ownership of story ideas - excavating the past

Steely Dan are peeved with Owen Wilson for playing Dupree in in You, Me and Dupree saying the plot of the film was ripped off from the song. It's ancient history now but I came across it and thought it raised fascinating issues - can you base a movie on a song?

Steely Dan to me are drawing a long bow. The Dupree in the song and film is an archeytpe. The Dupree mention in the title? Homage/pop culture reference.

In the interest of fair dealing here's the plot from IMDb
For newlyweds Carl and Molly Peterson, life can't get any sweeter as they begin anew to settle down into married life. With a nice house and established careers in tow, nothing seems to get in their way. However, Carl is about find out just how much friendship means when Dupree, his best friend has been displaced from his home and fired from his job because of attending their wedding. Taking his friend in, what Carl and Molly are about to experience is that the fine line between a few days and whatever else is after, can be a lot more than they bargained for. Especially when their friend overstays his welcome in far too many ways than he should. Written by mystic80

Carl Peterson, an architect, has just get married with Molly, and it seems that they're about to begin their happy life together. Everything is going fine, until Dupree, the best man and Carl's best friend, shows up to invade the couple's intimacy. Carl's disposed to help his old friend, giving him a shelter in the couch, thinking that the whole thing will be for 2 or 3 days. Despite Dupree has promised Carl that he'll look for a job the very next day, the immature and lazy bloke spend the time playing with the children from the neighborhood, or dating with a mysterious librarian girl. Molly begins to get tired of Dupree, but Carl must deal with another problem, his malevolent and overprotecting father-in-law, who has warned him that he wants his daughter keeps her maiden name and that he doesn't even think about having children with her. Apparently, Dupree has came to stay with Molly and the stressed Carl, who doesn't know how to get rid of him, becoming paranoiac because the charismatic Dupree is starting to take his place in the household.

And here's the lyrics from http://www.steelydan.com/lyr2vn.html#track7

COUSIN DUPREE

Well I've kicked around a lot since high school
I've worked a lot of nowhere gigs
From keyboard man in a rock'n ska band
To haulin' boss crude in the big rigs
Now I've come back home to plan my next move
From the comfort of my Aunt Faye's couch
When I see my little cousin Janine walk in
All I could say was ow-ow-ouch

CHORUS:
Honey how you've grown
Like a rose
Well we used to play
When we were three
How about a kiss for your cousin Dupree

She turned my life into a living hell
In those little tops and tight capris
I pretended to be readin' the National Probe
As I was watchin' her wax her skis
On Saturday night she walked in with her date
And backs him up against the wall
I tumbled off the couch and heard myself sing
In a voice I never knew I had before

CHORUS

I'll teach you everything I know
If you teach me how to do that dance
Life is short and quid pro quo
And what's so strange about a down-home family romance?

One night we're playin' gin by a cracklin' fire
And I decided to make my play
I said babe with my boyish charm and good looks
How can you stand it for one more day
She said maybe its the skeevy look in your eyes
Or that your mind has turned to applesauce
The dreary architecture of your soul
I said - but what is it exactly turns you off?

CHORUS

[End of song]

Now you can judge for yourself (and let me know what you think). Nice lyrics though.

FSC

FSC is a standard for environmental paper accreditation and FSC Australia was launched last night - conveniently just down Gertrude Street at Dante's - to a packed room. (There were two Peruvians among the official presenters - and I wasn't even aware that Peru had extensive forests - so it was quite interanational.) Harry Potter was printed on FSC paper in the UK but there wasn't enough certified paper here to print the Deathly Hallows on it. It was an exciting development that will help us to do something about the paper we use.

The language of certification is heavily beauracratic and laden with anacronyms - which I think we will all become very familiar with over the next few years. And I'm hoping Matthia's coming article in the B&P will help sort our way through the maze. An alternative certification scheme is PEFC and here is a link to a comparison of different schemes.

And we could end "sale or return" - that would help too. Waterstones is looking at doing so, when it's new distribution centre is up and running in the UK.

smoking banned at Frankfurt!

silos

I'm reading the Bloom Report and I came across the comment that people didn't participate in the survey because the different publishing sectors have so little in common, which is something I disagree with - strongly. And its a view that has always irritated me. And it was a topic that Maree raised at the APA roadshow - that industry was bunkered down in its silos. (aside - I'm guessing that 'silos' might be the new business word of the next few months, replacing road/mud map). In children's publishing we're very close to the educational sector and any good children's publisher knows that half the sales of many of our titles comes from schools. I've bounced around between the two sectors in my career and found enlightenment and ignorance on both sides. And I don't see tertiary, academic or professional as fundamentally different to what I'm doing as a children's publisher.

The industry has in common that it iis about gathering and packaging and selling information both in the forms of fiction and non-fiction and for now and into the forseeable future it will be done mainly in the beautiful and efficient form of the book.

