Kevin Allman

Nancy Nall kayos a plagiarist in one round

The always-excellent Nancy Nall, former columnist for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, posted a blog entry this morning about Tim Goeglein, a News-Sentinel op-ed contributor and special assistant to President Bush. Intrigued by an unusual name in Goeglein's latest column, she Googled the fellow and found that much of the column had been written, nearly verbatim, a decade before by someone else.

Nall laid out the evidence of plagiarism (see, cheaters? Cut-and-paste works both ways!) and concluded:

I mentioned at the top of this post that I feel bad about what I’m going to do here. (I stole that line, by the way; it’s Nora Ephron’s opening for her devastating profile of Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Now that I’ve given credit, it’s not plagiarism, it’s an homage. See how it works?) I feel bad because my old buddy Leo Morris, who edits the op-ed pages, is going to bear the brunt of this — the investigation, the uncomfortable announcement to readers, the search through the archives for more time bombs, the embarrassment of being took by someone any editor would trust, a self-styled intellectual and senior White House aide, for crying out loud. But either this stuff is important or it isn’t, and I say it is.

By early afternoon, Nall's readers had found several more easily Googled examples of plagiarism, Goeglein had 'fessed up and apologized, and the News-Sentinel ran the "uncomfortable announcement" that Nall had predicted even as its editors searched for more time bombs. (There were 20 and counting at last check; the little weasel had even Domeneched people like The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani and The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley and Michael Dirda, for God's sake.)

And by late afternoon, an official release from the White House press secretary:

Today, Tim accepted responsibility for the columns published under his name in his local newspaper, and has apologized for not upholding the standards expected by the President. The President was disappointed to learn of the matter, and he was saddened for Tim and his family. He has long appreciated Tim's service, and he knows him to be a good person who is committed to his country. President Bush accepted Tim's resignation today.

From blog entry to high-level political resignation in one news cycle: good on ya, Nancy Nall.

What Heath Ledger drinks

Early deadlines are perilous for a feature writer: the restaurant closes, the politico resigns in a sex scandal, or the couple who reveal "the secret to a happy marriage" up and die on you.

Perilous, perilous. Just ask the editors of In Style magazine, whose "What's Hot Now" product-puffery column obviously went to bed before a certain actor did:

And still it's not the most unfortunate item on the page:

"...hot-spot Wakiya -- frequented by Beyoncé -- kumquat-ginger granita with chocolate-basil spring rolls...."

Chocolate-basil spring rolls?

Memo to self: Next time Beyoncé calls and wants to go to dinner, don't let her pick the restaurant.

Hat tip for the item: Laura F.

Anne Rice: she's baaaack...

...or so she tells Time magazine this week:

"One more book." Those are the words Anne Rice fans have been dying to hear about the Vampire Chronicles ever since her shocking — and dismaying to many of his followers — turn to religious writing. Long seen as a committed atheist, four years ago the best-selling author drove a stake through the hearts of her followers when she vowed to abandon her sinister stories and instead write only of the Lord.

Turns out, vampires aren't that easy to kill. In an interview with TIME, the best-selling author of Interview with the Vampire and The Queen of the Damned, has revealed that she plans to write one last book about Lestat, the feared, yet beloved, blood-sucking main character in her gothic novel series. "When I published my first book about the Lord I said I would never write about those characters again," Rice acknowledged. "But I have one more book that I would really like to write. It will be a story that I need to tell."

This must be great news to her legions of vampire fans, who I don't think have embraced her Christian novels with the same brio that they did the Lestat books. (Her latest, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, comes out next month, and I doubt that this announcement on the eve of its publication was a coincidence.)

I'm not a Rice fan, but I'm not a detractor, either. That said, I reviewed two of her last Vampire books, and they were just Too Much -- too much description, too much melodrama, too much everything. By page 500, I had verbal gout. This excerpt from my review of 1998's The Vampire Armand in The Washington Post holds up pretty well, and sums up her latter-day vampire career:

As usual, it’s not just the epic plot, but Rice’s voluptuary worldview that’s the main attraction. Not many writers can shift from ruminations on Christianity into casual homoeroticism without stripping their gears, but Rice does it with ease. Elegant narrative has always been her hallmark; she glops on juicy, rococo descriptions as if they were scoops of whipped cream. And her talent for describing Gothic interiors down to the last bibelot and objet d’art makes her the Martha Stewart of the Charles Addams set.

Not all of Armand works this well. At times, Rice’s loamy dialogue veers into Barbara Cartlandisms (“Your face is as a jewel given me, which I can never forget, though I may foolishly lose it. Its glister will torture me forever.”). And when Rice brings these florid folk to modern-day New Orleans, she dilutes both the power of their personae and the power of the narrative; these characters seem too overripe for even the most elegantly decadent of American cities.

That said: I really hope that the story she "has" to tell somehow involves her vampires during and after Hurricane Katrina, because if there was ever a backdrop for her brand of sorrow and excess, that's it. I was at a Borders on Saturday and came across a table groaning with newly published Katrina books; a few looked interesting, but not one of them compelled me to buy it. But the dead souls of the Rice cosmology mingling with the dead souls in Katrina's wake: there are a lot of possibilities there. It could be a late-career shot in the arm...or it could be a huge mess. But read it? You bet I would.

Just don't let Tom Cruise anywhere near the project.

Time magazine, 1963, on black slang

Undercover Black Man has posted a fascinating article from an August 1963 issue of Time magazine, which tried to pull the cover off some of the black slang of the day for white folks:

A white man who attended a Negro civil rights rally as a spectator might well be puzzled to hear a speaker say "Now let's get down to the nitty-gritty."....

