Monday, April 24, 2006
I love Juhmpa Lahiri. I also love Zadie Smith. I like to think that my fondness is for their writing. So this story piques my interest. Some girl wrote a silly novel while a freshman at harvard about college pressure on a first generation indian immigrant. "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/books/06opal.html?ex=1146024000&en=6cde05dcafe442be&ei=5070 Sounds amusing and topical. kudos for her. Perhaps it answers the question of how the garcia girls lost their accent.
anyway, apparently now someone is accusing her of plagiarizing bits of the book from another chick-lit book about nerds becoming cool. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Young-Author.htmlhp&ex=1145937600&en=0c52b6fd2e713543&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Perhaps she and nic mcdonell (who wrote an autobiographical "novel" "twelve" about wild private high schoolers in New York (no word on whether bret easton ellis is suing him on similar grounds) while in a private high school in New York and got it published because his parents are publishers) hang out at the 'vard and swap stories. http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/t/twelve.shtml.
I am covering this story in part because I am jealous, in part because I think the NYT's obsession with ivy league gossip is unhealthy and perpetuates the cyclical nature of cultural classism, and in part because it is sortof sad. I am sure the plagiarism was incidental. Do you remember stuff you wrote at 19? Would it have withstood this kind of scrutiny. Stop publishing children; they aren't writers. Literature is one area I would expect to show a little restraint with regards to the allure of youth culture. You reap what you sow.
in addition, I was in bridal boutique on saturday looking for a-line bridesmaid dresses (not as easy as you might imagine). 1. you have to remove your shoes before entering a bridal shop. It gives the bridal shop the aura of an eastern temple which is culturally relevant because the bridal shop is the western location where you buy the clothes to enter the actual place of worship.Some in AmStud grad school get on the cultural ramifications of this right now! 2. In the bridal shop, they were playing the song that gives the killer synthesizer hook to madonna's "hung up." It is "gimme gimme gimme (a man after midnight)" by ABBA....and it is completely terrible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/books/06opal.html?ex=1146024000&en=6cde05dcafe442be&ei=5070 Sounds amusing and topical. kudos for her. Perhaps it answers the question of how the garcia girls lost their accent.
anyway, apparently now someone is accusing her of plagiarizing bits of the book from another chick-lit book about nerds becoming cool. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Young-Author.htmlhp&ex=1145937600&en=0c52b6fd2e713543&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Perhaps she and nic mcdonell (who wrote an autobiographical "novel" "twelve" about wild private high schoolers in New York (no word on whether bret easton ellis is suing him on similar grounds) while in a private high school in New York and got it published because his parents are publishers) hang out at the 'vard and swap stories. http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/t/twelve.shtml.
I am covering this story in part because I am jealous, in part because I think the NYT's obsession with ivy league gossip is unhealthy and perpetuates the cyclical nature of cultural classism, and in part because it is sortof sad. I am sure the plagiarism was incidental. Do you remember stuff you wrote at 19? Would it have withstood this kind of scrutiny. Stop publishing children; they aren't writers. Literature is one area I would expect to show a little restraint with regards to the allure of youth culture. You reap what you sow.
in addition, I was in bridal boutique on saturday looking for a-line bridesmaid dresses (not as easy as you might imagine). 1. you have to remove your shoes before entering a bridal shop. It gives the bridal shop the aura of an eastern temple which is culturally relevant because the bridal shop is the western location where you buy the clothes to enter the actual place of worship.Some in AmStud grad school get on the cultural ramifications of this right now! 2. In the bridal shop, they were playing the song that gives the killer synthesizer hook to madonna's "hung up." It is "gimme gimme gimme (a man after midnight)" by ABBA....and it is completely terrible.
# posted by 8yearoldsdude @ 11:50 AM 
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I didn't know they made A-line dresses in a "size Britt". Are you going to be a bridesmaid?
-EWK
-EWK
# posted by 
: 4:21 PM
: 4:21 PM
Yes, it's against the rules of blogging to mention that you happened to be looking for a bridesmaid dress, A-line or otherwise, w/o providing more context!
What irritates me about the teen novelist flap is how Harvard undergrads really believe this place is the be-all-end-all of higher learning, and that the prospect of not getting in can be the premise of a novel plus movie.
