In the wake of yet another high-profile plagiarism incident in the publishing world, we come upon the modern media proliferation justification for cribbing others’ work:

Although [16-year-old novelist Helene] Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

So according to this mindset, Hegemann’s lifting of an entire page from an obscure novel called “Strobo” for use in her book, “Axolotl Roadkill”, is fair game. Because “Strobo” came to Hegemann in a flood of content, it was essentially anonymous raw material, free for repurposing.

Which is all nonsense, of course. What strikes me about these supposed new-media rationalizations is that they are never disclosed ahead of time — only after the theft is discovered. If copycats like Hegemann truly believe that what they’re doing is acceptable, why don’t they reveal what they’re doing upfront, when their book/movie/music first comes out? Obviously, if they can’t admit to this content theft (or “mixing”, or “curation”, or whatever semantics sound best), then they know that they’re in the wrong. At best, they’re just too lazy to engage the original creators’ permission. Ethical quicksand, all around.

This past weekend’s tussle between Amazon and Macmillan over the right to set pricing on ebooks included some curious phraseology by Amazon:

We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles…

A “monopoly over their own titles”? In other words, Macmillan does, indeed, control the wares that it provides for sale — just like any other company that puts together products for mass consumption. And somehow, Amazon in implying that this is wrong. The term “monopoly” here is intentionally loaded: It makes the publisher seem exclusionary and greedy — again, for simply asserting the right to set its own prices. In other words, just like any other wholesaler or manufacturer (i.e., the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” that’s an accepted part of retail).

Sour grapes, basically. It also reflects Amazon’s roots as a Web company, and the general ethos that intellectual property should be free for the taking, business be damned. It’s hard to see how you can sympathize with Amazon at all, given this attitude.

In the (regrettably) long history of book-banning, it’s a wonder why more literary crusaders haven’t bypassed the piecemeal approach of targeting single titles in favor of taking down the ultimate source of all those evil words:

The Menifee [California] Union School District is forming a committee to review whether dictionaries containing the definitions for sexual terms should be permanently banned from the district’s classrooms, a district official said Friday.

The 9,000-student K-8 district this week pulled all copies of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary after an Oak Meadows Elementary School parent complained about a child stumbling across definitions for “oral sex.”

I’m guessing this same parent will have a downright conniption the day Junior’s classroom learns about oral tradition…

As original as you’d think it is to ban the language’s entire lexicon, in fact, it’s been done:

Joan Bertin, executive director of the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship, whose members include the American Library Association, said dictionary bans have happened in the past, although none has been reported since the mid-1990s.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were efforts to ban the American Heritage dictionary at schools in Alaska, Indiana, Missouri and California, she said. The Merriam-Webster’s dictionary came under scrutiny in New Mexico in the mid-1990s.

“It’s rare but not unheard of,” Bertin said.

I guess the kids will have to pick up those sanctioned definitions of sexual acts on the streets now. Which, actually, seems more normal than looking them up in alphabetical order.

As far as I know, the Canadian beaver is not an endangered species. Its print counterpart, on the other hand, is a goner, done in by a 1-2 punch of the schoolyard and the Internet:

To be more precise, the title ["The Beaver: Canada's History Magazine"] was doomed by a vulgar alternative meaning that causes Web filters at schools and junk mail filters in e-mail programs to block access to material containing the magazine’s name… The trouble went beyond Web pages. The magazine found that its attempts to e-mail classroom aids to teachers were thwarted by its name, as were attempts to contact many readers.

It’s a sincere shame that a venerable journal like this has to succumb to such crude slang. And how primitive is Canada’s IT infrastructure that it employs such hamhanded filtering technology? In the face of these challenges, I guess it’s right to be worried about The Beaver.

Although the Canucks aren’t helping matters any with events like The Great Canadian Beaver Eating Contest…

I was quite amused today to see a copy of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue: An American Life” sitting on dashboard of my morning bus, obviously in possession of the bus driver.

Because it was all too obvious that he was practically brandishing the hardcover, making sure that every rider that got onboard had a good view of it. Between that, and the staredowns he was administering, I’m pretty sure the driver was daring someone, anyone, to challenge him on it. Given the well-known proclivities of a good cross-section of New Yorkers, I’d imagine the odds are good that he got into more than one verbal joust with various passengers during his shift.

