AH-C Plagiarism
One particular kind of plagiarism is now so common among restive, ambitious writers, so often chronicled in this blog and elsewhere, that it's time to give it a name.
UD proposes calling the act of inserting pages of other writers' prose in your insta-book AH-Carrier plagiarism, after the recent discovery (described here, pp. 128-129) of the AH gene, which, in the words of one of its discoverers, "predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner."
Apparently, AH-Carriers have "four alleles... which [we] refer to as rectalleles." Depending on the combination of alleles in carriers, they may be "complete AH's" or lesser varieties of these.
With the latest case of AH-Carrier plagiarism, this one in Canada, I'd argue that we have a sufficient pool of AH writers to begin considering cluster studies, linkage analysis, and, ultimately, genetic counseling.
James Adams, in the Globe and Mail, picks up the story:
The Canadian publisher of an acclaimed bestseller on the U.S. invasion of Iraq has halted shipments of the book after an Atlanta newspaper said its text contains numerous passages that should have been attributed to one of its writers.
Toronto author and Harper's magazine contributor Paul William Roberts has admitted that his 2004 book, A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq, contains "elements [that] . . . closely resemble or are indistinguishable from passages" in an article in the Sept. 29, 2002, Atlanta Journal-Constitution by deputy editorial-page editor Jay Bookman.
In a Jan. 19 letter of apology to a lawyer for the newspaper, Mr. Roberts called his failure to acknowledge the use of Mr. Bookman's material in five of his book's 350-plus pages "a journalistic travesty" and "an egregious lapse of professional conduct," but he said the failure was inadvertent, more the result of "the dangers of sloppiness" than an act of malice or bald plagiarism.
You can always count on a murderer, writes Humbert Humbert of himself in Lolita, for a fancy prose style; and this is also true of AHC plagiarists: Egregious! A travesty!
Calls to Mr. Roberts in Toronto were not returned Thursday or yesterday.
But in his two-page letter he says he failed to print out the Bookman article during the almost six months he was in Iraq because "even if you found a printer, there was no paper anywhere (paper had been part of the UN embargo). [Here cometh the byzantine, self-aggrandizing tale of how he alone among the four thousand people who've written Iraq books was unable to do it without plagiarizing.] So I wrote down in notebooks what interested me, gluing all manner of paper and wrappers alongside or on top. By the time I left Iraq . . . the notebooks looked as if they had survived a cataclysm."
Mr. Roberts says another journalist, from Britain, agreed to e-mail Mr. Bookman's piece, among others, upon the author's return to Canada, but didn't until the next year.
"By the time it arrived, I was hard at work on the book," for which "I used my notebooks almost exclusively."
In the letter, Mr. Roberts also agrees he mistakenly attributes to himself a quote by prominent U.S. historian and former co-chair of the influential Project for the New American Century Donald Kagan that was, in fact, given to Mr. Bookman.
In the notes to Mr. Roberts's book, the epigraph-like quote from Mr. Kagan is cited as deriving from "interview with author, Sept. 2002."
Besides the quotation, the note is the only reference to Kagan in A War Against Truth, and the author's name does not appear in the index. [What the hell. Might as well also say I was the one who interviewed Kagan.]
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