Gabriel Bernstein’s Men of Magic & Mystery

Gabriel Brownstein’s latest book, The Man from Beyond, is a fictional account of the contentious friendship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. It’s a relationship that’s been explored by other writers over the years, including William Hjortsberg (Nevermore) and Thomas Wheeler (The Arcanum)—in fact, we may hear from Wheeler soon, but that’s another tale to be unpacked another day… Anyway, when The Man From Beyond came to my attention, I decided to ask what the story behind the story was. And this is what I found out…

Joan Didion’s advice to writers about words applies to novelists and their subjects: You don’t choose them; they choose you. Why did I write a novel about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle? Why are so many other writers drawn to these subjects? I can’t answer. I can only tell you in my case how it happened.

In a church basement book sale, I saw Houdini’s name in red on the spine of a musty black hardcover. I was surprised to see that he was not the subject, but the author of the book, A Magician Among the Spirits, a title whose power to me was incantatory. At this point in my life, I had published a couple of stories in literary quarterlies, stories that would become part of my collection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, but I had no notion those stories would be put together in a book. My first child had been born. My first novel had garnered only warm, encouraging rejection letters. Had I been a sane person, I probably would have given up writing altogether. But I opened the cover of Houdini’s book, and there on the frontispiece was a picture of the magician shaking hands with Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a moment in Othello when Iago says: “It is engendered.” That’s what happened when I saw that photograph. I was going to write the book, even if I did not know it then.

(more…)

21 November 2005 | guest authors |

GreatestJournal.com Neither Greatest Nor Journal

So I was checking myself out in Technorati yesterday, just to see if the book was getting any play I hadn’t yet seen, when I discovered some outfit called GreatestJournal.com was using a version of my RSS feed on their site and calling it “Beatrice.com’s Journal.” Being an RDF feed, it looked rather unattractive to me, so I sent them a note:

“I did not authorize the republication of my blog on your site, and given the poor quality formatting of the feed being used, I would prefer that this syndication not take place. Please terminate the feed at your first opportunity.”

Their support staff decided that I didn’t just need an answer, so they tossed in some extra attitude they had lying around:

“Your RSS feed is open for use on your website, which means that the feed in question does NOT violate your copyright.

You might wish to take your feed, and the site regarding it: http://feeds.feedburner.com/beatrice down if you don’t want people to use it.

Your copyright is NOT violated. The GJ Abuse Team therefore are unable to assist you in this matter.”

If I’d complained about my copyright being violated, they might have an argument, though frankly I think their refusal to provide an opt-out option is pretty snotty in and of itself. But I never had a problem with the copyright. My issue with GreatestJournal is this: Their site is ugly. I put a lot of effort into making my real website and my real RSS feed look good, and I don’t want people thinking I’d produce an inferior version and call it “Beatrice.com’s Journal”…and with a well-established principle in place that enables people with web sites to request that information aggregators exclude their content, there’s no reason a site shouldn’t stop carrying an RSS feed from another party when faced with a simple request.

UPDATE: The support staff was a little more helpful the second time around, although they still didn’t actually remove my feed from their site, as any data aggregator with an opt-out option would upon request. “I suspect someone set up Feeds to a number of blogs during this period and abandoned reading them,” writes the staffer. There’s also this cute footer I missed the first time around: “This correspondence is the intellectual property of GreatestJournal.com and may not be reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of GreatestJournal.com.” Well, it’s not like they can do anything to me other than suspend “my” account…

AND THEN AGAIN: Late Saturday night, the word came around that the feed had been removed at my request. So now I’m happy again.

19 November 2005 | uncategorized |