All I can say is that, during my half-hour trip, no one took the bait. Not that you could tell the difference by the driver’s customarily crabby demeanor.

Maybe I’m not the one to criticize Demond Wilson when it comes to promoting “Second Banana”, his memoirs from his “Sanford and Son” years.

But if Wilson actually wanted this book to catch on, I think he should have gone with the far more obvious choice of title: “You Big Dummy!”. Having Redd Foxx’s signature catchphrase from the show front-and-center on the cover would bring the book instant pop-cultural recognition. Plus, the novelty factor alone would have ensured a few extra sold copies.

Alas, this lost opportunity seems like something that Lamont Sanford himself would have flubbed. Eliciting yet another “you big dummy!” from his Pop, Fred G. — perhaps followed by yet another in a series of “big one” heart attacks.

The old saying about the shelf life of the printed daily newspaper takes on new life with the sale of hiatused Editor & Publisher to, of all things, a company that publishes boating and fishing magazines.

[Previous owner] Nielsen officially closed Editor & Publisher on New Year’s Eve after announcing in early December that the magazine would cease publication. Duncan McIntosh Co. is also publisher of several boating magazines and newspapers, and hosts the Newport Boat Show and the Lido Yacht Expo, both held in Newport Beach.

Not a promising sign for the newspaper industry when its flagship trade pub goes through such an ignominious transfer. At least there’s no danger of E&P becoming overloaded with rod-and-reel news: Fact is, McIntosh already puts out its own FishRap News.

As far as a medium-term cultural impact from Avatar, I believe that Bret Easton Ellis has, via tweet, nailed it on the head:

A lot of gays at Avatar at The Dome tonight. Well, now we know what the most popular Halloween costume in West Hollywood will be this year.

Running around half-naked and coated in blue body paint, validated by popular entertainment. It’s a no-brainer.

It’s practically high heresy in the pop-cultural spheres that I frequent to admit that I don’t particularly care for The Big Lebowski. It’s not from lack of trying — I’ve sat down to watch the movie a half-dozen times, but never could attune myself to its rambling groove. Fact is, I’ve never watched more than the first half without bailing on it.

Maybe I need a study guide in the ways and means of His Dudeness, to get in the proper film-watching frame of mind. Toward that end, the academic world is now teeming with dissertations on the movie’s White Russian-fueled leitmotif.

Thankfully, some of those eggheads are showing restraint:

When putting the book ["The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies"] together, [Indiana University professor Edward P.] Comentale said, he and his co-editor “immediately cut out all the papers celebrating the Dude as a hippie hero in a postmodern landscape.” That’s a sober choice. Admirers of the Dude are already dangerously close to becoming Internet-age versions of Parrotheads, the weekend-warrior Jimmy Buffett fans who tip back margaritas — and embarrass their children — while wearing flip-flops, board shorts, Hawaiian shirts and coconut bras.

“Trying to impress your academic colleagues and also make a dent in the popular market, that’s a fine line to walk,” Mr. Comentale added. “We wanted these essays to press the connection between the goofy and the profound.”

I’m not sure The Dude would abide to this drill-down, but there’s no stopping intellectual exploration.

Is it hackneyed to be taking a copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Informers” to read while flying to LA? Especially since I’ve already read all the stories in it about a dozen times?

Whatever, I’m toting it along anyway. It’s a 6-plus hour flight, ferchrissake. I need something fun to read along the way. My other choice was “Less Than Zero”; either way, my perception of Los Angeles during my stay would have been suitably warped.

If you’re a middle-aged sci-tech geek, you too probably wax nostalgic for the long-bygone Omni Magazine.

Not that I count myself among the mourners. I definitely remember seeing Omni regularly on newsstands during the 1980s, and I’m sure I dipped into a random issue now and then. But it never grabbed me. Even then, the fanciful boosterism over the latest techie trend seemed over the top to me, best absorbed in small doses rather than as a monthly drone of whiz-bang articles.

