On Plagiarism

I make my living as a university professor—a teacher who also writes books. This semester I’m teaching US History Since 1929, an upper-division course, one of my favorite classes. I like it in part because US History Since 1932 was the one class I took in college that made me want to go to grad school and become a history professor. (Perhaps more to the point, I decided that the professor who taught it, William E. Leuchtenburg, was who I wanted to be when I grew up. More about him in a moment.) I think I like teaching this course because it’s easier for me to imagine that there’s a student like the young me whom I need to inspire in this class than in my other classes.

I put a lot of time into thinking about the books I will assign, the writing assignments, what I’ll do in a given day’s class to stimulate discussion, etc. There is no relationship that I can decipher between the amount of time I put into a given task and how well the students react to it. Some things just work and some things don’t. I slave over some ideas that land with a thud, and I pull some out of my rear end that soar. If enough things work, we’re all happy. When they don’t work, everything can go downhill very, very fast.

Earlier this semester I assigned a book about the 1932 presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s a good book and I thought the students might engage it because in retrospect the 1932 contest has so many parallels to the 2008 election. They found it a little dry, but I thought it would provide enough fodder for good discussions that even if they didn’t particularly care for it, everything would be OK. That’s what ended up happening. They all wrote their reaction papers and moved on.

Except for one student. I only made it through the first three sentences of her paper. The third sentence just sounded weird, so I typed it into google. Sure enough, she had lifted that sentence and 2 others from her introduction straight from an essay she found on the internet. That’s as cut-and-dry a case of plagiarism as you’ll ever see (when I looked closely at it, I even noticed that the parts she copied and pasted were in 11-point font, and the rest of the paragraph was in 12), so I gave her a 0 and didn’t bother to read the rest. But then that was the last thing I thought about that night, and it was the first thing I thought about the next morning. I was so mad about it I threw up while brushing my teeth.

I emailed the whole class and told them they had to upload their papers to turnitin.com, the site that uses plagiarism-detection software to bust cheaters. Meanwhile, I started having all these thoughts about what a failure I must be that someone would try to pull this on me. Why didn’t I explicitly tell the students that they couldn’t copy and paste their essays from internet sites that aren’t even any good in the first place? What kind of idiot must this person think I am that she thought she could get away with this? I can guarantee you that I spent 100 times as many thinking and worrying about this than the cheater did.

When the student finally ran her paper through turnitin, the software determined that she had plagiarized seven sections of her essay from two sources, which together comprised more than half of her paper. The second source, from which she pilfered an entire paragraph, was an online chapter of The FDR Years, a terrific collection of essays that I’ve assigned in previous iterations of this class. The FDR Years was written by William E. Leuchtenburg, the man who encouraged me to go to grad school and wrote my letters of recommendation.

I had to go to my class the next day and read them the fucking riot act about plagiarism. What I didn’t tell them was that if you plagiarize, I will fail you (and I will take it personally and I will take it 100 times more seriously than you will), but if you plagiarize my mentor, I will hate you. That day the atmosphere in class was as toxic as it could possibly have been. But the student realized soon thereafter that she could withdraw from the class without penalty from the university (because this was the first time she had been caught cheating, even though she’s a senior and I know damn well this is not the first time she’s done it), so she did so. Without her the class has been great. For whatever reason, I feel like I’m doing the best teaching I’ve ever done. It’s funny how quickly the dynamics of a class can turn on a dime.

I’ve reflected a lot over the past couple of weeks about who this student cheated and how. Herself and her family, obviously: her parents paid a lot of money for her to sit in this class for a month and a half and learn exactly nothing and receive zero credit for it. Her classmates, too, including one who timed the delivery of her third child for spring break so she could get her assignments in on schedule and get back to class with as little time lost as possible, and another who told me last week that he’s an Iraq War vet dealing with PTSD. They, of course, managed to turn in papers that they had written. She cheated me, but I guess I get paid in part to deal with that kind of disappointment. She cheated Professor Leuchtenburg; even though she didn’t exactly harm him materially, she stole from him the currency of his profession, his ideas and the way he expresses them.

