tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59930822627107977452024-01-12T04:42:02.918+01:00THE SUMP PLUGPurging popular culture glop by glop and wallowing in the gooUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-55428565701884249762016-04-12T13:13:00.000+02:002016-04-13T14:34:24.342+02:00Jimmy Plage<div class="MsoNormal">
A few thoughts
about the plagiarism lawsuit that has been brought against Led Zeppelin by
Randy California’s estate over the similarities between “Stairway to Heaven”
and Spirit’s “Taurus”. At issue is whether Jimmy Page nicked the intro from the
Spirit song, since both are in the same key (A minor), both are played on
acoustic guitars, and both feature a descending chromatic bassline.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The trouble
is that chord progressions alone are not – or shouldn’t be – copyrightable. In
order for a claim to stand a real chance of convincing a jury (or potentially
convincing a jury with enough certainty that an out-of-court settlement can quickly
be reached), the similarity has to be between the melodies – or, to put it in
layman’s or juror’s terms, the “main tunes”. And the melody of “Stairway to Heaven”
— i.e., all Percy’s bits about bustles in hedgerows and all that — is nothing
like the one in “Taurus”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Hie thee to
YouTube and check out some of these intro and chord-sequence pairings:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">ITEM: The
intro to Springsteen’s “Born to Run”, with its drum roll followed by that
driving one-chord beat, is very similar to how Little Eva’s “The Locomotion”
starts. (In turn, the oh-oh-oh outro of “Born to Run” was ripped off by Elvis
Costello for “Oliver’s Army”.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">ITEM: The
chord progression of Jethro Tull’s “We Used to Know” (1969) is practically
identical to that of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” (1976), albeit in a different
time signature. Plagiarism? Not according to Ian Anderson, who often points out
the resemblance with a wrily raised eyebrow on stage, but he has never bothered
to sue over it, preferring — wisely, I reckon — to feel flattered rather than
affronted. (The Eagles had apparently opened some U.S. shows for Tull in early 1972,
but the specific Eagle who came up with
the guitar part for “Hotel California”, Don Felder, didn’t join the band until two
years after that tour, which somewhat weakens any “A-ha!” suspicions we may
have about him deliberately having ripped off Tull.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">ITEM: Cher’s
“Believe” has the exact chord sequence, in the same key and over the full 16
bars of the verse, as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” … on which one of the backing
vocalists was none other than the teenage Cher herself. But the arrangements
and instrumentation of the two recordings, made 35 years apart, are so
different that the similarity hardly leaps out at you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">As for
riffs, there are so many that “reference” or “pay homage to” other works, that
I’ll just leave one here that you may not be aware of. Think of AC/DC’s “Highway
to Hell” riff. Got it? Now fire up Queen’s “One Vision”. Again, <i>a-ha!</i>
But is it actionable? Almost certainly not. (As an irrelevant nerdoid aside, of
the two guitar tones there I do prefer Brian May’s over Angus’s for once.
There. I said it.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It’s only when
two main melodies match that the cash registers start to ching. “My Sweet Lord”
really is a carbon copy of “He’s So Fine”. (What the hell was George thinking? It
can only have been “What shall I do today? I know! Slap some new words on an
old Chiffons song!”) And the “rule the world” bit of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”
really is a straight lift of Joe Satriani’s instrumental “If I Could Fly”. (Satriani
did file a suit in that case but a private settlement was apparently reached before it could be put to a jury.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But when it
comes to ripped-off riffs, intros and chord progressions rather than upfront melodies,
the ripoffees tend to take Ian Anderson’s sanguine well-whaddya-know approach.
Tom Petty has never bothered taking The Strokes to task for, er, referencing the
“American Girl” intro for their “Last Nite” (as they, to their credit, have happily
admitted they did). And Randy California, although he was supposedly quite miffed
about “Stairway to Heaven”, no doubt struggling to understand why nobody had ever
invited Spirit to reform at the O2, never went so far as to take Led Zep to
court over it. It’s his estate that’s behind the current suit. (It’s always the
estate, isn’t it?) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The most potentially
damaging part of the “Stairway”/“Taurus”ruckus for Led Zeppelin is that the band
so notoriously has so much previous in this area. But since a jury wouldn’t be
allowed to hear about any of those, er, misunderstandings in court, and if this
case hinges only on the fact that the two songs at issue both feature a minor chord
with a descending chromatic bass line, then it shouldn’t be Randy California’s
estate who’s complaining; it should be the Sherman Brothers, who wrote “Chim-Chim
Cheree” for <i>Mary Poppins</i>. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">Now for something completely diff... er, identical. Here's Davy Graham in 1959, when he was the teen Jimmy Page's idol. The "Stairway" suit would appear to have the wrong estate as its plaintiff. (Thanks to Andrew Hill for the wink-tip.)</span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tWeejHJxGjs/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tWeejHJxGjs?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But that's not the end of the trail. Far from it. We have to go back a good bit further - <i>waaay</i> further - to find the first known iteration of the arpeggiated minor chord with a descending chromatic bassline we've come to know and love. Here's Giovanni Battista Granata struttin' his own Stairway stuff in the swingin' seventeenth century:<br />
<br />
Wind this clip on to 0:30 and prepare to hear Randy California's heirs say, "Aw, bugger."<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zKpbJ5Kjy2I/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zKpbJ5Kjy2I?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-350927023969079942013-04-14T18:59:00.001+02:002013-04-14T22:46:06.748+02:00Coruscating Happy People<a href="http://s264.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/media/C-3PO-is-Fresh_zps010d5af3.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt=" photo C-3PO-is-Fresh_zps010d5af3.jpg" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/C-3PO-is-Fresh_zps010d5af3.jpg" /></a><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The
writer’s armoury has a red door in the corner with a black skull and
crossbones stencilled on it, behind which we keep a select array of showoffy
Latinate words. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing wrong with that,
as long as they’re used with discernment for rare surgical strikes. All too
often, though, writers scatter them around willy-nilly, like landmines in a
potato field.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The
adjective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coruscating</i>, that favourite
of arts reviewers keen for the reader not to twig that they have
nothing at all to say, is one such – or it would be, if most of those who deploy
it actually knew what the damned thing meant. But I’ll come to that. Even on
the rare occasion when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coruscating</i> is
used properly, what’s the point? It’s no smart bomb; it’s surplus materiel — an
unnecessary, character-wasteful synonym for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sparkling,
gleaming</i> or just good old no-nonsense <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> shiny</i>. Even if
you’re tempted to use it because you’re convinced that only a showoffy Latinate
word will adequately fill a particular hole in a text you’re writing, then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scintillating</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incandescent</i> should serve your purpose well enough. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">But that’s not how I see people using
it at all. Instead, they use it to mean <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">acerbic,
mordant </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">edgy. </i> What are they thinking? I imagine that what they're thinking goes something like this. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coruscating</i> has got <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cor–</i> in it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Excoriating</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">corrosive </i>have
got <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cor–</i> in them too. Therefore, showoffy
Latinate words with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cor–</i> in them always
refer to astringent, exfoliating, ominously-smoking-dollop-of-KY-Jellyish-gloop-drooled-sulphurically-in-an-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alien</i>-film, paint-strippy sorts of things.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 135.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">A check of recent uses of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coruscating</i> in British newspapers<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>confirms the impression that I’ve had
for a while: writers, even professional ones whose copy is subedited, don’t
just balls it up often, they balls it up more often than not. What was the exception
is the new rule. The cause is lost. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">The adjective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coruscating</i> has become what American copy-editors — when faced with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enervate, decimate, bemused,</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beg the question</i> or any other word or expression
that too many people think means something other than what it’s supposed to
mean (hi, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">misogynist!</i>) — call "skunked”. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype";">It's stained, it stinks and it's irrecoverably spoiled. There's only one thing for it: throw it away. </span></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-89763332930036054282012-11-27T12:25:00.000+01:002012-11-27T15:19:53.753+01:00Spot marks the X?<a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="savbigcigarusethis" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/savbigcigarusethis.jpg" /></a><a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="spotcigarusethis3" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/spotcigarusethis3.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">In post-war, pre-Krays England, Jacob Comacho <span style="font-size: small;">AKA</span> Jack Comer — better known as “Jack Spot” — was the self-styled “Boss of the Underworld”.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">There are all sorts of stories about Jack Spot — most of them told by himself and lapped up by tabloid hacks slavering for salacious copy. With each retelling of his tales, Spot would embellish, embroider and embarrass himself further. Today it’s next to impossible to separate the facts from the self-aggrandising fiction.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">What is beyond dispute, though, is that Jack Spot in his pomp was a particularly vicious street thug. He had a special pocket sewn into his jacket for faster access to the tool of his trade, his straight razor. “Always cut down, never across” was his advice to wannabe vicious street thugs, because an inadvertently severed jugular would get you a murder rap, and, let’s face it, who wants that? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Between 1943 and the end of rationing ten years later, Jack Spot commuted regularly between the Whitechapel streets of his birth and his favoured out-of-town location: Chapeltown in Leeds. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">He first staked his claim to the North’s “Sin City” (Jimmy Savile <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dixit</i>) thanks to Jack “Milky” Marks, who ran a gambling dive there. The club was being shaken down by a cumbersome gang of persistent Poles. Milky had heard on the grapevine of an up-and-coming Jewish troubleshooter down in London who specialised in resolving such inconveniences, so he hired Jack Spot’s services. Spot duly arrived. The Poles duly departed. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">The word was passed around the shadier circles of Leeds’s large Jewish community: if you’re getting any grief of an anti-Semitic bent, here’s the man to call. <a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="rationbookuse" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/rationbookuse.jpg" /></a>Within a very short time all the city’s rackets were under Spot’s control. He had a piece of pretty much everything that was illegal, illicit or just ill-regarded by society. His main strategic business areas were granting and removing bookies’ pitches at racecourses and dog tracks, protecting clubs and backstreet spielers, and — most lucrative of all — the black market. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">In an interview for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Independent </i>last week, Paul McCartney recalled how in the early Sixties the Beatles would often give Jimmy Savile a lift across the moors in their van. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></div><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">He told us all these stories about his wartime exploits — how he had been buying chewing gum and nylons and all that, and selling them. He had all sorts of stuff going on.</span></i></div></blockquote><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Leeds</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">, 1943. Jimmy Savile was a seventeen-year-old spiv.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">But we don’t have to rely on McCartney’s word alone to draw that conclusion. Savile himself admitted as much, and more, in his 1974 autobiography, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">As It Happens</i>:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></div><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I was everyone’s mascot, pet, runner, holder of mysterious parcels and secrets. […] I was the confidant of murderers, whores, black-marketeers, crooks of every trade and often the innocent victims they preyed on.</span></i></div></blockquote><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Since all the “crooks of every trade” in Leeds at that time either worked directly for or operated under the beneficent umbrella of Jack Spot, is it fanciful to wonder whether he and Jimmy Savile might have been acquainted? We don’t know and perhaps we never will. But crooks seldom, if ever, are crooked in a vacuum. They all have a mentor, a father figure, a passer of the baton, a teacher of tricks and a teller of secrets. So who was Jimmy Savile’s?<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Even if Savile didn’t know Spot personally, he would certainly have known of him. And judging by Savile’s off-camera boasts to Louis Theroux about his “zero-tolerance” policy towards troublemakers at his clubs — or “slags” as he called them — it looks very much as though the most likely candidate for Jimmy Savile’s rôle model would have been Jack Spot. Right down to the fat cigars.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-54568958716859328402012-11-20T13:53:00.000+01:002013-11-27T20:19:51.729+01:00Captain Beefcake<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img alt="1970_Universe_usethis" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/1970_Universe_usethis.jpg" /></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">In 1966, the National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association voted in their new president for a five-year term. And in September that year Jimmy Savile presided, as presidents do, over <span style="font-size: small;">NABBA</span>’s showcase event: the amateur <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mr. Universe</i> contest.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">“A special day,” as Savile later reminisced. “It was like Indian drums</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"> — </span> but it was the beating hearts of all the lads.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">One of those lads was a 19-year-old unknown. His sinews were like steel hawsers but his English was still ropy. