Harper’s Violates the Law of the Letter

In a case watched closely in magazinedom, a federal judge has told Harper’s magazine to pay author and Alfred A. Knopf editor Gordon Lish $2,000 for publishing in its “Readings” section parts of a letter Lish sent to prospective students of a writing class he teaches.

The ruling in the copyright-infringement suit said Harper’s used more of the 2,300-word letter--which made Lish sound pretentious, if not bizarre--than “fair use doctrine” allows.

The judge rejected Lish’s claim that the letter was maliciously edited and that its publication had caused its flamboyant author emotional distress.

Readers should hope that this ruling doesn’t stifle the magazine’s unauthorized use of letters to lend insight into matters that might otherwise escape public attention.

The December issue alone includes three such missives, the dissemination of which clearly adds to America’s knowledge base and cultural self-awareness.

In one letter, a New York City condominium manager scolds residents for hurling a mayonnaise jar and Coke bottle from their co-op windows at three noisy homeless people.

A second, excerpted from a medical journal and titled “Whiz Kid,” explains how a quick-thinking Alaskan father “acted pragmatically and swiftly” when his young son’s tongue got frozen to a metal hand-rail.

His “unusual first aid”? He urinated on the frozen area.

Finally, Harper’s quotes a publisher’s rejection letter for a book on multiculturalism titled, “The End of the American Story.”

Written by an editor at Penguin USA to the agent for respected author Leonard Fein, the letter reads, in part:

“Fein has a distinctive and appealing style, and his subject is clearly one of the defining issues of the Nineties. Yet I have several concerns.

“At risk of sounding like a market researcher instead of an editor, I fear that his moderate and reasonable views on multiculturalism would put a damper on our efforts to promote and publicize the book.

“After all, it’s not as though he’s advocating some inflammatory point of view that would have all the talk shows clamoring to host him. Rather, it seems to me that this would be a relatively quiet effort to advance the debate on this important subject, and I’m not convinced the audience would be large enough to justify his or our efforts.”

REQUIRED READING

* Besides awesome photos of hurricane surf, the cover of the new Surfer magazine carries this enticement: “The Bikini Issue, Page 58.”

But fumble through the ‘zine to that page and--bummer, dudes!--there’s not a scantily clad rad Betty in sight.

What shredders get instead is a faceful of anti-sexist attitude by editorial consultant Matt Warshaw.

Warshaw’s diatribe is clear and effective when blasting as contemptible the array of subtle and overt male attitudes and actions that serve to keep females off the waves. No doubt about it, surfing’s still a boys’ club, and they can be pretty boneheaded in their grasp of gender issues.

But Warshaw--who touts Susan Faludi’s “Backlash”--wobbles in confusing sexism with the more intricate issues of sexuality that naturally arise around a physical sport.

The debate about revealing swimwear, for example, is more complicated than Warshaw or many feminists would care to admit. So Surfer fearlessly tosses its own publisher into the fray: “Look, we’re a lifestyle magazine, and the way women are shown in our ads is part of that lifestyle. Have a look around the beach . . . “

Preachy though he is in places, Warshaw shows more gonads--to use a favorite surf term--than all the macho poseurs who think skillful surfing excuses male chauvinism.

* Call it “The Mystery of the Missing Moxie.” As reported in the November/December Ms. magazine, literary revisionism has gradually robbed Nancy Drew of her original characteristics.

In the original version of “The Hidden Staircase” for example, Nancy tells her father: “You’ve often said you wanted me to grow up self-reliant and brave.” That line was axed from the later version.

In the originals, Drew is described only as “attractive.” The new Nancy Drew Files sounds more like the pre-enlightenment Surfer: “The tight jeans looked great on her long, slim legs . . . “

In short, Ms. says: “The teen-age detective who was once a symbol of spunky female independence has slowly been replaced by an image of prolonged childhood, currently evolving toward a Barbie doll detective.”

* When most Americans envision the world, nations are separated by the shaded pastel borders of a National Geographic map. Finally the magazine has given its readers the definitive visual aid to comprehend the chaos in Europe.

Included in the December issue, the new map of Europe shows a pink Slovenia nudging an orange Croatia, which seems to be swallowing the purple Bosnia and Herzegovina, as that newly sovereign state recoils from Yugoslavia.

And Russia sure dwarfs Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

* “The kindest thing you can say is that an authentic reproduction is a genuine oxymoron,” writes Ada Louise Huxtable in the Dec. 3 New York Review of Books.

And that’s about the only kind thing she says about the trend in American architecture toward fakery, and how that reflects the sorry state of the American mind.

“Inventing American Reality” gets carried away in places, railing against such battered targets as Disneyland, where New Orleans Square is re-created, “divested of the distractions of dirt, crime and ethnic diversity.”

But overall, the piece is thought-provoking and mildly worrisome. Huxtable says that selectively reconstructed places such as Colonial Williamsburg, where one period of “authenticity” is preserved at the expense of others, “have taught many of us to prefer--and believe in--a sanitized and selective version of the past (and) to deny the diversity and eloquence of change and continuity . . . “

* There’s probably more violence in that adorable new “Home Alone” clone than a CD full of “gangsta” rap. So Entertainment Weekly asked a real doctor to do a “reality check” and add up the medical costs of all that “wacky violence.”

Here’s one of the 11 examples of “wacky violence”:

“Marv steps into floorless lobby, falls one story onto face. Damage: Bruising; possible multiple facial, skull fractures. Treatment: Reconstructive surgery. Cost: $8,000, including two-day hospital stay.”