I’ve thought about what it would feel like to have someone plagiarize from one of the books I’ve written. I’m strangely neutral about it (at least in the abstract; talk to me again if it happens in real life). It won’t be like they’re stealing from me, unless they’re publishing my words in another book without attribution, and even then, there’s so little money to be stolen from authors of academic books that “stealing” doesn’t seem like the right word to use. No, the plagiarizer steals the expectation we have as readers that what we’re reading is real, no matter the context of what we’re reading. The plagiarizer steals from us.

Still Can’t Handle It

It’ s old news at this point, but I promised to keep up with this trend.  To get caught up on the litblog buzz from two weeks ago, please read BGB contributor Russ Marshalek’s essay in Creative Loafing’s Culture Surfing.  I’ll summarize by quoting Russ on the controversy surrounding the publication of Justine Larbalestier’s upcoming  novel Liar:

Almost immediately upon cracking that book’s spine, though, what you’ll find is that Micah, the teenage girl narrator, is, as the author describes her, “black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.”

Naturally, the publisher in its wisdom chose this cover to represent Micah on the advanced reading copies -

This choice rightly seemed to annoy many people, the Australian author among them.  After much hullabaloo on the blogosphere, the publishers decided to change the cover and go with this one instead:

This would all be very surprising, only it isn’t.  In July of 2008, I posted about similar shenanigans for three award-winning novels.

A friend of mine has written a book about the Tuskegee Airmen that will be published in the spring. I am officially urging him to not use the picture below for the cover. We can handle it.

American Literature Oxymoron Sez Nobel Dude

In the papers:

Nobel Guy:  Americans R dumb.

Americans: Nuh uh.  U R.

When I read that, I was all “are not!”

Race to the Bottom

Over the last month or so I’ve been getting hits a’plenty from people who are clicking on a link to Baby Got Books that is included in an anti-Obama viral e-mail (for that whole story, see this post).  As I’ve indicated, that entire e-mail is total bullshit.  But it doesn’t stop it from getting posted everywhere.

A few examples of where this e-mail has been posted:

• An Arizona Wildcats discussion forum
• An Orange County Register article about something else entirely
• A genius on Eugene Oregon’s Craigslist forgets the e-mail text but includes the links to the book covers
• This guy’s blog (scroll down under the most offensive Katrina vs. Iowa flooding post that you’ll see all day)
• AOL Message Boards
• A forum for people in the plastics industry
• A forum for Cardinal Sports (scroll down)
• A Comcast user’s forum
• and even Obama’s community blogs!

These are juts a handful of the posts that contain the link back here.  Some people have had the good sense to delete the links and just stick with the text.  A Google search will lead you to about 1000 more instances. The rhetoric in these postings – on both sides of the issue – makes me sad for all of us.  Is it wrong – or terribly naive – to expect something like civil discourse?  Where are all of the adults?

We Can’t Handle It

I’ve noticed an interesting but I suppose not surprising trend.  Here’s what I’ve got:

Exhibit A:

In the US, the new Richard K. Morgan book is called Thirteen.   In the UK, the book is titled Black Man.  (In the UK they also drop the middle initial, but that does not appear to be relevant.) It’s the same book between the covers.

Exhibit B:

Lawrence Hill’s latest novel is called The Book of Negroes in his native Canada, but it is saddled with the much more prosaic Someone Knows My Name in the US.  The same story is told between the covers.

Exhibit C:

This one is a little more subtle, but the same underlying principle seems to be at work. Can you guess which book cover for Zadie Smith’s On Beauty was used in the UK & Canada and which was used in the US?

If you guessed that non-Michael Jordan African-American silhouettes are forbidden in the US, you are correct.

Conclusions:

The message from US publishers seems to be, “Yes, you may be well on your way to electing a black man President, but we have to trick you into reading prize-winning books that might feature black people. We apologize for any discomfort that you might experience.”

