Alternate post title: “It’s for Writing about It, Not, You Know…”

Saw this first on Galleycat: Iain Hollingshead, author of Twentysomething: The Quarter Life Crisis of Jack Lancaster (Booklist called it a “lad’s version of Bridget Jones’s Diary”), has won Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

(Not, by the way, The Literary Review.)

From the AP, via USA Today:

Hollingshead beat established writers including Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell, best seller Mark Haddon and literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to the prize, which aims to skewer “the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.”

Judges were moved by Hollingshead’s evocation of “a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.” His description of “bulging trousers” sealed the win, the judges said.

“Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts,” the judges - editors of Literary Review magazine - said in a statement. “Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Thomas Pynchon was a fellow nominee:

Pynchon’s long-awaited, 1,000-page novel, Against the Day, was nominated for a scene involving a spaniel that ends: “Reader, she bit him.”

Too many great bits to quote. Read the article!

By the way, on Monday, I cast my votes for this year’s Top of the List. I’m not trying to be all mysterious and dramatic, I just thought I’d mention it.

Oh, and did I mention that the votes have been tallied? And that I know who the winners are?

(For the Adult section, that is–I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Youth, Media, and Reference.)

I wish I could tell you, I really do.

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Longer articles on the reclusive Mr. Fenjves, O.J. Simpson’s ghostwriter, appear in the Los Angeles Times:

For now, Fenjves remains holed up in his Brentwood home - the same one he lived in when he was Nicole Brown Simpson’s neighbor - fending off reporters who are awaiting the conclusion to this latest chapter of the Simpson drama. Ironically, when he was interviewed recently on KABC-AM, Fenjves said that one of the perks of his job was anonymity.

And in The New Yorker:

Still, Fenjves is undaunted. "It’s going to be bigger than ever," he said. "It’s like ‘Ulysses,’ except without the talent."

In the latter article, author Jeffrey Toobin notes that last year, Regan published Fenjves’s parody of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, titled A Million Little Lies. Fenjves’ parody of the made-up memoir appeared under a made-up name: James Pinocchio.

I’m reading the new John Shannon novel right now, The Dark Streets. So far, so good–reading a favorite author can be comforting, like catching up with a friend you haven’t seen for awhile. The familiar prose is like a familiar voice.

Anyway, on page 46:

Jack Liffey had a bit of unmanageable mid-day time to kill. He snoozed for an hour, cramped in his front seat, and then drove southward on Western for a while, keeping to the surface street just to give his skull a rest from the precariously imposed momentum of the freeway¹.

The footnote reads:

1. Joan Didion, for those who care where evocative expressions were stolen.

It’s an amusing aside, and timely. Yesterday’s post on plagiarism had me thinking about the difference between homage and appropriation, always a hard one to sort out. Almost everyone agrees that stealing another author’s words is wrong. But what about lifting them in order to pay tribute? We live in a sound-bite society, where movie catchphrases become the equivalent of a secret handshake, where dropping a quoted phrase into conversation lets us know whether we’re among friends or strangers. Yet we also live in a society willing to employ litigation in order to determine to whom credit (and cash) for that catchphrase is due.

(Incidentally, did you know that McDonald’s owns the phrase: “America’s Favorite Fries“?)

If Shannon had let that sentence go unattributed, would an alert reader have accused him of thievery? In my mind, it could easily be an allusion, or a clue, a little wink from the author–but if the author doesn’t call it out, then his intention can’t be judged. I found the footnote funny, but it did break the reality of the story, and so maybe it should have been left out. But these days, authors might think twice before making an uncredited allusion in homage.

While I’d hate to put myself in the position of downgrading plagiarism to a misdemeanor, I do hope that Google Book Search doesn’t fuel a hysterical hunt for plagiarists, ruining the reputation of everyone who’s ever lifted a sentence. After all, Collins’ article reminds us that the vast majority of plagiarism hasn’t really harmed anyone. Undiscovered for more than a century, it can be merely a humorous footnote, or a useful one that offers insight into the times or the minds of writers.

(And I should also distinguish between nonfiction plagiarism, in which one writer’s research or unique synthesis of ideas is stolen, and fiction, in which one writer’s stylistic flourish is copied–despite my strong feelings on the value of fiction, I can’t help but see the former as a more serious offense.)

I wonder, too, if we apply different standards for different media. When Keith Richards lifted Chuck Berry’s signature chunka-chunka riff, it’s possible that he was called a thief at the time. But now that more time has passed, we speak of it in terms of influence, and now that everyone else uses it, too, maybe it’s just like bootlegs of DVDs in China–too pervasive to get exercised about? Musical influence comes not just from style and tone but from riffs and hooks, and writing influence comes not just from style and tone but from words and phrases, too.

