Words Beginning with P, like Prozac, Piracy, Plagiarism, Planet and Publicity

This morning The Guardian reports what El Pais reported yesterday and some have tweeted: Spanish novelist stops writing novels because of piracy.

The Spanish have an unenviable record as some of the world’s leading download pirates. Behind this item of news is a recent judgement in which a young software designer called Pablo Soto was absolved in a trial brought by various publishers of music, film and books. Indeed the publishers had to pay all the costs. They have appealed.

But this is also a personal story. Lucia Etxebarria (1966) is the novelist involved. She came to fame in 1997 with a book called 'Amor, Curiosidad, Prozac y Dudas'. (Love, Curiosity, Prozac and Doubts).

By using Prozac in the title she was, of course, at least alluding to Elizabeth Wurzel’s 1994 novel 'Prozac Nation'.

According to the magazine Interviu, she did more than allude. In 2001 the magazine accused her of plagiarism in that book and in Estacion de Infierno where she had borrowed from Spanish poet Antonio Colina. In 2003, a court ruled that the magazine had reported ‘what was true'.

In 2006 Lucia settled out of court with the psychologist Jorge Castello who claimed she had used material from an article of his.

None of this changes that she does have talents, has been a considerable seller, has an honorary degree from the University of Aberdeen and, among other prizes, won the Premio Planeta in 2004. I have blogged on this ‘prize’ before. It is in fact an advance and is awarded in time for Christmas – it has been a tradition for years in Spain to give the winner as a present, usually to fathers. ‘Better than socks’ is the phrase.

What is interesting is the passions Lucia can raise. I checked on Wikipedia before writing this. The English version was temporariy nobbled. What in Spanish is 'escritor' (writer) was rendered as ‘plagiarist’ in English. She has been verbally assaulted by many pirates on the social networks. The vehemence and the hate are impressive.

The Spanish like to think their Indignados started the Occupy movement. Her critics are more than indignant. There are some as dumb as the girls in last summer’s English riots who thought small shopkeepers were ‘rich’. Others appear to be weighed down by the Generation X factor – there but for the cruelties of fate go I. Somewhere between stalkers and trolls they behave as if they own her.

But I suspect some of them feel betrayed, saw her as leading the way. No, I don’t think this is a novelist being hoist on her own petard. Yes, it appears her latest book (not in ebook) is not selling as well as previous productions. Actually that is a pretty common case. Spain has just acquired Amazon.es and there are signs that what has taken years in other countries is being implemented very fast. Javier Marias mentioned that a worried bookseller had told him that he had shifted just 12 copies of his best-selling novelist in 14 days.

So this is 'un toque de atencion'. A kind of ‘pay attention’. It’s about publicity more than piracy.

This blog is hardly Christmassy but I suppose it adds up to a stocking filler.

Have a Happy Christmas everyone!

Defrosting the Bird and Killing the Sprouts

When I was young I remember an Italian visitor to our house describing British Christmas cooking as ‘defrosting the bird and killing the sprouts.’

Years later, when I lived in Spain the story was very different. Around the end of November, live turkeys would begin to appear on the verandas along the street as families fed them up in preparation for Noche Buena (Christmas Eve). About a week before Christmas I got into the lift with an eleven-year-old neighbour and asked her how their turkey was coming along. Nice and plump, she said. She seemed quite excited. Then she told me it would be killed the next day. Ah, I said. And who does that? She turned to me with a spine-chilling, gleam in her eye. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I do it every year.’

I got out of the lift feeling quite disturbed. She was actually looking forward to the killing. I had no trouble gutting and jointing a bird, but would not fancy wringing its neck. Then I asked myself if we had all become too squeamish. The meat we eat must be killed. We are happy to eat it, but only if someone else kills it, preferably out of sight. Perhaps my young neighbour’s attitude was really more healthy. She was taking part in a matter-of-fact, life-death-food ritual.

My reflections on our relationship with blood and guts were rekindled soon after Christmas. We were in England spending a few days with relatives, when the doorbell rang. I opened it to find a neighbour holding up an, enormous, gleaming, salmon trout he had just caught. “For you!’ he said. My relative recoiled at the sight. The fish she normally bought from the local supermarket was rectangular shaped, frozen, wrapped in plastic, and came without bones. I sat her down in a comfortable chair and then went to the kitchen to deal with the neighbour’s generous gift.

When I took her a cup of tea next morning, I couldn’t help noticing, on her bed-side table, the lurid cover of the bloodthirsty crime novel she was reading.