Ass Clowns

Here at BGB, we don’t often talk politics.  We don’t hide our politics either; we just prefer to discuss political issues in the context of books.  If at all.  The older I get the less stomach I have for bare knuckle political confrontation.  I mention this because we’ve been unwillingly pulled into some unsavory right wing smear job, and I’m not happy about it.  Here’s the story:

Way back in 2005, which I am pretty sure was before this election season got underway, I posted a review of Barack Obama’s book Dreams From My Father.  Flash forward three years, a right wing smear e-mail starts going around that professes to let Obama speak in his own words by misquoting his books or by providing misleading snippets without the full context.  (Read the e-mail and the Obama Campaign’s rersponse.)

Well, the a-holes decided that they would use the picture of the book that is hosted on MY site in their e-mails by hotlinking to it – rather than download and host their own picture.  Once the pictures are stripped away, the e-mail just reads babygotbooks.com/Obama.jpg where the picture was (see what I mean here)  – which, to me, implies that BGB is somehow on board with their BS.   We are not.

Rather than attempt to find and confront these ass clowns, I decided to have some fun instead.  I have renamed the file for the Dreams from My Father cover and replaced the original Obama.jpg file so that the picture that will now show up in their e-mails is this:

Forward that e-mail around as often as you like guys.  Tell ‘em Baby Got Books sent ya.

Around the same time, and I suspect that the two are related, a comment appeared in the approval queue for Dr J’s review of Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope.  The comment never saw the light of day because I am not interested in having that kind of debate on my web site, but here are a few of its salient points:

Yes, the books are well written, and he is a charismatic, dynamic speaker who can stir a crowd to an almost frenzy–much like an evangelist during a revival.
President and Commander-in-Chief?  I think not.  He has successfully mesmerized his followers into believing he is the answer to our Nation’s and the world’s woes, much like Nickolai Carpathian (sic) in the “Left Behind” series.

Got that.  Obama not only has the magical powers to hypnotize people, but he is like a fictional Anti-Christ.  That is literally demonizing the man.  He is likened to a demon.  Demonization.

As long as we’re talking politics, and speaking only for myself and not for BGB at large, I say:

Under hypnosis,

–Tim

Sacrilege

Each morning, while I stand on the platform waiting for my train to work, this man is smiling at me:

Once on the train, this smiling countenance welcomes me:

Neither of those books will tell you on their covers that the authors head mega-churches and are preachers of the “prosperity gospel”. Slate did a nice job of exposing some of the problems with that top guy’s theology. The bottom guy (based here in Atlanta) is under Congressional investigation because a Senator wanted to know why churches that but Rolls Royce automobiles should be tax exempt entities. And his name is not in any way ironic.  Both of these books are bestsellers.

I was busy with being annoyed by these guys when a link to a web site for The Christ Corporation appeared in my inbox. At first glance, it appeared to be the logical progression for the prosperity gospel gravy train. Instead, it appears to be a poker-faced lampooning of the kinds of churches that these guys run. While checking out the site, I had that occasional feeling that lighting was going to come crashing through the window at any moment. But seriously, who are the sacrilegious here?

And of course, The Christ Corporation has a blog. It features tips for dressing for success (business casual conveys a saintly image) and some original scholarship on the nature of the Antichrist (it’s not who you think!).

And what’s with these guys’ hands? Who poses that way? This guy, while not a preacher, does the same thing…

It’s creeping me out! I guess that one guy at that success seminar at the Arena said that you gotta get those hands in the the picture – no matter how ridiculous you look.

Cease and Desist

Dear Publisher’s Weekly:

It was brought to my attention by keen-eyed readers Russ and David that you recently posted this shirt on your web site in a post titled Baby Got Books:

O! the copyright infringement-larity! While you were on questionable legal ground with that post, you then sought to proceed further into additional infringing activities by posting lyrics to a fictional song in your post Sir Mix-A-Lot Remixed.

As it should be clear to any reasonable party, this blog has a long established use of Sir Mix-A-Lot derivative work that clearly pre-dates your offending work.  My lawyers have begun to calculate just how much your activities will cost you. Please have your checkbook out and ready when they call in order to avoid any unnecessary, expensive, and potentially protracted legal actions through the courts. Thanks.

