"The book is just the loss leader for the speech." (Via varied internet schadenfreude re: Jonah Lehrer, trail no longer retraceable.)
I have occasionally contemplated the notion that in my ideal universe, I would write fewer reviews and branch out into a mega-speaking-empire, but I think that the exacerbation of habitual insomnia by travel would probably render it inadvisable, even aside from the question of whether literary topics would be likely to attract dollars on that sort of scale....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The thing that irritates me is that he didn't put that little bit in either the acknowledgements or the copyright page which says "Portions of this book previously appeared in Wired, the NY Times, etc." That is such a basic thing that everyone knows to do, and would have made the book thing a non-issue, though the repurposed articles are another story, so to speak. Is he too young to be so "successful"? Are editors who remind one of such conventions a thing of the past? Or is it truly arrogant hubris? I think perhaps the last with a dollop of the first...
ReplyDeleteAnd the thing that irritates me, Becca, is that so many people seem to feel such an acknowledgement necessary. Whatever for? Aside from the seemimg lift from Malcolm Gladwell, it's Lehrer's work, after all.
ReplyDeleteCulture is plagiarism.