PG isn’t exactly certain how, but there has to be a book in this.

From The Economist

Dogs greet other dogs nose-first, as it were—sniffing each other from fore to (especially) aft. People are not quite so open about the process of sniffing each other out. But the size of the perfume industry suggests scent is important in human relations, too. There is also evidence that human beings can infer kinship, deduce emotional states and even detect disease via the sense of smell. Now, Inbal Ravreby, Kobi Snitz and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, have gone a step further. They think they have shown, admittedly in a fairly small sample of individuals, that friends actually smell alike. They have also shown that this is probably the case from the get-go, with people picking friends at least partly on the basis of body odour, rather than the body odours of people who become friends subsequently converging.

As they report in Science Advances, Dr Ravreby, Dr Snitz and Dr Sobel started their research by testing the odours of 20 pairs of established, non-romantic, same-sex friends. They did this using an electronic nose (e-nose) and also two groups of specially recruited human “smellers”.

The e-nose employed a set of metal-oxide gas sensors to assess t-shirts worn by participants. One group of human smellers were given pairs of these shirts and asked to rate how similar they smelt. Those in the other group were asked to rate the odours of individual t-shirts on five subjective dimensions: pleasantness, intensity, sexual attractiveness, competence and warmth. The e-nose results and the opinions of the second group of smellers were then subjected to a bit of multidimensional mathematical jiggery-pokery (think plotting the results on a graph, except that the graph paper has five dimensions), and they, too, emerged as simple, comparable numbers.

All three approaches yielded the same result. The t-shirts of friends smelt more similar to each other than the t-shirts of strangers. Friends, in other words, do indeed smell alike. But why?

To cast light on whether friendship causes similarity of scent, or similarity of scent causes friendship, Dr Ravreby, Dr Snitz and Dr Sobel then investigated whether e-nose measurements could be used to predict positive interactions between strangers—the sort of “clicking” that is often the basis of a new friendship. To this end they gathered another 17 volunteers, gave them t-shirts to wear to collect their body odours, ran those odours past the e-nose, and then asked the participants to play a game.

This game involved silently mirroring another individual’s hand movements. Participants were paired up at random and their reactions recorded. After each interaction, participants demonstrated how close they felt to their fellow gamer by overlapping two circles (one representing themselves, the other their partner) on a screen. The more similar the two electronic smell signatures were, the greater the overlap. Participants also rated the quality of their interaction in the game along 12 subjective dimensions of feelings that define friendship. Similar odours corresponded to positive ratings for nine of these dimensions. Intriguingly, however, two participants smelling alike did not mean they were any more accurate at the mirroring game than others, as measured by a hidden camera.

Why scent might play a role in forming friendships remains obscure. Other qualities correlated with being friends, including age, appearance, education, religion and race, are either immediately obvious or rapidly become so. But while some individuals have strong and noticeable body odour, many—at least since the use of soap has become widespread—do not. It is present. But it is subliminal. Dr Ravreby speculates that there may be “an evolutionary advantage in having friends that are genetically similar to us”. 

Link to the rest at The Economist

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

From PLOS1:

The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 called attention to systemic racism in American society. In the #PublishingPaidMe protest on Twitter, authors shared the amount of their advances and in so doing revealed the pay discrimination for Black authors, who tend to receive lower advances on their books than their White counterparts. Close scrutiny of the industry highlighted its whiteness, not only in terms of authors and who receives recognition but also in terms of editors and decision-makers . These trends have deep historical roots, but little if anything had previously been accomplished in addressing these trends in recent years . However, following the BLM protests and #PublishingPaidMe, over a thousand people in the publishing industry signed up for a day of action to support Black authors, and publishers made statements of support for racial justice, announced antiracism workforce training, and pledged to publish more books by writers of color . These conversations in publishing echo ongoing discussions about gender inequality in the industry, which similarly point to disparities in who gets published, who gets reviewed in prestigious outlets, and how much authors are paid for their work (see for example the annual VIDA counts and their publications ). Despite the attention these conversations got alongside #MeToo, particularly in 2018, it is unclear that these conversations have spurred any meaningful or lasting change.

An historic cultural gatekeeper, publishing has become increasingly profit-focused . While editors purportedly used to call the shots based on taste and cultural importance, acquisition decisions and investments in particular book projects have increasingly become the purview of marketing departments. Decisions about advances, advertising budgets, and other decisions about book production and distribution are based on expectations of a book’s or an author’s performance in the market. Such organizational logics have historically been used to justify the lower pay and book prices for women compared to men. However, publishers have also played an active role in creating and cultivating markets and crafting their expectations about book pricing, as in the structure of the female dominated romance market which focuses on mass market production of inexpensive books by women for women. In attempts to diversify the racial and ethnic diversity of their offerings, publishers have tended to create specific and typically niche imprints for these works. Perhaps publishers have thus created their own self-fulfilling prophecies about anticipated performance and market behavior by marketing to specific and limited audiences and by making investment choices that both signal a lower investment in these works and give them less opportunity for discovery by a broader public.

However, publishers, for all of their shortcomings, are not the only potential source of discrimination in the book industry. With the closing of brick-and-mortar chains and independent bookstores as well as the shift in the product offerings within these venues, traditional publishing has become increasingly platform-based in its sales. Etailers like Amazon dominate the sales market both for digital and physical books. Unlike brick and mortar stores which have limited shelf space, online retailers can carry an almost unlimited number of titles. Whether those titles come from traditional publishers or from self-published authors, also known as “indie authors”, the etailers’ platform algorithms play a dominant role in product visibility. To the extent that these ranking and visibility algorithms incorporate consumer ratings and purchases, these algorithms may also be influenced by consumers’ discriminatory behavior and preferences. Yet consumer ratings are currently exempt from regulation and protection against discrimination [8, 9] and immune to publishers’ antiracist institutional practices. Moreover, to the extent that publishers use these ratings and algorithmic visibility in decision-making about which authors to publish in the future and how much to invest in their titles, such external evaluations provide a ready way to “launder” discrimination.