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Although he wouldn’t win the title until the following year, he still managed to come a close second at his first attempt (his weedy calves let him down, by all accounts) . </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"><a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="arnie67use" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/arnie67use.jpg" /></a>But second is for losers, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was inconsolable. One of the judges, Wag Bennett, felt so sorry for him that he and his wife took him in as a lodger at their home on the Romford road. Arnie lived with the Bennetts for the next five years, on and off, </span><span style="font-family: Georgia;">eating seven meals and popping three ’roids a day, and pumping any old iron in an East End gym to </span><span style="font-family: Georgia;">pave the way for the Conan gig, the Kennedy wife and the California governor’s mansion that were to come. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Sitting demurely in his pinstriped suit alongside the kaftan-clad Jimmy Savile in the front row at the Victoria Palace theatre that ultraripply and lavishly lubed-up evening in 1966 was another very strange man. Very strange and very, very rich, although in this case he’d made his pile by bringing up crude oil from beneath the sands of Kuwait instead of shaking down the dance halls that straddled the Pennines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Enter J. Paul Getty. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"><a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="getty-jean-paul-use" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/getty-jean-paul-use.jpg" /></a>Getty loved bodybuilders even more than he loved collecting classical statues of perfectly proportioned demigods with unfeasibly tiny penises. Despite making it into the 1966 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guinness Book of Records</i> with his $1.2 billion personal fortune, he was notoriously tight with his money. He even had a payphone installed inside his UK mansion, Sutton Place, to stymie any house guests’ plans to make long-distance calls at his expense. Yet whenever <span style="font-size: small;">NABBA</span> pleaded poverty, which was a frequent enough occurrence back then, he never thought twice about writing out another cheque to save the day. Jimmy Savile was good at getting people to do that.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">In 1967, the year Arnold Schwarzenegger won his first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mr. Universe </i>title, but for reasons that are somewhat less straightforward to extrapolate, Getty would also finance the decidedly odd filmmaker and Hollywood<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>tittle-tattle king Kenneth Anger, who was keen to get cracking on his new Aleister Crowley phase. The adventure lurched on for a few years with a few flaky projects that received next to no attention. It all ended rather abruptly when Jimmy Page’s wife threw Anger out and told him never to darken their gates of perception again.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">What is this — some kind of joke written by David Lynch? “A peroxide-haired Yorkshire DJ, an Austrian bodybuilder, a gossiping gay occultist and the world’s richest man walk into a bar….” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">No, it’s no joke. It’s just Savileana a-go-go: the gift — that’s the German word for poison, as Arnie might point out — that keeps on giving.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">________________ </span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>(Thanks to @TheOldBatsman for setting me off down this particular rabbit hole.) </i></span> </span></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-1443963081158954872012-11-18T13:38:00.000+01:002012-11-28T09:17:20.376+01:00Don Jimmy Gambino OBE<a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img alt="funeralusethis" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/funeralusethis.jpg" /></a><br />
When Dave Lee Travis was released on bail last week he was keen to distance himself from Jimmy Savile in the public’s mind. Fair enough — to be accused of dolly-bird-groping rather than kiddy-diddling is probably a worthwhile distinction to make. But Savile and Travis go back a long way. The future Hairy Monster’s first job was at Manchester’s Mecca-owned Plaza Ballroom. He was only seventeen when the manager, Jimmy Savile, hired him as a trainee DJ. (His age wasn’t a problem because the Plaza didn’t have a licence to serve alcohol.) <br />
<br />
<a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="LeedsMeccause" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/LeedsMeccause.jpg" /></a>The Plaza was just one of many dance halls and clubs that Savile oversaw, managed, disk-jockeyed at, wielded shadowy control over or had some kind of undeclared stake in, not only in Manchester but also on the other side of the Pennines — in Bradford, in Wakefield, in Halifax, over on the coast in Scarborough and Whitby, and especially in Leeds. In his hometown the joints he presided over included the Cat's Whiskers and the Locarno Ballroom in the County Arcade, known by locals simply as “the Mecca” (later rebranded as the Spinning Disc). That’s where, in 1958, his predilection for underage girls first came to the attention of the police. The matter was swiftly resolved by peeling a few hundred quid off the big roll of twenties that he always carried, right up until he died.<br />
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Meanwhile, in Manchester on any given night in the late Fifties and early Sixties, if you couldn’t find Savile at the Plaza at lunchtime, he’d surely be at the Ritz later on. Or, if not, try the Three Coins in Fountain Street. He didn’t even rest on Sundays; that was when he span the platters for upwards of two thousand jivers and twisters at his Top Ten Club at Belle Vue. <br />
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The man was everywhere — at practically every major dance hall and nightclub in the North’s heaving conurbations, as much of a fixture as the rotating mirror ball.<br />
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How did he do it? Criminally, it seems.<br />
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He’d started out in the early 1950s, putting on his pioneering “record dances” for any dance hall that would have him. Discreet beginnings, but he was soon Mecca’s “dancing area manager” in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and before the decade’s end he was a director of the company. Most of the fifty-two venues he ran were in the North, but not all of them. We’ll come back to that.<br />
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Dance halls back then were — much as today’s clubs largely still are — strictly cash-based operations. The books were easy to cook, and if Eric “Mr. <i>Miss World</i>” Morley had given you the key to the night safe, it was even easier to skim the take. Is that how Jimmy Savile made so much money so quickly? We’ll probably never know, but he already had a Rolls Royce by the end of the Fifties and would soon be parading around the streets of Manchester in an E-Type Jaguar too. <a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="Jimmy-Oscar-Savile-1950s-use" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/Jimmy-Oscar-Savile-1950s-use.jpg" /></a> How does that work, when he was still only supposed to be a wacky-haired weirdo who acted the yodelling fool and put records on for folk to shimmy and shake to? He already had his show on Radio Luxembourg by then, true, but it’d be another five years before he was a household name with regular appearances on <i>Juke Box Jury</i>, <i>Thank Your Lucky Stars</i> and <i>Top of the Pops</i>.<br />
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A clue to just how much clout Savile wielded on the Northern nightlife scene fifty years ago is casually dropped by an anecdote in his official biography. One night he twigged that the doormen at one of his dance halls were operating some kind of scam. Savile went apeshit — not because his staff were contravening company policy, but because they’d had the gall not to include him in on it. He challenged them to explain themselves. He demanded his “cut” (yes, that’s how the official biographer phrases it), or they’d be out on their cauliflower ears. They acquiesced. Jim had fixed them.<br />
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Say hello to László</h4>
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Hang on. Isn’t it supposed to be the heavies on the door who put the squeeze on the management? Not under Jimmy Savile’s regime. He had a whole crew of moonlighting miners, Eastern European bodybuilders — the one at the Mecca in Leeds was called László — and wrestlers at his permanent beck and call. Proper wrestlers they were, an' all, not mere dilettantes like Savile was during his stint as a novelty grappler. <a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="savillewrestlinguse" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/savillewrestlinguse.jpg" /></a>One of the three wrestling Crabtree brothers, Shirley, was among them — then still a sheer cliff of muscle billed as Blond Adonis or Mister Universe, many years before he turned to fat and reinvented himself as Big Daddy. Whenever trouble broke out on the dance floor, Crabtree would pick up the miscreants, bundle one under each arm like rolls of carpet and carry them outside. "Yow've been naughteh boys. Very, very naughteh boys.” He mostly worked for Savile on the door at the Cat’s Whiskers in Leeds, and in 1965, when he launched a club of his own (or at least ostensibly his own) in Halifax, Savile duly pitched up for the grand opening.<br />
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Meanwhile, back under the glare of the brighter lights of the Mancunian metropolis, things were obviously very different. Oh, wait. No, they weren’t. It turns out that most of the doormen at Savile’s Manchester dance halls were not hardnuts from Harpurhey, Longsight or Ancoats, as you might expect. They were Yorkshiremen. Jimmy Savile had taken his crew with him for company on his trans-Pennine commute. <a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="TeddyBoysMeccause" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/TeddyBoysMeccause.jpg" /></a>He kitted out the ones on the door at the Plaza with hair clippers to strip off any teddy boys’ offensive sideburns before they’d be allowed in. “Eether them sardboards go, or yow dow.”<br />
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Let nobody ever accuse Jimmy Savile of not running a respectable establishment. <br />
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What exactly is going on here? Being driven around in a succession of fuck-you flash cars, the big cigars, never spending two nights running in the same house, flitting from nightspot to nightspot with a posse of big-muscled minders, packing a big roll of banknotes to pay off the police, demanding and receiving tithes from his underlings’ illicit earnings.... What does all that suggest to you: the quirks and foibles of a wannabe showbiz personality or the typical trappings of a mob boss? <br />
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Beneath the veneer of a Mecca middle manager, it looks as though Jimmy Savile was running a large-scale protection racket at dozens and dozens of Northern dance halls and nightclubs for the best part of two decades.<br />
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A lippy little tyke with his hair in a tartan bob (Black Watch, as he liked to point out) is all that most people chose to see. But up North he ruled the night. How’s about that, then?<br />
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Smokeward bound</h4>
<a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="billywalkeruse" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/billywalkeruse.jpg" /></a><br />
And not just up North. By the early Sixties he’d also secured what is now called a “significant presence” down South. One of the Mecca clubs under Jimmy Savile’s very-much-hands-on purview — he nipped down the A1 to DJ there on Monday nights — was the Ilford Palais. And although he didn’t take his Yorkshire bruisers with him for that gig, you can’t say he skimped on their substitutes. One of his doormen at the Palais was the boxer Billy Walker, who no doubt would have become the British pro-heavyweight champion had it not been for the immovable hegemony of Henry Cooper. Walker’s brother and manager, George, had been Billy Hill’s minder. If you can’t quite place the name Billy Hill, he was the Kray twins’ patron.<br />
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On his weekly trips to London, Savile ran a schedule as tight as when he was on his home ground back up North. Before heading out for Ilford, and perhaps to Mecca's flagship Locarno Ballroom in Streatham as well, he recorded his <i>Teen and Twenties Disc Club</i> for Radio Luxembourg. Then he'd pop his head in at the offices of Decca Records. It was not a courtesy call. By the time he hit the street again, he’d not only replenished his stock of music but also fattened his wad. It was a sweet payola deal. He promised to play the latest Decca releases at all his dances in return for a reasonable consideration. Decca, like most other labels at the time, was very much a mixed bag in terms of the quality of their records (they famously turned down the Beatles, although they struck gold with the Stones soon afterwards). And for every future hit they gave Savile first dabs with, they saddled him with several real stinkers. He caned them all the same, one after the other at the start of his sets. Regular punters soon learned that they wouldn’t miss much if they arrived fashionably late, just in time for the decent stuff that they'd paid to hear.<br />
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Not the face!</h4>
<br />
<a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="wrestlingbilluse" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/wrestlingbilluse.jpg" /></a>Even the wrestling was bent. And not just because of the sham fights, with heels and blue-eyes working out all their moves in the dressing-room. The promoters were at it too. The top end of the business — because a sport is something it’s never been — was ruled by a cartel called First Promotions, which in turn was dominated by a tight clutch of Yorkshiremen. They bagged all the public’s favourite wrestlers and froze out any would-be rival promoters. Before long, the cartel was raking in £15,000 a week from TV rights alone. Of that, once “expenses” had been deducted, a couple of hundred quid tops would trickle down for the featured wrestlers to split between them. Jimmy Savile’s own bouts were promoted by Relwyskow & Green, two of First Promotions’ leading lights. By the mid-Seventies one of the Crabtree brothers, Max, was running the whole show.<br />
