this is the best i can do at formulating my thoughts on this. yes, sal plascencia is a friend, but i’m really not at all worked up about any situation between him and shane jones. i am, however, worked up about the range of responses to sal’s accusations, if that’s what you want to call them. i don’t want to summarize them — they’re all right there. all i want to say is:
blake — your first response on the thread implicitly threatened to expose an anonymous (which i don’t like, but the site clearly allows it) user’s identity and tried to muddy the waters with “what about the connections between any book and any other book?” this is totally disengenuous and you know it. you’ve said elsewhere that you “never once thought about [light boxes] as even that much influenced by [people of paper].” i don’t believe this for a second (though if true it would suggest you are a bad reader or have a bad memory), but it’s impossible to prove, and is any case beside the point — it’s not an analytical statment, or “concrete point,” which is interesting because you made it in the context of telling the blog’s author that she should make a “concrete point.” also, shane jones has never denied being influenced by plascencia.
sal — without getting into an analysis of the similarities or lack thereof you’re claiming, it was your right to get on there if you felt that way, and it was right to do. also, i’m sorry if you don’t want me to get into this, but i have to deal with these folks too.
john madera — that hobart cut and paste is a red herring. if you don’t see this you need to work on contextualizing.
shane — no, this is not better done by email. sal’s book is not his alone now that it’s a public artifact (which is why you felt it was okay to riff on, no?), but neither is yours. public is a good place to discuss these things, and trying to make them private makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. many of your friends’ responses also make it look like you’ve got something to hide, and also like they suspect you’ve got something to hide. i’m not saying that you do. i’m talking about perception.
kathryn — you are my wife and you are awesome. your post was hands down the best on this thread, and could have generated discussion.
phm — you caused a conundrum. on the one hand, i believe you’re a tough guy, which is good. on the other hand, tough guys don’t get to shut down conversations for no reason. you contributed nothing to the conversation but tried to instill fear. why? because you like shane? do you know sal and dislike him? can you prove that sal’s “accusations” are mere assholery? because they look pretty legit from where i sit. also, this is a conudnrum because you were maybe my favorite commenter on htmlgiant and in the past when you spoke your mind you seemed pretty well informed.
me — this wasn’t tactful of you at all but still you believe it and stand by it. you would like to be colleagues with these people and would like to respect and be respected by them, but only if they can give and receive real criticism, because you know that sunshine up the ass has never made you or anyone a better writer.
almost everybody else — it is good to congratulate your friends, but it is not good to be a sycophant. the line is not fine at all. keep it in mind.
sycophants — i can’t decide whether you’re worse than people who encourage sycophants to admire them or not.
everybody — kumba-fuckin-ya. it’s gonna be corny when i say this, but i like htmlgiant and i like what you all have done for books. but don’t let it become an echo chamber. when shane’s book comes out with penguin, other people might see a resemblance to the people of paper. say the new york times says it — are you going to be able to shut them down with these tactics? is that the point? if it is, then stick to your echo chamber. if not, and you want to be better writers, i suggest thinking about kathryn’s comment.
way to bring in a ringer duder
“say the new york times says it — are you going to be able to shut them down with these tactics? is that the point? if it is, then stick to your echo chamber. if not, and you want to be better writers, i suggest thinking about kathryn’s comment.”
Well, the discussion is taking place on HTMLGIANT and has blown up via HTMLGIANT, with nary a comment deleted nor an administrative tactic deployed, so I don’t think it’s fair to call the entire site an “echo chamber” interested in “shut down” tactics. Individuals commentators have their individual comments. Even if you think we’re all shitty writers who could learn a stitch or two, we’re still all shitty writers with separate heads. Really, there’s no official HTMLGIANT take on anything, which is how it’s floated all along, probably to avoid the kind of groupthink you’re accusing “us” of here.
Personally, I think it’s a good and worthy discussion, and it’s got at least me to go out and buy a copy of PoP. I’ve never read PoP, so I didn’t presume to defend Shane one way or another in the comments, even though (maybe especially because) I posted the post and I think he’s a lovely guy. In fact, I think it’s great to have the kind of discussion Kathryn talks about in her comment. But just as it’s non-productive for any one person to suggest canning the whole discussion, it’s non-productive and disingenuous and brash for you to melt “everybody” who posts or comments on HTMLGIANT into one homogeneous blob.
I know this comment is kind of a minor entry in a pretty well-oiled genre of argument contributions, the “hey, you’re fine on most things but you suck on this thing,” but I think we might share a tendency to bristle when an otherwise intelligent case trips itself with some lame-ass closing flourish. So yeah, just like all tissue makers, all Asians, all jewelry thieves, all folk out there lazily “they’d:” HTMLGIANT, not one brain, not an echo chamber. Talk that shit out. I’m glad to see it get hot if it needs to get hot.
hey christian,
this post is smart and insightful and I agree with you. i think the post by PH (someone i’ve never met and don’t consider a friend) took things in a really wrong direction. i can’t control what people say on that blog. i wish he wouldn’t have acted that way, and in a way, i wish i would have acted differently.
i see what you mean by perception. my reaction to sal’s post was “whoa, here is a writer that i love really angered by me and that hurts me why don’t i offer a one on one with him?” that was just my gut reaction and at the time it felt honest and i did it. i also sent sal my personal phone number if he wanted to call me. i just wanted a chance to talk with him and not have the usual blog post banter and nonsene that usually takes place. maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do or way to react, but i did it and take responsibility for it.