We further see the potential for discrimination from sources other than publishers when we consider the case of indie (self) publishing. Indie publishing has removed the gatekeeping and curation function played by publishers. An example of the gig economy or platform-based economy, indie publishing enables authors to market directly to consumers without the mediation of a publisher. On the one hand, this arrangement has the potential to remove the unconscious biases and prejudices of publishers that contribute to systemic racism or sexism in their acquisitions, production, distribution, and promotion of their catalogs. On the other hand, the consumer-facing gig economy offers no protections to authors from the potential discrimination by consumers and the potential ripple effect of that discrimination in the rating and visibility of their titles. Thus, the gig economy may prove more egalitarian given the removal of barriers to entering the market, but it may also heighten discrimination in ways that exacerbate inequality.

In short, in order to understand discrimination in the book industry, we must consider not only the behavior of publishers but also the behavior and preferences of consumers. This study uses a large-scale, randomized field experiment of over nine thousand subjects to examine the effects of author race, alongside gender and age, on consumers’ stated interest in a given book, their evaluation of an author’s credentials, and the prices consumers report they are willing to pay for books in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres.

Link to the rest at PLOS1 and thanks to P. for the tip.

PG says if lots of book sales are important to you (nothing wrong with that), but you think your race/gender/age may impair your book sales, pen names and massaged or manufactured biographies have a long history of use in the book world.

Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, George Orwell, George Eliot, Richard Bachman, J.K. Rowling, Robert Galbraith, J.D. Robb, E L James, Lemony Snicket, Victoria Lucas, Flora Fairfield and A.M. Barnard were/are pen names used by very successful authors for one reason or another.

An accompanying author’s bio can also be sufficiently vague to not disclose race/gender/age:

“Pen Name attended Princeton University and currently lives and writes in South Florida with a dog and two neurotic parakeets.”

As to the question about the biases of traditional publishers, PG says if you decide to run with a bad crowd, you’ll just have to deal with the consequences.

From Publishers Weekly:

We live in unprecedented times. We read and hear that slogan incessantly. It is often wrong—but with respect to the implications in general and the active threats of today’s book banning campaigns, it is chillingly correct for publishers, authors, readers, young people, free speech, democracy, and humanity. We urgently need to connect the major threads of today’s assaults, which threaten not only constitutional rights and children’s opportunities but also democracy, humanity, and the future of our polity and civilization themselves.

Viewed historically and comparatively, today’s banners are unique. Never before in the past millennia or more have the forces of censorship and claims for minority, extralegal power—rooted in fear—systematically fought to ban texts that they have not read or perhaps can’t read, which I call the new illiteracy. . . . Never before have children and young readers been so deliberately targeted. In all previous campaigns, adult readers have been the focus of the censors’ efforts. In all previous episodes, central targets have been white male authors, from Martin Luther to Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, J.R.R. Tolkien, Phillip Roth, and J.D. Salinger, with books by the occasional woman like Harper Lee or by people of color like Alice Walker or Toni Morrison also drawing scrutiny. In contrast to today’s “anti–affirmative action,” this was equal-opportunity banning.

Now, not only do banners focus almost exclusively on the young but—with great implications for publishers, booksellers, and authors—they go after nonwhite and nonheterosexual authors and leading characters. The rare white male author under attack has a protagonist of color who is differently gendered. A white male author’s much more obscene, profane, and offensive text is not censured. Research by the American Library Association, Freedom to Read Foundation, and BookRiot confirms the almost complete racist, sexist, transphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and ageist obsession of the new banners.

This is not accidental. The banners—and the nationally organized dark-money-funded websites and social media campaigns that mislead uninformed, fearful right-leaning (sometimes) parents—never show awareness of this. Nor do they grasp that their unconstitutional efforts are fundamentally in opposition to everything we know about child development; children’s desire to read, be challenged, learn, grow, and mature as a result of reading and teaching; humanity; and democracy. Multiple surveys found that at least 80% of those polled support so-called divisive and uncomfortable reading and learning. Not at all surprising but critical is the fact that book banners strive to ban countless other well-established legal rights of “free society.”

For publishers, booksellers, and authors, the challenges and the stakes of the book banners’ approach are huge, if insufficiently discussed. Some authors and their publishers benefit from the public attention and sales stimulated in the short-term by being banned. This is true, for example, of award-winning and bestselling Art Spiegelman (Maus); Toni Morrison (various titles); my friend, colleague, and coauthor Ashley Hope Perez (Out of Darkness); Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project); Isabel Quintero (Gabi: A Girl in Pieces); Nic Stone (Deep Martin); and Jerry Craft (New Kid). Some benefit from creative services like Banned Books Box, which sends two banned books with associated materials to its subscribers each month.

But a temporary boost in sales doesn’t occur for every banned author. Classroom adoptions and sales are sensitive to political pressures. Unconstitutional laws are proposed in Republican-dominated states, and even if these laws turnout to be unenforceable, authors and agents, publishers and publicists, distributors and sellers are all influenced, to one degree or another, by these assaults. This can prompt those under attack to search for security and self-protection, which can cause ripples through the entire supply chain. Library and bookstore orders can lag. Decisions about reprints and new editions, sensitive to cultural, political, and economic forces, can be deferred or delayed indefinitely.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Bookseller:

UK children’s publishers have defended the use of sensitivity readers following criticism from some quarters about supposed interference in the creative process, arguing the intention is to make books more inclusive and this should be “applauded”.

Speaking at Hay Festival last month, author Anthony Horowitz hit the headlines for claiming “children’s publishers are more scared than anybody” when it comes to so-called “cancel culture”, saying he was shocked when receiving the notes for his new work.

The author of the Alex Rider series said he “suffered” through the edits on his latest book for younger people, Where Seagulls Dare: A Diamond Brothers Case, due to be published next month by Walker Books, and claimed “what is happening to writers is extremely dangerous”.

