will the “anonymous” mr. young please stand up
DEC. 5 postscript: Media Bistro today notes my musing that Robert Clark Young’s stink piece about Sewanee may have to do with his having had a bad experience there. Note this comment left by a reader of From Here to Obscurity on Dec. 2. I certainly believe there is room for rational, healthy debate on what Vice might have done differently when it comes to “Tuscaloosa Knights.” However, Young’s article is an extremely questionable piece of “journalism,” relying in part upon an incorrect quotation from of a piece of Vice’s story from his dissertation, the story that later appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Vice’s actual sentence in the dissertation is much longer and more detailed than Young’s representation of it, which uses ellipses in order to make the sentence look as though it is plagiarized.
original post: Robert Clark Young wasn’t content to just write a nasty, unfounded article bashing Brad Vice, Richard Bausch, Barry Hannah, Josip Novakovich, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and others. He decided to take it a step further, writing an anonymous email to everyone in Vice’s English department pointing them to the article. When one of the faculty members there responded to Young, saying that he sounded like a disgruntled student, Young’s uninspired and vindictive response was that she was “sucking literary cock.”
Since Young is so intent on having everyone read Vice’s dissertation, note that Vice has an epigraph from Carl Carmer on page 144 of the dissertation. It’s also worth mentioning this, which Vice wrote to me in an email: “Mike Curtis at the Atlantic Monthly was fully aware of Jim Dent’s Junction Boys when he edited Report from Junction.”
December 4th, 2005 at 2:00 am
I was immediately skeptical about the NY Press article based on the nasty comments Young left at one of the Storysouth articles. They showed me that he was not interested in a discussion, nor in clearing up the matter of the alleged plagiarism based on objective analyses.
I, too, received an anonymous comment at the AVA site I contribute to, as well as an e-mail from a one “J.G.” (I’ll leave off the full name here) pointing me to the NY Press article. I wrote to JG:
“Thank you for sending the article. I probably would have missed it. I try to keep an open mind, but this doesn’t look good for Mr. Vice. Maybe Robert Clark Young is correct in what he says, but he doesn’t look any better as a denunciator. He seems to have put a lot of energy into the task of destroying a fellow writer.”
And received this response, which reminds me very much of RCY’s choice of words in the Storysouth comments:
“Thank you for such an interesting response, Mr. Roberts. Probably, though, I think Mr. Young’s motive is to uphold the standards in his dual professions, writing and the teaching of writing. I agree with you that the new investigations look very bad for Mr. Vice.”
December 5th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
Not everybody agreed with you folks, you know. Check out these folks: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/47169
I have to say, your defense of Vice’s “borrowing” is pretty thin.
Just my two cents.
– FP
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