoWriMo is incredibly unfair: the idea that 50k isn’t enough for a novel.
It’s ironic, actually, considering that NaNoWriMo is all about a monthly word count, daily word counts, and various accounting strategies for busting out the “winning” 50,000 words by St. Andrew’s Day. But my argument that the annual stuntfest misses the point of writing by fetishizing word count applies equally to NaNoWriMo’s critics who preach a weird dogma that 50k doesn’t qualify as novel-length.
In fact, specific to science fiction and fantasy, there is a widely held belief that 50k isn’t even half enough for a novel, November-written or not.
As this Writer’s Digest piece (amusingly billed as “The Definitive Post” on word count) asserts: “Science fiction and fantasy are the big exceptions because these categories tend to run long. It has to do with all the descriptions and world-building in the writing. With these genres, I would say 100,000 – 115,000 is an excellent range.” Even among non-sf novels, The Definitive Post claims that below 70k is “too short.”
I call double bullshit on that. Continue reading
We’re getting ready to get the computing smack-down laid on our gamer brains by a new generation of consoles, including the Wii U, the Playstation 4, and the Xbox One.
I know each of these platforms already has a boatload of games in the works, but nevertheless I’d like to offer my two cents to 8th Generation game designers, specifically on how to make better open-world games.
_
Statehood is a perennial issue in the District of Columbia, along with full enfranchisement of the residents of DC. It’s not for nothing that the District’s license place bear the motto “Taxation Without Representation.” Unlike other Americans, citizens of DC have no effective vote in Congress.
Interesting how all those Tea Party activists protesting in the District never made a big deal out of the taxation without representation right in front of their faces.
But, beyond all of the partisan politics behind adding a 51st star to the flag (DC is notoriously left-leaning and Democratic), a huge stumbling block in the DC statehood struggle is the fact that DC does not look or sound like a state.
If you are one of my close friends, I apologize, because you have heard this rant so many times over the past year that I am probably lucky we’re still acquaintances.
Despite what you might have heard in the news, Voyager is not “leaving the solar system.” It’s leaving the heliosphere, the tiny region of the solar system that is dominated by the solar wind.
To say Voyager is leaving the solar system by leaving the solar wind is like saying someone left the United States by stepping outside the White House. In short, it’s stupid, incorrect, and unscientific. Which explains why so many professional science journalists are saying it.