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We may never find out who Jimmy Savile really was: whether the entertainer, the philanthropist, the discotheque pioneer, the loner, the Bevin Boy, the loyal company man, the daft-coiffed eccentric, the secure-mental-hospital administrator, the all-in wrestler, the sociopath, the counsellor to royalty, the morgue attendant, the marathon runner or the serial sex fiend. At various times he was all those things. But it seems that from the early Fifties until at least the mid-Sixties he was, above all, a crook. <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-48152373947634117642012-11-09T12:54:00.001+01:002012-11-28T09:19:14.767+01:00The Sorcerer's Apprentice<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:HyphenationZone>21</w:HyphenationZone> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;"><a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="beatcityusethis" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/beatcityusethis.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: normal;">Ray Teret, 71, was arrested by Cheshire police yesterday for questioning about three rapes that allegedly happened before most of the cops who shook him down were born. He was described by the media, almost without exception, as Jimmy Savile's "chauffeur". But Teret — his name rhymes with <i>ferret</i>, not <i>beret</i> — was not only a good deal more than that to Savile, he was a good deal more than that in Manchester once the two had gone their separate ways. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">Ray Teret kickstarted his career as Jimmy Savile's friend, flatmate, flunky and factotum. He stood in for Savile when he wasn't around and stood up for him when he was. He fixed things for the man who was destined to become Mr Fix-It. He was Savile's Mini-me, his H. R. Haldeman, his young ward Robin and his Squeaky Fromme all rolled into one. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">The two met and hit it off on the cusp of the Sixties when Teret won a singing contest run by Savile at the Palace. At the time, Savile drove a Rolls Royce but lived in a grotty council gaff on Great Clowes Street in the Broughton Bridge area. Teret soon moved in. <a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="rayfabsusethis" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/rayfabsusethis.jpg" /></a>He worked as Savile’s backup DJ at his slew of Manchester residencies: the Top Ten Club at Belle Vue on Sunday nights, the Ritz Ballroom, and The Three Coins — or “The Three Cohens” as it would enter Manc lore because of its predominantly Jewish clientele. In 1964, no sooner had the club changed its name to Beat City than the Moptops themselves graced it with their presence. And Ray Peret was there to grab a snap for his scrapbook. Gear.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">Perhaps naïvely, given yesterday's events, Ray Peret dropped some leaden hints in recent interviews about the fun and games that he and Savile got up to with teenage girls in the back of Savile's fleet of flash cars. Blanks duly filled in, Ray. But let's focus on the cultural milieu he moved in; any crimes are <i>sub judice</i>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;"><a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="ugliusethis" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/ugliusethis.jpg" /></a>As Savile’s success with <i>Top of the Pops </i>took him increasingly farther afield, Ray Teret was there to take up the slack back in Manchester. And when most of Radio Caroline's star DJs jumped ship for the BBC’s new Radio One, Teret was among the first intake of replacements, billed as "Ugli Ray". </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">Back on terra firma, he became a local celebrity in the Seventies, thanks to his flagship three-hour daytime show on Piccadilly Radio. Not quite up there with Tony Blackburn or the Hairy Cornflake, perhaps, but in Manchester he was quite a bit more than just the bloke who’d driven Jimmy Savile around, let's put it that way. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">The former <i>NME</i> music critic Paul Morley has described Ray Teret as a "sickly Mancunian reduction of Sir Jimmy Savile", which is accurate enough but sells him short. In the Sixties and Seventies Ray Teret was to the Manchester pop scene what Tony Wilson would be to its post-punk reincarnation in the decades to follow. Indeed, his sub-Savilean style could even be seen strutting its strangely artless stuff when Joy Division performed "Love Will Tear Us Apart" on <i>Fun Factory</i>, the Saturday-morning kids' TV programme that he fronted. He introduced them as "not a female vocalist, but a band". Oh, how we didn’t laugh. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">But back when bands were still called groups, Ray Teret had a finger in every Mancunian pop pie. DJ, MC, impresario, promoter, radio star, TV personality and the region's go-to raffle-drawer </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">— h</span>e even wrote songs for several local acts, including “My Girl” and "No, No, No" (oh, dear) for The Toggery Five. For two decades in Manchester, he was <i>de rigeur</i>. He was ubiquitous. A face. He knew everyone who was anyone and was quite somebody himself. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: normal;">"Jimmy Savile's chauffeur"? Clearly, for the tabloids it's not who you were but who you knew.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-37191299197229808872012-11-06T13:57:00.002+01:002012-11-28T09:21:45.886+01:00Uncle Jim Cobley and all<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A flamboyant big-chinned DISK JOCKEY, whose hairstyle is a peroxide reimagining of Laurence Olivier as Richard III, is at the microphone:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(chomping on huge cigar)<center>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Now then, now then. Here's a nice slow </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">number for all yow loovleh guys 'n' gals</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">to get up close and let the romance flow.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">It's ... smooch time!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">INSERT – TURNTABLE: Tar-stained fingertips drop the needle onto a 7-inch record (blue Decca label).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">MUSIC CUE: KATHY KIRBY – SECRET LOVE</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">CUT TO:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A hard-faced YOUNG WOMAN with hard-lacquered big hair that's exactly the same colour as the Disk Jockey's. She's standing on the edge of the dancefloor, tugging at the jacket sleeve of her sour-faced, floppy-quiffed BOYFRIEND.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt;">YOUNG WOMAN</span></center>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Coom on, Ian. Just one song. Please! Yer </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">promised!</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt;">BOYFRIEND</span></center>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt;">(with a Gorbals growl)</span></center>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Luke. I've tawld ye a thoosand times, Myra.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I dinnae dance. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">CUT TO OH FUCK IT</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">__________________</span></center>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;">Pfft. No. Just <i>no</i>. Facile junk. Beyond belief. Bin it.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: normal;">Except it actually happened, as it 'appens, more or less as scripted. According to extracts from Myra Hindley’s diary quoted in Emlyn Williams’s <i>Beyond Belief</i>, she and Ian Brady were indeed regular punters at the New Elizabethan Ballroom at the now-demolished Belle Vue pleasure grounds, in Manchester’s Gorton district. <a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="right" alt="savilerolls-1" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/savilerolls-1.jpg" /></a>She daydreamed about the two of them being billed as featured dancers there one day, and we know that they attended at least one of the many "Carnival Nights" hosted by the venue's resident DJ at the time, Jimmy Savile. Myra Hindley was a Gorton girl, living at her grandmother's house on Bannock Street. Savile’s big red fuck-off Rolls Royce was a local landmark, regularly parked on ostentatious display right outside the entrance</span></span>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;">Savile sequenced two "smooch times" in his <span style="font-size: small;">DJ </span>sessions (still called "record dances" in those <span style="font-size: small;">pre-<span style="font-size: small;">d</span></span>isco days<span style="font-size: normal;">): </span>one before and one after the live group that he reluctantly put on as a sap to the Musicians' Union. The second smooch time would segue into an hour of rock 'n' roll, followed by a Ray Conniff-driven proto-chillout to end the evening and clear the room with as few altercations as possible. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;">On Boxing Day, 1964, Brady and Hindley made an audio recording as they bound, gagged and photograph<span style="font-size: normal;">ed </span>Lesley Ann Downey before they killed her. The tape ends with a snippet of the <span style="font-size: normal;">s<span style="font-size: normal;">o</span>ng </span>"The Little Drummer Boy". It was the version by Ray Conniff.</span> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;">Flash-forward fifteen years. Janie Jones, the tabloids' favourite sex-party hostess with the mostest, answers a summons to appear before Jimmy Savile soon after her release from prison. His grounds for demanding the encounter? To read her the riot act for having the temerity to campaign for Myra Hindley's release. Not for the reason why most people would have objected to the idea of freeing Hindley — you know, her having helped kidnap, torture, rape and murder other people's children and bury them on Saddleworth Moor, all that stuff — but because, as Janie Jones explained, "he said it was disgraceful that I was siding with Hindley against Brady." Ian Brady was Jimmy Savile's pal. </span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;">Where and when Savile first met Brady, whether at HMP Parkhurst or at Broadmoor Hospital, is unclear.<sup>1 </sup>Savile was famously — now infamously — associated with hospitals and care homes, but not with prisons, yet he definitely pitched up at Parkhurst at least once. That may well be where he met Ronnie Kray for the first time as well.<sup>2 </sup>And it's definitely where he first met Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, before going on to deepen their friendship at Broadmoor. Savile would "drop in" for some old-school Pennine bonding with Sutcliffe in his cell<span style="font-size: normal;">. </span>Yorkshire-born and Yorkshire-bred, strong in t' arm and a ball-pein hammer in t' yed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;">All this is almost certainly a coincidence of little or no consequence, of course. Just because Jimmy Savile seems to have gone out of his way to break bread with two of the most notorious serial killers in British history doesn't necessarily mean he dug where they were coming from. Indeed, as a good Catholic lad and Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great, he may have just felt sorry for them. But if the Savile story that's still being teased out were a James Ellroy or David Peace novel, the critics would slate it for collapsing under the weight of all its laboured links and heavy-handed happenstance. </span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;">It's like Sick Degrees of Kevin Bacon out there.<sup>3</sup></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: normal;"><a href="http://s264.beta.photobucket.com/user/visionspan/library/" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="bigdaddy" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/bigdaddy-1.jpg" /></a>Some of the coincidences are weapons-grade credibility testers, like Brady and Hindley falling in love to the strains of the latest Stateside pops blasting out from Jimmy Savile's "Power Sound Disc Deck" (oh, yes); or like Shirley "Big Daddy" Crabtree joining a crew of Hungarian émigrés to fine-tune his forearm-smash skills on the door at Savile's first string of dancehalls. Some of the coincidences are ma<span style="font-size: normal;">cabre<span style="font-size: normal;">, </span></span>like <span style="font-size: normal;">those </span>Ray Conniff fadeouts<span style="font-size: normal;">. </span>But most are just messy and confusing, like Savile leaving home on Belle Vue Road in Leeds to work at Belle Vue in Manchester; or like the surname of the 15-year-old suicide being the same as that of a certain litigiously non-licentious peer; or like Peter S<span style="font-size: normal;">utcliffe </span>committing one of his murders just opposite Jimmy Savile's penthouse in Leeds, and another in Savile Park in Halifax.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: normal;">Moors Murderers, Yorkshire Rippers, Kray twins, Ray Conniff S<span style="font-size: normal;">ingers, </span>Budapest muscle, Kensington madames — all are grist to the subsatanic Savilean mill. As to who'll be the next implausible but somehow inevitable name to be tacked onto the <i>dramatis personae</i> of this megametanarrative, it's anybody's guess. But my money's on Lord Lucan emerging, stiff-legged and blinking, from the secret cellar of Jimmy Savile's picturesque Glencoe hideaway. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">___________________________<span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">1. To assume that Savile and Brady's interaction in the Sixties might have gone beyond just breathing the same fagsmoke fug one unfateful evening at Belle Vue would surely be a stretch too far even for this farfetched melodrama. But you never know. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
2. Or maybe not for the first time. And there’s a whole new rabbit hole for us to tumble down right there. <br />
<br />
3. No offence, Kevin — although it might be rash to discount an appearance by </span> <span style="font-size: small;"><i>Francis</i> Bacon in some future chapter.</span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB">(Thanks to Dan Waddell for the Twitter-riffing session that spurred this.)</span></i></span></span></span></div>
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</style> <![endif]-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-69698052874282244922012-10-04T10:25:00.001+02:002012-10-04T10:29:46.538+02:00Period Costume 101: First, dress the throat<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
I'm watching - hopelessly late, as usual - the BBC's adaptation of a novel that I love, Michel Faber's <i>The Crimson Petal and the White</i>. It's very good indeed, transporting us in fine style to the coexisting extremes of splendour and squalor of Victorian London. All except for one jarring incongruity - or, more specifically, a glaring anachronism - in the period setting: the way the characters speak.</div>
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Chris O'Dowd and Amanda Hale (as William and Agnes Rackham) make do with a sort of Modern Sloane or Contemporary Rah. It works as far as it goes, inasmuch as it does convey a certain degree of toffitude to modern ears, but the problem is that the London rich didn't talk like that 50 years ago, let alone 140.</div>
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Just compare the Queen's accent when she was young with the one she uses today - they're as different as Scouse and Brummy. All that "It makes us viddy heppeh" business, or "often" sharing its first syllable with "awful"? The Queen doesn't talk like that any more, and I'm sure that Kate Middleton never has. But Agnes Rackham certainly should.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I had the same problem with Colin Firth and, to a lesser extent, Helena Bonham Carter in <i>The King's Speech</i>. You'd think a film that doesn't just touch on but is actually <i>about </i>what a historical character sounded like when they spoke would go to some trouble to get this stuff right, but no. I'm sorry, Colin, a cracking stammer face and all that, but King George VI didn't, in fact, sound just like Jeremy Clarkson when he talked. He sounded - or, rather, he syne-did, like Harry Enfield as Grayson in the Mr Cholmondley-Warner sketches.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">