Horowitz did not single out sensitivity readers, but the author seemed to echo concerns in the national press about their use. “I believe that writers should not be cowed, we should not be made to do things because we’re so scared of starting a storm on Twitter,” he said, although he declined to specify the publisher’s qualms.

Bloomsbury, Bonnier and Quarto all told The Bookseller they had employed sensitivity readers, saying the move was “important in inclusive, forward-thinking publishing” while rejecting any suggestion authors were being forced to make changes they did not want to make. None of the Big Four publishers responded to requests to comment.

Helen Wicks, managing director for children’s trade at Bonnier, said: “We recognise that this is a delicate balance, and that the authorial voice should be respected. However, we believe sensitivity reads can play an important role in inclusive, forward-thinking publishing. We have used them for many years, picking our partners very carefully and positioning them as peer reviews. Importantly, we believe our teams have both the knowledge and skill required to work with our authors and advisers to bring the best possible stories to the widest possible audience.”

Rebecca McNally, publishing director for Bloomsbury Children’s Books, agreed: “We think they are very helpful on some projects as many authors really do appreciate the insight of a specialist editorial perspective as part of the process. We view it as another kind of expert read that raises questions a general editor, however rigorous, may not think or know to ask. Mostly they give the author an opportunity to review their text through a particular (relevant) lens and make subtle changes, or not. We don’t expect them to make books bulletproof and don’t expect authors to implement all the sensitivity reader’s recommendations—it’s an intelligent, informed dialogue.”

Shannon Cullen, group publishing director for Quarto Kids, also confirmed the publisher used “a variety of editorial consultants” for some of its books “to ensure they are naturally inclusive and accurate in their representation, particularly when exploring topics such as history or geography, or in books that represent multiple experiences”.  

She added: “We encourage our creative partners to consider the potential impact of their work on children and families—regardless of their own intent in producing it—when considering any editorial or illustration feedback. We do not believe that you can make children’s books ’too inclusive’ if the result is also making every child feel seen or safe in their pages, or to build their empathy through reading.”

Silvia Molteni, head of the children’s and YA books department at PFD, said the agency had seen “an increasing number of UK publishers employing sensitivity readers recently, while in the past it was something much more common with US publishers”.  

“It is a process that we, as agent, are removed from as we work with our writers and it’s the publisher who decides whether or not and how to conduct a sensitivity read. Generally speaking, the intention of making children’s books more inclusive—without affecting creativity in the process—is certainly one to be applauded,” she said.

However, reporting in national media on sensitivity readers tends to focus on authors who are less receptive to the idea.

. . . .

Clanchy noted sensitivity reading’s origins in children’s and young adult fiction, and said “there are good reasons for regulating children’s reading: it is foundational and formational and may be enforced by school choice or being read aloud to”, adding “it is genuinely important, there, to avoid oppressive stereotypes”. Nevertheless, she argued Some Kids was not written for children. “Adults are able to put books down if they upset them, so their books may safely contain difficult ideas,” she said. “I thought carefully about all the notes I had been given and, in the end, adopted none of the suggestions proffered by the readers.”

Sensitivity readers, such as author Eva Wong Nava, are keen to explain what their role actually involves. Wong Nava says the term “sensitivity reader” is a “misnomer”. She told The Bookseller: “What a sensitivity reader does is really editorial. It’s not to cancel anyone, it’s really to add a recommendation or suggestion.” She explained how sensitivity readers read through the lens of their own lived experience, or professional and research experience, to provide feedback on authenticity. Wong Nava reads for the portrayal of South East Asian and Chinese experience, identity and culture, for example, as she is from Singapore and Malaysia. She also reads for British Chinese lived experience as she lives in Britain.

She stressed: “I understand writers feeling defensive, but the thing to note about sensitivity editing, is it is not to cancel, it’s to make your manuscript better, like any editor would want to do.”

Responding to Horowitz’s comments, she emphasised the “consultative” nature of sensitivity reading, where the author has the right to accept or reject suggestions, but also the need for children to feel safe.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

During World War II, a large number of ships were utilized to move soldiers, military vehicles and supplies from the United States and other locations to war zones. For the safety of those ships, a number of them were traveled as a group, a convoy. The convoy was guarded from attacks by enemy air and sea forces by armed naval vessels.

For the convoy to be an effective safety measure, the ships had to travel together at the same speed. That speed was governed by how fast the slowest ship in the convoy could travel. If the remainder of the convoy went faster than the slowest ship, that ship would be left behind and be a much easier target for enemy forces to attack and sink.

PG was reminded of the slowest ship in the convoy when he considered sensitivity readers. The most “sensitive” of the sensitivity readers would seem to set the standard for a publisher. If the editors or other sensitivity readers thought one of their staff was going too far, that would open them up to attack for not being sensitive enough to the fears, needs, traumas, lived experiences, etc., etc. of that sensitivity reader and others who shared those sensitivities.

PG was a trial lawyer for many years and anyone who spends much time in that field ends up representing people who have made decisions the lawyer wouldn’t have personally made. For example, marrying someone who was, in PG’s eyes, entirely unsuitable to be anyone’s spouse, life partner, drinking buddy, companion, friend, friendly acquaintance, auto mechanic, etc.

PG tried to screen out crazy people before they became his clients. But on some occasions, PG ended up representing crazy people because he/she didn’t present as crazy when PG first met with them (crazy people are sometimes quite ingenious in disguising their true nature) or a judge assigned him to represent a crazy person because even a crazy person is entitled to legal representation under many circumstances.

When PG considers sensitivity editors/readers/reviewers, he wonders how many crazy people slip into those roles. This question arises in PG’s fevered brain because some of the identified sensitivities are so abstruse and hypothetical he suspects that psychiatric treatment would be more effective than sensitivity editing for the exquisitely sensitive among us.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

I develop diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies for one of the biggest book publishers in the world, and I teach creative writing and publishing courses at area colleges, so I know why James Patterson is big-mad.

I found out about his comments Monday, on a group chat with my diversity, equity, and inclusion colleagues. We routinely share articles that help us recontextualize and embolden our work, and at some point, someone posted the article in the Sunday Times in which Patterson laments that white men are having trouble getting hired as writers, calling it “racism.”

