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April 29, 2006

COPYCAT REDUX

What's the difference between a plagiarist and a copycat? Nothing really -- except one admitted it and the other didn't, one is a writer and the other is an artist, one had her novel withdrawn by the publisher and the other had his layout in The New York Times Style Magazine defended by a Times editor as a case of copycat "coincidence."

Consider Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism vs. Vik Muniz's copycatting.

Here's a widely cited example, one of many borrowed passages in Viswanathan's recently published novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life": "He had too-long shaggy brown hair that fell into his eyes, which were always half shut. His mouth was always curled into a half smile, like he knew about some big joke that was about to be played on you."

Which bears a striking similarity to this passage in Megan McCafferty's 2001 novel, "Sloppy Firsts": "He’s got dusty reddish dreads that a girl could never run her hands through. His eyes are always half-shut. His lips are usually curled in a semi-smile, like he’s in on a big joke that’s being played on you but you don’t know it yet."

Here's an example, on the right, of what Muniz produced last December for a NYT Style Magazine fashion spread.

Which bears a striking resemblance to Norman O. Mustill's image, on the left, from his 1969 book of collages, "Flypaper":

Although the copied visual image is not exact, it bears as much similarity to Mustill's original as the plagiarized verbal passage bears to McCafferty's, and there's enough exact material -- tree branches within a human form in the context of a fashion statement and the referential hand -- to draw the appropriate conclusion.

As for the notion that Viswanathan's plagiarism is of a different order from Muniz's copycatting if only because of sheer numbers -- she apparently copied dozens of passages from two McAfferty novels -- it doesn't hold up unless 1) you fail to see the similarity between Muniz's borrowed technique of combining newsprint and human figure cutouts in the image on the right with Mustill's image from his 1971 pamphlet "Twinpak," on the left, or 2) you fail to compare percentages..

Viswanathan plagiarized roughly 40 passages (a sentence or paragraph each) in a book that comes to 320 pages. As blatant as that is, the total percentage of borrowed words comes to very little compared with the two Muniz copycat images, above, and a less obvious third borrowing (scroll down), which is 50 percent of the six-image Times spread.

Posted by jherman at 8:58 AM

April 28, 2006

GREG'S PALASTERIN'

The latest comes in a new book, "Armed Madhouse," a five-part investigation of the "global economic piggery" that starts at home in the good ol' U.S. of A.

To borrow a friend's coinage for one of Greg Palast's typical columns, Zounds! What a palasterin'! This time it goes like so:

Here is our new world of militarized greed, where America's panic over lunatics with box-cutters has metastasized into a billion-dollar fear industry; where Republicans sucking on Super-sized Slurpies® are hunting dark-skinned voters to eliminate their rights; where James Baker's fixer in alligator boots sets up the grab for Iraq's oil on her way to the rodeo; where miners are suffocated by the same investment bankers who are siphoning off auto workers' pensions.

Palast is ornery and relentless and right. He's also a bitchin' writer whose take on things can surprise you. For example, have a look at his recent piece in The Guardian on why Rummy Boy -- "a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon," to quote his lovely description -- should not resign. Palast has no use for the "wannabe Rommels," now "safely retired," who are calling for Rummy Boy's ouster. They're not only "four years too late," he points out, they're going after "the puppet instead of the puppeteers."

"Armed Madhouse" is divided into five sections:

THE NETWORK: The World as a Company Town. The weird and frightening facts about the tidal flow of international currency -- the real story of China's rise and the death of Detroit. Plus a report from the future on the assassination of Hugo Chavez -- [which] explains why it had to be done.

THE CON: Kerry won. But two million of his votes were never counted. They can't take away your Social Security until they take away your vote. In the 2008 race, four million ballots will go missing. Here's how it will be done.

THE FEAR: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? Turning Ground Zero into a Profit Center. Why does Southold, New York, have machine guns on SUVs at the casino ferry? Investigations of health insurance and suicide bombings -- in other words, the fun chapter.

THE FLOW: Trillion Dollar Babies. If you thought George Bush had a secret plan to seize Iraq's oil -- you're wrong. He had TWO plans, and Armed Madhouse has both of them.

