Master of Sockpuppets

By the end, you’re wondering if the author, Eric Naiman, is himself an invention of Harvey’s.

Slightly irrelevantly, I read “rather wonderful unraveling” and went “this is a Henry post,” which when I looked up it indeed was.

So beware of sockpuppeting, Henry! You have a distinctive style!

Now that I’ve read the article, I’m amazed at Naiman’s skill and persistence, awestruck at the web of deceit that Harvey spun, and genuinely concerned whether Harvey is now a suicide risk. I couldn’t even get halfway through before forwarding the link to my onetime research & bibliography prof.

“Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known. (Pause.) One pound six and something, eight I have little doubt.”
– Krapp’s Last Tape

I don’t see what all the fuss is about. He seems like a fine old gentleman. I only wish he had found a job — he might have been the best professor I ever had.

That record of the conversation between Dostoyevsky and Dickens reminds me of a meeting that took place once between A.D. Harvey and Lee Siegel….

a short story by Borges

Or Pierre Menard.

Henry @5
Thks for that, esp the second paragraph. My comment came across as a bit more dour than I meant.

And then a remark like Jeffrey Davis’s appears and makes me want to write another harsh comment, but I’ll refrain.

@Marcus Pivato

A.D. Harvey shows up immediately in the university library catalog that I have occasion to check most frequently. First item: Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (St Martin’s Press, 1978). Link

Anyway, why use Amazon as the check when anyone can go to WorldCat or the Library of Congress catalogs, just to name two?
http://www.loc.gov

The piece is not a “stunt.”

Here is *Warriors of the Rainbow*, which thanks to Amazon’s ‘look inside’ feature the reader can, well, look inside of.

http://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Rainbow-D-Harvey/dp/1582340897/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365650007&sr=1-1

Oxford, the Novel (1981) by Leo Bellingham (i.e. Harvey) is also in the Library of Congress catalog:

Link

And while we’re talking about Flann, we should mention Myles as well. The WAAMA offered ventriloquists who not only would supply intelligent conversation for people with nothing to say but who could supply both sides of the conversation–and, if you could afford it, misunderstand and argue with each other/themselves. As Casey Stengel said, you could look it up.

I am subscribed to SEELANGS although I don’t read it very often, and I vaguely remember the suspicious D-D encounter being discussed. If I were an American or British Dostoyevsky expert, I’d probably have called a Russian colleague in Moscow, St. Petersburg or Tartu to clear things up at once. It’s hard to imagine such a major finding to remain buried for 20 years.

Eric Naiman is perfectly real, of course – he teaches Russian Lit at Berkeley. The titles of his articles can be amusing: “A Filthy Look at Shakespeare’s Lolita,” “Perversion in Pnin (Reading Nabokov Preposterously),” “Historectomies: The Metaphysics of Reproduction in a Utopian Age,” and so on (the funniest one is in Russian, unfortunately).

What would be really interesting to take out of this mess is a full map of citations linking “good-faith” scholarship to the work of Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra (exempting A D H for the time being).

Naiman’s article was fantastic, but it left me wondering what Harvey was in it for. I mean, he went to such lengths! He wasn’t getting fame or money out of it, clearly. I wonder, does that leave any more than two serious possibilities: the satisfaction gained from beating a system which has excluded you; or the approval of one’s friends (a kind of grand joke, for their entertainment?)? If the former: really? Was it worth all the effort? And if the latter, someone else knew. But who?

What with the being / nothingness issue, it’s all about hoaxes this week, isn’t it? I mean, do I even know I am who I say I am?

“…but it left me wondering what Harvey was in it for.” Naiman is a Russian literature specialist. One day he spotted a highly suspicious claim that Dickens not only met Dostoevsky but revealed the workings of his imagination and his soul to the Russian novelist. Naiman absolutely had to check this – he is teaching a class on Dostoevsky after all – and found the claim unsupported by evidence. But the D&D tale had by then seeped through to the MSM as if it were a well-established fact – and how many other falsities are now considered common knowledge? It’s only natural that Naiman started unraveling the web of deceit and conceit.

I don’t see any problem with pseudononymous publication (she says, blogging under a somewhat obscured version of her real name). There’s something of a tradition of it, both for controversial academic works and for erotica.

