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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1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a seventeen year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township - journalists, Hudson Bay Company men, trappers, traders - but do they want to solve the crime, or exploit it? In this stunning debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and subtle humour to create a book that is at once an exhilarating thriller, a panoramic novel, a study of the human condition and a keen murder mystery.

Does that make you want to read The Tenderness of the Wolves? The problem with fiction, as I’ve noted before, is that if you want a good reading experience there is no strong reason to buy something by a ‘debut’ writer like Stef Penney. There are already more novels by authors with good reputations than most of us could read in a lifetime; and even better most of them can be bought cheaply in second-hand bookstores. So why take a risk on first-time novelist based just on the publisher’s hype (’stunning’, ‘exhilarating’, ‘panoramic’)?

Penney’s publisher, Murdoch Books, is trying to get around this by adopting a sales pitch I don’t recall seeing for books before: a money-back guarantee (pdf). Superficially, this opens them to reader dishonesty - you could enjoy the book and still get your $29.95 back, because Murdoch isn’t going to bother proving that you did in fact like it. It’s not like a manufactured good for which there can be objective tests as to whether or not it functions properly.

But in reality it is probably a shrewd move, since a money-back guarantee is a strong signal by the publisher of confidence in its product, but in practice even people who don’t like the book aren’t likely to bother recovering their $29.95. To get it, you have to send the book to Sydney, which would cost a few dollars in postage and packaging, do it by the end of June, and wait up to 8 weeks for your cheque to arrive. How much hassle are people prepared to go through to get $29.95 in two months? For most us, not much.

The money-back guarantee won’t affect my fussiness with fiction - what’s valuable to me is not the $30 but my reading time - so I will stick with my usual method of relying on the opinions of reviewers I trust. But for the budget-constrained reader it is a sales pitch that might just help Stef Penney overcome those first-time novelist doubts.

One disadvantage of being an editor is the habit of reading pedantically. When most people come across misused words, grammatical mistakes or erratic punctuation they use their natural ability to infer meaning from the jumble (try reading the transcript of a conversation you understood perfectly well to see how good you are at finding order amidst chaos). But when editors come across the same problems they tend to fixate on the errors instead of what the author is actually saying.

This happened to me on Tuesday when I was reading the High Court’s industrial relations judgment. I was continually distracted by the wrong placement of footnotes. Take these two not untypical sentences:

The constitutional underpinning of the legislation was noted, but not questioned[8]. McHugh J said[9] that “[t]he corporations power provides a broader basis upon which s 170LI may operate”.

Which should have been written:

The constitutional underpinning of the legislation was noted, but not questioned.[8] McHugh J said that “[t]he corporations power provides a broader basis upon which s 170LI may operate”.[9]

With rare exceptions, such as with dashes or where ambiguity might otherwise be created, footnotes go after punctuation. Putting them in the wrong place is surprisingly common. Academics seem nearly as likely to think that footnotes go before punctuation as teenagers are to think that apostrophes are needed to create a plural (or apostrophe’s, for victims of the school system over the last decade or so). Most mistakes are made by people whose disciplines use the Harvard author-date system of referencing. In that system the author’s name and the date of publication go inside the punctuation (like this). But clearly even where footnoting is still widely used, such as in legal publications, some people still have the wrong idea.
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In possibly the first ever book made of up of reprinted classified advertising, the London Review of Books is publishing a collection of its personals ads. Personals have long been a feature of The New York Review of Books, and over the last few months Australian Book Review has been trying to imitate the northern book magazines.

I can see why The New York Review of Books had such success with its personals classifieds. If books are your main interest in life, meeting possible partners can be hard. Not only is reading an inherently solitary activity, even reading the same book separately can be rare. Serious readers tend to take the bestseller lists as a guide to what not to read, on the grounds that what’s appealing to the masses can’t be much good. But this attitude sacrifices their opportunity to at least have something to talk about when they do meet other readers.

