The latest New Yorker has a fine article by Lizzie Widdicombe about the "Assassin of Secrets" plagiarism case. It seems a fitting subject for mid-February, a time of year marked by stories about rare honest politicians/statesmen, confessing about cherry trees or showing the world their warts or whatever.
"Assassin of Secrets" was the name of a book written by Quentin Rowan under the penname Q.R. Markham, a thriller in James Bond style, published by Little Brown last year and recalled (all 6500 copies) only five days after publication.
The extraordinary thing about this plagiarism was its range. Rowan just didn't steal from one or two selected sources. One authority on the subject, Edward Champion, found more than 34 acts of theft within the book's first 35 pages.
Rowan stole, unsurprisingly, from Ian Fleming. He also stole from the writer who was authorized to continue the Bond series, John Gardner. He stole from other spy novelists, such as Charles McCarry and Robert Ludlum. And, just to prove his range as a thief I suppose, he stole from works well outside the genre, such as a nonfiction history of the National Security Agency.
Widdicombe has interviewed Rowan, who is remorseful, and she has found some fascinating material about the making of a plagiarist. What sticks to me, though, is a matter of lineage. Rowan is the great-grandson, on his mother;'s side, of the renowned theologian Walter Rauschenbusch.
Rauschenbusch was a key figure in popularizing the notion of the "Social Gospel" in the early 20th century. His books included Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) which contains a dire-sounding warning to conservatives. "Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master."
If I try to hold the ideas of Rauschenbusch and the actions of Rowan in my mind at the same time, what happens? Do I explode?
No, but the phrase "regression to the mean" acquires a certain prominence.
Showing posts with label The New Yorker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The New Yorker. Show all posts
19 February 2012
08 January 2009
Music history
Each year I have a day-by-day calender sitting on my dresser.
Each year the theme is different. Cartoons from The New Yorker got me through 2008. But I'm all New-Yorkered out.
This year, I'll be tearing off the previous page each day to discover a new ... event in music history. Yes, "This day in music" is the theme.
And I'll share these with you lucky readers now and then, as dictated by my whim.
Today, for example, the calender tells me that it has been 35 years since KISS signed their (its?) first record deal.
Yesterday's landmark was more contemporary. January 7, 2009 marked 15 years since the final onstage performance of Nirvana in the US. So yesterday marked the anniversary of a last, and today marks the anniversary of a first. That's movement in the direction of optimism.
Each year the theme is different. Cartoons from The New Yorker got me through 2008. But I'm all New-Yorkered out.
This year, I'll be tearing off the previous page each day to discover a new ... event in music history. Yes, "This day in music" is the theme.
And I'll share these with you lucky readers now and then, as dictated by my whim.
Today, for example, the calender tells me that it has been 35 years since KISS signed their (its?) first record deal.
Yesterday's landmark was more contemporary. January 7, 2009 marked 15 years since the final onstage performance of Nirvana in the US. So yesterday marked the anniversary of a last, and today marks the anniversary of a first. That's movement in the direction of optimism.
08 February 2008
Crime and Punishment
A Pole named Krystian Bala sits in a crowded prison, awaiting a second trial on a murder charge. Not just any murder, but an abduction/torture/drowning, and one in which the prosecution's theory of his motive sounds Dostoyevskian.
The theory is that Bala was a proud intellectual who killed the old pawnbroker -- no, scratch that, the marketer of billboard advertising space -- because he had decided he could get away with it, thinking himself a Nietzschean overman.
And for a long time he DID get away with it. The body of Dariusz Janiszewski surfaced on the Oder River in December 2000. The initial investigation yielded nothing and the case was written off as about as cold as the corpse by the middle of the following year.
The case warmed up. The story of the revived investigation, Bala's arrest, trial, conviction, and partially successful appeal (only partial because he's still locked up -- successful nonetheless because he has been promised another trial) makes for a fascinating story. One can read it as detailed by David Grann in the Feb. 11th issue of The New Yorker.
Here are some delectable bits and pieces, to tide you over. The case was re-opened in the fall of 2003 by a detective named Jacek Wroblewski, which translates in English into "Jack Sparrow," which is of course also the name of a fictional pirate. (What's the name of the detective who catches Raskolnikov?)