But, getting back to <i>Crimson Petal, </i>the actors playing lower-class characters don't do much better, I'm afraid. Romola Garai's performance is fantastic, except for her voice. A Cockney woman making an effort to talk a notch or two "above her station" should sound like Irene Handl, not like Victoria Beckham. In the shifting sands of the wacky world of accents, whiny Generic Estuary is a very recent comer-in indeed - as out of place in a Victorian period piece as a mobile phone.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The best of the bunch, the cast member who seems to have paid the most attention to the way her character would have sounded, all laced up in her corsets and swathed in crinoline, is the one who had the most work to do of all of them. Although Gillian Anderson spent several years in London as a child, she's still an American. Yet she pretty much nails that clipped, oddly sing-song sound of someone trying to "posh up" a proper Old Cockney accent. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-72114753454824525202012-01-11T12:32:00.000+01:002012-01-15T12:45:24.819+01:00Lenore Hart, the alleged plagiarist, and Edgar Allan Poe, the alleged nineteenth-century writer<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">I was pleased to see that a <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/01/10/salon_debate_what_is_plagiarism/singleton/">Salon piece on plagiarism</a> published yesterday mentions the Lenore Hart affair, but disappointingly </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">— </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">and quite misleadingly </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">— it </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">refers to the </span><a href="http://www.pdf-archive.com/2012/01/08/o-neal-hart-57/o-neal-hart-57.pdf" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia;">evidence </a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">as mere "allegations". Since I get the impression that some people may still not fully appreciate just how clear-cut this case is, I thought it'd be useful to explain the mechanics behind my conviction that the media's fear of any comeback from calling a plagiarist a plagiarist is misplaced.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.virginmedia.com/images/peter-falk-columbo-290x400.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://www.virginmedia.com/images/peter-falk-columbo-290x400.jpg" width="145" /></a></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Here's a quick primer on plagiarism-hunting in the Internet age. It may once have all hinged on subjective judgment calls and grey areas but it's now advanced far beyond that. Today it's about examining quantifiable data and calculating probabilities — probabilities that offer a lot more certainty of making the right call than state-of-the-art DNA profiling.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Here's how it works.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; text-align: left;"><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; text-align: left;">Last year, blogging about the glut of </span><a href="http://thesumpplug.blogspot.com/2011/02/karajan-up-khyber.html" style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia; text-align: left;">one-minute’s silences</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; text-align: left;"> at Spanish football matches, I wrote this sentence:</span></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;">Now no self-respecting Liga match can be<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><em><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; font-style: normal;">without one to mark the<b> </b></span></em><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;">passing of Alderman Mumble (sorry, the PA system isn't all it might be)</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Now let’s suppose a luckless hypothetical plagiarist (we'll call her “LHP” for short) came along and rewrote my sentence like this:</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This season, would any Spanish football ground worth its salt go without one to mark Councillor Somebodyorother's sad demise? (The stadium’s Tannoy is playing up again, I’m afraid.)</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">LHP has been careful enough to cover her tracks by paraphrasing almost every important word or phrase. If we mark the text she's copied verbatim, all we're left with is this:</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">This season, would any Spanish football ground worth its salt go </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><b>without one to mark</b></span><b style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"> </b><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Councillor Somebodyorother’s sad demise? (<b>T</b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><b>he</b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"> stadium’s Tannoy is</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><b> </b>playing up again, I'm afraid.)</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">There’s no way Google could ever catch that, is there? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Yes, there is. Ridiculously commonplace though the words themselves may seem, the exact string “without one to mark" has only ever been used once by anybody on the whole of the Internet — by me. Type it into Google (including the inverted commas, to avoid hits for each individual word) and <a href="https://www.google.com/#hl=es&cp=1&gs_id=2l&xhr=t&q=%22without+one+to+mark%22&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&safe=off&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=%22without+one+to+mark%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=1320e7432ad8dc4c&biw=1024&bih=653">see for yourself</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">As if that weren’t "huh?" enough, now comes the really weird part. LHP could have stayed much closer to my original, like this, yet even so remained practically Google-proof:<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;"><b>Now no</b></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;"><b> self-respecting </b>Spanish <b>match</b> can forgo having<b> </b></span><b><em><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; font-style: normal;">one to mark the </span></em><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;">passing of </span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222;">Councillor <b>Mumble </b>(<b>the PA system </b>wasn’t <b>all it might </b>have been, <b>sorry</b>)</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span></span></blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">It turns out that "now no self-respecting" has been used half a million times, and even the six-word string "one to mark the passing of" gets over a thousand hits, but put "without" before it and we find nobody has ever used that exact string except me and LHP.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2]</span> And if, of all the possible contexts for LHP to have used that string in, it appeared in a piece that also happened to be about one-minute's silences at Spanish football grounds, and if we then factor in the extensive paraphrasing </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">— </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">changing "passing" to "sad demise" and "match" to "game" and so on </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">— </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">then ... you get the picture. </span><br />
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That's how Lenore Hart came such a spectacular cropper. Presumably to avoid detection, she took great pains to change words that were of obvious semantic consequence </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">—</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> she must have worn her thesaurus to dust </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 12pt;">—</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> but she failed to pay enough attention to those piddling little text strings that are of merely syntactic significance. What she did is like a burglar meticulously vacuuming the furniture and carpet to remove any trace of hair or fibre evidence, and then leaving a big fat fingerprint on the doorknob on the way out.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><b>As Poe wouldn't have put it, just do the math </b></span> </div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">There are </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">fifteen million volumes in Google Books' database. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Hitting by chance on a non-subject-specific text string </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">— </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">like our "without one to mark" or O'Neal/Hart's "privacy or as protection against" </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px;">— </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">in only two of them, which happen to deal with exactly the same topic, is several orders of magnitude more difficult than winning the lottery.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">But if you end up with a tally of not just one but <i>thirty-one</i></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"> exclusive string matches like this, we leave the realm of mere allegation behind us and stride firmly into dead-cert fact.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Expressed in the simplest, most conservative terms possible, the odds that Lenore Hart <i>didn't</i> plagiarise Cothburn O'Neal's novel are 1 in </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">15000000<sup>31</sup>. To give you an idea of just how big that number is, 15 million squared is 225 trillion, while 15 million cubed is 3.375 billion trillion. So 15 million to the power of 31 is ... you get the idea.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[4]<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">Isn't it time to stop alleging that Lenore Hart is a plagiarist and start calling her what she is: a proven one?<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">_____</span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;">1. A margin of error of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;">1 in 7000 is accepted as sufficiently conclusive for positive identification in crime-scene or paternity-case DNA analyses. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;"> <span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">2. I say "practically" because although Google allows you to use an asterisk to stand in for any word in a string (e.g. "now no self-respecting * match"), it's too cumbersome a method to be viable when checking for plagiarism, because you have to work blind, with no idea which words you need to turn into asterisks.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">3. Jeremy Duns has tried the same exercise, typing text strings from his own novels into Google Books, always with the same results: either no hits at all or far too many for it to be practical to wade through them. Just one match is always a loud plagiarism alert.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;">4. It's actually an even bigger number than 15000000<sup>31</sup>, because you also have to allow for things like motive (Lenore Hart's first draft, on the same subject as O'Neal's novel, had been rubbished by her editor and she'll also have been under deadline pressure to get the book out before Poe stopped being a hot property because of the bicentennial celebrations) and opportunity (of the seven billion people on the planet, probably only a few hundred are alive who have read <i>The Very Young Mrs Poe</i>, but, on her own admission, Lenore Hart is one of them), etc.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-size: xx-small;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia;"><br />
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<br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-1759478349296156272012-01-09T11:03:00.000+01:002012-01-12T10:12:44.035+01:00Once upon a midnight cloudy and misty<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(This one's pretty hardcore, so please bear with me. Test on Friday.)</span></i><br />
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We've <a href="http://thesumpplug.blogspot.com/2011/12/hart-tells-tales.html">already established</a> that when faced with writing a scene for which no historical record was available, Lenore Hart cribbed straight from what Cothburn O'Neal had made up. But what about when the events she describes <i>are </i>documented?<br />
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Same thing. She mostly ignored the historical source and trusted O'Neal to have done his research properly.<br />
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Take the Poes' 1844 trip by train and steamboat from Philadephia to New York, via Amboy, New Jersey. Poe himself wrote about the journey in great, almost absurd, detail in a <a href="http://www.eapoe.org/works/letters/p4404070.htm">letter</a> to Maria Clemm, who was his aunt and also his mother-in-law. This explains why, for instance, both O'Neal and Hart mention the 62-cent price of a certain umbrella. And this is the crux of Hart's defence: it's inevitable that she and O'Neal would both say the same things because both were working from the same historical sources. That's obvious. <br />
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Inevitable? Obvious? Really?<br />
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Let's look more a bit closely at <i>how</i> the two novelists chose to say those same things, because in many cases it was not the way Poe phrased it at all, and in some instances Hart filled in holes in Poe's account by choosing, oh-so-coincidentally, exactly the same words<i> </i>that O'Neal used in the bits he'd been forced to make up.<br />
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You can download a side-by-side comparison of the three writers' versions of this whole scene <a href="http://www.pdf-archive.com/2012/01/09/poe-o-neal-hart/poe-o-neal-hart.pdf">here</a>. If you see something highlighted in red, alarm bells should ring, because it indicates words used by Hart that match O'Neal's version of the journey but <i>not</i> Poe's account of it.<br />
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If you don't have the time or inclination to download the document - I did warn you that this was pretty hardcore - then you can take my word for it: it's a veritable sea of red.<br />
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In one detail - what time it was when the train departed - we find that Hart completely misunderstood what O'Neal was trying to say and as a result screwed the time up, even though Poe had been quite specific about the hour. Hart says it was "seven fifteen". O'Neal doesn't state the exact time, instead saying that the train left "an hour" after their arrival at the station "a little after six". In that case, seven fifteen sounds about right, doesn't it? Yes, it does - or it would if Poe hadn't clearly said that the train left at seven o'clock, not seven fifteen.<br />
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Then there's the weather in Philadelphia the day the Poes left. Hart says it was "a cloudy, misty morning". O'Neal had it as "a cloudy, misty day". So both must have got that detail straight from Poe's letter, right? No, wrong. Poe doesn't mention the weather at all until the end of the journey, by which time it was raining.<br />
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The source she used was only "historical" inasmuch as it was a novel written fifty-five years before hers.<br />
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But getting back to that rain on their arrival in New York, once again we find Hart misconstruing O'Neal's version of events rather than drawing from Poe's original account. O'Neal just refers to "rain". Hart glosses this as "persistent drizzle", but if she'd actually used the historical source that she claims that she relied on and not just plagiarised another writer's novelisation of it, she'd have seen that the needle was in fact at the other end of the raininess scale. It wasn't drizzling at all but tipping down by the time they got to New York - "raining hard" were Poe's exact words.<br />
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There are several other tell-tale details we could mention (the definite article in "at the Walnut Street wharf" which is used by O'Neal but not by Poe, or both Hart and O'Neal saying "boarded a steamer" when Poe had phrased it as "took a steamboat" - dull but dead-giveaway stuff like that), but I'll leave it there and let anyone interested see for themselves in the line-by-line breakdown of the three versions of the scene linked to above. <br />
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The conclusion couldn't be clearer. Even when the events she describes are documented, Lenore Hart's "same historical sources" defence is hogwash. Time and time again she couldn't be bothered to turn to the relevant document as her primary source, relying instead on Cothburn O'Neal's interpretation of it.<br />
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After all, that 170-year-old prose is full of stupid ampersands and, like, weirdo capitalization and abbreviations; who needs to actually plough through all that turgid stuff when some dead schmuck from Texas has already done the donkey work for you?<br />
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Oops.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-54062829333373064582012-01-08T13:06:00.000+01:002012-01-08T14:09:45.519+01:0057 varieties of career over. . . or is it?<blockquote>
<b><i><small>What this woman has done, clearly, is sit down with a book and rewrite it.</small></i><small> —Lawrence Block</small></b></blockquote>
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An 11-page document containing a <a href="http://www.pdf-archive.com/2012/01/08/o-neal-hart-57/o-neal-hart-57.pdf">side-by-side comparison</a> of 57 improbably similar passages, revealing 31 text strings appearing only in her book and the one she stole from. That’s the extent of Lenore Hart’s plagiarism in <i>The Raven’s Bride</i> found so far by the blogger <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-little-longfellow-war.html">Undine</a>, novelist <a href="http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/12/accidental-mountweazel-lenore-hart-is.html%E2%80%9D">Jeremy Duns</a> and me.<br />
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Hart’s book is literally (one of her favourite words) rife with stolen bits of business, pilfered scenes, filched colour detail, purloined characters, nicked descriptions and lifted dialogue, looted from a novel that she not only neglected to mention in her acknowledgments but had the klutzy chutzpah to disparage in an <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2011_05_017609.php">interview.</a><br />