THE CLASS WAR: I go deeper into George Bush's crude system of educational terror ("No Child's Behind Left"), Ken Lay's REAL crimes for which he won't be tried, and the story of New Orleans you won't get on Fox Snews. Here you'll get some complex economics and a free ticket to the circus -- and the core issue of the book: the war of the movers and shakers against the moved and shaken.

Palast is going on a book tour. Here's the sked.

And here in reverse order, in case you missed them, are previous items about Palast: Ahead of the Curve; The Gun That Smokes; Big Oil vs. the Neocons; Oh, Those Kooks and Crazies; Saint Ronald Gets the Heave Ho, and Stiffing Culifornia

Posted by jherman at 10:05 AM

April 26, 2006

BETTER THAN LE PETOMANE?

Here's one fer da books: "Ever Seen an Asshole Talk?" It brings back memories of "Naked Lunch" and tales of Joseph Pujol at the Moulin Rouge.

Postscript from a friend: "And here's one to make your hair stand on end. Remember Karl Böhm, beloved German maestro at the Met?"

PPS from another friend: "A little something to rival old Joe Pujol."

Posted by jherman at 10:12 AM

April 24, 2006

MUSIC TO MY EARS

Have you heard the song, "Let's Impeach the President," on the new Neil Young album (due out in May)? I haven't. But the song title sounds catchy.

[April 28: Click to listen to the album's songs. They're being streamed in sequence. "Impeach" comes seventh.]

Young has a better opinion of the American people than I do. He says, "I think there's a conscience in the country, and I don't think it's being spoken. Only a part of it is being spoken." Yeah, well. As written here, during the 2004 election campaign:

On the third anniversary of 9/11, the best way for Americans to honor the dead is to look to the future by realizing that the upcoming presidential election will be a referendum not on the candidates for the White House but on the conscience and convictions of the electorate itself.

After the election, there were signs of conscience. Remember the truly sorry hit magnet? Sincere but powerless. Come the November mid-term elections, we'll find out whether that has changed. Maybe the price of gasoline will strengthen America's conscience. In the meantime I'm joining Young's army. This is my enlistment form. Click the album cover. It will take you to the video clip of a great CNN interview with Young. (Just ignore the "ShowBiz Tonight" intro blather.)

Postscript: Could impeachment happen? Not likely. But "the Illinois State Legislature is preparing to drop a bombshell," blogger Steve Leser reports. Apparently, "a little known and never utilized rule" of the U.S. House of Representatives "allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature." Voilà: Illinois House Joint Resolution 125. We'll see if it passes.

Posted by jherman at 8:34 AM

April 21, 2006

'I AM ME AND RUMMY'S HE ...'

Brazen arrogance + abysmal incompetence = "I'm the decider." An old story by now. But the koo-koo-ka-choo of it is worth repeating. So click dat thang.

Posted by jherman at 9:12 AM

April 18, 2006

BIT OF NEPOTISM

Taking a break from da blog. But before I go, figured I'd mention a cousin o' mine -- Carol Edelson -- cuz she's got a show of recent work goin' up soon at the Martucci Gallery in Irvington, N.Y. Actually, this bit of nepotism is just an excuse to post an image of her "Summer Blooms and Reflections," which looks pretty sweet to me. The piece itself, painted in 2004, is a large oil on linen (24" x 60"). It's featured in the show. The image looks even sweeter on the postcard she sent.

You mean you wanna know more? OK, since you insist, here's the lowdown: The show runs from May 2 to June 3 at the Martucci Gallery, Irvington Public Library, 12 Astor St. (across from Metro North) in Irvington. Gallery hours are Mon., Wed., Fri. and Sat. (10 a.m.-5 p.m); Tues. and Thurs. (10 a.m.-9 p.m.). There will be a reception for the artist May 6 (Sat.), 3-5 p.m. Tel: (914) 591-7840.

Posted by jherman at 12:06 PM

April 14, 2006

ARTIST AND REVOLUTIONARY

Now that Repulski has his answer, the real question is: Where did Hemingway publish his comment about taxing the use of the word revolution?