And I’m not going to criticize Kierkegaard for writing as Johannes de Silentio etc.
Pseudononymously denouncing your own work can be an acceptable rhetorical device.

Inventing ficitious sources (e.g. the Dickens/Dostoyevsky incident), on the other hand, is generally not academically acceptable. Referees do sometimes check that cited sources actually exist, and probably ought to do so more often. (And also: oftentimes, if you trace back through the secondary literature to the primary source, you often find it doesn’t say what everyone who hasn’t actually read it thinks it says. And this happens witout delibrate fraud, just the Chinese Whipers effect).

There’s also something a bit suspect about using a pseudonym to praise your own work in a review .. it has something of the flavour of failing to declare a conflict of interest.

Still, I laughed at the article.
Borges’s Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius came to mind…

After Brian Nolan got out of school, he and his friends would manufacture controversies in the Letter to the Editor section of the Irish Times. High silliness. And, of course, there are the quotes from imaginary philosophers which litter his fiction The Third Policeman.

And, then there’s the marvelous boy Thomas Chatterton. And, of course, Swift’s solution to the Irish problem. And on and on.

Shortly before I got to this thread yesterday I read comments on Sayre’s Law so I was more or less primed to laugh at the issue, but then, knock wood, my livelihood doesn’t depend upon publishing.

37: that might be the cause of their long-running and bitter feud. It’s well known in Irish literary circles that Flann O’Brien would flatly refuse even to be in the same room as Myles na gCopaleen. I think that George Orwell tried for many years to reconcile the two, but he was persuaded to give it up as a hopeless effort by his friend Eric Blair.

I understand the Keynesian prescriptions. Krugman goes quite a bit further than that. Yesterday he was mocking the idea that deficits could have dangers. In 2004 he was saying that deficits half the size were likely to cause enormous problems. Arguing that deficits are worth the risk because high unemployment is much worse and already here is fine (and hopefully he has done that somewhere). Arguing that deficits aren’t a problem is different.

Furthermore his U turn wasn’t in 2012. It was in late 2006 when Democrats swept the House and gained the Senate. In 2004 he wasn’t arguing that he didn’t like Republican choices about the deficit. He was arguing that maintaining it was dramatically unsafe to the economy. In 2006, he argued that Democrats could spend at then current levels safely.

I’m in agreement with his political arguments that Democrats shouldn’t get sucked into deficit worries when other choices are more important if the deficit us at safe levels. My problem is with his characterizations of what counts as safe levels. He wasn’t just saying that Bush was running essentially tolerable deficits but making bad choices about where the money goes. He was actively doomsaying in 2004 about it threatening the economy (see the link I provided, it is very stark) and then immediately reversing himself about the level of danger within in weeks of Democrats winning the legislature in 2006.

This week he appears to be mocking the idea that current deficits could be problematic at all instead of making the more nuanced point that getting unemployment under control is more important.

@ Sebastian H

I had an econ professor who once told me, “Ask any Economist any question and if he is good he will always reply with the same answer , It depends”

You would have to be working backwards from the prejudice “I hate Krugman” to not conceed that most of his conclusions surrounding current economic affairs and prescribed prophylaxis is conditional

@29

For the lulz, my friend. For the lulz.

Part of its ineffable charm, Fu. Nobody knows what anyone is talking about.

19: Amazon is usually pretty good about fiction, even relatively obscure stuff.

I’m glad to see that LFC called this out in comment 20. Amazon is not a bibliographic resource. Really. Their information on publication dates, publishing house, and various other details (edition, number of pages if you care about that) is ridiculously unreliable. Seriously. They are not remotely complete even when they do have a listing. I say this as a book dealer. Use WorldCat.

(/kvetch)

dave heasman @47

Is that what you remember about him?

Odd–when he reminisced about you, what he mostly described were your nipples.

When I went to my copy of Tomalin’s Charles Dickens, I was disappointed to find that the passage isn’t there, but has been excised from the paperback edition. Tomalin writes in the acknowledgements that she is grateful to readers who have pointed out errors, but nowhere, afaics, is the change explicitly referred to.

“what he mostly described were your nipples”

Nice one Arn. Last time we met was at a North London book sale about 30 years ago. Do you still live in Leytonstone?