Straight Up |: April 2006 Archives

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really -- except one admitted it and the other didn't, one is a writer and the other is an artist, one had her novel withdrawn by the publisher and the other had his layout in The New York Times Style Magazine defended by a Times editor as a case of copycat "coincidence."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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ...

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.

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?

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.

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: