oselle | Real Writers Wanking It Up (Reply)

Some of you may have heard that nonagenarian recluse J.D. Salinger briefly emerged from his self-imposed exile to sue a Swedish guy for copyright infringement after said Swedish guy wrote a book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye that's about a 76-year-old man named "Mr. C" (not to be confused with any character on Happy Days) who busts out of his retirement home and then has some adventures of the navel-gazing variety much like a certain young man, also bearing the last initial of "C," who once busted out of his prep school and engaged in some similarly self-absorbed hijinks.

Yesterday a judge in New York ruled in favor of Salinger and said the book could not be published in the United States because it was little more than a retelling of Catcher in the Rye and not, as the publisher and author claimed, a "critical parody" of that book.

My favorite quote to come out of this story is from the Swedish author, Fredrik Colting:

“I am pretty blown away by the judge’s decision,” Mr. Colting said in an e-mail message after the ruling. “Call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books.”

Seriously? This guy is playing the persecution card? His book was "banned" because it was fanfic. He wrote FANFICTION (about one of the world's most famous stories no less) and he tried to PUBLISH IT and SELL IT and he stood up and made his case for it in front of a FEDERAL JUDGE. I don't know whether to ridicule the guy for his presumptuous ignorance or admire him for his brazen chutzpah.

In other fascinating real-world news about writers, James Frey, who was publicly pilloried by the terrifying Oprah Winfrey for duping her with his gritty "memoir," A Million Little Pieces, is apparently undaunted and back in business and co-writing a series of young adult sci-fi novels, one of which has already been optioned for the movies by none other than Michael "Blow Shit Up" Bay (who, I have to add, also cracked my shit up this week by claiming that his awful, loud movies really are great vehicles for actors, essentially taking credit for launching the careers of folks like Ben Affleck and Will Smith. Oh Michael...stop talking and go blow some shit up!).

Then there was this giant bucket of crazy in which author Alice Hoffman went ballistic on Twitter after a critic wrote a less-than-glowing review of her latest novel (DO read the Twitter-caps, please).

What all this got me thinking is that for all the abuse and finger-pointing and name-calling that fandom likes to heap on its members, nothing wanks as hard or is as unapologetically, shamelessly crazy as the real world. If Colting, Frey and Hoffman had pulled their shit in fandom, they would have been burned at the stake. But because they were operating in the real world, what happened? Colting actually got his book published overseas and then tried to claim, after the fact, that he was writing a parody, not Catcher in the Rye fanfic. Frey has a movie deal. And Hoffman's Tweets of Outrage will probably help her sell more books -- I mean, hell, I'd never heard of this book before Gawker picked up the story.

I'm so tired of the endless (and frequently self-righteous) bleats about how crazy fandom is. Fandom is an intensely passionate environment heavily populated by writers -- of varying degrees of ability, but writers nonetheless -- who, merely by virtue of being writers are a little bit touchy and narcissistic and removed from reality. And yet somehow it all holds together and most of the time we respect our boundaries and maintain our perspective and and manage to get along without making a literal federal case out of anything. As far as I'm concerned, there's a lot more crazy going on out there than there is in here.