Bertrand Russell said that he read murder stories to stop himself from murdering people, which seems a good reason. I sometimes wonder what became of my little Spanish neighbour. I do hope she developed a taste for crime fiction.

Lost Children Found

Earlier this year I blogged about Spain’s ‘Robbed Children’. During the Franco regime and for some twenty years after his death in 1975, a large number of new born children were removed from their natural parents and ‘sold on’ to adoptive parents. Doctors and member of the Church were involved in this business and the real parents were told their child had died.

The BBC produced a documentary on the distress caused and showed it last October. (See my last blog post about this). Amongst the cases they followed was an American citizen living in Austin Texas called Randy Ryder. He is now forty but only found out his parents were not really his parents twelve or thirteen years ago. One of the difficulties for children seeking their real parents is that documents like birth certificates were systematically falsified. Adoptive parents were recorded as the biological parents.

The documentary followed him through DNA testing to see whether or not he was the lost brother that a family were trying to track down. The DNA test showed he was not.

It’s a tough set of circumstances and the DNA register set up to help is necessarily limited. Of the roughly 1,500 legal cases opened only 6 so far have resulted in a DNA match.

In today’s El Pais it is reported that Randy has now found his mother. There is a twist. For a start she is not Spanish but South African and now living in London. Nor was he ‘robbed’. For an aspiring, 25 year old actress in Malaga, his birth was inconvenient and she gave him up for adoption. They are going to meet soon.

I am certainly not going to judge anyone but will also say that over 200 of the cases have been ‘archivado’ – shelved – because the mothers were found to have collaborated in the sale of their children. That’s how things are.

El Pais however also gives a case in which a mother and daughter (who have chosen anonymity) have been reunited through the DNA register. At first the mother was both upset and incredulous. She had been told she had given birth to a stillborn son. Indeed, she refused to accept the results of a second DNA test. It wasn’t until she agreed to meet her daughter that she saw the person claiming to be her daughter looked pretty much like her other daughter.

It would be nice to say this rare success had immediately gone well. But the mother is now as it were grieving for the child she did not have for thirty seven years, while the same but now adult child helps her through confusion and distress. That’s also how things are.

Icelight - in Best Five Thrillers of 2011

I have just heard that Icelight is number 2 in the Daily Telegraph's Best Five Thrillers of 2011.

Very nice news!

Apologies, Allies and Drop Caps

Yesterday I was contacted by Nicholas Blincoe who kindly pointed out that in his ebook version of Washington Shadow my name was, in the table of contents, given as Ally. This is, I hope now was, the case on Amazon, Waterstones, Apple and so on.

More importantly there is a hiccup at the beginning of each chapter. It is ‘the drop cap problem’. In the printed book each chapter begins with a very large opening letter and continues in upper case for a couple of words.

This has not transferred to the e-version. In fact the first letter has gone up a line and the following letters are a line down, either headless or, in some cases providing a new word.

Thus and for example we have

C

OTTON

or

W

HEN

I got straight on to John Murray and they have got straight on to sorting out the problems. These apparently afflict The Maze of Cadiz as well as Washington Shadow.

I am told Icelight is fine.

My apologies to any readers who have wondered why I should be talking about hens – and thanks again to Nicholas Blincoe for pointing out the mistakes.

Writers are sent author’s copies of their work in print. I wonder if it wouldn’t also be a good idea for publishers to send the e-version as well?

Poppies

My father-in-law clocked up 93 last Friday. Yes, he was born on Armistice Day, on 11-11 -1918. Had he been a girl he would have been called Irene. Irene means peace. I don’t know what the male equivalent is. He was called John.

Naturally we went over to see him and found him pretty well, though mildly amused by all the 11-11-11 cards.

He was more bemused by the poppy business, particularly as applied to the English football team’s insistence on wearing what turned out to be arm bands when they played Spain in a friendly match on November 11.

Like many of his generation, he is appalled by what he calls ‘the arm punching’ celebrations of present day millionaire footballers. ‘Arm-punching’ includes somersaults, group hugs and badge kissing.

May I be frank? I don’t think he has the slightest desire to shake John Terry’s hand.

On a wider level, he is also rather baffled by the poppy insistence. On graduating in 1939, he joined up three months before the declaration of war because he knew war was coming.

He considers himself very lucky, despite weighing six stone when he got out of Burma. His great friend John Wishart died on D-Day. My brother-in-law has Christopher as a second name for another dead friend.

But the thing about being 93 is that you get to consider a long life. And while WW2 was an absolute game changer that doesn’t mean you can’t think about it.