And frankly, what replaced Omni is no better:

[By the mid-'90s,] other magazines ate their lunch: Subscribers to the newly launched Wired looked suspiciously like Omni readers who’d moved on and gotten MBAs.

Inevitably, Wired is considered Omni’s pop-sci inheritor. Certainly, it inherited its predecessor’s insufferable pro-technocratic tone, and added a distinct smugness to boot. Whereas I could ignore Omni’s pie-in-the-sky optimism, Wired delivers such a know-it-all vibe that it’s not worth fishing through that for the occasional insightful idea.

The good news: People still love the printed book. The bad news: They don’t want to pay for it.

Fiction is the most commonly poached genre at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of Manhattan; the titles that continually disappear are moved to the X-Case, safely ensconced behind the counter. This library of temptation includes books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, among others. Sometimes the staff isn’t sure whether an author is still popular to swipe until they return their books to the main floor. “Amis went out and came right back,” Michael Russo, the manager, told me…

Although there’s no hard statistical evidence on most-stolen titles, The Telegraph of London reported last year that Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Virgin Suicides” was said to be “the most shoplifted book of modern times.” Eugenides had heard this for many years. “I just assumed that the book appealed to the young and sticky-fingered to a certain extent,” he told me, with some amusement. Years ago, Eugenides was at a literary conference with Paul Auster, another top choice among literary thieves. “Paul and I argued about whose book was stolen more,” Eugenides said. “He claimed he was stolen a lot, I claimed I was stolen a lot. Back and forth. It was one of those deep intellectual conversations.”

So much for the hipster literary shoplifters, and the curious badge of honor they give to their favored authors. What’s the most-boosted book amongst the mainstream?

“The Bible,” [Austin bookstore owner Steve Bercu] said, without pausing.

Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for. “Some people think the word of God should be free,” Bercu said. As it turns out, Bibles are snatched even at the Parable Christian Store in Springfield, Ore., the manager told me, despite the fact that if a person asks for a Bible, they’ll be given a copy without charge.

The pleasures of purloined paper-and-ink…

Well, Sarah Palin just blew it with one key constituency — hardcore Scrabble junkies, who object to this seemingly family-friendly passage from her new autobiography:

“Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoarding Ks and Qs and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores.” — “Going Rogue”, p. 12.

The problem? Not only can’t you hoard those particular letters (since there’s only one of each in a Scrabble set); but furthermore, even if it were possible, it’d be bad gameplay strategy to do so:

K doesn’t mesh well with most other letters and so you should try to dump it quickly. Q is paralyzing unless you have a U to go with it. If you are happy because you could lay down “quit” on a double word score, for 26 points, I would say you are not a very ambitious Scrabble player, all the more if you hoarded letters and waited turns to do that. (You have some chance of “aliquot” or “quaeres” or “quinoas,” but do you really expect to score “obloquy,” “quassia,” or “qigongs”?, keeping in mind that if you build upon an already-laid tile you need an eight-letter word with q to score the bonus.)

Sounds like somebody’s still stinging over that Katie Couric newspapers question, and slipped in this anecdote to suggest a homespun-smarts intellectual foundation. Palin should have vetted the editing to someone more familiar with the tile-slapping, triple-word-scoring tradition.

Not long ago, I questioned the real demand for a Kindle in a smartphone world:

I don’t see how the e-book readers can compete, frankly. Why lug around an extra, oversized display screen when you can carry around your library in your pocket? Obviously screen-size is sacrificed, but most people are accustomed to reading off their phone screens by now. If anything, I see the Kindle, [Sony] Reader, et al becoming niche products, for those who can’t do without large-print reading; everyone else will do their e-book reading via iPhone/iTouch. The disruption comes from including the e-book capabilities in the price of the device, versus shelling out a few hundred dollars for a separate reader.

Today, my paper of record validates my view:

“These e-readers that cost a lot of money only do one thing,” said Keishon Tutt, a 37-year-old pharmacist in Texas who buys 10 to 12 books a month to read on her iPhone, from Apple. “I like to have a multifunctional device. I watch movies and listen to my songs.”

