The Harvard student-turned-author who confessed yesterday to “accidentally” plagiarizing parts of her first novel, has now been blasted by the publisher of the book she copied from. “In a statement issued today, [a senior VP of Crown Publishing] said that, ‘based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act.” The executive, Steve Ross, also says that there are more than 40 apparently lifted passages in Viswanathan’s novel, and calls the situation “nothing less than an act of literary identity theft.”
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Will This Become Another “Poor Me” Story?
Alex Beam isn’t cutting Kaavya Viswanathan any slack for her alleged plagiarism, and points out that she didn’t exactly “write” her own novel in the traditional sense, anyway. “[She] bought her way into Harvard — her parents paid $10,000 to $20,000 to IvyWise, a college counseling service, according to The New York Times — then lucked her way into a $500,000 two-book contract with Little, Brown & Co. She shares the valuable copyright on her first novel with ‘book packager’ Alloy Entertainment, which helped flesh out the novel’s concept.” Beam wonders whether Viswanathan will be able to slough off the blame for the copying on some anonymous Alloy staffer.
Movie Satire Loses Specificity, Gains Appeal
Satire is hot right now, but the biting political send-ups that have made Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert millionaires seem to lose some of their specificity when Hollywood translates the idea to film. Caryn James says there’s a good reason for that: “Political satires on screen may be most successful when they don’t aim at specific politicians at all… At their shrewdest, movies like American Dreamz and Thank You for Smoking follow the lead of Wag the Dog. They don’t attack individual politicians or entertainers (not even Simon); they are really satirizing how all those scoundrels in Washington and Hollywood talk down to us.”
Ten Years On, Rent Still Paying Nicely
For a decade now, Rent has been a Broadway producer’s dream – a cult hit beloved by critics that outgrows its initial status to become a bona fide phenomenon, with a movie adaptation and everything. (Plenty of people despise the show, too, and as anyone in PR will tell you, that kind of animosity only makes your fan base more devoted.) Now, the original cast has reassembled for a semistaged tenth anniversary performance that raised $2 million for AIDS care and New York theatre groups, and while all the hoopla may have been more than creator Jonathan Larson could have imagined (he died shortly before the show opened,) it seems a fitting tribute to one of Broadway’s truly original thinkers.
National Advancement In The What Now? How Many Thousands?
For a quarter of a century, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts has toiled quietly away in Miami, encouraging and supporting young performers, writers, and artists to the tune of more than $500,000 per year in grants alone. Now, the NFAA is making a stab at true national recognition, mounting a star-studded gala in New York and a continuing push for attention, all designed to secure the organization’s long-term future and make it a household name among arts types.
Roanoke Orchestra CEO Quits; Musicians Cheer
The chief executive of the Roanoke Symphony in Virginia has resigned after running $480,000 in deficits and clashing with the orchestra’s musicians over cuts in the concert schedule. Paul Chambers had also faced criticism for contracting the orchestra’s marketing work out to his wife. The musicians are openly celebrating Chambers’ resignation, saying that “There wasn’t any aspect of Paul’s tenure that [we] felt really good about.” Chambers had come to the Roanoke Symphony after running the Savannah Symphony in Georgia, which went bankrupt on his watch.
San Antonio Lyric To Get Name Change And A New Home
The eight-year-old Lyric Opera of San Antonio (which has already been through one name change since it launched as San Antonio Pocket Opera) will become San Antonio Opera next season, in conjunction with a move to a smaller theater more conducive to opera. The move will likely mean more than the name change to local audiences, who were in near revolt this season after the company began presenting its performances in the massive Municipal Auditorium, which reportedly does not sport the finest acoustics. Mike Greenberg reports that, while the company has made significant progress since its 1998 debut, it is still being run on a skeleton staff, and will have to continue searching for a more permanent venue.
Phil Orch Fills Diaz Vacancy From Within
It isn’t often that principal positions come open in a major orchestra, so when the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal violist, Roberto Diaz, announced that he was leaving to accept a position as head of the prestigious Curtis Institute, there was no shortage of interest in succeeding him. Auditions for the plum spot were held this week, and when the dust cleared, the Philadelphians promoted longtime associate principal Choong-Jin Chang to the top chair.
TV Turnoff Week: Now More Than Ever?
TV is such a huge part of most lives these days that the notion of “TV Turnoff Week” (yes, it’s this week) might seem a bit antiquated. Some critics clearly feel that there’s enough good available on the set today to make the anti-tube forces seem out of step. But at least one UK writer wonders when exactly we all began building our lives around the infernal thing, anyway. “I’m sure there are good things to see on TV. I’m simply not convinced that it’s something you need to watch every single day… We have become a slovenly nation of living, breathing, wan-faced sponge fingers, entranced by some blinking, bawling machine.”
Did Britain Miss Out On The Last 150 Years?
There’s an outstanding new Van Gogh exhibition at a suburban London museum, but to some in the UK art world, such chances to view the work of a French master only serve as a reminder of how previous generations of Brits managed to almost completely ignore important developments taking place on the European continent. “Were we really the only nation to turn its collective back on each new movement in art as it arose, from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Fauvism and Cubism? … with a few exceptions, English collectors lacked the courage to purchase modern paintings, and that is why there are relatively few of these pictures in our national galleries as compared to Russia or the US.”