anyways, i feel completely sick about the whole situation. i haven’t been sleeping or eating. just the idea that I have unintentionally hurt another writer, and one that i hold in very high esteem, makes my stomach turn. you’re right, i’ve never denied being influenced by people of paper. i love that book. it makes my book possible in many ways. people have compared the two and that’s fine. i believe they are both solid works of art that deserve to be read and from what i do know, both have been enjoyed by many people and will continue to do so, i hope.
i really don’t know what else to say. i’ve been talking to sal and he seems to be a very cool and smart guy and i wish i had talked to him before and been more up-front about the connections between the two books and my respect and the many ways i’m indebted to his work.
anyways, thanks for interjecting your intellect on HTMLGIANT and here. kind of refreshing.
i’ts currently 4am. i feel like a zombie.
yup, now rambling. hopefully i’ve made some sense on this post. maybe i’ll see you in albany again?
also, i may take a break from checking blogs so don’t take it personally if i don’t respond to another comment here. i just need a break.
shane — sleep and eat. and also celebrate — you’ve got a good thing going. i can see getting worked up when sal came at you like that, especially since it seemed pretty sudden, but he’s a good and reasonable guy. oh yeah, it seems like in the barrage of posts i never got around to congratulating you — congrats.
I wasn’t trying to shut it down, man, it’s just that if Penguin and Spike Jonze get hold of this shit, it could have a very negative effect on Shane Jones, and that would piss me off to the point of violence. This is in part or in whole because I like Adam Robinson and Publishing Genius a lot. I have a thing coming out with them soon, so Jones is like a label-mate or something. I dunno. I got very angry and put it out there that way. I agree his accusations are legit, but I don’t see why he had to publicize them. He could have privately extorted Shane Jones or something. It bothers me that he did what he did; he could and should have done it in a bigger forum if he was going to do it. If I were him and in his shoes, I’d have submitted an article to P&W of the same tone.
mike — there’s no suggestion there that i thought htmlgiant was homogeneous, which is why i addressed many individuals first. but if you don’t think there are non-administrative ways to shut down an argument (and that some folks were trying to employ them) then i don’t know what to tell you. threatening violence, for example, that’s a way to shut down an argument. but also blake’s laying down of the law (which, you know, there’s a logical flaw there that would keep you from doing anything but pointing out things in books and saying how much you like them).
go back and reread the paragraph you’re critiquing. it didn’t say everybody sounds the same or everybody did this, it said “everybody, some of the people i mentioned above did this, and i don’t think you should do that or encourage it.”
sasha — you mean kathryn? she’s a big girl and jumped on of her own accord.
phm — hey man, that is a really intriguing and perverse take on the whole thing, seriously, and i like it. i also understand the concern, but i wouldn’t worry about it. i have no idea what’s going on between sal and shane behind the scenes but i’d bet it’s really civil — they’re both nice and reasonable dudes.
the bigger forum thing was the point i was trying to make. htmlgiant is popular on a weblit scale, but there are lots of readers who have never heard of it, shane, or publishing genius. so, this conversation could start up at any time anywhere. i personally think the folks directly involved with it should get it all out of their systems before that.
let me know when the book comes out with pg.
Your smugness and your lack of full disclosure (until now, maybe) notwithstanding, my purpose for posting that interview fragment was to initiate, provoke, further dialogue about the matter, to discuss ideas of, notions about influence, appropriation, sampling, “theft,” to split hairs, as it were, all of which had only been barely examined. It generated some more debate, albeit still of a superficial variety.
I understand “red herring” to mean an argument that doesn’t address the original issue, a deliberate attempt to change the subject, a diversion away from the argument. I don’t see how using Plascencia’s remarks about his own appropriation as a way of generating more in-depth examination about his criticism of another writer’s appropriation is a diversion.
I also don’t see how a red herring can ever be used as a way of contextualizing an argument. But then, you must be privy to some knowledge that I don’t have. As I said before, I intended to provoke (by using Plascencia’s admission of his own appropriation) some further delineations, demarcations. The response, while still only scraping the surface of his and other people’s ideas of intellectual property, did generate some further defining of terms.
Very little has been qualified or defined in this whole “debate”. There hasn’t yet been a full examination of all the issues. That’s what I’m interested in.
hey john — smugness i will always own up to. how many people in the comments threads are not smug? shane, maybe. lack of full disclosure is stretching it, though — first because i posted this blog and linked directly into the thread shortly after making the comment, second because very few others in the thread seemed to feel the need to disclose anything, and third because i had no inside info w/r/t this situation. i didn’t even know sal was aware of light boxes until sasha fletcher sent me an email asking what the dustup was all about.
i can also admit when i’m wrong. the general tenor of the thread seemed to me negative without being analytical, so when you posted the link without providing context, i assumed you were suggesting that sal had no business saying what he was saying given that he admitted to some degree of appropriation. mea culpa. while i think the types of appropriation under discussion are very different, i didn’t realize you were trying to see how different people thought they were. i would have liked to see more hairs split and usually do.
totally with you on the “full examination of the issues.”
Thanks for your apology.
In your first post you didn’t share that you were friends with Plascencia. Perhaps having an hour and a half in between a post and a pingback, wherein you admit your personal ties, doesn’t count as a lack of full disclosure. But it’s easy to consider this particularly when it isn’t immediately clear that these two posts are from the same person.
At any rate, I’m looking forward to some in-depth treatment of the issues raised by this debacle.