Though not quite in the same league as my Ernie, my friend Simon Caterson is the first entrant in Lavartus Prodeo’s Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. The idea is to highlight arguments built on tenuous links, and Simon is entered for managing to jump from a discussion of factual errors in Ishmael Beah’s book about his time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone to the overwillingness of baby boomers to believe the Samoan research of Margaret Mead.

It is quite a leap, with the thread tying it together being that there are some stories people just want to believe. But the examples of fictional non-fiction given in Simon’s article are too varied to give the article the focus on readers it needed for the Mead case not to appear, at least to a certain kind of vigilant mind, as being there for some other reason. Most of the article is about authors, who range from outright frauds like Norma Khouri, to people like Ishmael Beah who get some details wrong but still have a compelling story, to Margaret Mead who it seems was more the victim of a hoax than a perpetrator.

But none of this is what really caused upset at LP. It was the suspicion that Simon thinks ’sexual freedom is unnatural and wrong, and you should all stop it now’. And that required a leap in the argument worthy of making LP the second entrant in the Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow. So we go from these remarks by Simon:

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Alasdair Macintyre, Colin McGinn, Andrew Norton, Martha Nussbaum, … John Searle, Peter Singer

- from the contributors list in the 1st quarter 2008 issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine

Philosophically-inclined readers will realise that this is a case of a peasant mixing with the intellectual aristocracy, thanks to the egalitarian institution of alphabetical listing. I’m there at all because of my exchange of letters with Alan Soble over The Peel’s door policy, which in turn came about because someone at The Philosophers’ Magazine found this post from May. As I said earlier this month, I don’t think that debate went as well the public school debate with Andrew Leigh, but both seemed to have picked up audiences I would not normally get.

For the last few days, I have been dipping into The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, edited by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts. It contains over 400 entries on a wide range of Australian political topics. Many of the contributors are good choices: Ian Hancock on the Liberal Party, Murray Goot on public opinion, Galligan himself on federalism, Peter Coleman on political cartoons, Ian Marsh on think-tanks, and Judy Brett on political culture, just to name a few.

But the trouble is that Galligan and Roberts have also chosen as contributors people who are as much activists as academics on their Companion subject. A hardline lesbian feminist like Sheila Jeffreys is not the kind of person you’d ask to give a even-handed account of pornography or prostitution. But at least Jeffreys can tell the difference between fact and opinion, which is more than you can say for some other authors.

Take the ANU’s museum-piece Marxist, Rick Kuhn, who is given the entry for ‘class’. While unlike Clive Hamilton he probably isn’t ignorant of the sociological research on class in Australia, he does ignore it in favour of a straight Marxist account, right down to implicitly predicting revolution:

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It’s not yet mentioned on their website, but an e-mail over the weekend announced that libertarian bookseller Laissez Faire Books is closing down. As they explain it:

The book market has changed tremendously over the past 30+ years, and it has gotten harder and harder for a small niche bookseller to cover expenses. I suppose the market has spoken.

And those who advocate the market must accept its verdict. But I am sorry to see Laissez Faire books go. In my twenties (and maybe earlier, I can’t remember now) I was an enthusiastic Laissez Faire customer. I wasn’t ideologically (or perhaps nearly as importantly, temperamentally) inclined to sign up to all their enthusiasms, especially for Ayn Rand, but better Friedman, Hayek, Sowell et al. than the swooning over the state of much of the Australian intelligentsia.

Though I am sorry to see Laissez Faire close, I am one of the reasons they are going. Even when a Laissez Faire email alerted me to a new book I wanted, I would usually end up buying it from Amazon. Once, Laissez Faire was the only place I could locate many libertarian books, but Amazon caters to just about every niche market. After taking into account the cheaper postage when buying several books at once, Amazon was usually the less expensive option too.

So Laissez Faire have been caught up in the creative destruction of their ideology. Amazon does a great job of making libertarian books accessible, but it is has helped wipe out a specialist libertarian bookseller in the process.

Most of an article in today’s Age by Michael Heyward, the head of the critically and commercially successful Text Publishing, shows how well the Australian book industry operates in the market.

On Heyward’s figures, 60% of books sold in Australia are published in Australia, which if true is remarkable given the range and quality of imported books (of course some of the 60% would be overseas-authored books for which local publishers have bought the Australian rights). According to Heyward, our mix of bookshops is better than those in Britain, the US or Canada. Australians, he says, are near the top of the list for book consumption per capita (though on actually reading books we are typical of the Anglosphere, according to this recent Morgan Poll).

The only statistic he can find to suggest, in his view, that there is anything wrong is the number of books published per million people, in which we ‘lag’ behind other countries - but this is surely in the worthless factoid department since what is the possible rationale for yet more books when not even the most dedicated reader could get through the 8,602 titles that were published in Australia in 2003-04? (And most of the countries he mentions are not English speaking, and cannot use foreign publishers in the way Australians can).

But Heyward is determined to find something for the government to spend our money on, and it is editors. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Mark Davis’s essay in Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, the ‘decline of the literary paradigm’ - fewer works of literary fiction being published, and reduced public intellectual influence of literary authors -

can be understood in terms of broader social and governmental shifts related to globalisation, such as the decline of the postwar consensus (’welfare state’) politics and their supplanting by a new consensus based around free-market notions of deregulation, privatisation and trade liberalisation, and the rise of the global information economy.