Tim

P.S.  Or you could just send us one of those shirts.

Sports “News”

Chuck Klosterman, writing in Esquire, railed against the sports news establishment last month, especially against ESPN.  This was particularly impressive, because Klosterman is a regular contributor to ESPN’s Page 2.  In the article he lays out a plan to set things right.

Interestingly, ESPN’s Obudsman wrote a blistering assessment of the network after Klosterman’s hit.  She agrees with Klosterman: “what is not OK is cloaking opinion in the camouflage of reporting.”

Expect nothing to change.

Governments in Action

On the fiftieth anniversary of the court decision that ruled that Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl was not obscene, radio stations are reluctant to air a reading of the poem. Faced with the potential of stiff fines from the Federal Communications Commission for “indecency,” radio stations are taking a pass on the poem. Fifty years have passed and a court decision has ruled that the poem is NOT obscene, and they are still afraid to broadcast an important poem. Damn you, Janet Jackson.

Meanwhile, in Canada the government of Toronto used a picture of a penny in a campaign to lobby the Canadian government to return a portion of the taxes raised by the Province. Not only does Toronto appear to be getting stiffed on the tax issue, they are also being sued by the Canadian Royal Mint for copyright infringement for unauthorized use of a photograph of Canadian money and using the words “one cent”.

What is the What: Ongoing

If you’ve read and were moved by Dave Eggers’ novel about Sudanese civil-war and genocide, What is the What, then you need to run – don’t walk – over to Google Earth. The coolest map toy in the world has partnered with The US Holocaust Memorial Museum to bring actual pictures of the atrocities that are taking place now in the Darfur region. You can zoom in on destroyed cities, click on embedded pictures, read eyewitness testimonies, etc. I had no idea that the USHMM was doing this kind of work, but God bless ‘em. It sure makes it a lot harder for governments to deny this is happening when anyone can check out the evidence for themselves. Here’s a screen shot of what you can expect:

More from the Protest

I was going to call this post “the revolution will not be blogged,”  but I have no idea what that even means.   Below are some more pics from the protest/read-in at the AJC today.  I work around the corner, so I was able to pop in and out at various times throughout the day.

Things kicked off at 10 with protesters meeting in front of the AJC building with signs. Some were hand lettered, while others were simply the AJC book section mounted on a stick.  In a previous post, commenter FlavaWheel suggested carrying a sign that said, “When book reviews are outlawed, only outlaws will have book reviews.”  Given the anti-litblog backlash that has been brewing over the past week, I would have needed a black hat to go with the sign.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Tom Key conducting readings as things got underway.  If you’re not from Atlanta, there is a simple way to tell if a play here is going to be any good – check to see if Tom Key has anything to do with it.  If so, your odds are pretty good.  The readings that I saw were excellent, and I couldn’t believe that I was getting to check it out for free.  Someone needs to corral Tom Key into making this reading thing a regular feature of the Atlanta scene, charge admission, and serve drinks.  Seriously.  Make it happen.

The media were out in force.  The word on the sidewalk was that CNN, C-Span, the local Fox station, and others were on hand.  CNN ran this post, but that’s all I’ve seen from them.

A bulletin board was set up that included Richard Ford’s post at Critical Mass, a paper copy of the online petition, etc.  Hand outs of each were available for foisting on the passerby as well.

Have I mentioned that Tom Key was there?  Holy crap!

Later in the day, as the the numbers dwindled, the sidewalks did the talking.  One item said, “book reviews are better in print.”  I’ve got some doubts. After all, I’ve never held a paper copy of The Guardian, but I think that they have some of the best book coverage going.  It may be true for the AJC though.  Here’s an experiment: (1) go to the AJC web site,  (2) try to find anything that you would call the “book section,” (3) Keep looking.  I’ve been searching high and low.  If they truly plan to move their book content online, they may need to learn how to put things on the internet first.  I’m just saying…

I ran back by around 3 PM and everyone had cleared out.   I guess now we wait and see.  I’m not expecting much.