On the day that the victim, Janiszewski, disappeared he had his cell phone on him. That same phone was sold through an internet site, apparently a Polish version of eBay, only four days later. The website's records show that the man who put it up for auction had logged in as ChrisB[7], and Chris[B]7 is not a very well-disguised form of the name of Krystian Bala.
When Sparrow first discovered that in fact it was Bala who had sold Janiszewski's old phone in this way, he (Sparrow) drew no further conclusion from it. His inquiry hadn't centered on Bala at that point. And, after all, it seems a more likely supposition that the murderer would pawn the phone, knowing that pawnshops are more anonymous institutions than websites, and that some innocent party had then bought it at the pawn shop and sought to turn it for a quick profit on line. That the murderer himself would do this, especially a murderer who in other respects had been very good at covering his tracks, seemed to begger credulity.
The working-hypothesis was that the phone had passed through a pawn shop, and this gives the case one of its many Dostoyevskian echoes.
Also in 2003, as Sparrow was taking up the case, Bala was publishing a book. It was a novel -- an account of a philosophical murderer who gets away with the perfect crime. The name? Amok.
Sparrow found out about this novel, and read it. He was struck especially by a passage in which the killer/protagonist, who has used a Japanese knife to commit his murder, says: "I sell the Japanese knife on an Internet auction." [The police had never released to the public the fact of the internet-auctioning of the cell phone.]
Poland has an "Unsolved Mysteries" type television program called 997. The program asks viewers to call in, and its related website also asks for tips. After they aired a program on the Janiszewski case, they got tips via their website from Japan, South Korea, and the United States. This was unusual. Polish murders are rarely of interest to the rest of the globe. When Sparrow eventually looked through Bala's passports, he saw stamps from ... Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The dates matched. He had done a lot of travelling between 2000 and 2003, while working on his book, and when people came to know him, they somehow decided to look up a particular murder on a website associated with a Polish television program and write a comment.
The content of these comments was unhelpful, but Sparrow compared the time when Bala was in each of those countries with the timing of the tips, and they matched.
All quite circumstantial. You can see the appellate court's problems with a prosecution case largely based on such coincidences. But oddly compelling.
The theory is that Bala was a proud intellectual who killed the old pawnbroker -- no, scratch that, the marketer of billboard advertising space -- because he had decided he could get away with it, thinking himself a Nietzschean overman.
And for a long time he DID get away with it. The body of Dariusz Janiszewski surfaced on the Oder River in December 2000. The initial investigation yielded nothing and the case was written off as about as cold as the corpse by the middle of the following year.
The case warmed up. The story of the revived investigation, Bala's arrest, trial, conviction, and partially successful appeal (only partial because he's still locked up -- successful nonetheless because he has been promised another trial) makes for a fascinating story. One can read it as detailed by David Grann in the Feb. 11th issue of The New Yorker.
Here are some delectable bits and pieces, to tide you over. The case was re-opened in the fall of 2003 by a detective named Jacek Wroblewski, which translates in English into "Jack Sparrow," which is of course also the name of a fictional pirate. (What's the name of the detective who catches Raskolnikov?)
On the day that the victim, Janiszewski, disappeared he had his cell phone on him. That same phone was sold through an internet site, apparently a Polish version of eBay, only four days later. The website's records show that the man who put it up for auction had logged in as ChrisB[7], and Chris[B]7 is not a very well-disguised form of the name of Krystian Bala.
When Sparrow first discovered that in fact it was Bala who had sold Janiszewski's old phone in this way, he (Sparrow) drew no further conclusion from it. His inquiry hadn't centered on Bala at that point. And, after all, it seems a more likely supposition that the murderer would pawn the phone, knowing that pawnshops are more anonymous institutions than websites, and that some innocent party had then bought it at the pawn shop and sought to turn it for a quick profit on line. That the murderer himself would do this, especially a murderer who in other respects had been very good at covering his tracks, seemed to begger credulity.
The working-hypothesis was that the phone had passed through a pawn shop, and this gives the case one of its many Dostoyevskian echoes.
Also in 2003, as Sparrow was taking up the case, Bala was publishing a book. It was a novel -- an account of a philosophical murderer who gets away with the perfect crime. The name? Amok.