Let’s just say that Patterson’s comments did not help us recontextualize or embolden our work. Because he’s flat-out wrong.

“Doofus” was all one colleague could muster. And really, what more is there to say about a white man who is reckoning with the end of his time. Gone are the days when white men are prioritized only because of their identity rather than, let’s say, actual talent and intellect. That must be painful.

When Donald Trump says, “Make America Great Again,” and when James Patterson says, white men face “another form of racism,” please understand that these white men are saying the same thing. Trump and Patterson were born a year apart and grew up during America’s Golden Era. After galvanizing all its resources toward the war effort, America was able to redirect those post-war resources to meet growing consumer demand for goods and real estate, employing millions of Americans and boosting the middle class.

However, while there were many more jobs available during this period, they weren’t available to all. Only 2% of women and Black men worked in highly skilled jobs that pay better (like engineering), whereas 94% of doctors were white men. Generations of Trumps and Pattersons enjoyed unfettered access to the spoils of being born cis-het and white, while discrimination, unequal education, social norms, and bad laws tripped Black and brown people as they tried to sprint ahead.

. . . .

Book publishing, as we now know, has been an allegory for the rest of America. During the Golden Era, book publishing faced pressure to create new content as literacy rates climbed and more people went to college. Publishing was forced to expand and corporatize its operations, thus the literary star was born. Publishers realized they couldn’t possibly put an equal amount of effort behind each individual book, so they chose a select few to pour resources, ensuring the success of writers like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac. (There were famous Black writers of this era — James Baldwin, of course — but they were always exceptions. Toni Morrison famously championed Black writers when she worked at Random House starting in the 1960s, but after leaving her post, the publisher went back to its old ways.)

Half a century later and the world has dramatically changed: The internet, cell phones, and social media created an interconnected society where one can quickly and easily expose injustices, from #BlackLivesMatter to #PublishingPaidMe. A Black man and Black woman ascended to the offices of president and vice president, respectively.

. . . .

So yes, the country is changing, and publishing will continue to add more diverse authors and perspectives to reflect our new society. I am sure that for the Trumps and Pattersons of the world, who have only ever enjoyed their privilege, this change feels unbearable.

But things haven’t changed that much. A diversity audit by Random House (now Penguin Random House) found that three-quarters of authors from 2019 to 2021 were white, and only 6% were Black. A 2020 analysis by the New York Times of English language fiction from 2018 showed that 89% of authors were white, even though white people made up only 60% of the population.

And #PublishingPaidMe, in which authors revealed the advances they received on their books, showed that Black authors still often get paid significantly less than their white peers.

Link to the rest at The Philadelphia Inquirer

PG notes that, unless an author lives in or near New York City, that author is unlikely to ever meet with a publisher face-to-face. Ditto for an author’s agent, who is also likely located in New York City.

There is also the time-honored practice of using a pen name that suggests an ethnicity or provides no clue to ethnicity.

There have been more than a handful of men who have written under female pen names and women writing under male pen names.

Search on Google for Pen Name Generator and you’ll find lots of help and most of them allow you to choose your gender.

PG asked one pen name generator for a female romance writer pen name and it immediately spit out Trixie Selene Bolton.

PG tried out a UK pen name generator and was given MaryAnn Bethlake and Janette Beverly.

The UK site will also provide you with a selection of rapper names if that’s your side hustle to your writing career.

Selections for Rapper PG included Strawberry Harold, Tots-Shipman and Inspectah Sticky.

Who knows, maybe PG AKA Inspectah Sticky will turn TPV into a Rap Blog.

From Counter Craft:

In the 18th-century, a specter was haunting Europe—the specter of “Werther Fever.” Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was so popular that it catapulted the young Goethe into international fame and set off a trend of young men wearing yellow trousers and electric blue jackets… and also, allegedly, thousands of imitation suicides.

Goethe was an unknown 24 year old when he wrote the book, and he certainly didn’t set out to popularize garish fashion or suicide. The novel is an example of both art’s cultural power and also the unpredictability of its influence. There’s no better example of that than overtly political works. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was written to expose the poor working conditions of meat packers and inspire a socialist movement, but readers focused on gross meat industry health violations so instead of socialism we got the 1906 Meat Inspection Act. Even works as blatantly left wing and anti-capitalist as Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels and Star Trek can be turned into inspiration for rabid capitalists like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Etc.

You simply cannot choose what people will take from art. Nor can you overestimate the recuperative powers of modern capitalism, where even the most pointed artistic critique can be turned into just another product. Just yesterday Netflix announced it is creating a game show based on Squid Game, the anti-capitalist Korean series about a fictional dystopian game show that became an unexpected Netflix hit.

All this brings me to the latest discourse about The State of Literary Fiction, which was kicked off by British Journalist Ben Judah declaring that “we live in an extremely sick society”—hard to argue—and that what this sick society needs to address its massive, systemic, and global problems is… better literary fiction?

. . . .

[I]s Jane Austen not a novelist of interiority? But mostly what’s notable is how commonplace the central claim is. Sometimes it feels like every week someone argues political literature is dead or decries the failure of fiction, especially literary fiction, to cure our ailing society by… well it’s not exactly clear. Helping to “rock the vote”? Inspiring a resurgence of left wing politics? Igniting an armed revolution?

. . . .

Another issue is, well, look. How did that work out before? When was the point in which novelists, bourgeois mimetic or otherwise, saved society? As much as, say, Tolstoy was a genius—and he was—did his novels fix the ills of Tsarist Russia?

Link to the rest at Counter Craft

PG realized that he is including too many OPs about nothing today. He’ll be better tomorrow.

From The Atlantic:

My father loved books more than anything else in the world. He owned about 11,000 of them at the time of his death, in March of 2021, at 83 years old. There were books in his living room and bedroom, books in the hallways and closets and kitchen.

