Bethune on Roberts

Maclean’s books columnist Brian Bethune has posted a blog entry on the Paul William Roberts plagiarism controversy. (Quick recap: a few passages in Roberts’ book A War Against Truth were found to have been lifted from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Publisher Raincoast has stopped shipment of the book and will likely include an apologetic insert in future shipments.)

To begin, Bethune outlines in some detail a previous instance of plagiarism in a story Roberts wrote for The Globe and Mail last spring – a case that the Globe, strangely, left unmentioned in its own coverage of the War Against Truth flap. The Globe also gets points for appending the most baffling, unclear “clarification” imaginable to the Roberts piece in question.

It gets interesting when Bethune links the case to last fall’s Ian McEwan controversy:

A horde of big-name peers rallied to [McEwan's] cause, fellow lords of creation who adhere to the novelist’s first article of faith: we have the right to utilize as we wish the scribblings of lesser mortals (i.e. non-fiction writers), just as we have the right to play with the lives of real people (at least those who are safely dead and unable to establish lucrative relationships with libel lawyers).

Roberts won’t find nearly as many supporters, Bethune suggests; after all, Roberts is “a non-fiction writer too, and – like the rest of us – he’s no Ian McEwan.”

The problem with Blitcons

Although the famous have come to his defence in the question of plagiarism or fair borrowing as historical research, will anyone defend Ian McEwan from Ziauddin Sardar’s charge in New Statesman that he, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie form a triumvirate of Blitcons?

Sardar, a writer and broadcaster who has been appointed as a commissioner of the U.K. Commission for Equality and Human Rights, says the three are “the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives.”

According to Sardar, the “Blitcon project is based on three one-dimensional conceits” — a faith in the absolute supremacy of American culture, the belief that Islam is the greatest threat to Western civilization, and that “American ideas of freedom and democracy are not only right, but should be imposed on the rest of the world.”

After examining various bits of writing from each man, Sardar concludes:

The real world is not a fiction. The ideology of mass murder has a history and a context in all its perversity and evil. But the wild imaginings of the Blitcons are not an appropriate guide to the eradication of this horror. Turned to this end, the manipulative power of literary imagination is nothing but spin. And such spin is simply hatred answering, mirroring and matching hatred.

(Kind of makes the whole plagiarism controversy look like a walk in the park….)

Related links:
Click here for the full article in New Statesman

Gormless

Quillblog doesn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but there is an Ann Coulter plagiarism scandal brewing. Last Sunday, shortly after the release of her new book, Godless, the New York Post, a newspaper that has carried Coulter’s columns, published an article that quoted John Barrie, who created a “plagiarism-recognition system,” as saying that her new bestseller featured at least three instances of plagiarism and there were many more in her syndicated column. Two of the passages from the book were allegedly lifted from other newspapers and the third was taken directly from — wait for it — a Planned Parenthood brochure. That Planned Parenthood passage was actually used in a chapter on Bill Clinton.

But, seriously … the so-called liberal media that has provided Coulter with so much fodder over her seemingly interminable career in punditry is all over this story. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (whom Quillblog has admired since his days anchoring ESPN’s Sportscenter) has had Barrie on Countdown. (Check out the video on Raw Story.) And the Muckraker spinoff of Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo blog has been following this very closely, providing updates a few times a day.

For her part, Coulter has responded by ripping the Post in her latest column, reports Editor & Publisher. “How crappy a newspaper is the Post?” asks Coulter. “Let me put it this way: It’s New York’s second-crappiest paper.”

Related links:
Click here for the original New York Post article
Click here for the Raw Story item, with the Olbermann video
Click here for TPM Muckraker
Click here for the Editor & Publisher story

Vice’s vice for plagiarism

A few weeks back, news broke that the University of Georgia Press was pulping a short-story collection by Brad Vice called The Bear Bryant Funeral Train after it came out that one of the stories, “Tuscaloosa Knights,” included passages plagiarized from Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama.

Now writer Robert Clark Young has recapped the case in New York Press, and also uncovered other suspect passages in Vice’s book. The story “Report from Junction,” writes Young, “contains passages that are similar to material appearing in The Junction Boys, Jim Dent’s nonfiction book…. What is curious about Vice’s thefts from Dent is that they don’t even pertain to Bear Bryant or the football team, but consist of the most peripheral of descriptions, material that Vice could have found in other sources or easily rewritten in his own words.”

But not all of the lifted passages in “Report from Junction” are quite as damning as the “Tuscaloosa Knights” examples. In some cases, it would appear that Vice has lifted information more than prose. (From Dent’s book: “They [screwworms] would sometimes screw themselves into the brain and then exit through the eyeballs.” From Vice’s: “[T]he maggots will most likely screw themselves into its brain … before they exit back through his eyes.”)

To be sure, Vice’s clear-cut plagiarism in “Tuscaloosa Knights” has forfeited any benefit of the doubt he might have otherwise enjoyed. But this “second case” might remind some readers of a New Yorker article on plagiairism that Malcolm Gladwell wrote late last year.

In “Something Borrowed,” Gladwell recounts how he learned that playwright Bryony Lavery had borrowed several wordings from his articles for one of her plays — but in some cases, he found it hard to work up much outrage. “She didn’t copy my musings, or conclusions, or structure,” writes Gladwell. “She lifted sentences like ‘It is the function of the cortex — and, in particular, those parts of the cortex beneath the forehead, known as the frontal lobes – to modify the impulses that surge up from within the brain, to provide judgment, to organize behavior and decision-making, to learn and adhere to rules of everyday life.’ It is difficult to have pride of authorship in a sentence like that. My guess is that it’s a reworked version of something I read in a textbook.”

Related links:
Click here for the New York Press article on Brad Vice
Click here for Malcolm Gladwell’s article on plagiarism