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You can download a PDF of the 57 passages <a href="http://www.pdf-archive.com/2012/01/08/o-neal-hart-57/o-neal-hart-57.pdf">here</a>. I’m sure that St. Martin’s Press, her publisher, will be having a look at it. I bet that those responsible for the Wilkes University Creative Writing MA/MFA Program, where she teaches, will too. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a copy is plopped on top of her agent’s in-tray on Monday morning.<br />
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Fifty-seven compelling reasons for them all to … well, to continue to play la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you, most likely. Although under normal circumstances this would be a PR horror show to be dealt with as expeditiously as possible, these are clearly anything but normal circumstances.<br />
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Lenore Hart’s plagiarism of Cothburn O’Neal’s 1956 novel <i>The Very Young Mrs. Poe</i> was drawn to her publisher's attention twice, not long after <i>The Raven’s Bride</i> was published early last year. St. Martin's Press didn’t deign to reply to those who complained, but now claim that as soon as they learned of the allegations they got Hart to explain herself in writing — a commission she fulfilled by cooking up a rambling, surreal screed peppered with non sequiturs, obfuscation, dissembling and outright lies, which her publisher, in public at least, remains fully <a href="http://www.facebook.com/stmartinspress?sk=app_324540057556264">satisfied</a> with.<br />
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Lenore Hart's own views on the matter can be judged only by a most-unfortunate-for-her exchange with Jeremy Duns that she engaged in on Facebook and has since deleted, although screengrabs are available on request. (Summarising, it's all a terrible misunderstanding, apparently, based on anonymous Web allegations that are not to be taken seriously.) Since then, she and St. Martin’s have kept schtum, no doubt hoping it’ll all go away. Nothing to see here. Move along, please.<br />
<br />
Who are they trying to kid? Certainly not any of the other writers, like <a href="http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/12/lawrence-block-on-lenore-hart.html">Lawrence Block</a> or <a href="http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?p=1586">Steve Mosby</a>, or the other publishers, like <a href="http://mhpbooks.com/45338/delusional-st-martins-says-passages-and-scenes-from-1956-novel-that-reappeared-in-lenore-harts-novel-are-not-plagiarised/">Melville House</a>, who saw the bang-to-rights evidence and instantly came to the only rational conclusion. Certainly not anyone who commented on the story when it was covered by <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/21/lenore-hart-rejects-plagiarism-accusations">The Guardian</a> or <a href="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/is-it-plagiarism-publisher-says-no/"> New York Times</a>. And certainly none of the many people on Twitter who’ve been wondering pretty much every day for the last couple of months why the hell her book is still on sale. So who, then?<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://img.ehowcdn.co.uk/article-page-main/ehow/images/a07/bt/87/paint-old-radiator-800x800.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="220" width="225" src="http://img.ehowcdn.co.uk/article-page-main/ehow/images/a07/bt/87/paint-old-radiator-800x800.jpg" /></a></div>
As for any debate on the merits of the plagiarism claims, there is no debate. There’s no need for any. The breadth and depth of her plagiarism is out there for all to see in those <a href="http://www.pdf-archive.com/2012/01/08/o-neal-hart-57/o-neal-hart-57.pdf">57 passages</a>. Indeed, only one person has come out to champion Hart’s cause, albeit under the pseudonym "Red Radiator", in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R6Q9QFG5R143E/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2AXNFF1VZVS5N&cdMsgNo=18&cdPage=2&asin=B005X4DXRK&store=books&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx29IET1CPUPQZ6&cdMsgID=MxBZ79E100U4CR#MxBZ79E100U4CR”">another exchange</a> with Jeremy Duns, this time on the Amazon page for Hart’s book. But as soon as “Red Radiator” was unmasked as a faculty colleague of Hart’s at Wilkes, Sara Pritchard, she suddenly ceased her offensive defence of her chum's integrity (the worst of which was deleted by Amazon), apologised for her previous tone and disappeared, never to be heard from again. So much for Team Lenore.<br />
<br />
And that’s where things still stand.<br />
<br />
One is forced to ask how it could possibly be in the interests of Wilkes University to keep on stubbornly refusing to address these 57 varieties of career over, instead of doing what Hart’s other professional home, the Norman Mailer Center, did almost immediately when they were made aware of a possible rotten apple in their barrel (or a festering raven in their cage, if you prefer): announce that they’ve suspended her from teaching duties until further notice.<br />
<br />
And why doesn’t St. Martin’s Press do what Little Brown did last autumn within hours of learning that Q. R. Markham’s <i>Assassin of Secrets</i> was just a patchwork of pretty much every spy novel ever written: pull the book and quickly turn the page?<br />
<br />
Those are very interesting questions.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<href=””><b>Enter the salty sea dog</b></href=””></div>
David Poyer is a U.S. Navy captain turned thriller writer. Like Lenore Hart, he teaches on the MFA-program faculty at Wilkes University. Like Lenore Hart, he is published by St. Martin’s Press. Like Lenore Hart, he is represented by ICM. And like Lenore Hart, he lives on the eastern shore of Virginia. With her, in fact. He’s married to her. He has also openly acknowledged acting as her <a href="http://www.esva.net/~davidpoyer/seven.htm">“business manager”</a>.<br />
<br />
But most unlike Lenore Hart, David Poyer sells cartloads of books (not Lawrence Block–level cartloads, perhaps, but cartloads all the same). If St. Martin’s Press were to cut Hart loose, then Poyer — one of the most productive cash cows in their stable — might well feel aggrieved enough to turn to another publisher. And if Wilkes were to cut her loose, then Poyer — their showcase act, far and away the most commercially successful writer on their faculty — might well feel affronted enough to take his teaching elsewhere.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://fotos.starmedia.com/imagenes/2011/12/John-Lennon-y-Yoko-Ono-300x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="300" src="http://fotos.starmedia.com/imagenes/2011/12/John-Lennon-y-Yoko-Ono-300x300.jpg" /></a></div>
Let’s be plain about this: the Poyers are a duo, not just personally but also professionally. But they’re not a duo like Lennon and McCartney; think more John and Yoko. Fail to do right by her and you may notice the walls and bridges of your lucrative relationship with him beginning to teeter.<br />
<br />
Is it all starting to make sense now?<br />
<br />
Without Poyer’s hands-on management of Lenore Hart’s carefully constructed literary career, without his undoubted industry clout, she'd be unlikely to be published by the prestigious St. Martin’s Press or have an agent at swanky ICM. (The truth is that she’s a mediocre writer, as the exercise of side-by-siding her prose with Cothburn O’Neal’s has made only too clear.) If she was married to a drywall installer, she’d have been thrown to the wolves months ago — book quickly withdrawn, dishonourable discharge from her teaching post, curt letter from ICM: "we regret your profile is no longer in synergy with our strategy blah blah" — a toxic brand to be firmly and swiftly erased. Just like <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/little-brown-pulls-novel-citing-plagiarism/">Q.R. Markham</a>.<br />
<br />
But she’s not married to a drywall installer. She’s married to “the most popular living writer of American sea fiction”. In short, follow the money. Ethics are fine as long as they don't mess with the bottom line.<br />
<br />
(Of course, I may be completely off with these suppositions and extrapolations. But if there is no unseen hand rocking the cradle, then the drawn-out obduracy of St. Martin’s Press and Wilkes simply cannot be explained, because all that's being achieved with each day this impasse drags on is the steady undermining of their reputations.)<br />
<br />
I may write another time about what on earth could have come over or driven a professional writer of certain critical repute, with quite a lot to lose, to do something so crass, so cheap, so lazy and so ultimately doomed to humiliating failure. Problems with her original manuscript and deadline pressure from her editor, maybe? (It was published a full year later than announced, under a changed title.) Writer’s block? A nosedive in self-esteem? I don’t know. And quite frankly I don’t much care right now. All that concerns me at the moment is that she never be allowed to do it again, and that she — or at least those who publish, employ and represent her — should own up to what she has done and accept that it is wrong.<br />
<br />
Lenore Hart has been shown way, <i>way</i> beyond any shred of reasonable doubt to be a literary fraud, an intellectual thief and a <a href="http://thesumpplug.blogspot.com/2011/12/hart-tells-tales.html">shameless liar</a>, and she mustn't get away with it. But unless enough pressure is exerted to counter her husband’s no-doubt-considerable pull, she just might.<br />
<br />
Let’s not let her.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-52082280123740948262011-12-19T13:08:00.000+01:002011-12-20T23:56:41.456+01:00Lenore Hart falls in the river againLenore Hart and her publisher, St Martin’s Press, claim that any <a href="http://freepdfhosting.com/fb25fed951.pdf">"similarities"</a> between her novel <i>The Raven’s Bride</i> and Cothburn O’Neal’s <i>The Very Young Mrs. Poe</i> can be put down to both writers having drawn on the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/stmartinspress?sk=app_324540057556264">"same limited historical record"</a>.<br />
<br />
Fine. In that case, given that in their respective novels O’Neal and Hart describe in practically identical terms how their protagonist, Virginia "Sissy" Poe née Clemm, once sat alone by the fire and thought about her relationship with her husband, likening it to the alternately broadening and narrowing course of a river and its alternately calm and turbulent waters,<span style="font-size: x-small;">*</span> one of these two statements must necessarily be true:<br />
<br />
<i>(A)</i> Virginia, unbeknownst to Poe scholars the world over, left a secret diary to which the two novelists have enjoyed privileged access. Both included the same fireside river-simile scene in their novels because it is a documented historical event. They know what she was thinking because she wrote it in this diary.<br />
<br />
<i>(B)</i> Lenore Hart is a brazen plagiarist. Her publisher and the institutions where she teaches are — by their continued inaction — tacitly condoning her deceit, her lies and her intellectual theft.<br />
<br />
So, St Martin’s Press, the Norman Mailer Center/Writers Colony and Wilkes University, which is it? <i>A</i> or <i>B?</i><br />
<br />
It’s your call. And your reputation. (Hers, as you must surely know by now, is a lost cause.)<br />
<br />
<b>Update</b> - <i>20 December 2011</i>
<br />
The Norman Mailer Center announced today - i.e. within 48 hours of this mess being drawn to their attention - that they have asked Lenore Hart to take leave of absence from their next workshop, where she had been scheduled to teach. St Martin's Press, meanwhile, seven months on, continue with their la-la-la-can't-hear-you strategy. This isn't going to end well.
<br />
____<br />
<small>* See the latest <a href="http://freepdfhosting.com/fb25fed951.pdf">inventory</a> of plagiarised passages found (No. 25).</small>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-20138297257722976502011-12-10T00:50:00.005+01:002012-01-13T14:02:55.330+01:00Hart tells tales<a href="http://s264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/?action=view&current=2006_12_17_Appomattox_River_7AM-1.jpg" target="_blank"><img align="left" alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/2006_12_17_Appomattox_River_7AM-1.jpg" /></a>St. Martin’s Press, the publishers of <i>The Raven’s Bride</i> by Lenore Hart, have this week defended her <a href="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/is-it-plagiarism-publisher-says-no/">blatant plagiarism</a> of words and entire scenes from Cothburn O’Neal’s 1956 novel <i>The Very Young Mrs. Poe</i> by claiming that coincidences are inevitable when both writers have carried out similar “research into historical and biographical sources”.<br />
<br />
Yet while most of the <a href="http://uploaded.to/file/6o5eawz4">thirty-two examples of her plagiarism</a> identified to date not only lack any historical sources whatsoever, at least one of them is a screaming historical impossibility.<br />
<br />
O’Neal describes the Poes' arrival at their honeymoon destination like this:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<small>The train crossed the Appomattox after sunset but pulled into the Petersburg depot before dark. Their host, Mr. Hiram Haines, publisher of the Petersburg <i>American Constellation</i>,was waiting with his wife. He was a cheerful, balding man</small></blockquote>
<br />
And here is Hart’s version of the same event:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<small>We crossed the Appomattox after sunset and rolled into the Petersburg depot before full dark. As we descended from the car Eddy spotted our host, Hiram Haines, the cheerful, balding publisher of the <i> American Constellation</i></small></blockquote>
<br />
The words “crossed the Appomattox after sunset” are, to say the least, problematic. And not only because the only two instances of those exact words in that exact order to appear in the entire fifteen-million-volume corpus of Google Books are — ta-dah — in Cothburn O’Neal and Lenore Hart’s respective novels about Edgar Allan Poe’s child bride. No, that's the least of it. The real problem is that back in the 1830s the train from Richmond to Petersburg didn’t cross the Appomattox at all, after sunset or at any other time of day. The line ended on the north bank of the river and travellers had to finish their journey into the town on the other side by stagecoach.<small>[1]</small><br />
<br />
But wait. It gets worse. Much worse. It turns out that the historical Poes couldn't have travelled by historical train to the historical Petersburg or anywhere near it from Richmond. How do we know this, historically? Because that line wasn’t opened until 1838, two years <i>after</i> they made their honeymoon trip, that's how.<small>[2]</small><br />
<br />
In short, the whole scene is a historical nonsense. And although Cothburn O’Neal, writing from deep in the heart of pre-Internet and even pre-fax Texas, can perhaps be forgiven for making such a mistake in his research, Lenore Hart certainly can’t be forgiven for replicating it, almost word for word, fifty-five years later. I’m not sure which is the more astonishing: the shamelessness of her plagiarism or her abject laziness. Confirming the non-existence of that train took me under five minutes.<small>[3]</small> <br />
<br />
So what does Lenore Hart herself have to say about this? In a now-deleted (but much-screengrabbed) Facebook exchange on 21 November with the novelist Jeremy Duns, the person who's done the most to unmask her,<small>[4]</small> she claimed that<br />
<blockquote>
<small>To go 'into the Petersburg Depot' was HISTORICALLY the only way to travel by train to that destination from Richmond at that time. But I can't say this now, because another author (writing earlier about the same characters and same events, their documented honeymoon trip to Petersburg) also did so? Even if it was the only way the Poes could have gotten there, period, at that time. Hmm. I see.</small></blockquote>
That's not merely self-serving obfuscation in the face of damning evidence of plagiarism; as we now see, it's a desperate, tell-tale lie. Hart's claim that the Poes' honeymoon is documented is only true inasmuch as they seem to have spent it as guests of Hiram Haines in Petersburg. That's it. The honeymoon <i>trip</i>, as described in the two virtually identical passages quoted above, is barely documented at all. Nobody knows for sure how they got there (the now-clearly-mistaken claim that it was by train originated in the 1920s, from a source whose credibility on other matters has also been called into doubt), who might have met them on arrival or where that meeting, if any, took place. For those details a novelist would have to resort to conjecture and informed guesses. And that's what Cothburn O'Neal did — but unfortunately for him, and even more unfortunately for Lenore Hart, he screwed it up royally.
