Sweet. Big-time author echos my points about Rowling and pulls no punches doing it: 1) That Steven Vander Ark isn’t violating her copyright, no, that is for authors like Rowling herself to do in lifting plots and language from other authors; that nobody will refrain from buying Rowling’s Potter encyclopedia even if they already own Vander Ark’s, and 2) That her claim that Dumbledore’s gay would have had a lot more authenticity put into the actual books, except that, gee, she just wouldn’t have made as much gosh-darn money if she’d said it there. Oh and also, she’s only doing this because she craves literary respectability that was denied her by all the Potter sneerers out there:

Rowling has nowhere to go and nothing to do now that the Harry Potter series is over. After all her literary borrowing, she shot her wad and she’s flailing about trying to come up with something to do that means anything.

Moreover, she is desperate for literary respectability. Even though she made more money than the queen or Oprah Winfrey in some years, she had to see her books pushed off the bestseller lists and consigned to a special “children’s book” list. Litterateurs sneer at her work as a kind of subliterature, not really worth discussing.

It makes her insane. The money wasn’t enough. She wants to be treated with respect.

At the same time, she’s also surrounded by people whose primary function is to suck up to her. No doubt some of them were saying to her, “It’s wrong for these other people to be exploiting what you created to make money for themselves.”

She let herself be talked into being outraged over a perfectly normal publishing activity, one that she had actually made use of herself during its web incarnation.

Now she is suing somebody who has devoted years to promoting her work and making no money from his efforts, which actually helped her make some of her bazillions of dollars.

Wow. Read the whole thing, because wow. I think I finally need to go pick up a copy of Ender’s Game right now.

H/t Petitedov, who found it in Ace’s headlines.

“There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day and they’ve got a wonderful gadget–I was shown the model last time I was in town–by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice-Board every half hour. Then, that report slides itself into the right position where it’s connected up by little arrows with all the relevant parts of the other reports. A glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole Institue actually taking shape under your own eyes. There’ll be a staff of at least twenty experts at the top of the building working this Notice Board in a room rather like the Tube control rooms. It’s a marvellous gadget. The different kinds of business all come out in the Board in different coloured lights. It must have cost half a million. They call it a Pragmatometer.”

–C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

All the relevant parts connected to all the other relevant parts by little … links. The major difference, of course, is that the Notice Board was to be run by an Institute whose purpose was to manipulate, gull, lull, and damn the population, while the internet really is the embodiment of the old sixties radical slogan: Power to the people. When anybody net-savvy can link and pipe up their opinion, you really can see the views of vast swaths of people taking shape “under your own eyes.” It’s a marvellous gadget indeed.

J.K. Rowling sues publisher RDR Books and “feels betrayed” by Harry Potter Lexicon founder Steven Vander Ark because they intend to publish a print version of the same name. Seems Rowling was “accepting” of sites such as the HP Lexicon and others while they were thousands of dollars’ worth of excellent free marketing for her books but not so much now that they plan to publish a book that people will have to, you know, buy with money.

Rowling said she was especially irked that the site’s owner and the lexicon’s would-be publisher, RDR Books, continued to insist that her acceptance of free, fan-based Web sites justified the efforts.

“I am deeply troubled by the portrayal of my efforts to protect and preserve the copyrights I have been granted in the Harry Potter books,” she wrote in court papers filed Wednesday in a lawsuit she brought against the small Muskegon, Mich., publisher.

She said she intends to publish her own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia.

“If RDR’s position is accepted, it will undoubtedly have a significant, negative impact on the freedoms enjoyed by genuine fans on the Internet,” she said. “Authors everywhere will be forced to protect their creations much more rigorously, which could mean denying well-meaning fans permission to pursue legitimate creative activities.”

Poppycock. Is there a copyright violation in the intended work, or is there not? If there is, then for sure there is a copyright violation in the web site, which therefore should have been shut down by legal force years ago. Something doesn’t comprise “legitimate creative activities” when free (and free marketing) on the web but amount to copyright violation only when there are royalties involved. That she would begin to object only when royalties were involved is only too human-nature obvious. And she has a somewhat overblown concept of authors’ rights if she expects to be able to trample what even she describes as “legitimate” work in the name of preventing outright copyright violation.