And the answer is: In a 1934 catalogue for a show of etchings of Madrid street scenes by the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.

The artist's son writes that his father "started out as a Cubist under the influence of his friend, Juan Gris." Quintanilla was reluctant to engage in politics, but in 1934 he hosted a committee of the October revolution in his studio and was arrested for it. Besides contributing to the catalogue for the show in New York, Hemingway and John Dos Passos circulated a petition and organized protests to free him from prison. Ditto André Malraux in France and others elsewhere.

Quintanilla later played a prominent role during the Spanish Civil War, both as a military commander and as an artist. When the Republicans lost the war, in 1939, he went into exile for 37 years. His war drawings, including Andalucia: "Why do they kill us?" (1937), right, were shown first in 1938 at the Barcelona Ritz and then at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (with a catalogue by Hemingway).

Paul Quintanilla notes that "Why do they kill us?" was "an important drawing, one that Hemingway liked very much and wanted." He never got it. The drawing "was stolen, by a distant relative, of all people, from my collection," the artist's son writes.

A copy of the petition to free his father from prison turned up, however, in the archives of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Here it is, signed by Henri Matisse:

Incidentally, Hemingway's commentary on Quintanilla can be found in a recently published book, "Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame," a collection of his statements, public letters, introductions, forewords, prefaces, blurbs, reviews, and endorsements, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman.

Posted by jherman at 8:51 AM

April 13, 2006

REPULSKI'S REVENGE

Apparently prompted by yesterday's potboiler item, a regular reader named Repulski sent a message that I'm guessing was intended as a rebuke for overusing, or not fully appreciating, the term revolutionary.

"As a man with a keen eye for prose style and history, not to mention other ineffable insights," he writes, "see if, out of your huge imagining, you can identify the author of this":

Now this may possibly be a good time to suggest that a small tax be levied on the use of the word revolution, the proceeds to be given to the defence of ... any of your friends who are in jail, by all those who write the word and never have shot nor been shot at; who never have stored arms nor filled a bomb, nor have discovered arms nor had a bomb burst among them; who never have gone hungry in a general strike, nor have manned streetcars when the tracks are dynamited; who never have sought cover in a street trying to get their heads behind a gutter; who never have seen a woman shot in the head, in the breast or in the buttocks; who never have seen an old man with the top of his head off; who never have walked with their hands up; who never have shot a horse or seen hooves smash a head; who never have sat a horse and been shot at or stoned; who never have been cracked on the head with a club nor have thrown a brick; who never have seen a scab's forearms broken with a crow-bar, or an agitator filled up with compressed air with an air hose; who, now it gets more serious -- that is, the penalty is more severe -- have never moved a load of arms at night in a big city; nor standing, seeing it moved, knowing what it was and afraid to denounce it because they did not want to die later; nor (let's end it, it could go on too long) stood on a roof trying to urinate on their hands to wash off the black in the fork between finger and thumb from the back-spit of a Thompson gun, the gun thrown in a cistern and the troops coming up the stairs: the hands are what they judge you by -- the hands are all the evidence they need ...

Repulski's message continues: "I, of course, know the answer to this riddle -- to me it's a no-brainer. It shouldn't be to you. And your huge staff can't Google this one. But it might be a pleasing problem for your readers. Naturally,  I will send you the answer if I hear you smashing your shrunken brows in the agony of mindlessness."

Well!

Dear Repulski -- You are a man of strong intuition or ESP, maybe both, because I just re-read "Notes From a Sea Diary," Nelson Algren's riveting defense of Ernest Hemingway against critics like Leslie Fiedler, Norman Podhoretz, Leon Edel, and (especially) Dwight Macdonald, who accused Hemingway of being a puffed-up, bushy-bearded, celebrity-mongering phony who wrote (to cite Norman Mailer's word for it) "babytalk." Which leads me to believe it is Hemingway you are quoting. I'm not certain of this, but that's my guess -- not from the style so much as from the tone and content. And from Algren's assessment of him:

Had Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair died the same day as Ernest Hemingway, it would have been difficult to distinguish her work from his by some of the summaries.

"Hemingway's prose was as chaste as a mountain stream," one Magoo claimed of a stream bearing mules with their forelegs broken, stiffs floating bottoms-up and the results of several abortions.