… now I can hop down off my electronic soapbox.

promoting books and reading

Juliet Rogers and Maree McCaskill have been running a roadshow around Australia promoting the APA and its doings to stakeholders. It's a terrific undertaking and thanks to Julilet and everybody for being prepared to put so much time and effort into it. My comments that follow are in parts of the fruits of that progressive and democratic initiative.

Last Wednesday was the Melbourne meeting and, as the press was there, I'm sure its discussions are not confidential. In fact it was the press in the form of Andrew Wilkins who raised the point I want to blog about. Why in the list of objectives in the strategic plan is there nothing about promoting the book and reading? And that's a point that resonated with me in my children's publishing silo - I can here it echo.

Promoting books and reading is one of the core tasks for me of the APA and the Children's Committee of the APA, and a major reason I joined. It's what we're all about as publishers - more books, more readers, another generation. Its like the Age promoting newspapers to schools - it's guaranteeing a future, that we will be around for another generation. And I thought the promotion of the book and reading would resonate with the education publishing (especially primary education publishing) silo next to me.

Maybe it is something that comes first to the minds of children's publishers, since we're not relying on an existing generation of readers.

Books Alive is a great beginning to build on.

Promoting reading and books was always a hot topic for Agnes Niewenhuizen. Let me quote: "There isn't a reading culture. We don't have any kind of concerted national program. Our promotion of books is very poor. [Im interpreting book in a generic sense.] Reading is not valued in schools. We are losing librarians, And with very notable exceptions, I think things are slipping."

"Brought to Book"

Frank, our accountant, recommended Julian Gough's article to me "Bought to Book". He'd found it in the AFR, originally published in Prospect magazine and available online.

Gough asks provocatively why the modern literary novel is so worthy and dull and answers that its because tragedy has squeezed out comedy. Otherwise it is too rich to summarize here. Highly recommended. Gough coins the marvellous term "wangster".

Gough won the UK's National Short Story Prize, the richest in the world in April for "The Orphan and the Mob" - "15000 pounds worth of story".

shrinking mainstream

I love reading about the census figures. Such rich food for thought (especially a publisher in hopeful search of the zeitgeist.)

According to the Age based on the latest census figures the mainstream is shrinking. James Jupp is quoted as saying mainstream is British-Australian Christian, and we're down to two-thirds of the population - though I wouldn't claim to be a Christain and I prefer the term Anglo-Celt to British (there's enough rebellious Irish blood still flowing). And the average Australian is a 37 year old, mother of two, still paying off a mortgage.

&, if I read this right, Judaism disapproves of the census. Which surprised me, as it would have seemed to me a statistical rather than religious execise, but I am sure there is rich and logical Talmudic reasoning at work.

The data showed "a particular growth" in non-Christian religions. And the number of Muslims has been overtaken by the number of Buddhists.

There are nearly 400 languages spoken in Australian homes with Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) the most common language other than English, replacing Italian and Greeks. Cantonese, alone ties with Arabic (after Greek and Italian) as the most common language other than English spoken at home. But Mandarin and Hindi are the fastest growing languages.

Sonya

The Penguin publicity machine are doing a superb job - I feel that everytime I open a newspaper in Melbourne in the last few months I'm been reading about Sonya Hartnett - and how unhappy she is. I suppose an unhappy author is easier to promote than an happy author - I'll pass that on to Susie, our publicist, so she can enourage our authors to suffer more in the cause of their publicity. Harnett is a superb writer but her unhappiness with writing and being a writer is in severe danger of over-exposure.

And found the following quote in this morning's Age article of particular interest: "The celebration of the mediocre we have in this country is dispiriting." Following the sentence "Her disillusionment with writing reflected frustration at seeing average books such as The Da Vinci Code or the Harry Potter series being outrageously overpromoted." Was either book any more promoted in this country than anywhere else? Have Dan and JK now taken up residency in this country? Maybe she could have a taken a pot shot at the overpromotion (Is that an oxymoron anyhow?) of, say, a diet or a cook book.

quote from the Age - future of the book is hopeful

"When it comes to value and volume, Nielsen BookScan principal Michael Webster says, book sales in Australia are growing, with value up 3.8 per cent to $1.05 billion and volume up 2.2 per cent to 53.3 million units last year on 2005. He showed that even without the Harry Potter titles and Dan Brown, this still applied and the trend was continuing in the first half of this year. Contrary to some claims, independent booksellers are not being driven out of business, with the sector's share in value terms leaping 16.1 per cent last yea compared with 2005, giving it a 21.8 per cent chunk of the market."

and

"Webster showed that youngsters are actually buying books, with 31 per cent of 10-18-year-olds being described as avid and confident readers, according to figures he quoted from Kids: Young Australians Reading, 10-18-year-olds. However, there was agreement that at adolescence the number of readers dropped significantly. "It's the biggest marketing challenge for everyone in publishing."

16 June

Alibris?

Does anybody know anything about this online bookseller?