Sparrow found out about this novel, and read it. He was struck especially by a passage in which the killer/protagonist, who has used a Japanese knife to commit his murder, says: "I sell the Japanese knife on an Internet auction." [The police had never released to the public the fact of the internet-auctioning of the cell phone.]
Poland has an "Unsolved Mysteries" type television program called 997. The program asks viewers to call in, and its related website also asks for tips. After they aired a program on the Janiszewski case, they got tips via their website from Japan, South Korea, and the United States. This was unusual. Polish murders are rarely of interest to the rest of the globe. When Sparrow eventually looked through Bala's passports, he saw stamps from ... Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The dates matched. He had done a lot of travelling between 2000 and 2003, while working on his book, and when people came to know him, they somehow decided to look up a particular murder on a website associated with a Polish television program and write a comment.
The content of these comments was unhelpful, but Sparrow compared the time when Bala was in each of those countries with the timing of the tips, and they matched.
All quite circumstantial. You can see the appellate court's problems with a prosecution case largely based on such coincidences. But oddly compelling.
15 November 2007
Cartoon captions again
How long has it been since I described the cartoon caption contest on the back page of The New Yorker in this blog? Let me go look. Talk amongst yourselves.
I found it. The last time was ... August first. Three and a half months ago. I check such things because I'm always worried I may end up on too tight a loop, repeating myself on any subject without the proper decent interval.
Three and a half months seems to me a large enough loop. So here we go.
The winning caption from last week? The cartoon is of two men in robes who look like stereotypical angels, with wings and halos. They are seated on the same cloud, but they look bored.
One of these men is speaking to the other. The caption is, of course, supposed to indicate what he's saying. The winner proposed, "I always figured Hell would be less ironic."
Just to the right of that is a caption contest that has reached its final stage. The picture here shows Mr. Potato Head sitting at a bar, with what looks like a beer in front of him. There's a well-dressed man at the same bar, one seat over. There are three finalists as to what Mr. Potato Head is saying:
a) If I start to drink too much, just pull off my lips.
b) My wife left me for Mr. Peanut.
c) I should have stopped after the botox.
Do you, gentle reader, have any opion as to which of those is most humorous? Personally, I would exclude (b) on grounds of confusion. Mr. Peanut is a commercial logo, but not so far as I know a popular children's toy. "My wife left me for G.I. Joe" would be consistent, although a bit too obvious. "for the Ken doll?"
Anyway, (b) as is won't float. Also, (a) seems pretty obvious, which leaves me leaning toward (c).
Below both of those, there's the new contest. It shows a judge (a man, judging from the hairline) in robes and seated behind the bench. But the judge's bench is also a sink, and he's washing dishes! This is a bit like Dada-ist art.
There's also a bailiff standing in front of the judge. He may be about the inform His Honor of something, "The prisoner is ready to be brought it," or whatever this bailiff might say. That, of course, wouldn't be funny and wouldn't reference the kitchen sink.
So ... what's it gonna be?
I found it. The last time was ... August first. Three and a half months ago. I check such things because I'm always worried I may end up on too tight a loop, repeating myself on any subject without the proper decent interval.
Three and a half months seems to me a large enough loop. So here we go.
The winning caption from last week? The cartoon is of two men in robes who look like stereotypical angels, with wings and halos. They are seated on the same cloud, but they look bored.
One of these men is speaking to the other. The caption is, of course, supposed to indicate what he's saying. The winner proposed, "I always figured Hell would be less ironic."
Just to the right of that is a caption contest that has reached its final stage. The picture here shows Mr. Potato Head sitting at a bar, with what looks like a beer in front of him. There's a well-dressed man at the same bar, one seat over. There are three finalists as to what Mr. Potato Head is saying:
a) If I start to drink too much, just pull off my lips.
b) My wife left me for Mr. Peanut.
c) I should have stopped after the botox.
Do you, gentle reader, have any opion as to which of those is most humorous? Personally, I would exclude (b) on grounds of confusion. Mr. Peanut is a commercial logo, but not so far as I know a popular children's toy. "My wife left me for G.I. Joe" would be consistent, although a bit too obvious. "for the Ken doll?"