Is there a copyright violation? I don’t know (insert I Am Not a Lawyer boilerplate here). But on the surface it seems that if there is, then that standard would surely apply to sites like TheOneRing.net and the books I helped create based on that site. So what if Rowling plans to publish her own encyclopedia? Reference material can be copyrighted but surely not the right to create reference material. Suddenly half of academia would be out of business. Fiction utilizing the characters is different, but a publisher would have to be crazy to put any of that (mostly) swill into print for cash. And nobody really believes that upon publication of Rowling’s own encyclopedia, anybody would say “Oh, well, I already bought Vander Ark’s website in print form, so I don’t really need the definitive word from the author herself,” do they?

She added: “I find it devastating to contemplate the possibility of such a severe alteration of author-fan relations.”

Which is just a sentimental (or, in the British, treacly) way of saying “Our relations will be lovely so long as you do nothing that irritates me, whether it’s actually illegal or not.” Nice.

“As has so often happened in the great crises of her history, France produced a man.”

–Winston S. Churchill, speaking of Joseph Dupleix, in The Age of Revolution

Resist.

Man. I procrastinate reading Lileks for a few days, and this is what I miss:

… young idiots [drove] by and [shouted] obscenities at everyone … the gentleman at the next table whipped out a long thin bamboo tube and shot what appeared to be a sharp dart into the rear right wheel of the vehicle … the POP of the tire’s explosion was followed by two more, each punctuated by a sharp concise exhalation from the man at the next table … the vehicle had come to a stop, its driver too stunned to proceed, and by the time the driver regained his composure the fellow had opened the door and removed he youth who had shouted the obscenities to the ladies. He marched the youth back, and with the slightest pressure on his upper ear – a gesture that seemed to inflict a great deal of discomfort – he compelled the youth to apologize to the ladies, and empty his pockets to pay for the meal he had sullied with his vulgarities. Then he dispatched him with a kick on the seat of his trousers, but you could tell it was intended more for show than the actual infliction of injury. We rose in a round of applause, and thereafter amused ourselves watching the youths push their vehicle off to the side of the road. Shouts of “Get a horse” and “that’s right, lads, get your back into it” were laughingly proffered.

I hope Mr. Lileks forgives me for reprinting the heart of his story, but I’ve started three emails to him and abandoned them all as too fatuous, basically asking: “Are you pulling our legs?” So I guess I will just post the fatuousness here on the blog for all to see, instead.

Is he or isn’t he? He tells the story with what passes on the web for a straight face and gives no indication that he’s joking. But my basic experience of modern life inclines me to believe this is so unfathomably unlikely that I’m left … flummoxed. Not to mention that the “youths,” morons or not, would have had a good case of destruction of property to take to the police. Real or Not?

Verdict: Consult the laws of physics, Anwyn, you credulous girly girl. I’m going to credit it to Lileks having an Owl Creek Bridge moment, then.

Because she really is a super-cool progressive, see, so she’ll make the most beloved character in a generation of literature retroactively gay and hope nobody notices that if she’d actually said so in the books, she wouldn’t have sold nearly as many.

Oh well. The fact that she didn’t say so in the books means I can just pretend it didn’t happen. If I can do it with three whole Star Wars films I can certainly do it with the after-market remarks of the richest woman in the world.

Via the headlines of the Beta Heartbreaker.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t read many novels. The one that is the subject of this post happened to catch my eye at Costco when I was in the mood to buy books. That line of florid dreck didn’t stop me from reading, but this might: Another of the protagonists says to her niece, on the subject of “What if Indians steal our food?” (the book is set during a wagon-train prairie crossing): “If you were hungry and someone had a picnic in your yard, wouldn’t you want to join them?”

Are you kidding me with that garbage, Ms. Kirkpatrick? And here I thought only Sesame Street was that addled. I can’t find a clip, but the sketch that caused my son and me to cease watching Sesame Street involved Baby Bear becoming irritated that Goldilocks always took his porridge, setting out to rewrite the tale so that she would take somebody else’s porridge, and eventually having a friend tell him he should re-write it so that there was a designated Goldilocks bowl waiting for her when she got there.

Teaching children that stealing’s okay because it’s always motivated by need and that in fact the victims should feel guilty about this need? Oh, and that stealing is “joining?” No thanks.