Editors

From iTunesI've just discovered that there's a band called Editors - "they can pull off the once old-fashioned blend of dark post-punk guitars and jittery vocals"

villains

Do children's books up to and including YA lack enough good villains. We want to like our characters too much as authors, editors and publishers, and the effect of PC is to be nice to everybody, so the forceness of niceness are eliminating a powerful motor for stories - and make books less appealing for children to read. Sometimes the most successful books, especially those that children choose to read themselves, have an old-fashioned non-PC feel to them

Michael Panckridge's The Cursed seems marvellously old-fashioned in the quality of its villains: "The Light Crusaders and their leader Raymond Brampton are surely the most sinister villlains since Voldemort." - James Molony

Joke - warning, may cause offence

I loved the letter play in this joke. It may cause offence, but I think not.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl

Mockingbird

I'd like to recommend the lovely Mockingbird bookshop's
myspace page

Now I'm tempted to do a black dog "my space page" - to see how different my space is to a website. Some people myspace instead of blogging.

and here's the website

And if you're in Mont Albert do visit Evelyn and shop at Mockingbird at:

Mont Albert Village
377 Month Albert Road
Mont Albert vic 3127
email: mockingbird@bigpond.com
tel: 03 9899 2955

Tufte quote

"Powerpoint is a low resolution screw-up like voice-mail menu systems"

Actually I quite like Powerpoint though it is overused to the point of tedium, but I really do hate voice-mail menus systems.

Diversity in the business of publishing

While I was waiting for a coffee I picked up a business magazine and started reading an article extolling the profit virtues of diversity in the marketplace, specifically a diversity in the work force as stimulus to new business and new ideas. It was one of those articles that you wished you could rip out and take away with you.

Diversity is something publishers in general seem to value, presenting something new, different and exciting, and it is something we value at black dog - maybe our size and relative newness gives us a particular opportunity to experiment in distinction to the multis.

(Maybe the alternative story, something fresh, sells better than one supporting the mainstream view. But I wouldn't want to push that argument very far.)

I know we like the story that present a different perspective. A story the presents at least two sides so that each side informs the other, such as Scarecrow Army, or Black Snake, where by the time Carole had finished writing the book she had changed her view of Ned Kelly.

Much as I enjoyed reading Fitzsimmons Kokoda, it reinforced an established Australian story of fighting on the track, and in the end I valued reading Paul Ham's Kokoda book more because it showed me something of the Japanese side, and the diversity and oddities of human behaviour.

Tri-nation Cup culture

In the Tri-nation Cup countries, the ex-Briitish colonies of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, "high culture" is a new and fragile thing. It came a shock to me, a while ago while in NZ when I realised that many of the "state' theatre, ballet and opera companies of both countries, the torch bearers of the this sort of culture, are recent creations of the 1950s and later, and funding for the bodies seemed to have peaked in the 70s and 80s.

In that context I was interesed to read the comments of Jacques de Vos Malan, formerly director of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra and recently appointed CEO of the Melbourne Recital Centre. The Cape Town Orchestra has closed, "the opera company has also gone, and many professional theatre and dance companies are closing down." Mr de Vos Malan moved here after "losing faith in the African renaissance".

He described his daughter now "as having that fantastic self-confidence that Aussie kids have from growing up in a safe and secure country".

What we define usually has "high culture" has a very European bias.

Chinua Achebe has of course just won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Nadine Gordimer, one of the judges said: “Chinua Achebe’s early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature."

Food critics/defamation

Reviews and defamation are topics of intrigueing interest to writers and publishers so the case of the restaurant Coco Roco v food critic Matthew Evans/Sydney Morning Herald was food for thought. Matthew had among other things described Coco Roco's oysters as "jangled like a car crash" - nice turn of phrase. The jury had found in favor of Matthew initially but that was overturned on appeal and High Court supported the appeal court 6-1 (no mean majority):
" Business capacity and reputation are different from personal reputation. Harm to the former can be as here, inflicted more directly and narrowly than harm to a person's reputation."
Perhaps as a business I should feel warmed by the court's view. In my experience the law tends to support business over the individual - which maybe why we can describe our economic system as capitalist.
John Lethlean said it would raise concerns from journos "whether they comment on restaurants or cinema or theatre or literature, whatever" The restaurant review is a singularly potent influence on the success or failure of a restaurant - maybe it's to do with the size of the market a restaurant draws upon - its local - in comparison to a film or book where many reviewers are (hopefully) at work.
The dissenting judge was Michael Kirby who admitted judges didn't know much about food: "jurors are much more likely to reflect community standards, many of whom like myself, have no special interest in culinary matters, expensive restaurants or cuisine generally. Astonishingly judges may occasionally lack sense of irony or humour." So Mr Kirby is coming out in defence of the jury system with a delicate self-deprecating flourish.

I'm trying to remeber the case when another Sydney food critic was hauled over a flaming lobster.

test your book title

This is entertaining and even a little thought provoking.
title scorer

e-books and graphic books

There's been much trumpeting blowing about both in the book trade but in neither case has the delivery matched the press. At least withn the traditional book trade. Maybe it's all still coming … but slowly, slowly, slowly.