Lonely Lawyer, Literary Deal

January 27, 2010

Talk to any London literary agent and two claims will soon be made. One, the non-fiction market is in a dire state, thanks mainly to the recession, and two, the ‘Misery Memoir’ has run its course. The reasons for the decline of the latter are many and varied, depending on which agent is doing the talking, but among them could just be the simple fact that the public has grown weary of people who choose to brandish their misfortune in print.

But just when the last rites for the Misery Memoir were being read, along comes a book to give the genre a shot in the arm. It will wend its way to these shores all the way from Canada, in which not-especially-miserable country former lawyer Emily White will shortly publish her first book, Lonely: A Memoir.

Legal Blog Watch has the story. Ms White had long yearned to be a writer but had also suffered from chronic loneliness. As she puts it: “When I became incredibly lonely in my early thirties, I found myself at the library, searching for a book that set out loneliness in personal, immediate terms. I wanted to see someone else describing themselves as lonely, just so that I wouldn’t feel so alone and peculiar in struggling with the state. When I couldn’t find the book I was looking for, I decided to write it myself.”

White currently writes a somewhat breathless, exclamatory blog and her website has an FAQ in which the word ‘lonely’ appears so often that one could be forgiven for concluding that she is on a crusade to stop it from feeling lonely. Indeed, the semantic implications are profound. If the word ‘lonely’ is surrounded by the word ‘lonely’, is its loneliness actually intensified? The PR and marketing bods at her publishers might have advised its repetition ad infinitum but surely synonyms should have been found, so as to ameliorate its and its author’s inherent despair?

But we cavil and quibble with the gentlest of asides. Loneliness isn’t much fun and fair play to White for securing a book deal from her experience.

We wish the erstwhile environmental lawyer well.  As well as reviving the Misery Memoir, her book may prove to add admirably to the canon of existential despair, one whose number includes a myriad of less-than-sociable characters. In the interim, besides hoping that she is considerably happier now, we can’t help but wonder whether White’s former profession has anything to do with all this. Anyone for ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Lawyer’?

 

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From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.

Not so right said Fred

February 2, 2012
fred hat

So Farewell, then, Sir Fred Goodwin.

Now you are just Fred.

Not Right Said Fred, but plain Fred.

The Forfeiture Committee did for you.

No one had heard of it before,

But Dave said it had to act, and it did.

Trouble is that no one knows what to think.

Is it ‘Alas, poor Fred‘,

Or ‘Hurray! Sir Fred is dead!’?

We don’t know.

Do you?

By A. Mob, aged 1,378 and a half.