Sometimes I stop in the center of my own home like a bird arrested in flight, entranced by the books that line my walls. I live in a small Manhattan apartment, and I, too, have books in the living room, the bedroom, the hallway, the closets. Often, I stare at them because I’m puzzling over their geography. I wonder if I’ve placed any book in the wrong spot, according to an emotional map I’ve made of my bookshelves. As I gaze at the titles, the associations come tumbling out. Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs is next to a biography of Patrick Dennis called Uncle Mame, because Williams and Dennis had many things in common: Pathos. Cruel fathers. Spectacular female characters. A Dictionary of Yiddish Slang & Idioms is next to Heartburn because, however secular Nora Ephron was, her humor comes from deep within her Jewishness. The Lord of the Rings is between Time and Again and Rosemary’s Baby because I like how they form a triumvirate of fantasy stories that have nothing in common save my personal opinion that they are the finest of their genre. (Many would argue that Rosemary’s Baby belongs in horror, not fantasy, but my system allows for the blurring of these lines.)

And then there’s the shelf above my desk. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that it’s where I keep my favorite books. A more esoteric logic is at work. In About Alice, Calvin Trillin wrote that his wife had a large envelope marked important stuff, in which she collected letters the children had written her, records of their accomplishments, and other ephemera. She seemed to know what belonged in that envelope on raw instinct. So it is with the shelf above my desk. Here are the books that speak to some part of my sensibility—my youthful daydreams, the worlds I once imagined for myself. The Princess Bride is up there—I read it in a single day when I was 12 years old. “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” Who could put it down after an opening line like that? Also on this shelf: Birds of New York Field Guide, because I used to fantasize that my newborn would one day be a junior member of the National Audubon Society. Next to that: Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers, a long-ago gift from my mother that embodied her high standards of kindness and etiquette.

My books about writing are in the center of the shelf, because writing is what I do at my desk. They make me less afraid to be alone with my keyboard. Among them is On Writing, by Jorge Luis Borges. Yet this book is not there because it is about writing. It is there because of my father.

My father loved Borges. I remember him reading aloud a passage in which Borges expressed his admiration for how “physical” English is. It had ways to describe motions through space, he said, that were more keenly expressive than those he could find in his native language, Spanish. My father read the passage with sensual care, the way a gourmand enjoys a bowl of freshly harvested peas (M. F. K. Fisher, An Alphabet for Gourmets) or the way James Beard uses brisk rhythm and precise timing to achieve the optimal texture for scrambled eggs (James Beard, Beard on Food). My father’s joy in Borges’s words spread gently across his face in a smile that tugged at his lips and lit up his eyes. When he read aloud, you knew, deep in your bones, that you were learning a kind of catechism.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

Is PG the only one who wondered how this was chosen for the magazine?

Preliminary note from PG: He was not familiar with the term, “Homiletic” prior to reading this article from a publication called Homiletic . After a short bit of online research, he discovered the definition:

”of, relating to, or resembling a homily.”

PG thought he knew what a homily was, but again checked to make certain.

Definition of homily
1: a usually short sermon – a priest delivering his homily
2: a lecture or discourse on or of a moral theme
3: an inspirational catchphrase
also : PLATITUDE

Fully educated, PG pressed forward with the OP which appeared in Homoletic. He will note that the original was downloaded as a PDF and was a bit more difficult to handle than other PDF documents PG has encountered, so if the formatting is hinkey here and there, he apologizes.

From Homiletic Vol. 47, No. 1 (2022):

In April 2021, Religion News Service ran a series of articles related to the topic of plagiarism. The most notable of the articles, authored by editor Bob Smietana, was also the most ironic. The article opens by focusing on a woman attending virtual services with her congregation in Franklin, Tennessee. It chronicles her growing frustration with her minister’s  preaching, culminating in a “really not Jesus-like” tirade when she discovered the minister’s  sermon had been preached by another minister in Kentucky three years earlier. To add to her  minister’s pastoral and homiletic misconduct, this deeply troubled woman discovered that the  minister’s next sermon was a near word-for-word lifting—including a visual demonstration—of a sermon preached by none other than Mark Driscoll when Driscoll was still with his Mars Hill  Church in Seattle. The 2013 sermon was titled, “Do Not Steal.” Knowing Driscoll’s own history  with plagiarism, irony abounds. The woman’s minister resigned in 2017, only to be caught  committing the same pastoral crime in April 2021 at his new congregation in Woodhaven,  Michigan, again preaching old sermons from Driscoll. When asked by RNS about his use of  sermons from other preachers, the minister simply said that he had studied hard for his sermons  and had been run out of the congregation in Franklin due to a coup, leaving Smietana to conclude  that “the truth of the Bible can still come through, even with a pastor who plagiarized. But that  does not make it right.”

But what about the use of images in sermons? One of the issues that drew RNS attention  was that the minister in question, Zach Stewart, had not only used Driscoll’s sermons word-for- word, but had also plagiarized visual imagery such as gesturing how to shoot a bow and arrow and the use of Driscoll’s graphics. Preachers may search through sermons on Paul’s letters to the  Romans and come across an intriguing series by another preacher who has prepared excellent  graphics. Then a preacher’s next sermon collection on YouTube includes the exact same graphics, without credit given online to the originator of the material or in the accompanying printed or digital materials. We may chase the rabbit down the hole far enough to discover the congregational worship arts team that designed those eye-catching visuals in the first place. Or, in reviewing a student sermon, you find her selection of a visual image (one you seem to remember seeing years ago in your college art appreciation class) compelling. But when you search her notes to find any information regarding the image, you discover that there is no reference to any kind of source material. Is this simply bad research, or does it constitute plagiarism?

The issue of plagiarism, both verbal and visual, is not new to the preaching profession. As far back as 1952, Webb Garrison, then professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, stated that, “Any minister can consistently produce original sermons. Yet there is a steady stream of instances in which plagiarism is detected in published works.”5 The Internet has made this practice of “borrowing” immensely easy. To be honest, this author has frequently been guilty of visual borrowing in the past. The pressure to preach stimulating insights accompanied by evocative visuals has increased in the pastoral marketplace due to the increasing expectation of those who hear and see our sermons.6 We have wrestled with this issue so much that “to cite or not to cite” is more than just an adaptation of Shakespeare’s immortal line from Hamlet.

