Now I’m happy.
Geeks the world over have reason to celebrate today – George Lucas has finally listened to their pleas and is releasing the original versions of the ‘Star Wars’ trilogy on DVD.
On September 11, two-disc sets of ‘Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope’, ‘Episode V The Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘Episode VI Return of the Jedi’ will hit the streets, featuring the digitally restored and re-mastered versions of the movies.
And as bonus material, they will also include the holy grail for true ‘Star Wars’ fans – the original theatrical versions of the films.
And the article’s writer says something that Peter has said about eight thousand times:
As a fan of the originals, I’ve avoided buying the updated versions of the films in the hope that Lucas would one day listen to sense and release them in an untainted form.
Can’t wait…!
[tags]
I am not normally of a litigious turn of mind. But if the incision of the gentleman in this story fails to heal properly, and if I were he, by God would I hunt down someone at Paramount to sue.
Whose idea was this inane stunt…?!
(Full story about the promotional campaign and its other backfires here.)
[tags]Mission Impossible III[/tags]
The other morning, an Irish actress and cookbook writer whose food writing I really like — a lady named Biddy White Lennon — was on the morning show on TV3. She was making nettle soup.
Now this is a dish that has a long history over here — there were various hermits and hermit-saints who were reputedly fond of it, and there’s even a legend about one of them who got snarky with his cook when he found the man was ruining the (theoretically) strict asceticism of the saint’s nettles-only diet by sneaking oatmeal into the soup. Nettle soup also has something of a reputation as a spring tonic. 
While I watched Biddy making the soup — which took very little time — I thought, “Hey, with all the physical stuff I’ve got going on at the moment, I can probably use a little detox…” This impulse was strengthened when the on-air personality handed one of the studio crew a bowl of the stuff to taste, and was utterly unable to pry it away from him afterwards.
So I made it, and it was really good. Here’s how you do it.
You get a big pot, peel and chop a large onion, and saute it in the pot in a little butter. Then, when the onions are transparent, you put in about a liter and a half of water in a pot, and a bouillon cube / stock cube — chicken for preference. Bring this up to a boil and otherwise leave it to its own devices while you peel and chop up three or four medium-sized potatoes, or two or three largish ones. You want a “floury” variety for this, a baking potato, not a waxy one or salad variety. Put the potatoes in the pot and let them cook in the stock for twenty minutes.
While that’s going on, go out and pick your nettles. You want only the tender young tops — say the first inch and a half’s growth on a given stalk. The recipe as I saw it on screen called for 350 grams of nettles, but frankly, life is too busy around here to spend time weighing nettles. I saw the size of the container Biddy was using — a colander about eight inches deep, with a twelve-inch diameter — got my own colander, which was a rough match, and went out and picked nettles (wearing the rubber dishwashing gloves, naturally…) until it was full.
Once you’ve got your nettles, and when the potatoes are done, rinse the nettles well in some cold water, drain them and shake them to get rid of the excess, and dump them in the pot. You don’t need to cook them very long: in fact, if you do, you’ll ruin this dish, as you want to keep the maximum amount of the vitamins in place. Five minutes in the boiling stock/potato/onion mixture is plenty. The nettles are going to turn an impossibly vivid green (and the cooking very swiftly deactivates their stinging quality.).
When they’ve had their five minutes, take the pot off the heat, find the stick mixer (if you’ve got one: otherwise put the whole business in the blender, in stages) and liquefy the whole deal. You get a lovely thick soup with this astonishingly bright green springtime color.
Dish it out, add a swirl of cream (you can see my attempt to do so in the image, but for some reason the creme fraiche I was using came up in little bobbles instead: don’t ask me why, the cream was fine…). Maybe a crouton or so would go well too. I put some chopped chives on top….and then devoured about three bowls of the stuff, one after another, because it was really good. If you like spinach soup, this would be right up your alley.
(Peter suggested that adding some smoked bacon to the sauteeing stage would improve the soup even more. But he would say that: he likes smoked bacon in most things…)
[tags]soup, Ireland, Irish, Irish food, nettle, nettle soup[/tags]
Little, Brown has canceled Kaavya Viswanathan’s two-book contract, and announced that no revised edition of her first book will be issued.
