The axe falls

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 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 routinely 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"...

Grasping the nettle

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...)

A very annoying anecdote

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...?!