When U.S. Negroes talk to one an other, their speech is often marbled with expressions incomprehensible to whites. Since slavery days, Negroes have created an ever-changing argot of their own, full of ambiguities, tinged with humor and sorrow.

Some of those incomprehensibilities that are pretty comprehensible 45 years later: "put down," "busted," "fuzz," and "fox." The article also explains "ace boon coon," which is still in circulation but probably wouldn't make the pages of Time today unless it was a direct quote.

UCB adds his own memories:

When I was coming up, only black folks would say “from the get-go.” Now, only white folks say it.

“Mickey D’s” is another one. That went from black slang to corporate asset in one generation. McDonald’s calls itself Mickey D’s nowadays. I even saw it on a McDonald’s receipt one time.

But as years pass, white people tend to forget where these words came from. Us too. I didn’t know, until I bought the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, that “the Big Apple” was originally black slang for New York.

I didn't know that either.

Busted.

Nancy Rommelmann on "JT Leroy"

Score another one for Nancy Rommelmann; her cover story in this morning's LA Weekly, a profile of the woman behind the JT Leroy literary hoax, is about the best feature reporting I've read so far this year.

"The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, aka JT Leroy" is the name of the story, and it explains, in great detail and with a good deal of psychological insight, how a fortyish woman could pull off posing as a teenage author-savant for the better part of a decade, stroked and coddled by a cadre of Hollywood and publishing lickspittles and sycophants. A terrific (and terrifically creepy) piece of work.

The Times-Picayune: why we did what we did

I never heard back from The Times-Picayune as to why the paper's editorial page editors bowdlerized their coverage of That Photo, then scrubbed the coverage from their website, but to its credit the T-P addressed the issue in an unsigned explanation in today's edition:

It's great that the T-P is being forthright with its readers, but I don't think attempting to scrub all evidence of what they considered an error was the correct approach. Keeping the Web versions of the razz and the LTTEs online, but appending an editor's note to each, would've been the right -- and the transparent -- thing to do...and would have given the impression that the paper was attempting to right a wrong, rather than cover its mistakes.

The Times-Picayune continues to scrub its coverage of the Nagin photo

Now this is getting ridiculous. After scrubbing its editorial page criticism of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin -- first in the print edition(s), and then in its online edition -- the Times-Picayune seems to have removed two letters to the editor about the incident from its website, replacing them with two different letters that did not appear on the main editorial page of today's edition.

Here are the letters that appeared in print today, and on the T-P website this morning:

Who's Bonnie? Who's Clyde?

What were they thinking? I said my thoughts out loud as I saw the appalling photo of Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Warren Riley accompanying reporter Walt Philbin's article on new police equipment in Wednesday's morning paper.

I hope I am not the only one in New Orleans who believes this picture shows grossly inappropriate behavior on the part of the mayor and police superintendent.

How are we to teach the youth of our city that guns are not playthings when we have the two highest-level city officials posing as bad Bonnie and Clyde wannabes?

The first rule in gun safety is never point a gun at another human.

New Orleans carries a very bad reputation as the murder capital of the United States, and the new crime-fighting equipment given to the Police Department is seriously needed.

I do wish the mayor would curb his impulses and try not to act like a buffoon. He really is an embarrassment.

Christa Montgomery, New Orleans

We are not amused

I can't believe I saw a picture with our good Mayor Ray Nagin pointing a rifle at Police Superintendent Warren Riley in Wednesday's paper.

What's even more unbelievable is the fact that Riley finds it funny. What ignorance!

Kenneth Hamilton, New Orleans

But if you visit the paper's online opinion section this afternoon, both Christa Montgomery's and Kenneth Hamilton's letters have been disappeared, replaced with two different LTTEs that didn't run in my print edition:

And yet the original letters critical of the mayor and police superintendent are still buried on the Times-Picayune website...though for some reason someone seems to have stripped off the headlines and replaced them with Xs:

I've got an email query out to the Times-Picayune's editorial page editor Terri Troncale about the whole matter, and will be curious to hear the paper's explanation.

...and now it's gone from the online edition, too

That Times-Picayune editorial page slap at New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin over That Photo? First it disappeared from the print edition, and now the online copy has been memory-holed as well.

How the page appeared this morning:

...and as of 1 pm CST:

Curiouser and curiouser. Don't they know that in the Internet age nothing ever really disappears?

I've got a query into the Times-Pic's editorial page editor Terri Troncale to see what she says about it.

The Times-Picayune editorial page: bowdlerized?

Looks like someone on the Times-Picayune editorial board got cold feet about taking New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin to task over That Photo.

Here's a scan from my copy of this morning's editorial page:

And here's the same page from what appears to be a later edition of the paper:

Down the memory hole!

But if you're going to de-razz your opinions, don't forget to do it in the Internet edition, too -- at the moment, it's still live at the paper's website. Should they decide to memory-hole that one as well, here's the original text:

RAZZ

New Orleans Mayor RAY NAGIN violated the cardinal rule of gun safety -- never point a gun at anyone -- while showing off $1 million in equipment for the New Orleans Police Department. While posing for photographers, the mayor jokingly pointed an M-4 rifle at Police Superintendent Warren Riley. His action wasn't funny, and it sent the wrong message about how to safely handle weapons.

(Edited to add: Looks like the paper's "Caption This Photo!" contest has been taken down, too.)

Gun safety is no accident: the paper responds

In regard to That Photo of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and NOPD chief Warren Riley, the Times-Picayune would like you to know:

I'd love to read the emails and hear the phone calls that occasioned this non-correction.