"He was dedicated to Truth and Beauty," another mad groundskeeper claimed of a man who had always disposed of both abstractions in his "built-in shockproof shit-detector,'' as he described it.

The overpraisers were judges as useless after his death as had been the begrudgers before. ...

Algren continues:

Ernest Hemingway's need was not to write declarative sentences with a beautiful absence of subordinate clauses. It was not to meet celebrities: he was on speaking terms with Georges Clemenceau, Benito Mussolini and Mustapha Kemal before he had heard of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was one of the most highly paid correspondents in Europe.

Therefore the man had at his disposal a lifetime of meeting celebrities, while living comfortably with his wife and children in the capitals of the world; enjoying that degree of fame a foreign correspondent earns.

It was a lucky way of living -- but he didn't want it. He didn't want it because, to him, it wasn't living at all. To Dwight Macdonald it would have been living. To have a respectable name with the Establishment and be a dissenter too! What more could a man ask than to have it both ways?

Hemingway didn't care for it either way. He wasn't an athletic young man from Oak Park. He was a soldier whose life had been broken in two. He didn't come to The Moveable Feast as a picnic begun in Kansas City now being continued in the Bois de Boulogne. He had seen the faces of calm daylight looking ashen as faces in a bombardment. He had been the man who did not know where he went each night nor what was the peril there; nor why he should waken in a sweat more frightened than he'd been in the bombardment ...

Hemingway had felt his life fluttered like a pocket-handkerchief by the wind of death. In the watches of the night he had heard retreat beaten. Out of dreams like Dostoevsky's, endured in nights wherein he had lost his life yet had not died. Hemingway forged an ancestral wisdom in terms usable by modern man: that he who gains his life shall lose it and he who loses it shall save it; into a prose magically woven between sleep and waking.

Algren's admiration for Hemingway was an artist's belief. It was more thorough, more receptive, the product of a literary intellect more powerful than a mere scholar's or critic's. He writes:

It wasn't his syntax, but the man inside the prose, that makes Macdonald struggle and fret to secure a hold on [Hemingway]. For, to one so devoid of inner sinew as Macdonald, literature is explainable only in terms of syntax. He must of necessity assume that Hemingway's style was a matter of being an athletic youth sufficiently clever to pick up some tricks from Gertrude Stein to serve his ambition.

Hemingway's emulators thought so too. For his art was so hidden it seemed easily imitated: one had only to talk tough and cut it short. Some imitated him boldly, some secretly, some mockingly and some slavishly. But what they wrote had no tension: his prose was invulnerable.

Though his prose was invulnerable, his life was not. He flaunted a personality as poetic as Byron's and as challenging as Teddy Roosevelt's; before timorous men whose lives were prosaic. It was necessary, no, absolutely essential to get his number.

"He thinks like a child," someone remembered Goethe saying of Byron. So Norman Mailer said "Hemingway has never written anything that would disturb an eight-year-old." So Professor Fiedler said it and Professor Podhoretz said it and Professor Edel said it and Professor Macdonald said it. First they said it one by one. Then, gathering courage, they all said it together in chorus. Now we have his number: Now we really have his number.

And of all our thinkers from Paul Goodman to Ronald Reagan, who has given us a passage so certain not to disturb an eight-year-old as this:

"If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot define completely but the feeling comes ... when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it had flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of government, the richness, the poverty, martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all one as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm-fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light-globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-long-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream with no visible flow, takes fives loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm-fronds of our victories, the worn light-bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against the one single lasting thing -- the stream."

Call that babytalk.

Posted by jherman at 9:38 AM

April 12, 2006

ANCIENT PAPYRUS SPEAKS

Mining the files has uncovered a text from Sept. 23, 1971. The original, typed out on seven pages of orange graph paper with photo illustrations, includes this little potboiler:

A LIBERATIONIST PLOT

The Pacific Railroad Station was marked for destruction. It sat between two hills adjacent to an old farm. The morning was cool and the sun rose between the hills, casting an orange transparency over the valley.

