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Between yesterday and tomorrow.
Apr. 28th, 2006 12:26 amTired. Tired. Tired. But...
A reformulation of an old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, plagiarize and sometimes make much more money than most of those who can. To wit, 19-year-old chick-lit Harvard wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan. Little, Brown and Company signed her to a six-figure book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Dreamworks even bought the film rights. And now Viswanathan has been accused of stealing much of the novel from Megan McCafferty, her publisher is pulling the book from stores for a "revision" to remove the offending portions, and Viswanathan is apologizing. It's all very queer to me. Queer as in strange. Queer as in gay Republican queer. Odd. All the books in question sound dull as dirt. I have trouble getting past that part, but when I try, the whole mess just seems...well...queer. Mostly, though, I'm sort of vaguely horrified at a 19-year-old Harvard student getting a six-figure book deal, plus movie deal, for writing what I strongly suspect (but cannot conclusively state) is vapid crap. It matters not to me whether she stitched it together from someone else's wildly successful vapid crap, though I do wonder at an apparently smart young woman's inability to write her own vapid crap.
Er...there was something else. Wait. It'll come to me. Oh yeah.
I was going to write something about the difficulties of being a solitary practitioner of Wicca in an oppressively social & Xtian world. But it's long, and it's complex, and I'm only two-thirds awake. So maybe I'll come back to that some other time. It's depressing, anyway.
As far as I know, I wrote the preceeding. All by myself. Well, except that I read the Yahoo article first. Maybe Miss Viswanathan is merely guilty of "over researching"....
Postscript: Sophie now claims that Lopez the chihuahua has a law degree he acquired via e-mail. I think she's lying. You decide.
A reformulation of an old adage: Those who can, do. Those who can't, plagiarize and sometimes make much more money than most of those who can. To wit, 19-year-old chick-lit Harvard wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan. Little, Brown and Company signed her to a six-figure book deal for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. Dreamworks even bought the film rights. And now Viswanathan has been accused of stealing much of the novel from Megan McCafferty, her publisher is pulling the book from stores for a "revision" to remove the offending portions, and Viswanathan is apologizing. It's all very queer to me. Queer as in strange. Queer as in gay Republican queer. Odd. All the books in question sound dull as dirt. I have trouble getting past that part, but when I try, the whole mess just seems...well...queer. Mostly, though, I'm sort of vaguely horrified at a 19-year-old Harvard student getting a six-figure book deal, plus movie deal, for writing what I strongly suspect (but cannot conclusively state) is vapid crap. It matters not to me whether she stitched it together from someone else's wildly successful vapid crap, though I do wonder at an apparently smart young woman's inability to write her own vapid crap.
Er...there was something else. Wait. It'll come to me. Oh yeah.
I was going to write something about the difficulties of being a solitary practitioner of Wicca in an oppressively social & Xtian world. But it's long, and it's complex, and I'm only two-thirds awake. So maybe I'll come back to that some other time. It's depressing, anyway.
As far as I know, I wrote the preceeding. All by myself. Well, except that I read the Yahoo article first. Maybe Miss Viswanathan is merely guilty of "over researching"....
Postscript: Sophie now claims that Lopez the chihuahua has a law degree he acquired via e-mail. I think she's lying. You decide.