I returned to the office to find that Atlanta author (and Emory professor) Joseph Skibell had posted about the controversy at Critical Mass (So weird. We were just talking about that guy).  Anyway, it could be argued that the AJC could now invoke Godwin’s Law and win the arguement.

Notes from a Demonstration

The protest/read-in at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Building began this morning at 10. I ran down to check it out. So far, a small but determined group has assembled. A nice media presence was present reporting on the event. Tom Key, the king of Atlanta theater and head of The Theatrical Outfit, was reading aloud from To Kill a Mockingbird, The Moviegoer, and other works. That was cool enough on its own to warrant a crowd. The one misstep, and I’m quibbling, Tom Key said in his intro to The Moviegoer that if left to bloggers the book probably would not have received the recognition that it deserves. WTF? Everyone in the blogosphere totally blew it on The Road this year, right? Tom, it’s not an either/or scenario. ANYWAY, I had to dash back for a meeting. I’m going to go back out during lunch and see how its going. I’ll post more (and better) pictures this evening.

The Endangered Book Review

The Atlanta literary scene’s battle with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not an isolated incident.  Across the country, newspapers are “redesigning” book sections and/or eliminating book reviews from their papers.  The National Book Critics Circle has drawn a line in the sand and says its time to fight back.  They’ve launched the Campaign to Save Book Reviewing.  As part of this campaign they’ve set up an online petition where you can voice your concerns about what is happening in Atlanta. (Over 1000 signatures so far!).  The Campaign also has a list of five things that you can do, wherever you live, to keep book reviews and literary news in our nation’s papers.  Visit the NBCC blog at the link above and get involved. 

Also: Wordsmiths’ Russ has an excellent post on the Atlanta Literary Community.  Check it out.

Call to Arms

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, our local newspaper, has decided in its infinite wisdom that it no longer needs a book editor. Presumably (although it hasn’t been said) this means that the paper will run reviews/stories from the wire services rather than locally written pieces. That sucks – especially considering that the paper has an American Idol/”local radio station drama” beat in its online edition.

Zach from Wordsmiths’ is leading the local response. His recent blog post details why a local book editor matters and what you can do to help. Don’t just wish that we had a better local book scene – make it happen.

Point of order: Zach’s post quotes an NBCC blog post that calls Atlanta the 15th most-literate city in the U.S. If the NBCC had checked with us first, they’d know that we’re #3 (tied with D.C.)

n+1

I was reminded by Nitro’s Lit Mag as accessory post that I’ve been meaning to write about the n+1 vs. lit-blog dust up. The good thing about being late to the party is that there are nice summary posts on other blogs to point to. So here we go.

The Millions blog has a very nice (and even-keeled) summary of a brief essay that the lit mag n+1 ran, unattributed, in its latest issue. The n+1 essay explains why lit blogs are highly suspect. The gist is that lit-bloggers (and I count us in that group) are whores for advance copies, are only writing for the recognition/legitimacy of the publishing houses, and are essentially an unpaid army of publicists writing what is expected of them. Or something.

Wet Asphalt takes up the issue with a little more umbrage, pointing out the hypocrisy of n+1’s position.

The Elegant Variation reproduces Exhibit A – n+1 may think that bloggers are free publicists for the publishing house, because that was the expectation that they had when they provided free issues to bloggers.

The timing of this couldn’t be worse. After writing night and day for over two years, we’ve just to begun to receive a trickling of complimentary books. (To date this blog has received a grand total of five (5) free books from publishers.) We have been “recognized” by one publisher who used a blurb from a review that I wrote about a self-purchased book. We’ve clearly sold out for all this bling and respect – only to now be called on the carpet by n+1. I’m so ashamed.

Actually, no I’m not. It is nice to be recognized, but I suspect that we’d be doing this without the molehill of schwag that we’ve received to date. Don’t get us wrong, we love free stuff. And nothing is cooler than an advance copy. In fact, we’d be just fine if we never had to pay for a book again. That would be swell. (Please keep sending us stuff!)