We gave him Max Hastings’ All Hell Broke Loose. His first reaction? ‘We’re beginning to bite the bullet’.

Now my father-in-law has thought for some time that the Russians beat the Germans and the USA beat the Japanese. The British, apart from a brave and rather lucky window, were fortunate to tag along.

But one of his standards is the deaths suffered. The Russians lost millions. The Germans lost about half that number. The British? However cruel this may sound, surprisingly few.

John Wishart, for example, had four years of doing nothing very much until D-Day. My father-in-law himself says he rarely experienced danger – he only found out relatively recently that the commanding officer who sent him and others into Burma was summarily relieved of his post while they were tackling unmapped terrain with neither adequate equipment nor medication. They were sent out in leather boots that rotted within days.

To a considerable extent, military mismanagement dominated the lives and deaths of the British troops. When my father-in-law got to Mumbai (then Bombay), the main preoccupation was whether anyone had thought to countermand the order to sail on to Japanese occupied Singapore. The ship ahead kept sailing and the Gordon Highlanders disembarked into captivity.

John Wishart really died. He stepped off a landing craft on D-Day and was mown down. And it’s partly out of respect for an old friend that my father in law thinks poppies have become as fatuous as ‘arm punching’.

Kerosene and Pink Diamonds.

When I talked with Laura Wilson at the Electric Theatre in Guildford on October 22 we touched on the portrayal of history in film – mostly from the humble aspect of how people actually looked, moved and behaved in the 1940s and early 1950s.

I have fairly recently seen two films with a similar subject - a young woman agrees to ensnare an enemy official for what could be called a cause greater than her own physical and emotional well-being and even survival. The films are Black Book (2006) and Lust, Caution (2007). The first is set in Holland during WW2 and the second in Hong Kong and Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of China. Both end grimly, with multiple deaths.

Neither is a bad film, some of the performances are excellent. Tang Wei’s portrayal of her character in Ang Lee’s film is remarkable, nuanced and very brave.

But I want to concentrate on the look of the films. Let me put it this way - there are a lot of very good looking people, flawless teeth and a considerable expenditure and effort on stylish clothes and vehicles.

Now I have nothing against costume designers, art directors and careful lighting. But a stylish gleam does miss a lot that could inform the anguish and dilemmas the protagonists have to deal with. I don’t know how divine details are but they matter and I’d suggest, for this viewer anyway, that they are better rendered without too much prettification.

The Dutch film is not based on a book. Of course it is true that we all bring our own lives to reactions. One of my father’s closest friends was a Dutch mathematician. Aged seventeen when the Nazis invaded, his farmer parents were, of course, beside themselves with fear that he would be taken away to work camp or worse. The result was that he spent the ‘next two years dressed as girl or hiding in the woodpile.’ Of course it isn’t fair for me to ask the film makers to have this kind of very grim surrealism inform their work but I did find the sheer silk, well-cut trousers and slightly stressed new knitwear a distraction.

Lust, Caution is based on a short story by Eileen Chang. I kindled this up. Within a couple of pages there is the kind of passage that shows why words can outdo film images. It involves the hoarding of ‘Kerosene or pink diamonds’ – and reveals the world of collaborators’ wives in Shanghai as they play Mahjong. Kerosene was the highly inflammable fuel for lamps, heaters and, for the poor, cooking. It was dyed pink. It illustrates succinctly and precisely the unease of these women: they dread poverty and they need their wealth to be easily transportable and to keep its value.

Ang Lee is very respectful of his source. It may just be I am getting old. But movies simply don’t allow the same kind of appreciation of the world behind such a remark. Not of course when you are watching beautiful people exquisitely dressed and lit.

Still photographs work however. In the last day or so I have been looking at photographs published in some British newspapers. They come from an exhibition called “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League 1936 – 1951” at The Jewish Museum in New York from November 04 2011 – March 25 2012.

I have ‘borrowed’ one for this blog. It shows a film poster of a book I mention in the next Peter Cotton and has that wonderful boy and tyre. Yes, it’s a frame but it has all kinds of possibilities and stories.

My father’s tall Dutch friend grew his hair and wore a dress and hid in the woodpile, looking at the mathematical possibilities in curled woodlice. The last time I saw him he asked me what the British had against mixer taps or faucets. A little later he said his main memory of his time in the woodpile was smell. ‘I stank’ he said.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Films can stink but they can’t invoke smell. I don’t know the smell of kerosene but my husband remembers it well from his childhood in Africa.