Like it or not, preachers and worship leaders are bound by what is called “fair use” law for proprietary material. The desire to use others’ creative materials does have some limits, and when those limits are exceeded, the consequences can be serious. Ultimately, this essay is not about verbal plagiarism (i.e., the borrowing of another’s sermon), although it will touch on this concern. Instead, this essay seeks to broach a different discussion, one concerning the visual side of plagiarism—a topic of which there is a dearth of material, especially in homiletic literature. Looking first at the problem of both verbal and visual borrowing, this essay provides an explanation of fair use codes and concludes with a discussion of existing and creative solutions for crediting sources, especially as they relate to visual borrowing. The hope is to initiate a generative conversation regarding the topic of “fair use” in homiletical and liturgical discussions.

The Problem of Verbal and Visual Borrowing 

In a day when learning management systems arrive to campus with plagiarism detection software built into their coding, one would think that the issue of verbal and visual borrowing  would be on the decline. However, it seems that the problem is getting worse rather than better.   On one end of the spectrum is Rick Warren, who is famous for quoting Adrian Rogers: “If my  bullet fits your gun, then shoot it,” meaning he has no problem with other preachers using his material verbatim in their own preaching, teaching, and even writing. On the other end of the  spectrum are preachers like author (and former attorney) Carey Nieuwhof of Connexus Church in Ontario, who has argued that preachers should not provide sermons to a wider audience because the temptation to steal a sermon is great when the pressure is high. Both of these views  are adventures in missing the point. 

First, we need to ask what is the nature of the current problem with verbal borrowing in  sermons? There was a time when, in order to borrow a homiletical insight—or an entire homily—one had to consult books; in particular, sermon collections. Sermons have been  published for decades, with some modern major publishers running entire sermon series. For  example, one popular preacher in my denomination from a generation or two ago published a  handful of textbooks on preaching and pastoral ministry, even publishing a couple of collections  of sermons. This was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He continued to do so, even as he moved  back and forth between the church and the academy. That is, until he visited a former student of  his—without advanced warning—only to hear one of his own sermons preached word-for-word.  Then there were sermon tapes, and later CDs. Lynn Anderson is a popular preacher within my  denomination whose “tape ministry” was quite successful. That is, until the week the tape did not  record. Blank tapes were sent across the United States, much to the dismay of many preachers.  Anderson said that he decided to discontinue the taping of his sermons when he received a call  from one flustered preacher who asked what he would preach in a couple of weeks because he  only preached what Anderson had preached.

It is one thing to quote an insight from a popular preacher like Barbara Brown Taylor or Andy Stanley in a sermon. Neither is it unusual to cite a passage from the preacher’s favorite  biblical commentary. In doing so, the preacher develops a “discipline of invitation” which allows  other voices to be heard in the sermon, deflating the preacher’s own position of power and  conflating various streams of insight into one united voice. However, it is wholly another thing  to borrow these insights—or entire sermons—without attribution simply to create an Aha!  moment for the listeners. Recent statements from William Willimon such as “Stealing really isn’t  stealing if it’s done unselfishly for the good of my neighbor” and “My sermonic borrowing is an  indication of how much I love my people,” even if offered in jest, are ethically incompatible  with the preaching ministry. This is what Michael Knowles has referred to as the “stealing of  power” from another which perverts the sermon into a weapon of violence rather than an  instrument of peace. Reid and Hogan refer to this as a problem of inauthenticity. They note, “In reality, there is a lot of borrowing and influence that goes on in the production of anything  worth reading or hearing. That is a good thing. Once the term plagiarism is applied to borrowing  however, it suggests a large amount of uncited, verbatim usage rather than just influence. It also reframes the activity as a form of cheating.” The issue that is at play here is not ingenuity but integrity. As Tom Long has noted, “There is a difference between being a debtor and being a thief… Preachers who strive to tell the truth, who seek to honor the communion of saints, who desire to maintain the trust of the faithful community—that is to say, preachers with ethical integrity—will wrestle with these questions and make the best decision they can.”

On one hand, “intellectual property” is a thing that should be respected. While one preacher may be okay with anyone using his or her material, this is not and cannot be seen as a blanket view of those in the pastorate. On the other hand, any sermon, just like any book, can have value to a wider audience when used appropriately. As Bradley Munroe once humorously mused,

“Perhaps I am being much too negative about the possibilities for good and way too cautious about petty moral hindrances to good preaching. Imagine the possibilities: through the Internet good sermons could be universally available to every minister in the technologically advanced world. The ‘demise’ in modern preaching could be ‘cured’ overnight. My limited vocabulary and lack of theological insight would no longer hinder my congregation from growing into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Bible reading would return! Mission would explode! Maybe even evangelism would happen! Oh, it is too wondrous to think. I am giddy.”

The former view is confronting plagiarism head-on by embracing it as an option, while this latter view is preventing plagiarism at any cost.

It is hard to believe that Chris Stinnett’s article on citing our sources was written over twenty years ago. However it is still as timely as ever. There have been back-and-forth conversations as well as entire issues of academic journals dedicated to the topic. Yet the present essay is not about borrowing another preacher’s sermon. In 2022, if you still think borrowing another’s sermon (or sermon illustration or other portions of a sermon) without giving that preacher some form of credit is acceptable, then you need to seriously consider the unethical example that you are displaying to your congregation. As Jeffrey Peterson argued twenty years ago, we live in a “wired world,” meaning that we who speak for God must practice integrity in all aspects of our teaching ministry—including our use of creative sources such as audio, video, and visual imagery.

Link to the rest at Homiletic Vol. 47, No. 1 (2022) 

PG hesitates to make this post longer, but the OP generally used the term, “plagiarism” as equivalent to copyright infringement.