Anyway, I don’t have time to really finish this thought so I’m going to leave it there. I welcome your thoughts.

From the Los Angeles Times:

William Diehl, the bestselling author known best for “Sharky’s Machine” and “Primal Fear” - fast-paced thrillers that became hit movies - died Friday at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. He was 81.

(I’ve warned you before that I’m an obituary reader.)

Diehl led a more interesting life than most people, and had the kind of variety in experiences that seems less likely to occur nowadays. And I always admire the late bloomers:

He had no permanent job and was on his second marriage in 1974 when he turned 50. Someone had given him a party with an ice-cream cake shaped like a typewriter, an allusion to Diehl’s long-held dream of becoming a novelist.

The cake, too pretty to eat, melted into a gooey mess, which struck Diehl as a metaphor for his life.

“I’d been working for 30 years and what did I have to show for it?” he recalled thinking when he beheld the cake.

The next day, he sold all his cameras, borrowed $5,000 from his best friend, and resolved to launch his best and final career.

He may not have achieved–or aspired to–literary greatness, but he sure entertained a hell of a lot of people.

Thought for the day: getting a two-year-old dressed in the morning is like trying to help a belligerent drunk into his clothes on the deck of a ship in a stormy sea.

In “If They Did It“–boy, we’re really wearing that out, aren’t we?–Rebecca Dana offers more postmortem on O. J. Simpson’s now canceled book and interview. Among the many details (some of them interesting, some of them arguable, such as Dana’s assertion that Barbara Walters is a “journalist”):

Ms. Regan arranged a phone call between Ms. Walters and the book’s ghostwriter, Pablo Fenjves, a former co-worker of Ms. Regan’s at The National Enquirer who was also a witness for the prosecution in Mr. Simpson’s criminal trial - it was he who recalled the "plaintive wail" of what might have been Nicole Brown Simpson’s Akita on the day of her murder.

So If I Did It, O.J.’s memoir that he insisted was false–yet which most people would have insisted was true, had they been able to read it–was written by a witness for the prosecution at his trial, a neighbor who just happened to be a former coworker of Judith Regan.

I don’t have anything funny to say about that. It’s just weird.

(Although if you Google “Pablo Fenjves,” you’ll discover a man with an illustrious career as a ghost author and screenwriter.)

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More old news. In his Slate article “Dead Plagiarists Society,” Paul Collins discusses intriguing possibilities in the age of Google:

Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years’ worth of plagiarists - giants and forgotten hacks alike - who have all escaped detection until now.

We’ve seen the start of this already, as he wittily notes:

For any plagiarist living in an age of search engines, waving a loaded book in front of reviewers has become the literary equivalent of suicide by cop.

But one of the most intriguing details, for me, was an aside:

There have always been a dizzying array of ways that authors can rip each other off, even in reverse: Literary critic Terry Eagleton has written entertainingly of “anti-plagiarism,” a 19th-century literary wheeze favored by Irish critics, who pounced on poets or novelists for plagiarizing or surreptitiously translating some little-known domestic or foreign work and presenting it under their name. The trick was that the “original” work presented by the prosecuting critic was itself a forgery, written after a new work’s publication to frame an enemy.

Which is interesting, because I was just about to announce to the world that The Da Vinci Code was actually first written about twenty years ago, in German, by me. And so besides being a horrible plagiarist, Dan Brown now owes me a lot of money.

As I observe a strict no-blogging-on-holidays policy, I’m just now catching up on some of last week’s news.

It’s always fun to read about lost manuscripts being found. Keith J. Kelly, Media Ink columnist for the New York Post, suggests that an English professor’s discovery of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Screenews of War” might just be chum in the waters for publishers:

Today, at least two major magazines and a book publisher are said to be intrigued by the 40-odd-page manuscript, which has been quietly circulated over the past week by the professor who made the astounding find. 

O’Neill, of course, is known primarily as a playwright, and didn’t write many short stories, which might up the ante somewhat.

O’Neill was a young, aspiring writer who was just beginning to discover his literary voice when he penned “The Screenews of War,” a story about a cast of Hollywood newsreel makers who were filming the Mexican revolution for American audiences.

He apparently had first attempted the story as a play, but grew disenchanted with that and turned it into a novella.  

Who knows if the story is any good, but the title is terrible. And if it’s ever turned into a movie, we can count on some Hollywood executive to make it even worse: Newsreality, anyone?

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Publishers Lunch notes that Amazon still has a page up for Orenthal James Simpson’s now-canceled book, If I Did It. They also note the unusual number and variety of user meta tags. Okay, well, maybe “variety” is the wrong word. They range from “boycott regan books” to “shame on amazon,” with a few “i could puke”s thrown in. Does this fall under the category of “the customer’s always right”?

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