Anyway, (b) as is won't float. Also, (a) seems pretty obvious, which leaves me leaning toward (c).
Below both of those, there's the new contest. It shows a judge (a man, judging from the hairline) in robes and seated behind the bench. But the judge's bench is also a sink, and he's washing dishes! This is a bit like Dada-ist art.
There's also a bailiff standing in front of the judge. He may be about the inform His Honor of something, "The prisoner is ready to be brought it," or whatever this bailiff might say. That, of course, wouldn't be funny and wouldn't reference the kitchen sink.
So ... what's it gonna be?
10 October 2007
In praise of a camera
Anthony Lane wrote in praise of the M-series Leica cameras in a surprisingly interesting essay in the Sept. 24 issue of The New Yorker.
There have been Leicas since 1925, and as Lane points out early in his piece, the famous head shot of Che Guevara, the one reproduced on countless posters and tee-shirts over decades now, was taken on a Leica, as was the "celebrated smooch caught in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945" the photo in which a nurse gracefully bends in a half-circle while receiving a sailor's festive attentions.
You can read Lane's article here.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_lane
In the letters sections of the more recent TNY, the one dated Oct. 15, I see two letters that expand a bit on the Leica cult. One of them is from Frank Van Riper, a Washington-based commercial and documentary photographer himself, who writes that the great thing about his two M6 Leicas is that they don't look intimidating to the subjects. The great bugaboo of serious photography is that spontaneous moments like that kiss can't really be caught by the "typical photojournalist, bristling with ling lenses attached to S.L.R. bodies whose shutters and motor drives sound ominously gunlike."
I'm a lousy photographer, and take bad touristy shots, but listening in on the fervent discussions of almost any cult can be interesting. And in this case, the real issue is one of preserving and recovering the past.
(I was sufficiently captured by the exchange to look up what the initials S.L.R. mean. Single lens reflex. It's a camera in which the photography views the subject through a mirror. Sadly, I don't feel any wiser for having looked that up.)
There have been Leicas since 1925, and as Lane points out early in his piece, the famous head shot of Che Guevara, the one reproduced on countless posters and tee-shirts over decades now, was taken on a Leica, as was the "celebrated smooch caught in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945" the photo in which a nurse gracefully bends in a half-circle while receiving a sailor's festive attentions.
You can read Lane's article here.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_lane
In the letters sections of the more recent TNY, the one dated Oct. 15, I see two letters that expand a bit on the Leica cult. One of them is from Frank Van Riper, a Washington-based commercial and documentary photographer himself, who writes that the great thing about his two M6 Leicas is that they don't look intimidating to the subjects. The great bugaboo of serious photography is that spontaneous moments like that kiss can't really be caught by the "typical photojournalist, bristling with ling lenses attached to S.L.R. bodies whose shutters and motor drives sound ominously gunlike."
I'm a lousy photographer, and take bad touristy shots, but listening in on the fervent discussions of almost any cult can be interesting. And in this case, the real issue is one of preserving and recovering the past.
(I was sufficiently captured by the exchange to look up what the initials S.L.R. mean. Single lens reflex. It's a camera in which the photography views the subject through a mirror. Sadly, I don't feel any wiser for having looked that up.)
01 August 2007
Three subjects
1. Tom Snyder, best known as the star of the Tomorrow Show between 1973 and 1982, passed away, due to leukemia, at age 71, this weekend.
I'll miss him. I'll miss my memories of late nights/early mornings in my dorm at college, staying up to see what guest Tom had, enjoying his laugh. I'll miss Dan Ackroyd's take on Snyder's mannerisms and ... again ... that laugh.
Do I regret his passing because he was a talented guy or just because I regret my own aging? It hardly matters. May the road to heaven rise up to meet him now, and may the wind at his back never be his own.
2. Last week, I described the cartoon caption contest in The New Yorker, and especially one uncaptioned cartoon. It involved a monkey and a typewriter. A scientist is looking at a piece of paper and saying ...
Here are the three finalists. Not in the right order (or with exactly the right words either, because I'm doing this from memory), but, roughly speaking, here they are:
* Bad news, another rejection letter.
* Why don't you re-write it from a third-monkey point of view?
* We'll run this past our infinite number of editors.