He does get a little more specific (an earlier version of his chapter can be downloaded here) pointing to allowing parallel importing - ie, letting booksellers import books that publishers fail to release promptly in the Australian market - and abolition of subsidies for printing Australian books, which he suggests disproportionately affected literary fiction, since most illustrated titles were already printed overseas.

But it seems very unlikely that policy changes have greatly affected the state of Australian literary fiction. Read the rest of this entry »

If publisher Random House’s poorly-maintained website is a guide, Andrew Charlton’s book Oznomics: Inside the myth of Australia’s economic superheroes, was going to be more humorously titled Does My Boom Look Big In This?: The truth behind Oznomics. But with the precedent of the best-selling Freakonomics and the local Gittinomics Random House must have thought another nomics neologism was more likely to sell books.

Oznomics is a textbook-polemic hybrid. It’s part of a welcome trend of books trying to simplify and popularise economics, taking us through some fairly orthodox micro and macro-economic ideas in the Australian context. But it mixes this with more partisan goals and and a more aggressive tone than the other pop economics books of the last few years.

So along with explanations of why protectionism is bad, we get the protectionists continually referred to as ’sandbaggers’, because when the ‘tidal wave’ of competition arrives, their first instinct is to ’stack sandbags on the beach to protect their territory’. The metaphor doesn’t really work as it relies too much on us remembering his original tidal wave metaphor (and how often do Australians sandbag beaches?), and ends up looking like a shot that is a cheap as the Chinese goods that the protectionists are trying to keep out. I’m as against protectionism as Charlton, but the insult was irritating me, and I expect it would be more off-putting for others less used to free trade ideas than I am. People need to be taken gently through counter-intuitive ideas.

And anyone who has ever dreamt of voting Liberal - and there are plenty of protectionists among that group who need to hear Charlton’s message - Read the rest of this entry »

When I bought my copy of Nicholas Stuart’s Rudd: The Unauthorised Biography the day it came out the woman serving me in the bookshop said she was wondering how well it would sell. In Susan Wyndham’s Undercover column in the books section of this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald we have the answer: not very well.

In its first 10 days, according to Nielsen BookScan, it sold 572 copies. Its less critical rival biography by Robert Macklin had 504 sales. Once you take out friends and family of Rudd, friends and family of the biographers, people who think they might have been mentioned, Liberal politicians and staffers looking for dirt, and discount for those in the aforementioned groups who bought both books the number of members of the general public curious to know more about our likely next PM may be down into double figures, in the first week-and-a-half anyway.

Having read the Stuart book the book-buying public has probably made a sound judgment. Reading it cover to cover won’t change any perceptions a newspaper reader might have formed about Rudd over the last few years (indeed, it reads like a long newspaper article) and will add only slightly more detail. He is intelligent, hard-working, emotionally stable, politically moderate and very ambitious. He drives his staff hard, he loves his family.

Anyone running for PM is by definition somewhat unusual, but Rudd is on this account not a complex man - the pieces of his personality fit neatly together, without strong tensions between them. That may be something in his favour as the alternative Prime Minister, but it doesn’t help biographers craft an interesting story.

Some say that they can read other people ‘like a book’. But you can also read other people by their books. I always find a bookshelf analysis a useful way of getting acquainted with someone without having to ask too many questions. A shelf full of Noam Chomsky tomes? I’d better avoid discussing politics. Books on spirituality or lives of religious figures? Nobody could read more than one or two of them without being a believer, so skip religion. Too many books with the author’s name in large, gold-embossed letters? Better keep the conversation on mass culture topics. I noted but tactfully said nothing when I found a copy of Fat Is a Feminist Issue on the shelves of a female colleague who was not quite as slim as she once was.

Though helpful, the bookshelf examination is not a perfect analytical tool. A 2005 survey found that one in three residents of London and south-east England had bought a book ’solely to look intelligent’. So if I was using books as a proxy for human characteristics I could wrongly come to the conclusion that a person was intelligent, because he or she had a book that an intelligent person would buy. And now another British survey finds that:

Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them.

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One curious feature of both academia and journalism is that copying without attribution something written by somebody else that is correct is a far worse sin than publishing something that is one’s own work but entirely wrong. Yet from the point-of-view of the reader, which is the larger problem? Many of us rely heavily on the reporting and research of others in forming our views, and an erroneous fact has much more serious consequences for the soundness of our opinions than a mistaken attribution.

These strong norms against plagiarism, as Richard Posner argues in his The Little Book of Plagiarism, are a modern phenomenon, with great writers like Shakespeare freely copying from others, though often improving on the original in the process. In his time, there were pragmatic reasons for plagiarism. When plays were censored it was safer to re-use old material than to create new words that might be censored. Also, without modern mass production of cultural works copying brought ideas to wider audiences.

Posner sees the rise of individualism as important: ‘each of us thinks that our own contribution to society is unique, and so deserves public recognition, which plagiarism clouds.’ This has potential economic consequences, as authors (as I noted earlier in the week) become brands. The original author may be disadvantaged in selling his or her work by those using their words and gaining sales instead; the plagiarist may create a false brand, which consumers cannot rely on when considering whether to buy their subsequent works.

But clearly it isn’t just about the money. There is outrage surrounding plagiarism even when it has no financial consequences. And it doesn’t really have much to do with protecting consumers, who may be only vaguely aware of the author’s identity when, for example, reading newspapers and magazines or watching a TV show. It has far more to do with the pride of authors in wanting to take credit for their work, and in our interest in character - if plagiarists deceive us about authorship, can we trust them at all? (though this matters less with fiction than non-fiction).
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