<br />
<br />
Lenore Hart cribbed O'Neal's invented scene, presumably unaware that by doing so she was compounding a historical howler. Although, to be honest, I doubt that she cared all that much about whether it was historically accurate or not, confident as I'm sure she was that nobody was ever going to pick up on her raven-like picking of a dead man’s bones. <br />
<br />
Oops.<br />
<br />
__<br />
<br />
<small>1. It would be another twenty-five years until the line was prolonged to the other side of the Appomattox. The “Petersburg depot” that both authors mention had indeed been operational for three years in 1836, but it served only the lines fanning out southwards from the town. There was no rail service from there to Richmond or anywhere else north of the river until the 1860s. <br />
<br />
2. Source <a href="http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Richmond_and_Petersburg_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War_The">here</a>.<br />
<br />
3. To be precise, it took me as long as it took me to type "Richmond-Petersburg railroad" into the Wikipedia search field. I mean, come <i>on</i>.<br />
<br />
4. Although Jeremy Duns has acted brilliantly as the dogged Plagefinder General in this and <a href="http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/11/highway-robbery-mask-of-knowing-in.html">other recent high-profile cases</a>, the bulk of the groundwork for the exposing of Lenore Hart was done by the Poe blogger <a href="http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-little-longfellow-war.html">Undine, back in March</a>. (See also comments below.)</small>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-69849003905556714952011-07-16T12:57:00.001+02:002011-07-16T15:28:22.085+02:00Hyperbole: absolutely the worst thing in the history of the human race“Dan’s coming over later. Said he’d bring beer.”<br />
“Awesome!”<br />
“You heard about Cath, I take it.”<br />
“No. What about her?”<br />
“She’s won six and half million on the lottery.” <br />
“Awesome!”<br />
<br />
See the problem there? The ante for reacting to any piece of good news, no matter how mundane, has been upped so high that we’ve run out of ways to react to events that are truly out of the ordinary.<br />
<br />
The same applies to not-so-good news too, with every minor setback now a “total catastrophe.” <br />
<br />
My Twitter timeline has been peppered with people saying how “very sad” they feel about the death of the actress Googie Withers, despite presumably knowing she’d been living in comfortable retirement in Australia, made it to the ripe old age of 94 and has had her life and career remembered with glowing obits in all the papers today. <br />
<br />
So how would these people have reacted if a 44-year-old actress had died? That would be “absolutely tragic beyond words”, I expect. But then where is there left to go when you learn of the murder of a child? <br />
<br />
(If you happen to think this post is the direst dross you’ve ever read in your <i>entire life</i>, then I am so terribly, terribly sorry I could curl up and die. Possibly.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-82138311965676683922011-07-13T21:42:00.008+02:002011-07-14T10:42:14.501+02:00Dirty doorsteps (or why Johann Hari deserves to be harried out of journalism)In the '50s and '60s, my mum was a <i>Guardian</i> journalist. <br />
<br />
That sentence has been spun for maximum impact, although it's essentially true (we'll come back to that in a bit). In fact, she was an old-school reporter - assizes, inquests and children’s page - on the <i>Middleton Guardian</i>, and an occasional stringer for the then-<i>Manchester Guardian</i> down the road. She told me that, as far as she knew, the only other woman reporter ever seen in a coroner's court outside London at the time was one from the <i>Sheffield Telegraph</i>. That was Jean Rook.<br />
<br />
My mother's career path followed the only possible route for non-university-educated women back then: start in the typing pool and hope for the best. She eventually got to take letters for (rather than to) the editor, who, having noticed that she had a knack for turning a phrase after she'd knocked his rambling dictation – he enjoyed a drink – into some kind of usable shape, started sending her off to cover the occasional inquest. (He was very much a deep-end kinda guy. "Anything juicy?" he’d ask when she came back in. "Pfft," she’d reply. "Misadventure again. Sorry.")<br />
<br />
One fateful day (as she would certainly never have put it), the editor assigned her to cover a Conservative party meeting before some local elections, an event that all the full-fledged reporters had managed to find an excuse to avoid. A local organiser, Mrs (Name Lost in the Mists of Family History), spoke at soporific length about how to get the most out of the chore of canvassing. "At some houses you needn't waste your time," she told the eager faithful after an hour or so of precise leaflet-folding instructions. "You can tell they vote Labour before you even knock on the door. Just look down. If you see a dirty doorstep, you can forget it. Try next door instead."[1] <br />
<br />
My mother couldn’t believe what she'd heard. Well, she could, because she'd been taking the whole speech down verbatim in her erm-and-ah-perfect shorthand. <br />
<br />
Front-page splash in the paper the next day: <small>LABOUR VOTERS HAVE "DIRTY DOORSTEPS", TOP LOCAL TORY CLAIMS.</small><br />
<br />
Mrs NLMFH rang the editor shrieking that she’d said no such thing. The local party chairman rang the editor, calling for the head of the "recklessly irresponsible young lady" who’d had the temerity to invent such a terrible slur.<br />
<br />
The editor stood by his reporter, much as Simon Kelner stood by Johann Hari, except in this case not only was she able to show him her shorthand notes, she’d also had enough nous to take the contact details of a couple of other people who’d heard what Mrs NLMFH had said and would be willing to confirm it. <br />
<br />
The local Tories lost the election, my mother was promoted to the newsroom proper and the paper got a healthy blip in its circulation.<br />
<br />
The lesson my mother learned that day was one she passed on to me: "Say what you like, and be as shrill and sensationalist as you like, but always, <i>always</i> make sure you’ve got the facts right or it’s back to the typing pool for you, and you won’t get another chance."<br />
<br />
It was advice I followed when I worked as an advertising copywriter. Yes, I polished every selling point so hard it gleamed – not unlike a Tory doorstep, in fact – but anyone checking up would find that although it had been spun with Hotpoint-like vigour it would always hold up under scrutiny. <br />
<br />
It occurred to me over the last couple of days that Johann Hari has fallen foul not only of my mum’s standards as an old-school journalist but also of mine as an old-school copywriter. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, he’s essentially just as much a copywriter, propagandist or PR for Noble Causes as he is a journalist. (In a 2004 interview he said that his view of a columnist's role was "a sort of paid political campaigner for the causes you believe in," which explains quite a lot, really.) <br />
<br />
So, if you met your interviewee on the terrace of a hotel beach bar, don’t say it was a Starbucks. If a psychologist is a flaky fringe figure, don’t call him a distinguished social scientist. And if Hugo Chávez said something to someone from <i>Newsweek</i>, don’t claim he leaned forward, patted your knee, shifted in his chair, took a sip of his coffee, looked out of the window and said it to you several years later. Because if you do, when you’re called on it – and some day you certainly will be called on it - you won’t be able to pull that little ring-bound notebook out of your handbag and point to where it says, in perfect shorthand, "dirty doorstep". <br />
<br />
______<br />
<br />
<small> 1. Or, as Johann Hari might have put it but for reasons best known to himself never did, words to that effect. The notebook and my mum's cuttings scrapbook haven't survived and the <i>Middleton Guardian</i>'s online archive doesn't go back that far. Don't think I haven't checked.</small>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-19958824347412079082011-07-13T15:23:00.010+02:002011-07-14T18:53:22.600+02:00Seven Pillars of BullshitThe aspect of Harigate II - the allegations of sock-puppetry and serial Wikipedia mischief by Johann Hari rather than his now-proven serial plagiarism - that has been most harshly criticised by his apologists is the "cheap", "unfair" and "vindictive" use that has been made of the porn connection. (To cut an improbably long story short, the online trail left by Johann Hari’s mystery Wikipedia champion leads to one other place only: a hardcore story about pimping out a 15-year-old boy that was posted on a gay website.) <br />
<br />
I don’t know why bringing this matter up is supposed to be unfair. After all, Hari himself has written at length and in non-condemnatory terms about not only pornography but also <a href="http://www.johannhari.com/2002/01/09/forbidden-love">incest</a> and gay sex with teens. <br />
<br />
In his introduction to a <a href="http://www.johannhari.com/2006/10/02/the-disturbing-rise-of-bareback-porn">2006 piece</a> on his website about "bareback" gay porn, Hari downplays (I’m trying hard to be even-handed here and not say "condones") the sexual abuse of male teenagers in these terms:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><small>[G]ay men are right to suspect that while making porn can fuck up the women who are spat out (or swallowed) in its production, it is less likely to have a psychologically dangerous effect on the men who take part. In 1998 the distinguished social scientist Bruce Ring published a thorough study into the difference between the way girls and boys react to sexually abusive or exposing situations. He found that teenage boys who had been abused "reacted much less negatively than women." While girls were usually dreadfully disturbed, most boys suffered "negative effects that were neither pervasive nor typically intense." So the girl your straight mates watch being gang-banged on camera for cash will probably be deeply disturbed by it for years; the boy you watch probably won’t be psychologically damaged for long.</small></blockquote><br />
I’m not going to discuss that argument's worth or even its potential for eyebrow-raising, because I’d rather focus on the one part of it that is, at least at first sight, not contentious: the seven words "the distinguished social scientist Bruce Ring published", because five of them are demonstrably bollocks.<br />
<br />
Bruce L. Rind (not, perhaps fortunately for him, "Ring") is a psychologist (not a social scientist) who co-authored a certain paper (not, as suggested, wrote and published it alone) in 1998. <br />
<br />
So what about the "distinguished" bit, then?<br />
<br />
At the age of 59, Rind is still a non-tenured "adjunct instructor", which is roughly equivalent to an assistant lecturer, hired to teach a specific course for a specific period of time. He teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, which is ranked 132nd in the <i>U.S. News</i> rankings of American universities (although, to be fair, its Psychology graduate programme streaks home in 50th place). And he’s not exactly a wow with his students either. They’ve graded his classes with an average score of <a href=”http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=35440”>2.5 (“poor”)</a>.<br />
<br />
The 1998 Rind <i>et. al.</i> paper wasn’t just dismissed by at least four peer reviewers as "scientifically invalid" and roundly disowned by the American Psychological Association; it's the only paper in the history of U.S. scientific literature to have been condemned by Congress. No, not railed against by some school board in Knuckledrag, Kansas – actually condemned by the House of Representatives. To call its main conclusion, that the sexual abuse of adolescent boys is not necessarily harmful, off the mark would be to do it a big favour. What Johann Hari neglects to tell us is that males who were sexually abused as adolescents have been found by subsequent – and presumably equally distinguished – researchers to be three times more likely to turn to therapy for emotional problems and five times more likely to commit suicide than their non-abused peers. <br />
<br />
Both Rind and his long-term colleague Robert Bauserman (one of the co-authors on that 1998 paper) have <a href="http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/rind/bak.html">published extensively</a> on what is sometimes whitewashed as "man-boy love", although some researchers refer to it as "intergenerational intimacy", while Rind and Bauserman go one better and oh-so-scientifically call it "age-discrepant sexual relations (ADSR)" instead. One of the journals that they chose to publish their findings in was the now-defunct Netherlands-based <i>Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia</i>. Here's an extract from that publication’s statement of purpose, to give an idea of where these people were, er, coming from: <br />
<br />
<blockquote><small>[T]o speak today of paedophilia, which we understand to be consensual intergenerational sexual relationships, is to speak of the politics of oppression. This is the milieu in which we are enmeshed, the fabric of our daily life and struggle. [...] It is our contention that the oppression of paedophilia is part of the larger repression of sexuality, and that this repression in general represents an irrational expression of authority in government. The oppression of paedophilia is therefore dangerous in a wider sense than simply to paedophiles.</small></blockquote><br />
The same year that they published the paper that Hari so confidently cites, Rind and Bauserman participated as keynote speakers, alongside two members of the editorial board of <i>Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia</i>, at a pro-paedophilia conference held in Amsterdam. Rind’s address was later published in the <i>International Pedophile and Child Emancipation Newsletter</i>, which must have been nice for him.<br />
<br />
But let’s get back to more familiar and probably more comfortable ground for Johann Hari: Wikipedia. It turns out that such a distinguished titan of the social sciences as Dr Bruce L. Rind has a Wikipedia entry of his own that is...oops, he hasn't got one. (I mean, come on, even my distinguished mate the self-published short-story writer has got his own Wikipedia entry). Rind does, however, feature heavily in the entry titled "Rind et al. controversy" about the huge stink that was raised by the very paper that Johann Hari saw fit to cite to bolster his curious beliefs. <br />
<br />
So that’s the "distinguished" bit dealt with. (Maybe we should be charitable and assume that Hari’s autocorrect must have been playing tricks the day he tried to write "discredited".) <br />
<br />
And there we have it. Of the seven words "the distinguished social scientist Bruce Ring published", only two actually hold up to any scrutiny at all: "the" and "Bruce". <br />
<br />
What conclusions might we reasonably draw about the accuracy and fair representation to be found throughout Johann Hari’s journalism based on this analysis of one teeny-weeny fragment of it? I’m not sure, but I’m confident Andreas Whittam-Smith will let us know before too long.<br />
_______<br />
<br />
<b>POSTSCRIPT (14 July 2011)</b><br />
I was under the impression that Hari's bareback-porn piece, which I quote from, had not appeared in <i>The Independent</i>, as I could find no trace of it anywhere other than on Hari's website. (The length of the piece and the amount of "worked-up" detail suggest it was written for publication rather than as a blog entry, so it might be reasonable to assume that it was spiked.) However, I have now learned that the part of the text that I specifically deal with here (from "the distinguished..." to "'...less negatively than women'", i.e. the Rind <i>et al.</i> citation and quoted material) had already been used by Hari with the exact same wording - yes, the misspelled surname and all - in a completely <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-what-we-can-learn-from-female-sex-tourists-407706.html">different article</a>, published by <i>The Independent</i> nearly three months before the bareback-porn post appeared on his blog.<br />
