This is a very old website, with very old links, converted from Google Classic to the new Google Sites. Little of it will be updated.
Post date: Dec 10, 2008 1:59:19 PM
Wow, that was a fun couple of days. This weekend I found this old picture of me in my old apartment building, where that old woman showed up in the entryway and is preserved in memory as glaring at the back of my head. I wrote an essay about it on Open Salon where I suspect it would have been largely ignored, but something happened to draw a lot of attention to it
Someone plagiarized me. On a singles Web site, Match Doctor, this woman ("RomanticLibra106," Marilyn Harsanyi of Portland, ME, class of '68) found my post, cut-n-pasted it into her blog, changed my name to hers, and let it run as though she'd written it. One of her regular readers thought it didn't sound like her other work, Googled some text from it and found my original post. She notified me and I started an account on Match Doctor to confront her; she promptly deleted the blog and her account. Her friends on Match Doctor, however, ignored the proof I presented and accused me of stealing from RomanticLibra106; they likewise ignored proof other users produced of her having ripped off other published articles.
She claims to be a published author, but in actuality she has uploaded a manuscript to Lulu.com, which is the Cafe Press of literature: people can order one-offs of whatever you set up there. This isn't a reputable publishing channel, you don't need an agent or an editor (though she direly needs an editor) and you don't contact a publisher. They print off copies of whatever you upload to their site, that's it. Not quite the same thing as being a published author in the traditional sense. And who knows how much of the writing in this book is actually hers? She says she gathered stories from around the Web--this is probably more literally true than her friends realize.
Despite the negativity of this event, I made acquaintance with a couple other users and exchanged e-mail, chatting about writing and craft. A few people had been encouraging me to stay and contribute and I thought it might be a fun side-project. I posted a couple times and had a look around at some of the other blogs. I found a lot of hatred there: racism, mainly, but intolerance in other forms as regards politics and religion. I stewed over this for a couple days, kept writing a blog entry about my views, kept deleting it. Last night I read an article about a Ford/Lincoln/Mercury dealer who produced and issued a racist radio campaign, insulting Toyota and its customers. I wrote up my opinion of this in the blog and, sure enough, the racists came out to defend their usage of epithets. One guy told a horrifying story about what someone in his family called nails that stick out of the wall, tried to pass it off as comedy. One woman suggested there were multiple sides to this story, as though there were a positive light in which to spin a racial slur. I was decried as "politically correct" and a liberal.
That pretty much confirmed what I was learning about the place and I deleted my account.
In the meantime, I wrote an article about being plagiarized in Open Salon, and that article got a lot of hits. It pointed back to my original article about my neighbor, and that article in turn received a lot of hits as well. The writers of Open Salon have been nothing but sympathetic and encouraging, and I've been thrilled with the support they offer. All in all, this whole thing has been a learning experience.