Over the last eight months, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a range of smaller companies have released book-reading software for the iPhone and other mobile devices. One out of every five new applications introduced for the iPhone last month was a book, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends.

For the record, I’ve yet to consume any books on my iPod Touch. I do read plenty of Web content on it, though. And write a fair amount via the virtual keyboard. I’m obviously not hankering for an e-ink screen…

I wonder if the editor for this week’s New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary recognized the name of one of the reader contributors, Keir Dullea.

Because I’m assuming that it’s the same Dullea that was in 2001: A Space Odyssey, along with several other notable roles in a 50-year acting career. I mean, there can’t be more than one “Keir Dullea” out there, right? No special notation by the Times, though, so who knows?

Anyway, here’s his published entry:

Some years ago, my wife and I would regularly take my parents to dinner at a restaurant they particularly liked on Madison Avenue in the upper 80s.

We usually came in from Connecticut by car. Most often, as I fed coins into the parking meter out front, a particular panhandler would ask me for a donation. He was a regular and I would often give him something. Once he even gave me a quarter when I was out of change.

One day around noon, I was walking along Madison in the 70s when I spotted my panhandler across the street. I shouted to him: “What are you doing way down here?”

His reply: “Oh, hey, man, this is my day job.”

Not exactly a Kubrick-quality script, but certainly an enlightening vignette, worthy of note.

As much as I enjoy much of Ricky Gervais‘ work, I’m going to pass on his new release, The Invention of Lying. I learned my lesson when I got burned by Ghost Town…

The premise for Lying certainly sounds intriguing, though:

A comedy set in a world where no one has ever lied, until a writer seizes the opportunity for personal gain.

It also sounds familiar. To me, at least. Because I’m probably one of the few who, about 15 years ago, picked up an obscure little book called “City of Truth” by James Morrow. Here’s the premise behind that work of fiction:

Morrow’s nearly perfect satiric novella takes place in the dystopia of Veritas, where everyone tells the truth or faces harsh punishment — which Jack Sperry risks when he learns that his son Toby has a fatal disease, and that by lying to him, he may enable Toby’s cure.

Not a perfect match, but really, really close. The Amazon synopsis makes “City” sound darker than it is. From my recollection (and I probably still have a copy, buried somewhere deep in storage), it was strong on the black comedy, and hard to take entirely seriously. It wasn’t a great piece of work, but it was good enough to stick in my memory despite only one or two readings.

I don’t see Morrow’s name anywhere in the credits for “Lying”. I suppose Gervais and his partners came up with the idea independently. But the similarities with Veritas are strong. Maybe if the movie had followed the book more closely, it wouldn’t be getting panned by critics right now as being half-baked. Or was that unavoidable, to dodge paying Morrow anything for the inspiration?

From the same folks who brought you “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” comes “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”, the next installment in the sudden cottage industry of comic-horror reworked Jane Austen prose.

Ben H. Winters provided the supplemental authorship this time around, and he shares his creative process behind injecting Lovecraftian imagery into Regency chick-lit.

Key to Winters’ efforts was a liberal reimagining of basic plot elements, like subbing in a steampunked underwater city for 19th-Century London. This technique was greatly aided by a new ratio of new-to-old in the storytelling:

I had room to describe Sub-Marine Station Beta at considerable length, by the way, thanks to one significant difference between my book and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”. In that work, [writer Seth] Grahame-Smith wrote 15 percent of the final text; the rest was Austen. The readers who gobbled up “Zombies” reported back to [publisher Quirk Books] that as much as they loved the Jane Austen stuff, they wanted a little less of it. So my mandate on “Sea Monsters” was to deliver a book that was 60 percent Austen and 40 percent me. Which made my life easier: I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to describe a city built entirely underwater, where wealthy Britons attend costume balls dressed as pirates and government scientists conduct ill-advised experiments whereby fish organs are transplanted into men, but it takes a few paragraphs.

The people have spoken, and so now the monster mashing-up wordcount is practically on par with the original Austen. How long before the balance is more than tipped, to the point where only the classic character names and broad strokes are commandeered into an entirely separate storyline?

