One More Epicycle

Consider the following story:

An astronomer who dabbles in writing once heard — and was amused to hear — that one of his nonscientific works had been cited in a particularly unusual context.   He’d thought about this story from time to time and so he decided to dig up the article and turn it into a post.

Well, after a bit of work early on a Tuesday evening, he succeeded in finding it..  but it wasn’t a cite.

It was a direct lift of barely-touched sentences.  Uncredited.  With no quotation marks.   And it’s not subtle, either: the style is so different from the surrounding material that he’d lay even money that you, dear reader, would be able to figure out which paragraph was by the astronomer.

What should the man do?  In the grand scheme of things this is pretty small beer, of course.  The article is several years old and has probably been read by no more than a few dozen people.  Moreover, the article’s author is a relation of a former acquaintance of the astronomer, an acquaintance to whom he bears no ill will.

On the other hand, the article is in a forum where one could fairly expect the highest standards of the writers.  And it’s not likely to be a mistake: the only reason the astronomer knew about the existence of the article in the first place was because the acquaintance in question told him about it, and asked him how the article’s author could get a copy of a particular book related to the subject matter.  The author clearly yanked sentences from the astronomer’s article and assembled them to fit the context.

The article’s author was also doing a thesis at about the same time, and the astronomer now has grave concerns about what you’d find if you googled passages from it.

Those who have ready Dorothy Sayers’ classic Gaudy Night may recognize the dilemma the astronomer is in; and the possible consequences.

Such an astronomer would be in for a major headache.

I was reading a webcomic the other day. It wasn’t great, but it was reasonably diverting, and so I didn’t mind the cheap political digs. I prefer my poli-snark to be a little more rooted in reality (“reality-based”, to use a phrase the American left is fond of), but whatever.

I was drawn up short by the Bush “Triumph of the Will” reference, though. (Punchline seems inappropriate.) For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a famous Nazi film made by Leni Riefenstahl.

Enough has been said about the ludicrousness of the Bush-Hitler comparisons that there’s frankly nothing left to say. If you advance a comparison between the two — even using “dangerous trends” weaselwords — I simply can’t take you seriously. In fact, I think of it as a kind of implied Holocaust denial. If Bush is materially like Hitler, then presumably Hitler was no worse than Bush. I can’t remember what grad student at Queen’s said he suspected the neo-con junta was going to launch a coup or whatever, and then refused to take my bet, even though I’d offered whatever odds he liked..

Anyway, the entirely gratuitous drive-by ruined my enjoyment of the whole comic. Like most conservatives living in a time when the arts are dominated by the Left, I’ve learned to set a lot aside, but it can still be annoying.

The Left, for want of practice, isn’t as good at being a target: witness the remarkable on-a-dime turnaround that so many South Park fans demonstrated when Matt & Trey started going after liberal sacred cows. (For the record, my favourite scene remains the rescue of the choir by the bulldozers in Rainforest Schmainforest. Now that was funny.)

Even when it’s not egregiously offensive, I try to keep politics out of my creative work, except for when it’s necessary for story purposes.. and I don’t use my characters as a ventriloquist’s dummy. Many of my recent stories have been about a libertarian, whose politics are at least in my universe, but the views of the man in question are quite different from mine on lots of subjects. Like most libertarians, he’s far more confident in technocratic solutions to human problems than I think is warranted, and has quirky positions which seem oddly flat when compared to the richness of human life.

In another set of stories, the character in the series most like me — not the hero, by the way! — is indirectly responsible for a terrible event because she does something that I might have done, for reasons rooted in my own political inclinations. The hero, by comparison, is kind of apolitical, but if I had to label her I guess she’d be the type of typical big-government Canadian “moderate” I used to mock over beers at the Brew Pub. Think of her as a Liberal without the corruption or the condescension.

Long story short, it’s seldom necessary to offend your potential audience. Doesn’t mean there’s not a place for snark: I do it here all the time, after all. But there’s not much reason to take a story that someone would enjoy and make it harder for them to do so.

Why, it’s almost enough to drive a man to pseudonymity..

The scene: a small, beautiful campus located in a sleepy college town by a lake where the mountains meet the Foothills.

The event: the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society.

The history: for centuries before Europeans arrived in the New World, the people of the First Nations had known there were times to admire the wonders of the Rockies as the sun set — and times to be somewhere else.

