Keep your eyes on your own paper

Dean Barnett is one of the masters of the blogging trade, and the spiffy new look to his Soxblog site has coincided with a wealth of output these past few months. I rate him among the masters of the trade, and divide my favorite bloggers between those who pulled me in via the Dan Rather Memogate fiasco (Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Captain's Quarters, The Kerry Spot (now TKS), Little Green Footballs, and National Review Online's The Corner) and non-Rather (soxblog, The Irish Trojan . . . gee, that's a lot of blogs via Rather, eh? Well, in fairness, I was reading The Corner before Memogate, aka The Greatest Story In the History of the World. My own less-than-miniscule participation there is a tale for another day). I should add Andrew Sullivan, who demonstrated how the entire genre worked and was so masterful in the weeks following 9/11, and then so erratic starting around Spring of 2004, starting with his obsession with Abu Ghraib and followed by his decision to support Kerry, mostly over the issue of gay marriage.

Look, I'm in favor of gay marriage. To paraphrase Steve Buscemi: Show me a petition and I'll sign it. Put it to a vote and I'll vote for it. But (back to me) I won't use it to choose a Commander-in-Chief in wartime. Sorry.

Back to Barnett. I was careful to paraphrase Buscemi lest I be accused of plagiarism, a serious thing. Barnett gives the details :

I honestly don’t know how stuff like this keeps happening. Some gullible publishing house paid a Harvard freshman $500,000 to write her first novel. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news – there’s a pretty decent chance it will be her last novel.

According to the Boston Globe, it appears that the frosh-person in question plagiarized significant portions of said-novel for which she was so richly compensated. Still, a half million dollar score for a an 18 year old grifter is nothing to sneeze at.

You can go with this any way you like. For me, before I went through Soxer's link I made three wild guesses:

1. That the Harvard co-ed in question was a babe. I mean, smokin' hot.

2. That she was not white.

3. That she came from the Middle East.

How close did I come? I won't say perfect, but you judge for yourself.

And really, am I really the best person to just such a thing--me, a struggling novelist in my own right, with two unpublished manuscripts on the shelf, someone likely to let my jealousy hamper my reason? Shouldn't I be a little less judgmental toward mistakes of youth? Almost certainly. You see, In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had."