The Harvard Crimson is now also reporting similarities between passages in How Opal Mehta… and passages in The Princess Diaries.
(sigh) So the noise of this continues to roll ’round the world, with people reacting in all kinds of directions (especially many unsympathetic variations on “How can a kid smart enough to get into Harvard still be so stupid” — sometimes with the added codicil “…as to get caught!”) and decrying everything in sight. (I did actually see one article that said “Society’s to blame!”, but now I can’t remember where I saw it. The best response to this probably remains the Pythonesque one: “Fine, let’s arrest them instead.”)
But the occasional voice can be heard rising from the noise and echoing my own opinion that Kaavya’s not the only one responsible for the contents of the book, or the results of its publication, and should not be left carrying the can…for there are two entities sharing the copyright. From Edward Hower at the Boston Globe:
Lest you think I’m the kind of reviewer who spends his spare time clubbing baby seals to death for sport, let me say up front that Kaavya Viswanathan, the 19-year-old author of ”How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” is unlikely to be responsible for all the inanities that abound in this product marketed under her name. The book, which the publisher is now racing to recall because of a plagiarism controversy, reads as if it were assembled by a committee, and, according to many reports, it was.
And here’s a reaction I hadn’t seen before. Under the article title “That Crazy Kaavya Chick Ruins Life For Us Legit Lit Lackeys”, a YA writer wonders if this is going to make us all look bad —
Even with the critical success of novels like Harry Potter and the commercial success of series like Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (both Alloy projects), young-adult authors already sometimes struggle to be seen as legitimate writers deserving of their ever-increasing space on Barnes & Noble shelves. When a (then) 17-year-old girl is paid a half-million dollars to join those ranks and then plagiarizes, she’s certainly not raising esteem for her craft.
This concerns me particularly because I’m also writing a young-adult novel, to be published next year. Like all the memoirists out there who cringed at the unmasking of James Frey’s fabrications/exaggerations (and at his subsequent public flogging and blank-eyed, half-hearted apologies), or like the journalists who winced at the train wreck that was the short-lived newspaper career of Jayson Blair or the Hollywood-immortalized magazine career of Stephen Glass, as a young-adult writer, I feel the collective, Homeresque “D’oh!” Now, every time I tell someone what it is I do for a living, I find myself bracing for the inevitable question: “What do you think about that Harvard student … ?”
Somehow I doubt this is really going to be that much of a problem in the future. If anything, it’s going to ensure that “real-world” YA stuff is going to be more carefully vetted, and originality will therefore have a better chance of being recognized. (Fantasy YA writers, of course, are these days laboring under a burden that sits at an entirely different end of the spectrum: rather than one writer having a work investigated and found to apparently borrow from others, many of us are now routinely assumed to be borrowing from one particular writer before anybody even cracks a cover to find out otherwise.) (Insert Rueful Grin here.)
But finally, here’s a very interesting thought from a Washington Post article:
In fact, as it emerges from interviews she gave before the plagiarism scandal erupted, Viswanathan’s unpackaged story was better than the processed story she — or her helpers — produced: the maternal grandfather in Madras who bought the 6-year-old Kaavya a copy of “Great Expectations” and made clear that his own expectation involved a doctor granddaughter. (She’s thinking investment banking, actually.) The mother immersed in planning an over-the-top book party. (“They wanted to have a red carpet strewn with rose petals. And I’ve just woken up and I’m still in my pajamas and my mom will call, and she’ll say like, ‘Kaavya, would you prefer pink or white rose petals?'”)
The cutthroat environment of Viswanathan’s science magnet school (“People would ask, ‘Who’s writing your recommendation for Yale?’ And they wouldn’t tell you because it gives you a competitive advantage if people don’t know.”) Viswanathan’s own overwrought Harvard admissions story (the e-mail server on which she was supposed to get her early action notice crashed, three other classmates got in, and Viswanathan, assuming that meant she’d been rejected, “spent the whole night — 13 straight hours — weeping inconsolably and trying to look at life ahead.”)
Life that is, in this case, more engaging, more nuanced and ultimately more disturbing than art.
Now there’s a story I’d gladly have read more of.