<br />
Still with me? This may seem like only a minor detail but it's actually crucial. I used those seven words as an example of the sort of thing that Andreas Whittam Smith might consider looking for when he reviews Hari's writings for the newspaper. I now realise that since the seven words <i>did</i> appear in the newspaper, albeit in a completely different context, they fall slap-bang in the middle of the remit of Whittam Smith's investigation.<br />
<br />
Perhaps someone reading this might wish to draw his attention to those seven words, because, besides further demonstrating Hari's penchant for distortion and dissembling, they don't say a fat lot in favour of the paper's editorial filtering processes, do they?<br />
<br />
I get the feeling it's going to be a long, hot summer for one genuinely distinguished old gentleman of the press.<br />
<br />
(Thanks to Damian Thompson of the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> for pointing this out.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-58419624877670897442011-04-18T14:29:00.010+02:002011-04-18T16:09:33.188+02:00What's Real Madrid all about, Alfie?<a href="http://s264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/?action=view&current=c1236894363.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/c1236894363.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" align=right></a><br /><br /><blockquote>The football Barcelona played at the Bernabéu was just brilliant. Their superiority was patent and on view for all the world to see. They've got something that Real Madrid don't have. The whites were hemmed in by opposition that dominated the midfield throughout the whole match. Barcelona played football and danced; Real Madrid just ran up and down, tiring themselves out.<br /><br />Only if Xavi, Iniesta or Busquets lost the ball did Real Madrid ever try to put together an attack, but of course it was with a punt upfield in the hope that something might come of it. And whenever those three wanted, they could put the sheep to sleep passing the ball to one another with complete mastery, short and straight to the feet — perfectly executed, tight passes that were safe and sure for whoever was on the receiving end.<br /><br />It was as if they wanted to take the ball home with them, because it was all theirs. Their mission was to feed the Barcelona strikers — and how well fed they were! — because they are so crushingly effective and the ease with which they create danger is permanent.<br /><br />"Besides maintaining a very quick pace without once letting it up, the Barcelona players fought like true gladiators. They worked very hard indeed off the ball and never stopped moving. <br /><br />"There was no negotiation, no refusal to paint their work of art on that green canvas, whatever the final scoreline might say, because they even played pretty football, always well placed. Their positioning in the team is a key factor. All their players show that a level of tactical thinking that is unmatched, with a highly developed sense of interchanging their roles. <br /><br />The defensive effort was all Real Madrid’s, like the lion against the mouse. They were unable to neutralise their opponents with effective pressing in midfield, which is what they needed to do, although stopping Barça from making you so dizzy you end up reeling is much easier said than done. For the spectator, their well-put-together attacks in combination were a wonderful thing to see.<br /><br />For as long as Di Maria had the strength to break through on the few occasions he had the ball, he was Madrid’s best player (along with “Saint Iker” Casillas, who deserves to be canonised right now).<br /><br />Messi is the best in the world. Not only is his football spectacular, as an example of professionalism he also knows no rival. He shone on Saturday and it will be wonderful to watch him again in Wednesday’s Cup Final.<br /><br />Barcelona’s success comes from their attacking approach, wisely applied to mature and become consolidated in time for the three more Clásicos that are upcoming. Attacking means you have to control time as well as your nerves.<br /><br />Given all this, it’s obvious that Barcelona are better than Real Madrid, and that trying to build up attacking moves based on counter-attacks is not the most appropriate way to try to catch them by surprise. Their technical and tactical quality is such that they always occupy the pitch in a rational, well-balanced way, leaving no free spaces to be filled and taken advantage of.<br /><br />Pep Guardiola's team always had their hands firmly on the reins of the match. With this result they’re now another step closer to their third consecutive Liga title, and the truth is that they deserve it, because they've done their homework properly. They’ve never stopped being themselves and it’s plain for anyone to see that they enjoy themselves and have fun when they play. <br /><br />Another thing that needs saying is that Real Madrid aren’t making their fans feel as happy as they deserve to be, because the fans’ support for the team has been unconditional. Real Madrid showed more heart than order, and in the end their ambitions were frustrated.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Things I liked</span><br /><br />I like and admire the huge dominance of Barcelona’s play. It’s football to be watched not with your eyes but with your soul. They treat the ball with respect, with adoration, almost pampering it. Watching this team in action is a delight for us all.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Things I didn’t like</span><br /><br />Real Madrid was a team with no personality. This match should set the guidelines for how the next one needs to be faced, because the approach of trying to play against Barcelona with counterattacks is clearly not the way to go.</blockquote><br />- Alfredo Di Stefano (<span style="font-style:italic;">Marca</span>, 18 April 2010)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-80398251648654689702011-02-14T12:40:00.013+01:002011-02-14T19:52:02.469+01:00Karajan up the Khyber<a target='_blank' title='ImageShack - Image And Video Hosting' href='http://img696.imageshack.us/i/barcelonamanchestercity.jpg/'><img src='http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/5160/barcelonamanchestercity.jpg' border='0' align="center"/></a><br /><br />Has the craze for minute's silences before football matches reached your parts yet? If not, you don't know what you're missing. Now no self-respecting Liga match can be without one to mark the passing of Alderman Mumble (sorry, the PA system isn't all it might be), now as sadly forgotten as he was then improbably corrupt. Yes, you know, him.<br /><br />The key features of the new default modality for the minute's silence are that (a) it doesn't last for a minute and (b) it's not silent either. Presumably to save us from our baser instincts - particularly our unfortunate inclination to shout "Just bloody get on with it!" - the minute's (<i>sic</i>) silence (<i>sic</i>) actually consists of a twenty-second random snippet from some petrol-station-sourced K-Tel-equivalent of Herb Karajan's <i>Adagio</i> compilation, while the players all gather round the centre circle and link arms like the Tiller Girls with snoods.<br /><br />So, football clubs, here's my proposal. If you saw fit to put on a testimonial match for the commemorated one way back when, fine, give them a minute's silence now. Under any other circumstances, isn't that what that half column-inch on page 14 of the programme is for?<br />_____________________<br /><br /><small><i>* On the rare occasion when the deceased actually did have a connection to the club, it's likely to be the son-in-law of Betty the Boiling Bovril Lady or the bloke who used to hang up the alphabet-coded half-time scores before the advent of video screens proved that truly none of us are indispensable.</i></small><br />_____________________Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-9792171792033018342010-07-10T11:58:00.007+02:002010-07-10T20:25:31.667+02:00The Moatygate Tapes<span style="font-weight:bold;">Gazza, tell us about the Raoul Moat you know.</span><br /><br />Raoul Moat, a knew um yairz agur. He yowsed to be a boansa in Newcastle. A knew um a lot of yairz since when a was a young kid when a played for Newcastle. He was lake a jettilman. Someone's musta woand him up or done something, rate? All of a sudden a've just listened to the radio, rate? A mean on TV nyowz. Obvisslee he's killed someone, and he's shot two, rate? Which is not naice, really. Obvisslee he musta been on droogz. And he shot two peepil, rate? Now a've heard on the nyowz that obvisslee the droogz a musta worn off. Now he's willing to give in, rate? The Pleece are gonna hold um, rate? He’s a lovelee blurk, a nur that. So, the end the deer, a think he's frightened... erm, he's put his gun doan. A nur for a fact, he's put his gun doan, because a think he’s scared in case the Pleece shoot um and kill um. The droogz have worn off. All he wants to do is surrenda. The end the deer, you shoot someone and kill two othaz, ye might get, what, twelve yairz? Could be about six yairz that he's oat. A nur that he's a good lad.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">If he could hear a message from you, Gazza, what would you say to him tonight?</span><br /><br />Well, a think that the Pleece got a hurled of um. Listen, a've drurv from Newcastle in a taxi to Rothbury. It’s cost a lot of money. A've brought a dressun goan for um, a big jacket, a've brought some chicken, some bread... a nur you’re gonna laugh at this one: a've brought um a can of lawga... a've brought um a fission rod, cause I heard he was at the rivva, and I’ve got a fission rod too, and fission I’ll have a chat with um, and talk to um, cause a think am the urnly man, I think, I can help um through this. A’ve talked to the Pleece. A sez, “Listen,” a sez, “A nur the guy, he’s a nice guy.” A sez a wanna go through where they had everything cordoned off. I wanna get through there but the Pleece wouldn’t let us. So that was a wairsta tame. Cause they would be frightened in case he’d, lake, shoot me, y’gnaw. But I told um, “He will not shoot me.” <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">It’s a dangerous situation, though, Gazza, isn’t it?</span><br /><br />Lissen. A’ve just been in a car crash, hit a wall at nanety male an owwa. A’ve survaived that. Gnawun may luck he’d probly miss. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">So what you’re saying is, you want to go in there, you want to help negotiate?</span><br /><br />A’ve got a jacket, a’ve got a dressun goan, a’ve got some chicken, a’ve got some bread, a’ve got a can of lawga, a’ve got a fission rod, a've got my fission rod, and am willun to sit down and dish out, "Moaty! It's Gazza! Whay-aye!” And a guarantee if I shout his name out — “Am heeya!” — we can sit and chat, and me and him can sit and chat, a little bit of fission, and all a’d tell um, ad say, “Moaty, listen....”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">So you could sort it out and have a man-to-man chat with him — two pals on the riverbank?</span><br /><br />Yeah, two friends on the riverbank from Newcastle… look, listen, A’d be just, ya nur, “Put the gun aware, thruh it in the rivva,” sayun, “Look, Mawty, the worst of the worst, ya might get a twelve-yair stretch. The Pleece are not gonna kill ya.” Cause a nur he’s willun to give in now, cause I think whatever he was on, it’s worn off. A’d say, “The Pleece are not gonna kill ya.” He might do a twelve-yair stretch, obvisslee, for killun someone, which is not very naice, but he did it because obvisslee he was high on drugs probly, rate? For good behaviour he’d get oat after six yairz.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Paul, have you been in touch with him recently?</span><br /><br />Naw, because a’ve been in hospital.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">When did you last talk to him?</span><br /><br />Well, a seen um a suppose a year and a half ago when a was in Newcastle.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">When you spoke to him then, how was he?</span><br /><br />How was he? Sounza bell. Nowt wrang with um. He’s a boansa, he’s a good lad, he’s a hard guy, he’s a jettilman, but it’s not naice when his girlfriend ran off with anotha guy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Gazza, thank you very much for talking to us on Real Radio tonight.</span><br /><br />Thank you very much, and do us a favour?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Go on....</span><br /><br />Send a cheque through the purst, ha ha.... Unnly jerkun.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-5100020647297249772010-06-15T12:23:00.006+02:002010-06-15T12:41:37.262+02:00Just turn round, will you? I want to read your shirtAt some point during this World Cup I want to sit bolt upright and go "Who the fuck is <i>that</i>?" I want to cross my fingers hoping a player will turn round in close-up so I can see how his name - which I'd never heard in my life before until the commentator just garbled it - is written on the back of his shirt. <br /><br />All I ask is to be pleasantly surprised by a player at the World Cup. Is that really such a tall order?<br /><br />Only three players have managed to squeeze an "ooh" out of me so far, spurring a frisson of excitement every time they got the ball. One of them was Leo Messi, arguably the only player since Maradona who surprises you if he <i>doesn't</i> get you to go "ooh". The other two - with names that would make a cracking pair of competing soap powders, as it happens - were Özil and Elia, playing for Germany and Holland, respectively. <br /><br />They both impressed me, yes, but did they surprise me? Not really, no. I'd had a good idea of what to expect for several months during all the pre-tournament build-up. (I hardly devour the sports press, but they were hard to miss: both had been touted - along with four hundred and eighty-seven others - as candidates to fill the slot at Barcelona that Thierry Henry is expected to vacate this summer.)<br /><br />I note with dismay that, apart from the Spanish players who I watch every week (sorry, Jesús Navas, but you've been a known entity for years), only Cristiano Ronaldo plus a supporting cast of ten and Dunga’s notoriously ooh-lite Brazil remain ready to set their wares out on the table for our delectation. It looks increasingly as though - unless the Dear Leader in Pyongyang has something up his cowpat-brown sleeve - my dream of being surprised by a player at this World Cup will be unrealised. <br /><br />Thanks, YouTube. Thanks a fat lot.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-77256222997943580922010-06-12T12:20:00.019+02:002010-06-12T14:33:54.142+02:00Edward G. Robinson's banana kick<a href="http://s264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/?action=view¤t=3320aoy-1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/3320aoy-1.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" align="center"></a><br /><br />Having watched the first three matches of the World Cup, I've got a "little man inside", like Edward G. Robinson's in <i>Double Indemnity</i>, and he's starting to whisper that there's something here that doesn't square.<br /><br />It's not the schedule-shredding kick-off times – "No, dear, I'm afraid I can't do the weekly shop; aren't you aware that dark horses Greece are up against ever-unpredictable South Korea?" It's not the aural migraine of the "atmosphere-enhancing" vuvuzelas. It's not even the flying FIFA logo that announces, with all the elegance of an Allied Carpets advert, the eighth ultra-slomo replay of a ball trundling disconsolately into touch three minutes into the first half. No, it's none of that.<br /><br />Deep, deep breath.<br /><br />It's the football. It's not very good, is it? In the second half of last night's lifeblood-vacuuming France-Uruguay match I placed my hand over my heart and asked myself a question. Is this really any better than watching Coventry City versus Everton (or, more likely in my case, its equivalent: Mallorca versus Racing Santander)? Unless I could say "Yessiree, Bob!" faster than Thierry Henry falls over clutching a random body part, shouldn’t I be doing something more satisfying, if not productive, with my time? <br /><br />But I stuck with it to the miserable nil-nilly end. Of course I did.