The problem?

Zombies. Lots of zombies. Creepy sasquatch-like monster zombies.

The title: Publish or Perish.

Yes, I will write the screenplay to spec, if any producer types are reading this..

The past few weeks have been very crazy, hence my relative quiet: but I have to take this opportunity to congratulate my old net.friend Rebecca Anderson for her being signed to Adams Literary on the strength of her young adult novel Knife.

It was obvious this would happen eventually, and unfortunately I can’t even take credit for being one of a select and farseeing few who recognized her talent all those years ago because, frankly, everyone did.  She’s the only person I know who’s had a line from her fanfiction used and credited in a published novel, which is a testament to how much fun she is as a prose stylist.

Reading her work makes the rest of us better writers.  To this day, when I need to reach for an arresting description of something, I ask myself “what would Rebecca find here?” — find, not see, because one of the strengths of her writing is nonvisual metaphor.  And “to this day” has some weight behind it.  We first started exchanging letters over ten years ago.

I trust that this will be the start of an enjoyable and fruitful career, aside from her full-time job as wife and mother of three; it shouldn’t take long to place the manuscript, and others will soon follow.  To quote myself, though:

[..] I’m still miffed that she hasn’t finished her Holmesfic The Case of the Winning Woman. (It probably won’t be finished before the End of Time, as after her young-adult fantasy novel Knife sells doubtless her editors will ask for more of the same, not Conan Doyle pastiches.)

All I ask — and I know she’s reading this! — is that after establishing herself and getting some books out there, she considers having another look at it.. and no, I’m not going to stop bringing it up.  Poor little orphaned story, someone has to care for it, and if the task falls to the on-call astrophysicist, well, a man has his duties.

I’d go on record with embarrassing (for her) and obvious (for everyone else) predictions of future success, but I think the ship has long sailed on my chance to play prophet where she’s concerned.  Congratulations again to RJA.

Tiresome contrarian that I am, I want to dissent from the general angry astonishment that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has decided to assign James Lileks — arguably the best pure writer in the ’sphere, as my blogroll has described him since my very first post — to beat reporting. But I can’t.

To BEAT REPORTING! As Dave Barry writes:

This is like the Miami Heat deciding to relieve Dwyane Wade of his basketball-playing obligations so he can keep stats.

Sometimes I don’t understand the newspaper business. What’s left of it.

From an outsider’s perspective, this seems like the incomprehensible institutional stupidity that only one familiar with the exploits of Harold Ballard can recognize. At least after correcting for the fact that Ballard knew how to turn a profit, legal or otherwise. I could almost understand laying Lileks off, if it came to that, if I were uninterested in quality and only wanted to control costs — maybe this Ballard analogy is better than I thought! — but transferring one of the great observational columnists of our age to straight reporting?

In what world is that a useful allocation of resources? For Canadian readers, this is like assigning John Stackhouse (probably our best get-his-hands-dirty social-issue investigative reporter) to the business pages. Or getting Rex Murphy to cover varsity sports. An enormous talent, shunted aside into something where his natural ability will nevertheless make him better than most.. but much less than his potential when he’s in his niche.

As yours truly once wrote (kind of a stepdown from Barry, I admit):

My favourite anecdote about Lileks, which captures the esteem in which he’s held by so many of us, comes from Jonah Goldberg. Jonah had gone to give a talk at the University of Minnesota, followed by some pubbing, and guess who dropped by? Lileks described the event afterward, but — as Jonah put it — “he leaves out that he was [..] greeted like Aragorn at the Prancing Pony Inn”. I can understand the reaction of the crowd, and it’s characteristic that it would go unmentioned.

For those who haven’t sampled his brilliance, this post on his great-grandfather is one of my favourites from the last year.

I’m with Hugh Hewitt. This situation is too absurd to last.

I’m also hoping that the best comparison will turn out to be with Canadian journalist Christie Blatchford. After the end of the Conrad Black era of the National Post — i.e. when the Post went Martinite and let go of most of its best columnists — they also fired Blatchford. Recognizing their luck, i.e. their competitors’ idiocy, the Globe and Mail wasted no time in picking her up. She’s since been one of their best writers, both in her crime reporting and in her Afghanistan series.

This shall not stand! It can’t. It’s too lame.