Plagiarism scandal du jour

We learn to speak by mimicking the sounds we hear: when we get the response we like, we make that sound again. We learn to write the same way. Good, precocious writers easily glom on to the trendy expressions and attitudes, mimicking them and putting them together in variations that appeal to the public. When a writer takes those standard, trendy modes of expression and pushes them just a teeny bit forward, we are astonished and pleased. We call that genius. Writers who push them more than a teeny step forward, are generally called Gertrude Stein. And no one reads her.

So did Kaavya Viswanathan borrow from Megan F. McCafferty? Yes. Did she intend to or know she did it? Very likely, not. Frankly, once again, my disdain falls largely upon the greed driven publishers, who latch hungrily onto a hot commodity like a Harvard-going young woman of color hailing from foreign shores (so much more appealing than a Jersey girl with an Irish name…) and rush to press, with zero quality control.

Doc Bubbles is trying to restrain her snarky laughter. Really.

Cool Bumper Sticker of the Day

Immortality or bust.

the forest for the trees

Spring has come full force to Pixieville. Every day, new trees are blossoming. Even in the unkempt churchyard of St. Jonah's (motto: "yes, Lord, angry enough to die" (Jonah 4:9)) the magnolia tree is in magnificent pink array. Those of us who toil here are uplifted as we walk to and fro, and see it from the window. In honor of next Sunday's being Earth Day, excuse me, Creation Sunday, the group of those dedicated to the environment here at St. Jonah's have set up a big triptych display--right in front of the window.

Do I even have to add any commentary?

Update on Heretic v. Heretic

As I'm sure you know by now, Dan Brown was exonerated of the charges that he unfairly reworked a single source, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, to create the Da Vinci Code. I should join in with all the free speech crowd who thinks this is a key victory: after all, what Dan Brown did, they argue, is what scholars do, transform and rework the ideas of others. Do I only want to see him fall because he totally relied on the work of one book and didn't do his own research, and instead, promulgated these half-baked theories to a gullible public? Not really... Do I want the world to learn the lesson I try to teach my students about BOTH citing sources, and checking on their reliability? Well, yes. And, I guess, it seems a little different from a free speech issue, when person 2 gets rich off the ideas that person 1 published first, but wasn't such a marketing whiz. But that, as we say, is capitalism.

Christ Among the Partisans

Garry Wills writes: "THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. "---this piece articulates just what I have been brooding over lately. Read it!