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Ethics - do writers need any?

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there are...I don't know if they're moral rules though! More like legal ones.

 

An American librarian recently got into trouble for writing a memoir thinly disguised as fiction, describing all the bad (borderline illegal) activities of her patrons. Unfortunately this was published by a vanity press (a real publisher would have surely realised how dicey it was) local people recognised themselves, and now she's been sacked. I feel kind of sorry for her, if she'd just been a bit smarter she could have used her patron's antics as part of an original story and no-one would be any the wiser. Now she's ruined as a librarian and a writer.

 

A cautionary tale indeed. However possibly a fitting end for her career if she had been reduced to vanity publishing. Far better the honest underachievement of non-publishing in such a case. Maybe she'd have been better suited to a career in blackmail - now if she'd sold the books to the patrons, secretly...:hihi:

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It was Publish America, who pose as 'traditional publishers' to get $ from naive writers. She's not the first to be suckered in- but she's a librarian for godsakes, we're taught to research the truth of things! Yeah, blackmail would have been more lucrative.

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I'll make a note not to use them in future. Didn't she break some kind of librarians code of conduct as well?

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Houellebecq had a message? Please tell me what it was! I even watched the film and I still didn't get it!

 

Well ok, it wasn't a clear MESSAGE, but the book is like:

 

It was a gloomy day, Joe lit a cigarrette and thought "What is the point of existence, our lives are doomed by the limitations of our physical selves, our society is hampered to the extent that we are splitting apart from each other, in fact we may have always been distant... (continues for 94 pages). Joe stubbed out the cigarette and ordered a beer.

 

The message is not tied with the story in the same way that, for example, Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood do it - not to say Atomised was a bad book, but sometimes it was like reading a philosophy essay plonked down in the middle of a story about a man who had trouble relating to people.

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I'll make a note not to use them in future. Didn't she break some kind of librarians code of conduct as well?

 

Yep, that's why she got fired. Actually, there are a couple of somewhat successful 'tell all' librarian memoirs but they were smart enough to disguise the places/people.

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Well ok, it wasn't a clear MESSAGE, but the book is like:

 

The message is not tied with the story in the same way that, for example, Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood do it - not to say Atomised was a bad book, but sometimes it was like reading a philosophy essay plonked down in the middle of a story about a man who had trouble relating to people.

 

Maybe it read better in the original - my school level French wouldn't enable me to tell. But it felt very dreary beside McEwan and Atwood.

 

But, apparantly, Atomised was supposed to be about this:

 

Atomised is an effort to sound the depths of perversity itself. Perversion, as Houellebecq's narrator acknowledges, is humanity's bitter response to an intolerable condition of its own technological devising: the separation of need and desire. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has identified in the serial erotic torpor of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, a desperate effort to bring together these radically divided categories, to make of sexual desire the habitual essence of quotidian existence.

 

http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/atomised.html

 

If so IMO de Sade did a much more comprehensive job of sounding the depths of perversity. Unfortunately, somewhat like Houellebecq, he never quite managed to write a readable book!

 

I hope Houellebecq enjoyed doing the research because this reader experienced very little pleasure with the finished work!

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Yep, that's why she got fired. Actually, there are a couple of somewhat successful 'tell all' librarian memoirs but they were smart enough to disguise the places/people.

 

Hmm, I'll never trust a librarian again.

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Well ok, it wasn't a clear MESSAGE, but the book is like:

 

It was a gloomy day, Joe lit a cigarrette and thought "What is the point of existence, our lives are doomed by the limitations of our physical selves, our society is hampered to the extent that we are splitting apart from each other, in fact we may have always been distant... (continues for 94 pages). Joe stubbed out the cigarette and ordered a beer.

 

The message is not tied with the story in the same way that, for example, Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood do it - not to say Atomised was a bad book, but sometimes it was like reading a philosophy essay plonked down in the middle of a story about a man who had trouble relating to people.

 

Hello,

 

You mentioned Margaret Atwood. Living in Canada: I have tried, believe me, to read her books but 94 pages or several chapters describing things like a wart on someones face, doesn't do it for me.

 

Long ago,I relegated M. Atwood to a list of authors I call my "Benchmark Set" - when their writing begins to resonate and have meaning, I will know that I have gone mad.

 

Then a little while ago, I picked up a short piece Margaret had written on the death of her beloved mother some months before. It was free of all the usual things we find in her books and very moving. Now I don't know if I have gone over the edge or not.

 

Regards

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As far as I know, the Publish America writer wasn't a librarian, but a library assistant. There's a long thread about the case over at Absolute Write, which makes compelling (if somewhat ugly) reading.

 

I'm sure that Publish America must have published a few good books in its time but I've never managed to find any.

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Hello,

 

You mentioned Margaret Atwood. Living in Canada: I have tried, believe me, to read her books but 94 pages or several chapters describing things like a wart on someones face, doesn't do it for me.

 

Long ago,I relegated M. Atwood to a list of authors I call my "Benchmark Set" - when their writing begins to resonate and have meaning, I will know that I have gone mad.

 

Then a little while ago, I picked up a short piece Margaret had written on the death of her beloved mother some months before. It was free of all the usual things we find in her books and very moving. Now I don't know if I have gone over the edge or not.

 

Regards

 

94 pages describing a wart? I must have missed that one, and been focussing on those novels of hers that are based on nothing but meaning (and politics, and history, and science - you know, the usual pointless stuff ;))

 

I think we must have been reading a different Atwood.

 

*puzzled*

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