Topical Guide 560
Mark Dorset
Plagiarism
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 7:
The graffitist writes this:
IF IT’S ANDERSON’S IT’S PURE AND STURDY AND TASTY —
AND IF IT’S PURE AND STURDY AND TASTY IT MUST BE ANDERSON’S!It’s Jack’s ad, says Matthew.
Stolen from Pabst Blue Ribbon, if you ask me, says BW.
I have searched the Web, and I cannot find a Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement with wording that resembles the wording in Jack’s Anderson advertisement. I think BW’s accusation is without merit. MD
Marketing: “Guerrilla”
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 7:
It’s funny that he should write an ad.
He’s probably being paid. It’s a new breakthrough — commercially supported graffiti.
I happen to know that in the earliest days of the development of the Personal History, when Kraft was self-publishing, he had two stories “by” Peter Leroy printed through conventional printing methods, as stand-alone booklets: Larry Peters Is Missing and Larry Peters, Child No More. He and Madeline used these booklets to promote the Personal History project by leaving copies on the racks of promotional brochures that they encountered in rest stops on their travels.
Tom Stoppard, in his introduction to a reissue of his novel Lord Malquist and Mr Moon:
On the re-publication of his only novel The Rock Pool ten years after its first appearance, Cyril Connolly remarked somewhere that here was the proof that his novel had lasted. I’m writing this from memory. It may be that Connolly merely observed that what was proven was that his novel had escaped oblivion, which would not be quite the same thing. But that was the gist. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was published forty years ago (or thirty-nine and a bit) by Anthony Blond, and has turned up sporadically under different imprints a few times since. And yet it seems to me that my novel has spent its whole life in oblivion. Occasionally I meet someone who claims to have read it, but I always take this to be a form of politeness. I don’t think I have ever seen a copy on anyone’s bookshelf but mine. I can’t remember its ever having been reviewed, but I see that Panther disinterred an amiable paragraph by Isabel Quigly in the Sunday Telegraph, and that Faber was able to quote three provincial newspapers on the 1980 paperback and (significantly?) the same three the next time they went in to bat for me.
I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blond’s Lord Malquist and Mr Moon sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela — a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles’ bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops.
Reference: Internal
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 7:
Does he mean that you can’t be wise, good, and just unless you’re happy? Or does he mean that if you’re wise, good, and just, you can’t help being happy?
Who cares?
I just wonder whether he’s saying that you have to be happy to start with. Is this a message of hope? Or — or is he telling me that —
He is not writing this for you, Matthew. He is writing this because he is a crazy person.
Reservations Recommended, Preface:
[Matthew Barber]: “You know what a frustrated system is?”
[Peter Leroy]: “Yes!” I said proudly. “I do.”
I waited, but he said nothing.
“Well?” he said after a while.
“Oh. Sorry. It’s a mathematical system, a matrix, say, in which the elements or the relationships among them or both are defined in such a way that not all the conditions can ever be met. For instance — ”
“That’s all right. That’s all right. You’ve got it. Well here’s a frustrated system for you. You ready?”
“Still ready.”
“It’s the attempt to do more than two of the following three things. You ready?”
“I’m ready. I can’t do more than two of the following three things.”
“Yes. You. Me. One. One cannot do more than two of the following three things: Live in the world, be happy, and have a conscience.”
Happiness
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