Is there possibly — despite all present appearances — still a book that Kaavya might successfully get published? An after-the-fact book about this whole unhappy situation…?
Meta, rather than “Mehta”…
[tags]Kaavya Viswanathan, Opal Mehta, Alloy Entertainment, plagiarism[/tags]
Just when you thought the Kaavya Viswanathan stuff might be about to die down a little, here comes the next wave.
Turns out one of the New York Times’s readers has caught a number of passages that appear to have been lifted from a book called “Can You Keep A Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella. There are fewer of them, this time: only three. But still…
My first thought was, “How many more books is this going to turn out to be a mashup of?”…and the second was, “I bet that poor kid’s become sorry this book ever saw the light of day.”
(sigh)
[tags]Kaavya Viswanathan, Sophie Kinsella, plagiarism[/tags]
We are apparently in the longest period since 113 B.C. during which no one has crossed the Rhine with fire and sword.
…of a kind. Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 is falling apart (as it has been since ’95, when its nucleus split in four). Check out this one-minute video, an animation created from Hubble Space Telescope stills, as the comet sheds some more of its interior on its inward swing toward the sun. (Its period is about five and a half years.)
…And no, it’s coming nowhere near us. The calved-off chunks will be passing Earth at something like seven million miles’ distance.
When out in Athy the other afternoon, we managed to score some plaintain from the local African grocery. This is a good thing, and calls for a brief swerve into something Caribbean for dinner.
So the breaded version of Cuban steak (with twice-fried plantain on the side) is on the menu. One thought, though. The recipe calls for the steak to be marinated in “sour orange juice”. Other similar recipes give a workaround for faking it with orange and lime juice. No problem: we have those.
The question, though, since I have an interest in rare/unusual citrus: what’s the standard source fruit for “sour orange juice” in Cuba? A Seville, perhaps? Anybody have an idea?
Must see if I can find somewhere that doesn’t want me to buy them in lots of 100. 
They’d be fun to have in the kitchen, though.
(I also kind of like this chili bracelet. There’s a ton of chili-oriented stuff out there on the Intarwebz, it seems. But I don’t have time to go hunting today: I’ve got a short story to finish.)
(Reminder to self: pull out that half-finished design for the logo of the “Department of Alcohol, Tabasco and Firearms”, finish it up, and get it made into a T-shirt for Peter.)
And an excellent writer. And he just did this wonderful long blog post just now (okay, it was really a couple of days ago) in which he said just about everything I’d say to a teenage writer (though in a different tone of voice, naturally).
All of you who’re teenagers and want to write, go read this.
Now playing: Bonnie Tyler – Here She Comes
The only amusing take (with a few home truths thrown in) that I’ve seen so far on the Kaavya Viswanathan situation:
It doesn’t help that publishers feel the need to compete with, say, “American Idol” and try to make people famous just because they’re young and potentially marketable. There’s a difference between a 17-year-old who sings an Avril Lavigne song on TV and one who is faced with the task of generating 314 pages that will be distributed and marketed all over the world.
Not that professional writers are all that, but published authors have to be more responsible than bloggers or MySpace types or clever e-mail writers. Sure, even though a few writers can be really good when they’re young — Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” when she was 19, but that was in 1816 when you weren’t always getting interrupted by text messages — even the most meticulous of them aren’t really up to the task until they’re in their 20s or even really old, like in their 30s or 40s.
An addendum: The Boston Globe takes a look at how the book deal itself was structured, and raises some questions about this kind of packaged / “cooperative” literary project.
”They are not paying out that much money to a 17-year-old with no track record,” said Boston literary agent Doe Coover. ”They are paying it to this organization which has had huge hits aimed at a similar audience.” And some wondered who is looking out for the creator of the work…
Interesting point, and one which may have gotten lost in the shuffle. This article points out that the copyright was split between the author and the packager, so that the author wouldn’t have gotten more than half of that $500,000 advance in any case. Yet it’s Visnawathan who is taking most of the heat for this: whereas (it seems to me) there’s been too little inquiry, in the press at least, to the packager’s role. (One exception being the NY Times article here.)
This story has a bit further to run, I’d say…
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