Personals columns in literary publications are an attempt to get around these problems. A friend of mine once considered putting an ad in The New York Review of Books even though he knew it sold few copies in Australia, because he thought it might help him find a girl with the right book collection. A NYRB ad would reach a small but well-targeted audience.

But as the examples from the London Review of Books James Button quotes in The Age this morning suggest, it’s not clear that its advertisers are always serious:

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Alice Garner’s The Student Chronicles, about her life at the University of Melbourne in the late 1980s and 1990s, shares a problem with self-published memoirs and family histories - if you know the people involved these stories of fairly ordinary and uneventful lives can be interesting in themselves; but if you don’t know them, you need some other reason to keep reading.

I don’t think Garner ever really finds a way to make her book compelling. Though her background is a little unusual - she is the daughter of writer Helen Garner, and enjoyed some success as an actor before starting her studies - for the most part at her time at the U of M was much like that of thousands of other identikit female Arts students. In one of the book’s few memorable phrases, she describes her early time as a student as enjoying a ‘warm bath of anonymity’. The book is one long bath of anonymity.

Who, for example, would have guessed that in a share house the guys don’t meet women’s standards of tidiness and cleanliness? Or that she was against the University’s decision to introduce full-fee undergraduate places, or opposed to VSU, or in favour of refugees?

Having had the same boyfriend (to whom she is now married) throughout her time at university, there isn’t even the novelistic drama the discovery and growth of love might have provided. Instead, we hear a bit about the love lives of various friends and housemates, which is even less interesting than the love life of an actress who is the daughter of a famous person.

Ross Gregory Douthat’s Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class is a much more successful student memoir. Though Douthat is a talented writer and has a better store of anecdotes than Garner (how could she beat going skinny dipping with William F. Buckley Jr?), he also knew that his own stories of roommates, student elections, studying and trying to get a girlfriend wouldn’t be enough in themselves. He solves this by locating his story in a much bigger story - that of Harvard itself and the ‘ruling class’ its students (despite all the efforts at ‘diversity’) largely come from and end up in.

Garner’s focus on her own experiences and feelings will perhaps appeal to fans of the chick lit genre. Mark Latham’s ‘metrosexual knobs and toss-bags’ might like it too. But most men who are not related to or friends with Alice Garner should spend their book budget on something else.

According to the website of Mark Latham’s book of quotations A Conga Line of Suckholes:

Mark Latham was the Federal Member for Werriwa from 1994 to 2005. He was Leader of the Labor Party between 2003 and 2005. Mark Latham is the author of The Latham Diaries and five other books on Australian public policy, including Civilising Global Capital and From the Suburbs. He lives in the outer suburbs of Sydney with his wife and two children.

But if you don’t know that you’re unlikely to be interested in this eccentric collection. Virtually all the good quotes (with the exception of a few from Menzies, Whitlam and Keating) and many more besides can be found in international collections like Antony Jay’s Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations. The main interest in Conga Line is what it says about its author.

Latham’s old obsession with a fellow deeply flawed and complex politician, Richard Nixon, is on full display. In 223 pages there are 37 quotes by or about Nixon, a dozen more than Jay fits into 400 pages. Curiously, several of the Nixon quotes are about his extraordinary durability in the face of large setbacks. You can’t imagine Nixon voluntarily chucking it all in the way Latham did in January 2005 (though they both turned to book writing to fill in their retirement years).

Another theme that comes up more than once is not letting your enemies get the better of you. One, from Barry Humphries, is on the back cover: ‘Don’t let your enemies dwell rent-free in your head’. And then, under ‘Hatred’, another Nixonism: ‘Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.’ It’s sound advice, in itself, but not actually the wisdom a pyromaniacal bridge burner like Latham needed to read most, which would be to forgive a little more, so that you don’t end need to avoid enemies living in your head. I’m sure I was not the only person who found this part of Latham’s appearance on Andrew Denton’s interview show sad and misguided:

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