The Name Game

[peake]

Sometime back in the 1980s I was in a bookshop on Longacre. For some reason I started flicking through one of the literary magazines there, either the LRB or the TSP I’m not sure which. Suddenly I stopped, because there was my name. Not in a review, but in the headline for an ad!

Not long before, I’d reviewed a novel by Tim Winton for, I think,

Comments

[verdandiweaves]

The first time I reviewed theatre during the Edinburgh Festival I was startled to find my reviews with byline often flyposted around venues. On one occasion an actor attempted to hand me my own review as a reason to come to his show.
I don't review any more - and I miss it (although not the hours!), but I was always ambivalent when my review (and name) was used as a major drive to up audiences.
Then again any good review from me was hard won - I was a particularly ruthless reviewer. :)

[fjm]

Also that sense of looking an old "photograph" of one's thoughts and thinking "did I really look/think like that?"

[tysolna]

Whatever happened to asking if it's OK to quote someone? Or is that neccessary only in academic circles?

[redbird]

There seems to be a custom and/or expectation that published reviews are quotable without further checking. I'm not sure of the legalities of that (IANAL, as we say over on Usenet), though I suspect that the quotes are usually brief enough to count as fair use.

[nwhyte]

Sometimes too brief. I once reviewed a book which had a quote from H.P. Lovecraft on the back, describing it as "a classic of the first water". What Lovecraft actually said was "But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water" which is just a little different in its thrust!!!

[peake]

You only need permission for a very long quote. A sentence or two counts as fair usage - and I (along with every other reviewer) would be stumped if that wasn't the case.

It is just that when you come across your name in unexpected circumstances it is strangely disorienting.

[nwhyte]

Part of the way I relate to it is that once the words are written down and published, I feel that in a sense I have lost ownership of them; people will take them and do what they will with them, so it is prudent to maintain a bit of distance. An article I wrote on Diplomacy strategy when I was 17 is floating round the internet (God help anyone who follows my advice). The book-of-my-PhD-thesis is cited in works as diverse as Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age, from Antiquity through the First World War, by Richard P. Hallion and Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses, by Andrew Gibson. Perhaps it's also that I have moved from scholarship to politics, where the rules are very different.

[beamjockey]

I've recently learned that the revised edition of a book from Lulu.com will contain a blurb quoting me. From a comment I posted on Making Light, not even my own blog. Odd.

(Not that I mind.)