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June 30, 2006
TT: On the dotted line
Upon returning to New York from Smalltown, U.S.A., I found in my waiting pile of incoming snail mail a contract for a five-hundred-word piece I recently wrote for an upcoming issue of a Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless. It consisted in the main of the usual you-agree-to-let-us-do-whatever-the-hell-we-want boilerplate, but the following paragraph was new to me:8. You agree to use your best efforts to participate in the promotion and marketing of the Work and The Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless by making reference to the Work and The Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless in settings including, but not limited to, articles or books written by or about you or the Work, interviews, editorials, press conferences, press releases, television appearances, Internet Web sites maintained and operated by you, and any other media available for the promotion of the Work to which you have access.
My immediate impulse was to scrawl Screw you, buddy! across the face of the contract and send it back in the stamped, self-addressed envelope thoughtfully supplied by the Magazine Which Must Remain Nameless. After further consideration, though, I decided that it was more important to get paid than strike a pose, so I signed the contract--grudgingly--and dropped it in the mail.
The whole dismal exercise put me in mind of the following passage from Patrick O'Brian's The Reverse of the Medal:
"As for Gibbon, now," said Stephen when they were settled by the fire again, "I do remember the first lines. They ran ‘It is dangerous to entrust the conduct of nations to men who have learned from their profession to consider reason as the instrument of dispute, and to interpret the laws according to the dictates of private interest; and the mischief has been felt, even in countries where the practice of the bar may deserve to be considered as a liberal occupation.'"
Or, as Auberon Waugh observed in his autobiography, more succinctly but no less devastatingly, "Honourable causes are seldom advanced by the employment of lawyers."
I'd say that includes common courtesy, wouldn't you?
UPDATE: This guy soooo missed the point, which didn't strike me as especially subtle. An author who isn't willing to publicize his own work by any and all available means is an idiot. In the immortal words of John L. Lewis, "He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted." On the other hand, a magazine that tries to make him do so by stuffing yet another lawyer-drafted clause into its two-foot-long standard-form contract is...but you get the idea, right? Don't you?
Posted June 30, 2006 12:00 PM
