I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Thank you for all the lovely comments on the last post! And thanks, cesperanza, for the virtual gift basket! Because actual baths are restricted for now, I am pretending that the basket was full of bubbles and bath salts and other indulgences for my virtual self.

Clarifications: (1) Rivkid 2.0 is a girl. I feel really weird when people react with “that’s great, one of each!” I know there aren’t really all that many things to say, and it’s not as if a newborn has a personality or any other feature one could easily remark on. Yet I find the gender implications disturbing. I might have a Republican and a Democrat (though I certainly hope not! ;) ) and/or a gay kid and a straight kid and/or a musician and a lawyer, etc., but it’s boy and girl that count as one of each. Of course, I did agree to cut my son’s hair in significant part because so many people were saying “what a pretty little girl,” so I’m hardly pure, but I still twitch every time.

(2) Headache is gone. That blood patch thing is a good idea.

W/r/t the recent Mary Jane comiquette (seriously, what is that name supposed to mean? Its relation to maquette seems notional at best): There are much smarter responses out there, such as liviapenn, but my basic take was a variant of her initial reaction: Outraged? I’m barely surprised.

Joe Miller, Cross-X: The cover calls it “The amazing true story of how the most unlikely team from the most unlikely of places overcame staggering obstacles at home and at school to challenge the debate community on race, power, and education.” That’s largely true, though also somewhat misleading, which in many ways makes it a perfect description for a book about high school debate. Miller, a journalist, comes to an urban Kansas City school looking for a story; he finds debaters from the Urban Debate League (disclosure: I am a donor, because I was a happy policy debater for eight years) and, later on, leaves his journalist role to become their coach. In the meantime, he finds incredible institutional incompetence, structural racism, and cultural conflicts, all of which make it difficult for the young debaters he’s following to get to tournaments, much less to win them. At the beginning, he sees debate as a way out for the kids – a path to the educational rigor, knowledge, and scholarship opportunities that the rest of school simply denies them. But as his investment in the team deepens, he concludes that poor black kids will never be able to catch up with the rich white kids from suburbia/private schools who dominate debate. Playing by the rules will never change things; the rules themselves, he decides, have to change, so he encourages the debaters to challenge the core rules of the game and debate race and power in every round.

The storytelling deterioriates as the book continues and Miller becomes more coach/participant than narrator; I knew what was going on even as Miller’s descriptions got sketchier, because I have the relevant background, but someone unfamiliar with debate might well end up confused by the last hundred pages or so. Nonetheless, the book overall is a powerful indictment of an exhausted educational system, an indifferent local bureaucracy that can’t be bothered to reward achievement, and an actively hostile state organization that just wants these poor black kids to shut up and go away because “everyone” knows they’re worthless anyway.

Richard A. Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism: At least it’s short. Posner, uncharacteristically, has nothing new or interesting to say about plagiarism. He thinks it’s a species of fraud, because it’s only wrong when it induces reliance to the detriment of some affected party, but to make this work he has to define “reliance” very, very broadly and also play pretty fast and loose with the idea of who’s affected. Of course it matters when students’ or professors’ plagiarism gives them advantages over others with whom they’re fairly directly competing, but it’s very hard to imagine that this applies in the general literary world. Kaavya Viswanathan was not “competing” with the authors from whom she took and rewrote passages in the ordinary sense. It’s not even clear that her book contract precluded random writer X from getting a book contract, much less that her copying was the reason she got her contract. This isn’t to say that she did nothing wrong – clearly she violated current standards for creative writing – but the harm isn’t to Salman Rushdie etc. or to random writer X. It may not even be to (most of) her readers, who probably didn’t care where the felicitious phrases came from. The injury is much more abstract and systemic, and specific to the current literary system. But you won’t get that from Posner’s discussion.

Robert Ebert Byrnes & Jaime Marquart, Brush with the Law: The True Story of Law School Today at Harvard and Stanford: This terrible book about terrible human beings tells how two of them scraped by at Harvard and Stanford despite serious drug abuse (Stanford) and gambling addiction (Harvard). Like many awful people, the authors only see the awfulness of others, leading them to dismiss their harder-working classmates as assholes and grinds. Of course, I clearly would have been both according to their lights, so take my evaluation for what it’s worth – but the only valuable thing about these narratives of debauchery is to remake the point that there are a bunch of bad reasons to go to law school. If you don’t actually have any interest in the law, but don’t know what else to do or just want to make a lot of money, law school is a mistake, and a very costly one at that. (Notably, though the authors talk a lot about the huge debts they piled up thanks to generous law school loans and credit cards, they say very little about how they plan to pay them off; presumably the book contract helped with that.)

David A. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825: Another entry in the history of fanfic, covering various “further adventures of” popular characters during the period. The detailed exegesis in the main chapters is very inside baseball; if you don’t already know a lot about Richardson’s Pamela, Tristam Shandy, etc. it will be very hard to follow. But the introduction and conclusion are particularly useful contributions to theorizing the intersection of authorial property and popular insistence on investigating what happened next, given that Brewer’s period covers the first real flowering of copyright. His discussion of how authors tried to maintain priority of interpretation is useful and still resonates, as does his investigation of the imagined communities – and real divergences – among audiences united only by their love for a particular fiction. .