A sophomore in my language class recently asked where I went for undergrad and then said, "That's not bad." 'Twas inconceivable to him that anyone might've decided to go elsewhere after meeting a bunch of kids like him.
What irritates me about the teen novelist flap is how Harvard undergrads really believe this place is the be-all-end-all of higher learning, and that the prospect of not getting in can be the premise of a novel plus movie.
A sophomore in my language class recently asked where I went for undergrad and then said, "That's not bad." 'Twas inconceivable to him that anyone might've decided to go elsewhere after meeting a bunch of kids like him.
# posted by : 4:56 PM
: 4:56 PM
Britt - great post today! Malcolm Gladwell had a great New Yorker article about 2 years ago, in which he wrote about exactly these sort of influences in literature and in music. Knowing your love of Gladwell, you would really like the article. Unfortunately I don't remember its title.
Re: the Madonna hook and Abba. Growing up in my parents' household, I heard a bit of Abba growing up. I never liked Gimme Gimme Gimme, but I do really like "Hung Up" -- in my opinion, a lot of the best dance and hip-hop takes good aspects of otherwise mediocre older songs and turns them into something fresh. On the other hand, there are some famous Puff Daddy and Tupac songs that basically take entire songs and just provide new lyrics to them. That, to me, is unoriginal and hackish. The people like Madoona (or at least the people who put her tracks together) and DJ Danger Mouse who're able to take old songs apart and put them back together again in new arrangements are much more artistically credible in my opinion.
Re: the Madonna hook and Abba. Growing up in my parents' household, I heard a bit of Abba growing up. I never liked Gimme Gimme Gimme, but I do really like "Hung Up" -- in my opinion, a lot of the best dance and hip-hop takes good aspects of otherwise mediocre older songs and turns them into something fresh. On the other hand, there are some famous Puff Daddy and Tupac songs that basically take entire songs and just provide new lyrics to them. That, to me, is unoriginal and hackish. The people like Madoona (or at least the people who put her tracks together) and DJ Danger Mouse who're able to take old songs apart and put them back together again in new arrangements are much more artistically credible in my opinion.
I agree that the sort of literature mentioned in that article is faddish and will go away sooner or later. It started when I was in college - actually, guy on the lightweight crew team (class of '00) published a "how I got into Yale" memoir that was reviewed in the NY Times sunday book review despite the fact that it was bland and unremarkable in every way. If it was titled "how I got into Stanford," I doubt it would have found a publisher.
In recent years, the NY Times has made national news out of the President of Harvard pointing out that there aren't as many cutting-edge female mathematicians as there are male mathematicians and Yale's labor unrest, among other incidents. On the one hand, its sort of a badge of pride -- if the president of almost any other university said that, nobody outside of the area code would care about it one way or the other. We can take some pride in knowing that the leaders of our insitutions -- and here I think not just of Larry Summers but of the recently deceased Reverened William Sloane Coffin -- really do drive the national agenda. However, I think you're right to say that the NY Times' interest in Ivy League gossip either fosters actual cultural classism or, at very least, the appearance of cultural classism, and reinforced the Niles Crane stereotype that so many people associate with Yale and Harvard.
In recent years, the NY Times has made national news out of the President of Harvard pointing out that there aren't as many cutting-edge female mathematicians as there are male mathematicians and Yale's labor unrest, among other incidents. On the one hand, its sort of a badge of pride -- if the president of almost any other university said that, nobody outside of the area code would care about it one way or the other. We can take some pride in knowing that the leaders of our insitutions -- and here I think not just of Larry Summers but of the recently deceased Reverened William Sloane Coffin -- really do drive the national agenda. However, I think you're right to say that the NY Times' interest in Ivy League gossip either fosters actual cultural classism or, at very least, the appearance of cultural classism, and reinforced the Niles Crane stereotype that so many people associate with Yale and Harvard.
I always rather liked the fact that Monty Burns and Sideshow Bob went to Yale. (Thanks to the Harvard writing staff on the Simpsons.) I think we should promote that stereotype.
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# posted by : 10:40 AM
: 10:40 AM << Home