Tommy Fast gazed through the quiet, unsuspecting atmosphere and adjusted his binoculars. There was nobody to be seen on the station platform or further up the tracks -- they gleamed like two silver solitary threads that disappeared from his line of sight where the valley took a turn to the left.

Tommy descended into the valley from a northeasterly direction. The air caught his breath and left him with a sharp, almost hungry pang in the pit of his stomach. In his pocket he held two sticks of nitroglycerine and two separate fuses. His eyes searched the deserted station. It was built of ancient redwood and seemed more than sturdy. Two empty wooden benches provided for passengers were bare except for some folded newspapers, the only evidence that the station was in use.

Tommy Fast's connection with various revolutionary groups which had sprung up all over the world was more or less accidental. He rarely made inquiries about others in the same line of work. This complemented his desire for security and an anxious need to maintain secret operations. He did not even bother keeping up with news since he found the habit of reading the daily papers strangely treacherous to his motivation.

He'd once been told by an ancient gentleman who, it was rumored, had been part of a group of pre-revolutionary Russian anarchists, that the greatest danger to a revolutionary consisted in the ease by which various distractions could slow the momentum of revolutionary ambition. Distractions inevitably led to the commission of small errors of detail -- errors which the police would capitalize on swiftly and without mercy. Tommy found news distracting.

He made certain thorough calculations in a small pocket notebook kept for the purpose. He noted the time it had taken him to cross the ridge which marked the beginning of the valley and the farthest edge of the farm which bordered on the station. Fifteen minutes to descend to a small clearing in a slanting meadow just below the tree line. He drew a quick sketch of this distance with arrows marking the line of descent. From the meadow to the tracks there was not more than another twenty yards.

DISTRACTIONS

Dateline Moscow: Authorities announced, in response to what are termed "rising Zionist demands," that 10,000 Jews daily will be allowed to emigrate to Israel -- on condition they are shipped in simple pinewood boxes. When asked if there are any other conditions that might have remained unsaid, a government spokesman claimed: "None whatsover. They need only apply."

Dateline Paris: Preparing for an official state visit by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, ventriloquist dummies poured out of CRS vans in search of "undesirables" on order of the Russian Embassy. French spokesmen described their internment on Corsica as "a paid vacation." Brezhnev arrived aboard a prototype Concorde in the glare of Orly Airport kleiglights in time to see them off: "Bon voyage."

Dateline Vienna: A group of happeners freaked out local cops by smearing ox brains mixed with cat shit on their genitals. At private showings, valkerie amazons sucked them off and puked stillborn rabbits. They were all marched off to a nuthouse under police surveillance, but not without a final act of defiance: They went, singing "Nuthin' could be finer than to be in Carolina in the maw-aw-awh-ning ..."

Dateline New York: American painter Andrew Wyeth was commissioned to do the unofficial Nixon portrait. At a press conference, the painter was quoted as saying: "I think he is a handsome president. The man has very fine features."

Posted by jherman at 10:58 AM

April 5, 2006

MINING THE PAST, AGAIN

Came across this: An essay by Raphael Sorin, "Le mouvement 'Cut-Up,'" in Le Monde, 25 fevrier 1972, about The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE little magazine, Nova Broadcast Press, "Cut Up or Shut Up," "The Braille Film," "Twinpak" (with an illustration), "la poésie visuelle politique," and so on. Sorin's article is part of a two-page spread, "LA 'LITTÉRATURE' SAUVAGE," which also includes Jean-Michel Palmier's essay, "Quand Lénine devient Mickey," about Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Ain't dat a kick in da head?

Posted by jherman at 11:03 AM

April 4, 2006

BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

First he made "Old Glory" condoms that came in red, white and blue. Then he got them patented as a patriotic anti-AIDS device after a fight with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Now he's submitted a formal proposal to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a Disneyfied Vegas-style Resort & Theme Park in Nantucket Sound called ''Martucket Eyeland.'' It's an award-winning commentary on an actual plan to install a controversial wind farm of 130 turbines in the Sound.

Trouble is, according to the Cape Cod Times, the proposal could land its creator, Jay Critchley, in jail. "By submitting the proposal to the Army Corps" for a development permit, "he triggered a federal review" -- and if it's judged a hoax, "Critchley could face five years in prison and fines up to $10,000."