Hopefully, any such future usurpation will follow Winters’ sensible plot synchronization:

Throughout this project, I found that Jane Austen and I collaborated best when I used the monsters and other interpolations not to replace but to accentuate what was already there in Austen’s novel. She made Col. Brandon a bit too old for Marianne so she would have to struggle to see his goodness; all I did by giving him an octopus face was make her struggle a little harder. Whenever possible, I coordinated monster attacks with the moments of high emotional peril that Austen had already created—the Devonshire Fang-Beast pounces just as Elinor learns the truth of Edward Ferrars’ past; Marianne’s heartbreak at Willoughby’s betrayal is heightened by the march of the death lobsters.

Surprisingly skillful application of a gimmick. Maybe Austen herself would approve — after she scrubbed away the mucocutaneous residue on her work.

If that ocean of font names seem overly ornate, you might consider a food-based mnemonic to keep them straight. Or you just might want to see if you can distinguish between a typeface and a fancy hunk of milk curd, with Cheese or Font?.

In other words, is Holland’s own Gouda truly bolder than Goudy Bold? And can you tell the difference? Without using either bread or paper as a testing medium, of course.

As eminently disposable as I consider my Twittering to be, my latest tweet is witty enough (if I do say so myself) to merit a more permanent preservation here:

I just killed a spider the size of Norman Mailer. (true incident, verbiage inspired by @eastonellis)

Yes, that Twitter handle does belong to Bret Easton Ellis. I don’t know if he’s ever tweeted about killing spiders, but he certainly put those words that I paraphrased into one of his novels. As passing as that quip was, it stuck with me, and came to mind when I killed my frighteningly-oversized arachnid earlier today.

No telling if the late Mr. Mailer ever approved of being used as a comparative for bug-size. Well, maybe he did in the ’80s, but probably wouldn’t now.

It’s apparently been around since the mid-1960s, yet this past weekend was the first time I’ve ever heard the coining of the phrase “faction”. That’s a meld of “fact” and “fiction”, as applied to books, movies, and other works that integrally incorporate real-life people and events into a fictional account/narrative. Just about any docudrama, historical fiction, and the like would qualify.

That crunching-together sounds good at first — until you realize that “faction” is already a word, with a distinctly different definition. The common description of a dissenting group within a larger one isn’t everyday language, but it’s far from obscure.

I wonder if “faction” in the literary sense is a British invention, and is used more widely in the UK than over here. Even if it is, it’s still a linguistic reach, given the existence of the established definition. Just stick to “fictionalization” for the fact-fiction combos, and be done with it; no need to get cute or pithy.

I’m not one indulge in the typically voyeuristic media coverage of a high-profile murder du jour. But the grisly details of a Southern California model’s death have, I admit, snared my attention:

When Jasmine Fiore’s body was found in a Dumpster in Buena Park, Calif., Aug. 15, her fingers had been cut off at the second knuckle and all of her teeth had been pulled out. But authorities were still able to identify the swimsuit model from the serial numbers on her breast implants.

“We actually have had several cases where we identified the victim or the defendant in that way,” Orange County District Attorney spokeswoman Susan Schroeder tells PEOPLE. She says implants carry serial numbers “because of the potential for recalls.”

Body parts removed in such a way as to betray the desperately calculating state of mind of the killer — and the horrific task winds up not being thorough enough. I’m sure DNA testing would have identified Fiore if the implants couldn’t have; to go through that level of minute mutilation indicates that the killer was just trying to buy enough time to escape, knowing that everything would be revealed sooner rather than later.

And all indications are that Fiore’s ex-husband, real-estate millionaire Ryan Alexander Jenkins, is the killer. Adding to the case’s twists is Jenkins’ visibility on recent reality TV shows on VH1, which he qualified for despite a documented criminal record in his native Canada. He’s currently on the run, crossing the border into British Columbia en route to a hideout either in Canada or elsewhere.

I hate to say it, but as disturbing as this whole situation is, I can’t help but compare it to something out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The callous disregard for human life, the mindset of the privileged class, and the celebrity subculture all combine into a nihilistic mess. Ellis’ dark visions were limited to his fictional Los Angeles; Fiore’s murder hints of real-life LA intruding upon a similar brand of darkness.