It seems to me that the first of those is something of a cheat. There aren't any visual clues (like a ripped-open envelope) that the page is a letter from an outside source. The clues suggest that its a page that just came from the monkey's labors. The second and third of the above answers both work from that premise. And they're both funnier.
I like the infinite number of editors line. What about you folks?
3. The Bancroft family and, accordingly, the board of Dow Jones, the business-news publishing company responsible for the Wall Street Journal, Barrons' and the famous Dow Jones stock indexes, have agreed to sell the company to Fox and Rupert Murdoch.
As with Tom Snyder, I regret the passing. I wish the old WSJ the best of afterlife fates for a newspaper. But, really, consolidation is inevitable and there is no real point wailing or gnashing one's teeth.
The recent demise of the Weekly World News, though ... now THAT was a tragedy. Where will supermarketr shoppers get their Elvis-sightings fix now???
I'll miss him. I'll miss my memories of late nights/early mornings in my dorm at college, staying up to see what guest Tom had, enjoying his laugh. I'll miss Dan Ackroyd's take on Snyder's mannerisms and ... again ... that laugh.
Do I regret his passing because he was a talented guy or just because I regret my own aging? It hardly matters. May the road to heaven rise up to meet him now, and may the wind at his back never be his own.
2. Last week, I described the cartoon caption contest in The New Yorker, and especially one uncaptioned cartoon. It involved a monkey and a typewriter. A scientist is looking at a piece of paper and saying ...
Here are the three finalists. Not in the right order (or with exactly the right words either, because I'm doing this from memory), but, roughly speaking, here they are:
* Bad news, another rejection letter.
* Why don't you re-write it from a third-monkey point of view?
* We'll run this past our infinite number of editors.
It seems to me that the first of those is something of a cheat. There aren't any visual clues (like a ripped-open envelope) that the page is a letter from an outside source. The clues suggest that its a page that just came from the monkey's labors. The second and third of the above answers both work from that premise. And they're both funnier.
I like the infinite number of editors line. What about you folks?
3. The Bancroft family and, accordingly, the board of Dow Jones, the business-news publishing company responsible for the Wall Street Journal, Barrons' and the famous Dow Jones stock indexes, have agreed to sell the company to Fox and Rupert Murdoch.
As with Tom Snyder, I regret the passing. I wish the old WSJ the best of afterlife fates for a newspaper. But, really, consolidation is inevitable and there is no real point wailing or gnashing one's teeth.
The recent demise of the Weekly World News, though ... now THAT was a tragedy. Where will supermarketr shoppers get their Elvis-sightings fix now???
25 July 2007
Typing Monkey
I subscribe to The New Yorker, in part due to a clerical mistake.
Nonetheless, they might consider this a plug. They do carry some well-written articles, including for example this week's "Letter from Jerusalem" by David Remnick.
When I first open a copy of TNY, though, I open it to the back page, and check out the cartoon caption contest. It reminds me of a classic Seinfeld episode in which Elaine is ticked off that the cartoons have become incomprehensible. Still....
Each week there are three panels: the winner of one contest, three finalists for another, and a fresh challenge. This week's winner is Sandy Sommer, of St. Louis, Mo. She submitted a caption to a drawing that shows a bird, with very few feathers indeed, and a rather tight-looking bathing suit. The bird is strutting proudly about on the limb of a tree, and two bird-watchers (perhaps a married couple) stand below the limb, looking through their guide books.
Ms Sommer's caption: "It's a thongbird."
The second panel shows an implausibly large wave arising out of a backyard swimming pool. A husband and wife are both about to be overwhelmed -- or, at the minimum, severely wettened. The wife looks unconcerned though and is saying something to her husband.
The three finalists each put words in her mouth as folows:
It's time that child went on a diet.
I told you this house was too close to the moon.
Cowabunga, dear.
-------------------
That brings us to the fresh one, this week's contest. It's a bit more complicated than its precursors. We see two rooms in a home, a kitchen and a living room. In the kitchen we see an unshaven man, with cans and an opened bag in front of him (beer and potato chips most likely). There's also a dog, peering inquisitively at the man, who is saying something in response to that look.