An artist's rendering of the resort-cum-theme park, above, shows a nuclear power plant, a shopping center called Meltdown Mall, a replica of the Pilgrim monument, a casino for family-friendly gambling, and a ferris wheel that turns on a wind turbine. Doesn't the Army Corps realize Critchley's proposal is satire? A Corps spokesman told the Cape Cod Times it's not his agency's responsibility to determine intent, so it will begin the preliminary process of determining what federal agencies should be involved. Hello?

Postscript: Looks like Critchley's been saved by the U.S. Senate. His proposal won't need to be reviewed. Nor will any others.

Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM

April 3, 2006

QUARTERBACK MORNING

Several points to make before signing off for a while:

1) Dontcha just love Paul Krugman's anti-McCain columns? "The Right's Man" on March 13 was tasty. "It's time for some straight talk about John McCain," Krugman began. "He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be." Conclusion:

Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party. And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.

This morning's, "John and Jerry," was especially delicious. It takes McCain apart for playing kissy face with religious extremist Jerry Falwell. But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I hafta disagree with Krugman, who sums up his opinion of McCain this way:

[H]is denunciation of Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson six years ago helped give him a reputation as a moderate on social issues. Now that he has made up with Mr. Falwell and endorsed South Dakota's ban on abortion even in the case of rape or incest, only two conclusions are possible: either he isn't a social moderate after all, or he's a cynical political opportunist.

Uh, Paul, how about sticking to your guns: McCain isn't a social moderate in the first place, and he's a cynical political opportunist, which you've been getting at all along.

2) Noam Chomsky laid it out nicely this morning when he pointed out, among some other salient observations about the current state of our American democracy, what consumer advertising and U.S. election campaigns share in common: "The purpose is to delude and deceive by imagery."

Ah, images. That brings up issue No. 3:

3) Byron ("Barney") Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, is so earnest about editorial transparency that he wrote half of a whole column a couple of weeks ago about "improving openness to reader feedback" and how to reach Times reporters and editors by e-mail. But he still hasn't replied to me about The Copycat and the Original Cat.

I messaged Calame on March 13, alerting him to the item and expressing my dismay at "three months of stonewalling in this matter" before finally receiving an unsatisfactory reply from a Times Style Magazine editor. I got back Calame's standard automated response that my message was received: "Everything sent to this mailbox is read by either me or my associate, Joseph Plambeck. If a further reply is appropriate, you will be hearing from us shortly."

I've heard nothing from him shortly or longly. I guess he thinks it's inappropriate to bring up the issue of exploitation verging on plagiarism, let alone stonewalling by the Times. Or maybe he's just overwhelmed by a busy schedule, unlike the foreign desk and Jeffrey Gettleman, the Times reporter who recently returned to Iraq and is putting out jolting front-page features like this morning's on gun sales in Baghdad, which offers the real lowdown on life in the Wild East.

Last week I messaged the Times's foreign desk asking about the slight difference between the print and online versions of a key paragraph in Gettleman's Sunday story of March 26, "Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad."

This appeared in print:

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, is now saying that militias are Iraq's No. 1 security threat. But he has been careful to paint the problem in broad strokes, implying both sides are at fault.

This appeared on the Web site:

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, has expressed increasing alarm about militia violence, saying it is a bigger killer than car bombs, the former No. 1 security threat. But he has been careful to paint the problem in broad strokes, implying both sides are at fault.

A minor difference, to be sure. My message went to the foreign desk on March 27, at 9:29 a.m. The foreign desk forwarded my message to Gettleman, and at 10:42 a.m. he replied:

hi jan.

glad to help.

often, for space reasons, we have to trim stories that run on the web at a longer length.

in this case, to fit additional information in, we made the decision to cut out the mention of car bombs and rewrite the sentence the way it appeared in print.

jeffrey

Now that's not only editorial transparency but service way above and beyond the call of duty from a war correspondent busy dodging bullets. It's the kind you'd expect, however, from a public editor busy being earnest about transparency.

Posted by jherman at 10:49 AM