The Difference Between Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement

From Copyright Alliance:

There are many differences between plagiarism and copyright infringement, yet it can be easy to confuse these concepts. While both plagiarism and copyright infringement can be characterized as the improper use of someone else’s work, they are distinctly different improper uses of someone else’s work. The biggest difference is that copyright infringement is illegal, while plagiarism is not. This blog post discusses additional differences between the two and provides examples of each type of improper use.

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism occurs when a party attempts to pass someone else’s work or ideas off as their own, without properly giving credit to the original source. Plagiarism, while not against the law, is an ethical construct most commonly enforced by academic intuitions. Consequences of academic plagiarism may range from receiving a failing grade all the way to the revocation of a degree.

Plagiarism is not just limited to the academic setting. In the professional world, plagiarism has its own set of consequences, which may include sullying the plagiarizer’s reputation and in some instances termination and difficulty finding new employment. For example, in 2014 CNN fired a London-based news editor for repeated plagiarism offenses over a six month period, involving a total of 128 separate instances of plagiarism, mostly taken from Reuters.

What is Copyright Infringement?

Copyright, at its core, is the set of rights belonging to the creator or owner of a work of authorship that is original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. This set of rights automatically vests to someone who creates an original work of authorship like a song, literary work, movie, or photograph. These rights allow a copyright owner to control who, when, where, and how their work is used, such as through the right to reproduce the work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies, and to perform and display the work publicly.

Copyright infringement occurs when a party takes an action that implicates one or more of the rights listed above without authorization from the copyright owner or an applicable exception or limitation in the copyright law, such as fair use. There can be significant legal consequences for copyright infringement, including injunctions, monetary damages, and in extreme instances criminal penalties.

Comparing Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement: Examples

The examples below illustrate some of the differences between plagiarism and copyright infringement.

Plagiarism But Not Copyright Infringement: A student copies a few sentences of a 20-page book illustrating and describing species of birds to use in article on evolution submitted for her high school newspaper but fails to provide a citation or footnote explaining that the information came from the book. This student may have committed plagiarism by not properly attributing the information and making it seem like the information originated from the student. However, the student will most likely not be found to have committed copyright infringement because such an inconsequential amount was used in an educational setting in a manner that is unlikely to harm the authors market for the work that the use is likely a fair use.

Copyright Infringement but Not Plagiarism: This time, the high school student copies the entire bird species book that she includes in several article published in the paper, but she puts a citation at the bottom of each article that includes the author’s name, the title of the book, and how the entire article is taken directly from the book. While the student properly attributed the author and did not try to pass the article off as her own work, she copied the entire work without permission, which likely infringes the author’s rights under copyright law.

Both Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement: A young writer, hoping to be published, copies line for line a popular wizard book series. The young writer sends the work to her publisher and says she wrote it. This author has committed plagiarism by submitting someone else’s work as her own and, in addition, has committed copyright infringement by copying someone else’s protected work without permission.

Link to the rest at Copyright Alliance

From The Guardian:

At the end of March, a book that had been condemned to die came back to life. There was no star-studded launch, and no great fanfare, although this book is now somewhat famous. The new publisher of the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me felt it wrong to cash in on the controversy that has engulfed it. So the new editions – with some intriguing changes to the original text – were quietly resupplied to bookshops willing to stock them.

What follows is a tale that reverberates well beyond publishing. It’s about whose voice is heard, which stories are told, and by whom. But it has broader implications for working life, too, particularly in industries where so-called culture wars raging through the outside world can no longer be left at the office door.

When Some Kids first emerged in 2019, Clanchy was much admired for her work at an Oxford comprehensive, teaching children from diverse backgrounds to write poetry, with sometimes luminous results. A celebration of multicultural school life, coupled with candid reflections on her own flaws, Some Kids was lauded by reviewers and won the Orwell prize for political writing, with judges praising a “brilliantly honest writer” whose reflections were “moving, funny and full of love”. But then things began to unravel.

In November 2020, a teacher posted on the amateur reviewers’ website Goodreads that the book was “centred on this white middle-class woman’s harmful, judgmental and bigoted views on race, class and body image”, using “racist stereotypes” to describe pupils. The author, she said, wrote of their “chocolate skin” and “almond eyes”.

Clanchy hit back, initially on Goodreads and then in July 2021 on Twitter, claiming “someone made up a racist quote and said it was in my book” and urging her followers to challenge reviews she said had caused threats against her. Literary giants, including the 75-year-old children’s author (and president of the Society of Authors) Philip Pullman, rose to her defence. Yet it quickly emerged that those phrases (although not, as we will later hear from Clanchy, everything attributed to her) were in the book. Her prickly response not only sat awkwardly with Some Kids’ theme of a narrator open to learning about herself – one who believed, she wrote, that deep down “most people are prejudiced; that I am, that prejudice happens in the reading of poetry as well as everything else” – but had unintended consequences for her critics, too.

Three writers of colour, Monisha Rajesh, Prof Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, who had challenged Clanchy on Twitter, endured months of racist abuse and sometimes violent threats, despite Clanchy’s own publisher, Picador, describing their criticisms as “instructive and clear-sighted”. An 18-year-old autistic writer named Dara McAnulty, who had questioned Clanchy’s description of two autistic pupils as “jarring company”, was forced off social media by abusive messages. Picador, having initially apologised, saying Clanchy would rewrite the book, then announced this January that it was parting company with her by mutual consent. (She has suggested Some Kids would have been pulped had Mark Richards, co-founder of the new publishing house Swift, not bought the rights.) Clanchy, who lost both her parents and got divorced in the same year her career imploded, meanwhile disclosed in December that she had, at times, felt suicidal.

The row erupted at an anxious time for publishing, following similar pushback at novels ranging from Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 book American Dirt – whose portrayal of a migrant Mexican family was critically acclaimed, until Latin American writers accused its author (who is of Irish and Puerto Rican heritage) of peddling stereotypes and inaccuracies – to the queer black author Kosoko Jackson’s A Place for Wolves, a gay love story set during the Kosovo war that was withdrawn in 2019 at the writer’s request after Goodreads reviewers attacked his representation of Muslim characters.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to C. for the tip.