<br /><br />I'm convinced that we have an image of the World Cup that's not unlike our image of our body shape: burned at some point in the increasingly distant past into non-editable ROM in our brains. For me - someone who'd be pushed to describe himself as even a late-summer chicken - that image consists of a bunch of Thornton's-fudge-coloured men wearing bleedy yellow and blue on an even bleedier Subbuteo-green pitch, strolling rings (running was a development that would only come much later) around an abject shower of lumbering Europeans. What exotic planet did these marvellous creatures come from? What was this strange magic that they wove? Did you see that free kick? It actually <i>curved in the air!</i> Did you see that move? Five passes and the ball <i>never left the ground!</i> <br /><br />Of course Pele is the greatest player of all time. How could he not be? We only ever saw him play for three weeks every four years. We had to imagine all the rest while we were watching Sunderland in the mud.<br /><br />Now, the world's half-decent players are so familiar to us we're sick of the sight of most of them. We're terminally over-Tevezed and all Drogba’d out. And, let's face it, not even <i>los supercracks</i> – those inhabitants of football's Mount Olympus who are usually referred to by TV pundits as "the likes of yer Messis and Ronaldos" - are, while playing with a group of semi-strangers, likely to come up with anything that we don't see them doing for their European clubs twice a week. <br /><br />That's what Edward G's little man inside has been saying, anyway. But he's not alone in there. He has to compete with that little lad and his gaudy, bleedy blues, greens and yellows, like a watercolour in the rain. And that's why, hope against hope, I'll be there for Algeria-Slovenia tomorrow, on the off chance it might unveil, to a world enraptured, a 21st-century equivalent of Rivellino's banana kick.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-21979367918229215782009-11-24T12:53:00.011+01:002009-11-25T09:55:15.356+01:00Game of the Day?<a href="http://s264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/?action=view¤t=advert570subbuteo-1.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii189/visionspan/advert570subbuteo-1.gif" border="0" alt="Photobucket" align="left"></a> <b>Barcelona's Lionel Messi may miss Inter Milan game</b><br /><br />So says the BBC website. Although, as far as I know, Messi isn't missing his game at all. It's the same as it ever was: one of sewing the ball to his left boot, wrong-footing opponents, instantly changing pace, laying on surgical through-balls or chipping it over Iker Casillas's head.<br /><br />Subbuteo is a game. Barcelona v. Inter Milan is a <i>match.</i><br /><br />Oh, while we're at it, calling him "Lionel Messi" is like referring to "Robert Charlton", "James Greaves" or "Kenneth Dalglish". On Messi's website, on his autograph and on his FC Barcelona data sheet it says his first name is "Leo". (Although maybe this is just the UK media's revenge for the Spanish media's decades-long insistence on "John Benjamin Toshack".)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-56786601691539282072009-11-20T12:58:00.020+01:002009-11-20T15:49:09.476+01:00Lies, damned lies and Google statsI can and did walk away from being called (deep breath) "ridiculous", "sanctimonious", "not as capable as he thinks he is", "smarmy", "the Leader" of a "cult”, "on his high horse", "over-inflated", "deluded”, "pompous”, "Spoilt Bastard", "big-headed", "incompetent" and "smug”. What I can't walk away from is being accused of "telling lies" and then - just in case I didn’t get the message - "outright lies", followed by "lies, for Heaven's sake!" (the caps lock is probably coming next).<br /><br />First, I said that Googling "unadvisably" - AKA the Adverb From Hell (AFH) - brought up a host of hits from a bunch of eminent authors and publications, from Milton to the present day. And indeed it does - with <a href="http://books.google.es/books?q=unadvisably&btnG=Buscar+libros">over six hundred citations</a> in the Google Books corpus alone (to give you an idea of how conclusive that is, that’s twenty times as many citations as come up for its first cousin "ill-judgedly", a word that Fay Weldon has used in print without anyone accusing her of not knowing bad writing from good).<br /><br />Second, I said that the AFH was in <i>The Concise Oxford Dictionary</i>. And indeed it is — or rather "unadvisable" and "advisably" are, but with this note in the "Using this Dictionary" section: <br /><br /><blockquote>The inflection of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs is given when it is irregular, or when, though regular, it causes difficulty</blockquote><br />That, in case it needs spelling out (and in this case I fear it probably does), means that an adverb <i>won't</i> be included if it’s regular, as the AFH is, and causes no difficulties, as the AFH doesn't - or at least managed not to for several hundred years until they started braying "It's not a word!" at it on the Internet. <br /><br />I can't even remember why I used the AFH in the first place. It's certainly not a word I bandy about in my everyday conversation. I assume I may have wanted to avoid using another adjective beginning with an "i" in the sentence it appeared in, or something subconsciously style-driven of a similar sort. Hell, it may even have been a typo, and I let it stand because I knew full well that, while not particularly common, it's a perfectly kosher word - as Google Books and dictionaries then more than confirmed. <br /><br />So there we have it. More lies than you can shake your dic at. Six hundred and eight of them, in fact. <br /><br />To paraphrase the bloke who inadvertently started this whole surreal and sorry saga: fuck off, middlerabbit.<br /><br /><center>.</center>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-19965792939805580292009-11-07T10:05:00.011+01:002009-11-11T09:52:33.876+01:00iPhones for sale (foreigners need not apply)Four days ago, I went to a Movistar shop (an actual owned-by-Telefónica shop, not a franchise or associated dealership) in a Spanish city to upgrade my wonky old prepaid Motorola to a contract for a spanking new 32-gig iPhone 3GS. Yes, they’d arrived at last, after a mere three-month wait (as discussed <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1387">here</a>). I was armed with everything required: multiple ID, bank details, SIM card, the works. All was well until the very end of the 25-minute form-filling, photocopying and key-tapping procedure, when the shop assistant looked up from her screen, shrugged, and said, “‘Transaction unauthorised’, it says here.”<br /><br />“Er, sorry? I’m offering to give you €239 in cash right now and commit, in the middle of a recession, by means of a legally binding contract, to at least a further €700 over the next 18 months in flat-rate fees and charges, and you’re <i>not interested?</i> Why, pray, why?” I beseeched the shop assistant (perhaps not in those exact words).<br /><br />“I’m not allowed to know,” was her reply, so sheepish that all the local dogs started growling. Apparently I would have to wait for a call from the “Traffic Department”, who would explain the problem and how it might be solved.<br /><br />So I waited. And waited. Since the promised call from the Traffic Department was not forthcoming, I called them (via nine calls to a call centre in Honduras, as you do). It turns out they wanted a €150 deposit, returnable in six months, provided I was up to date with my monthly fees and charges.<br /><br />“Is this because of the ‘X’ at the beginning of my ID-card number, by any chance? Because I’m not a Spanish citizen and therefore not to be trusted to pay my bills?”<br /><br />“No, no. It’s just that it’s not quite as easy to buy an iPhone as it used to be.”<br /><br />“Ah, so everyone who wants to buy one has to spend half an hour filling in all the forms only to be told that they’ll have to wait for a call from you that never comes so they have to phone Honduras nine times to find out that you expect a deposit? That’s your system for selling iPhones, is it? Across the board?”<br /><br />“Er…(a pause so pregnant its waters were breaking)… yes.”<br /><br />He was lying. I could hear his eyes flicking away to the left and his foot twitching to stub out an imaginary cigarette end as he said it.<br /><br />I really, really want an iPhone, so I just sighed and asked how I should go about paying the deposit. He gave me an account number to pay the €150 into. Oh, but I couldn’t do it via bank transfer over the Internet; it had to be done in person at a specific physical bank. Oh, and the specific physical bank had to stamp the receipt legibly – very important that. Oh, and I then had to fax (fax!) the receipt to a number that he gave me. Then, and only then, would I be able to buy my iPhone.<br /><br />The following morning I went to the specific physical bank, €150 in cash akimbo, to make the required deposit. The cashier laughed in my face. “Did Movistar give you this account number?” he asked me.<br /><br />“Er, yes… and?”<br /><br />“It was a temporary account. It’s been closed for months. It doesn’t exist. Sorry.”<br /><br />So I took the most radical, most dramatic action that was open to me: I called Honduras nine times again. Eventually (a word that will forever be associated with the Telefónica group the world over), they gave me an account number that they assured me does indeed exist, and this morning I went to specific physical bank No. 2 to try again. The cashier laughed in my face. “Cash deposits can only be made into this account between the 10th and 20th of every month. Oh, and only before 10:30 a.m.”<br /><br />Eventually (there goes that word again), I managed to send them the money in accordance with their terms by driving 15 miles to my own branch and doing a transfer from there. Having now spent an entire afternoon and an entire morning trying to buy an iPhone, I will apparently be able to complete the transaction next Tuesday - that's eight days after uttering the fateful words "I'd like to buy an iPhone, please" - because the “system” will take 48-72 hours to approve the operation. That’s provided, of course, that the fax number he gave me was correct, that it arrived, that it was legible and that it had its very-important-that stamp duly in place.<br /><br />The upshot is that Movistar discriminate against immigrants, which is illegal. There; I’ve said it. Let them sue me if they dare.<br /><br />My advice? Go to Vodafone or Orange and buy a sodding BlackBerry. Or if you really, really, <i>really</i> want an iPhone, take out Spanish citizenship. It’s easier.<br /><br /><b>UPDATE</b><br /><br />Incredible. After only eight days, eighteen calls to Honduras, three bank trips and five visits to the shop (estimated total leaning-abjectly-on-counter time: five and three quarter hours), I now <i>own an iPhone!</i> I had to pay €150 in Feelthy Foreigner Tax for it, but it works. Well, nearly. My SIM card is apparently old and knackered and needs replacing in order for me to get "optimum functionality" (jargoneers: if you really, really must, try at least to use the right crap adjective, which is "optimal", OK?), and the duplicate machine wasn't working. "We'll call you," they said, so I took the most radical, most dramatic course action open to me: I muttered "OK", grabbed my iPhone as if it was my genitals in a defensive wall facing Dani Alves, and ran out of the shop.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5993082262710797745.post-80760704411488849692009-09-30T10:16:00.049+02:002012-10-04T16:19:24.544+02:001977: Another World, Another Planet<div style="color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In 1977, girls who had sex with anyone other than a steady boyfriend without putting up some kind of resistance, albeit token, were widely considered at best to have <i>no class</i> and at worst to be <i>sluts</i> or <i>slags</i>.[1]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">While many women, and much of society as a whole, saw a woman's primary role to be to <i>please</i> men, many men were driven by <i>the thrill of the chase</i>, where the concepts of male <i>conquest</i> and <i>the art of seduction</i> were still the norm for heterosexual relations. And, if you think about it, what is seduction if not leading someone to a place they neither expect nor really want to go? And what are the conquered if not victims? Yesterday's seduction is today’s date rape.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">That evening at Jack Nicholson's house, Roman Polanski probably thought he was only doing what Jason King did every week on TV. Men were expected to <i>smooth-talk</i> girls into bed, and if champagne and jacuzzis were involved, so much the better. ("I do not believe it was Mr. Polanski's intention to frighten me or cause me harm." --Samantha Geimer in a letter to the L.A. Superior Court, 1997.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In 1977, still a couple of decades before paedophiliaphobia kicked in, hardcore child pornography was on open sale in several European countries - the "miracle" then-West Germany, for one - in the form of glossy magazines, complete with the publisher's masthead on nonchalant display. It was simply a niche market - not unlike the ones for coin collectors or model-railway enthusiasts - and the girls depicted were often a lot younger than 13.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In some U.S. states the age of consent for girls was 15 or even 12. In Mississippi there was no age of consent for a girl to marry at all, provided her parents approved of the relationship.[2]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The rules weren't quite so lax for gay people. Consensual gay sex in private (as we say now - back then, with full Biblical wrath, it was still termed "sodomy") had ceased to be a felony in California only the year before the Polanski-Geimer case.[3]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Such attitudes may seem disturbingly sexist and homophobic to us now, but then it was a world in which older men who used their <i>wiles</i> to seduce young teenagers without physically harming them were not considered to be predatory paedophiles - only the Moors Murderers and the dreaded <i>men in cars</i> were that - but just <i>studs</i> who specialised in <i>cherry-picking</i> because they happened to have <i>a weakness for fresh fruit</i>.[4] Slang can be quite telling about the era it belongs to.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The sociosexual morés of 1977 were so utterly different from those of today that it wasn't the pubescent girl who people saw as the victim in Nabokov's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Lolita</i>; it was the "poor", "hopelessly besotted" Humbert Humbert.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">1977 and 2009: different strokes for different folks - and different crimes for different times.</span></div>
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<small><span style="font-size: xx-small;">1. Women were still "girls" then. In the UK, girls considered attractive by men were "crumpet" - a free-market commodity that was measured in "pieces". If deemed unattractive, they were "dogs".</span></small></div>
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<small><span style="font-size: xx-small;">2. This explains why Jerry Lee Lewis was able to marry a 13-year-old cousin of his.</span></small></div>
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<small><span style="font-size: xx-small;">3. Between 1947 and 1976, Californians convicted under the sodomy laws were monitored on a "register of sex offenders" (ring any bells?) and had to report any change of address.</span></small></div>
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<small><span style="font-size: xx-small;">4. Two years before he met Samantha Geimer, Polanski had a brief sexual relationship with Nastassja Kinski, apparently with her father’s blessing. She was 15.</span></small></div>
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