Your opinion first, then mine. Tell me what you think of this line of prose, taken from the book All Together in One Place by Jane Kirkpatrick:

“Mazy Bacon embraced her life inside a pause that lacked premonition.”

Not much context necessary; it comes very near the beginning of the book. Mazy Bacon is the protagonist, an 1800s Midwestern farm wife, 19 years old.

Give your interpretation and your opinion of the line. I’ll update this post later after a few comments.

Update: Overwhelming majority in the comments says: Pretentious BS. Also the overwhelming majority made this judgment without going ahead and saying what they think the author is actually trying to say. And thus my point, in a nutshell: Be pretentious and you not only look pretentious but you drive people off of trying to figure out what you want to say. Anne and I were on the same wavelength–she said she’d stop reading right there. And I almost did, although since I already bought the book the fact that I might have stopped reading wouldn’t have affected the publisher’s bottom line–but it would affect the author’s exposure.

“Editors are ghouls and cannibals” was said by Harriet Vane in Dorothy Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon. I’m accustomed to taking the general drift of Harriet’s remarks as author’s voice, and if you surveyed a random sampling of authors on the question of “agree or disagree,” I’d lay money that the majority would come back “agree.” But the editor’s only job is to make the author look better. Whether it’s by correcting actual mistakes of grammar, spelling, punctuation, or usage or by adjusting wording for readability or by telling the author, “Look, this is pretentious BS, go back and fix it,” our only job is to make the author look good for publication. Of course there are officious editors who would like nothing better than to swap their own words in and the author’s out, but good editors use their BS detectors on the author’s behalf. Yet so many authors resist changes with everything they’ve got. I don’t blame them; I’ve been on the other side of the coin myself. It is an emotional battle. But if authors kept the basic tenet in mind–that our only job is to make them look better–both authors and editors would ultimately have an easier go of it.

Here’s the kicker: This is not a bad book. It’s not the Great American Novel, of course, but it’s not bad. It’s got a good basic story line, some interesting characters, and some good language … but stunners like this crop up from time to time and divert the flow of reader’s enjoyment right into an anger bucket. It’s not good. The kindest thing a good editor could have done for Ms. Kirkpatrick would be to have stopped her cold at lines like this and made her understand that if the reader has to wade through even one line of meaningless dreck to try to hazard what the author could possibly have meant by it, it takes away so much from the story that readers will even quit reading.

wg’s interpretation: That Mazy Bacon does not think about the consequences of her actions.
Anne’s interpretation: That Mazy Bacon is stupid and doesn’t see even what’s happening right in front of her.
My interpretation, with advantage of having read the back-cover blurb before beginning reading: That Mazy Bacon loves her life and doesn’t know it is about to change.

I believe mine is the correct interpretation (and, of course, I know the other two are incorrect because of what I already know about Mazy Bacon), but it took me a few tries even though I knew what was going on in the story, and the other two folks who hazarded guesses came up with two different ones. If a line is open to so many different interpretations, it doesn’t convey many facts about your protagonist, now does it?

I don’t know whether the problem here was an editor who embraces the pretentiousness a little too much, a dim or timid editor, or a mulish author who resisted whatever the editor might have tried to tell her about this kind of language, but the result was a book that is a lot worse than it needed to be. Sad.

Just a light fisking, a little one, for Megan McArdle, for whom magic must depend on scarcity to make sense, and that therefore the Harry Potter series is not as well thought-through as it ought to be. (Via Ace, via PetiteDov.)

There will be **SPOILERS** for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows below the jump. (more…)

I will just say I’ve got a bad feeling about the new book. No, I haven’t read anything. I just don’t see it ending wholly satisfactorily no matter who lives or dies.

Incidentally, J.K. Rowling needs to save her breath (or pixels). It just makes her look silly to keep begging people not to do things they are going to do anyway, over which she has zero control, and lets us know exactly how inflated her head has become over all the hype. The end of her series is not the end of the world, whether Harry lives or dies.

Update: A judgment on my first statement above. No plot spoilers, but nevertheless click at your own risk. (more…)

Ann Coulter’s column at Human Events now allows comments.

Run.

“I don’t want any of this lover’s lament crap. I want something peppy, something happy, something up-tempo. I want something snappy.”

Update: Lileks still has a job. Let’s hope somebody gave him more than 300 words to play with this time.