Among the free copies that we’ve received, there has been no indication that the sender has an expectation of a positive review or even of a commitment to mention the book. Certainly nothing as blatant as Elegant Variation’s note from n+1. Maye a publisher would stop sending us stuff if we hated everything they sent us. But that would be a good thing, right?

Here’s some math – we’ve posted reviews of 199 books to date. One of those posts was based upon a free copy of the book. 0.5%.

So where does that leave us? Should we point out generally that some of the books that we write about may have been given to us by the publisher? Should we point out that a specific book was free? I’ve never seen either scenario anywhere. Ever. Does Michiko Kakutani buy her own books? (We’re certainly not Machiko, and we don’t mean to compare what we do here to what she does.) Help us chart our ethical path forward in our comments.

I still think that n+1 should have been the name of a statistics blog/journal.

Old News

Ripped from today’s headlines (or last month’s):

First off, I’ve been taken to task by a BGB Board Member for not mentioning an article that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. The article details the kick in the family jewels that independent publishers recently received when their book distributor’s parent company filed for bankruptcy – after collecting all of their holiday season sales. The entire inventory of some small publishers remains in the warehouses of the bankrupt company while negotiations with the creditors are on-going. McSweeney’s is one of the independent publishers involved. Proceeds of Dave Eggers’ What is the What, which were intended to go to a Darfur-related charity, are basically gone. Nice.

Speaking of San Francisco, this Writers with Drinks series (voted best literary drinking by SF Weekly) sounds like the kind of idea that needs to be exported to other cities. I’ll get our West Coast partner on this ASAP.

The Top Fake News Stories of 2006 have been announced.

This guy is creating a chapter-by-chapter graphic novel adaptation of 1984. He has very cool INGSOC gear for sale at his MINIPLENTY store to support the effort.

Finally, some really old news, back in November Boing Boing linked to some “great” photo sets on Flickr that “documented” hilarious “signs” with inappropriate use of quotation marks. “Hilarious.”

Farging Bastages

If you’re like me, you might be a little over-protective of your books. An example: I wouldn’t let BGB Contributor, Shaft, borrow my copy of The Tender Bar. It was signed after all. He is a good friend and a fairly responsible, productive member of society. I knew he was good for bringing it back. We swap CDs and DVDs back and forth all the time with no problems. That wasn’t the issue. What if he dropped it in a tub of mayonaise (like he does)? What if the dog got to it? What if…?

In 1991, my copy of The First Man in Rome, an enormous brand new hard cover, rode on the top of my car for a few blocks until it fell off on a busy street in downtown Orlando. By the time I got to it, the cover was gone and it had tread marks all over the pages. Luckily I had thought to remove the dust jacket before bringing it inside for lunch. I was able to cover the book and restore some of its former dignity, but I’m afraid I never recovered. I still have that book.

It should be no wonder that I react badly when the few volumes that I do loan out never find their way back home. I hate the idea of defacing a book by gluing a bookplate inside the front cover. If I could bring myself to do it though, I might go for something like this to get the message across.

The more likely scenario is that I would then become obsessed with bookplates, and the no-goodnik book thieves would remain oblivious to their crimes. The Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie blog gives some idea of what book plate addiction looks like (link via Librarian.net). Won’t someone think of the children!

Vote already!

I have election fatigue so bad I may never wake up.  Seriously.  End already.  There’s a part of me that believes that’s the plan of The Man – to wear us down. Where’s the anger?  Where is this slacker generation’s protest music?  The best I can come up with on short notice (and it is very angry) is Mr. Marshall Mathers song from the 2004 election.

[youtube]8E_lPrlk3t8[/youtube]

If you want to take the high road (isn’t that how we found ourselves where we are?), please read Michael Kinsley’s lengthy political book review and treatise on intellectual dishonesty from Sunday’s NYT Boook Review.

The Saints are Coming

U2 and Green Day offer some suggestions on how things might have been handled a little better/quicker in New Orleans after Katrina:

[youtube]seGhTWE98DU[/youtube]