Meanwhile, in the living room, a woman has written mathematical/chemical formulae on a blackboard, and is explaining her work to ... the family cat. The cat is seated at a stool, and appears to be following that exposition.
So we have the trite opposition of male (canine) on one hand, female (feline) on the other. We have laziness in the former case and industriousness in the latter. I guess. No good caption comes to mind.
I preferred last week's new contest -- we'll learn next week, I expect, who the finalists are for that. Last week's drawing showed a monkey who had just been typing away -- at an old-style typewriter mind you, not a computer's keyboard. A scientist (we can tell he's a scientist because he's wearing a lab coat) is looking at a page apparently just taken from the monkey, and is speaking....
So what's the caption?
There's an old statistician's thought experiment about a thousand monkeys typing away until they come up with the complete text of Hamlet (or, name your favorite Shakespeare play here -- or, the Complete Works of). I infer that the drawing is meant to suggest that much to us, anyway.
My own proposed caption for that one would be, "No, Hamlet and Ophelia can't live happily ever after. Try again."
We'll see how it goes.
In blogger business today, I'd like to mention that the philosopher Matthew McGrath has honored our humble blog with a comment. You'll find it below my May 22d entry. I had had some fun at the expense of a thought-experiment in a book of his, about "sake realism." He assures me that, yes, the humor of that example was intentional.
Glad to hear it, and I'm glad to have such distinguished readers.
Nonetheless, they might consider this a plug. They do carry some well-written articles, including for example this week's "Letter from Jerusalem" by David Remnick.
When I first open a copy of TNY, though, I open it to the back page, and check out the cartoon caption contest. It reminds me of a classic Seinfeld episode in which Elaine is ticked off that the cartoons have become incomprehensible. Still....
Each week there are three panels: the winner of one contest, three finalists for another, and a fresh challenge. This week's winner is Sandy Sommer, of St. Louis, Mo. She submitted a caption to a drawing that shows a bird, with very few feathers indeed, and a rather tight-looking bathing suit. The bird is strutting proudly about on the limb of a tree, and two bird-watchers (perhaps a married couple) stand below the limb, looking through their guide books.
Ms Sommer's caption: "It's a thongbird."
The second panel shows an implausibly large wave arising out of a backyard swimming pool. A husband and wife are both about to be overwhelmed -- or, at the minimum, severely wettened. The wife looks unconcerned though and is saying something to her husband.
The three finalists each put words in her mouth as folows:
It's time that child went on a diet.
I told you this house was too close to the moon.
Cowabunga, dear.
-------------------
That brings us to the fresh one, this week's contest. It's a bit more complicated than its precursors. We see two rooms in a home, a kitchen and a living room. In the kitchen we see an unshaven man, with cans and an opened bag in front of him (beer and potato chips most likely). There's also a dog, peering inquisitively at the man, who is saying something in response to that look.
Meanwhile, in the living room, a woman has written mathematical/chemical formulae on a blackboard, and is explaining her work to ... the family cat. The cat is seated at a stool, and appears to be following that exposition.
So we have the trite opposition of male (canine) on one hand, female (feline) on the other. We have laziness in the former case and industriousness in the latter. I guess. No good caption comes to mind.
I preferred last week's new contest -- we'll learn next week, I expect, who the finalists are for that. Last week's drawing showed a monkey who had just been typing away -- at an old-style typewriter mind you, not a computer's keyboard. A scientist (we can tell he's a scientist because he's wearing a lab coat) is looking at a page apparently just taken from the monkey, and is speaking....
So what's the caption?
There's an old statistician's thought experiment about a thousand monkeys typing away until they come up with the complete text of Hamlet (or, name your favorite Shakespeare play here -- or, the Complete Works of). I infer that the drawing is meant to suggest that much to us, anyway.
My own proposed caption for that one would be, "No, Hamlet and Ophelia can't live happily ever after. Try again."
We'll see how it goes.
In blogger business today, I'd like to mention that the philosopher Matthew McGrath has honored our humble blog with a comment. You'll find it below my May 22d entry. I had had some fun at the expense of a thought-experiment in a book of his, about "sake realism." He assures me that, yes, the humor of that example was intentional.
Glad to hear it, and I'm glad to have such distinguished readers.
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