PG has had a million thoughts about the OP and several other similar stories. However, he will try to be brief.

1. Nobody owns stories, settings and characters except the author.
2. Nobody has any legal rights to stories, settings and characters except the author.
3. Nobody has inherited exclusive rights to stories, settings and characters.

PG has never traveled to Austria and can say with confidence that he has no Austrian ancestors. If PG writes a novel set in Austria, is he stealing anything from Austrians?

Copyright law protects the creator’s expression of people, places and things real and imagined that a writer, painter, photographer, etc.

Just because an Austrian author writes a novel set in Vienna from the 1890s until the outbreak of World War I — a period when Freud and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, musicians Schoenberg, Mahler and Alton Berg, and writers Robert Musil and Arthur Schnitzler, artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and architects Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos were living in the city and hard at work — doesn’t mean that another author or many other authors born and living all over the world can’t write about Vienna during its golden age of extraordinary creative and artistic activity.

To take a more concrete example, a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe, a member of an old, distinguished and lily-white New England family and the wife of a white college professor, wrote a book, published in 1852, titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

Ms. Stowe’s express purpose in writing the book was to educate Northerners on the realistic horrors of the things that were happening in the South. The other purpose was to try to make people in the South feel more empathetic towards the people they were forcing into slavery.

This book is filled with material and written in a style that would never be accepted for publication had it been submitted to any American publisher in 2022. To say that the contents are politically incorrect would be an understatement.

However, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a huge best-seller in a much smaller United States, appearing in a 40-week serial in a major anti-slavery periodical

When it was published as a book, it sold out its first printing in a few weeks. The publisher kept eight printing presses running constantly to try to keep up with demand.

After the start of the Civil War, Stowe traveled to the capital, Washington, D.C., where she met with President Abraham Lincoln. Her son later reported that Lincoln greeted her by saying, “so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second best-selling book in 19th century America, with the Bible ranking first.

From Electric Lit:

Delusion, when used as a literary device, is just another word for truth-seeking. Facts are not truth. Characters with irrational thinking have usually given the facts a try, and are frankly unimpressed. Instead, they develop an extreme conviction that, held up against the traditionally accepted facts or reality, seems ludicrous. Even dangerous.

Yet I would argue that most of us, in real life, labor under one delusion or another. The belief that hard work leads to success. The faith that so-and-so loves us. Even when proven wrong—even when we are ruined by such things—we stubbornly believe. We want to believe. Nursing a myth can keep us alive.

Delusion, especially the obsessive variety, may lead one to certain doom, but often a delicious doom, full of discovery. My list concerns books with characters who, for better or worse, sink into their own world to find something beyond the narrow existential experience society has deemed acceptable. Bonnie, the main character of my book, One’s Company, attempts the same by submerging herself into the alternate reality of a vintage sitcom to escape her own past. She wants to be other people, live other lives. Whether she knows it or not, she is trying to heal herself. For her, delusion is necessary. Maybe it is for all of us. Perhaps it is only through transcendence, or escape from this human trap, that we will ever approach happiness.  

. . . .

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

The main character of this book is obsessed with the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, Treasure Island, and when she ends up living back with her parents after some parrot-related hijinx, her obsession ripens into delusion. Her voice is strong and relentless, and she is very! Serious! About it! Some people find this book funny, which it is, but it’s also a risky book that’s full of domestic minutiae amid the madness, which I wholeheartedly admire.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori 

Like many breezy-sounding songs from the 1970s that are actually about suicide and societal unrest, Earthlings has a very conversational tone that belies the out-there plot. Two children are convicted in their belief that they are literal aliens not of this earth. It gets weird.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
“You’re not my type!” Lise, the main character, screams this phrase at other people as she hunts for someone to assist in her own annihilation. The plot of this book unfolds over the span of a couple days in an unnamed European country, and follows erratic Lise as she searches for The One.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

A few minutes ago, PG was doing some housekeeping behind the scenes at TPV on a group of posts from 2020.

Evidently, he somehow managed to archive all his recent posts. All should be as it should be now.

Thanks to C. for letting PG know about his electronic screwup.

From Publishers Weekly:

Another May has come and gone without BookExpo or any other in-person, industrywide spring show taking its place. As the pandemic eases, more and more publishing and publishing-related conferences, meetings, and fairs are moving from online-only events to either in-person or hybrid affairs. That has raised the question of whether there’s any interest in seeing a new national in-person trade show emerge that could gather the various segments of the book industry together in 2023. Interviews with a myriad of publishers, booksellers, and other publishing players yielded only one consensus: if a new show is to be developed, it should not look like the retired BookExpo. Indeed, no one wants a new show whose business model would rely on exhibitors taking out large, expensive booths.

In the absence of in-person shows, publishers have turned to various digital initiatives to reach their trade partners—particularly independent booksellers. Macmillan said that from June 13 to 17 it will be holding the Macmillan Fall into Summer Reading campaign, a weeklong virtual preview of upcoming titles being published in June through December. A handful of online conferences also sprung up to fill the void left by BookExpo’s demise, including the PW-produced U.S. Book Show.

. . . .

The success of their virtual ventures—augmented by their attendance at smaller in-person events, especially those held by the regional bookseller associations plus ABA’s Winter Institute—seems to have convinced the biggest companies that they can efficiently reach the audiences they need via Zoom and other online services. As one major publisher observed, “The opportunities for account-facing engagements is just not as urgent or productive as pre-Zoom times.” All the biggest companies made it clear that their participation in a national in-person conference would be limited.

Smaller and independent publishers were more interested in a national event, but only if the show underwent a complete makeover from BookExpo in its final years.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

If the traditional publishers themselves have concluded that fact-to-face bookselling to buyers for physical bookstores is not a profitable use of the publishers’ time, PG suggests that may say something about where publishers how they see their futures lie and, perhaps, how they regard the future of bookselling in physical bookstores.