Reminder about a Dorothy Parker production this week. The Midtown International Theatre Festival and TimeSpace Theatre Company present THOSE WHISTLING LADS, The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker. Adapted for the Stage by Maureen Van Trease, Directed by Jeff Janisheski. Showtime: Friday, August 3, 1:30 p.m. Place: The Workshop Theatres, Mainstage, 312 West 36th Street, 4th Floor. Running Time: 70 minutes. Admission: FREE. The piece explores the connection between Dorothy's tumultuous personal life and the satirical, biting wit she showed the world through her short stories and poetry. Selections include Here We Are, The Sexes, A Telephone Call, Dusk Before Fireworks, and You Were Perfectly Fine. It will be performed by 7 actors. Labels: events
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 7:47 PM | Permalink | Comments  
The Dorothy Parker Copyright Trial ended today. It lasted seven days; the final day was devoted to concluding the video deposition of Randall Calhoun. The monotonous testimony considered the line of questions that took up most of yesterday afternoon, defining what “poems” and “poetry” mean to scholars. Calhoun, an assistant professor of English from Ball State University, had another three hours of his deposition played in court. Calhoun, who bears a passing resemblance to Adam West, saw the questions put to him become a little more difficult, as he flopped around and tried to explain his contradictory statements to the attorneys. The cross-examination today was begun by Thomas Kjellberg, of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, a trial attorney representing Penguin Books. He grilled Calhoun on intricate interpretations of the schematics of poetry. Calhoun continued to be as wily as ever, contradicting himself and forgetting what he had previously told the attorneys, written, or testified about. In a remark he made, Calhoun related the craziest tale I’ve ever come across in my nine years of running this Web site. “There's a rumor,” Calhoun said, “That I think it's a fact, that Lillian Hellman went to Parker's apartment and found her dead and collected anything she could find there. And there's a rumor going around that someplace in Switzerland, there's a whole bunch of Dashiell Hammett/Dorothy Parker papers that are lost.” Wow! Somehow this was not mentioned in the 5,000-word article Marion Meade wrote for Bookforum last year about the Hellman-Parker relationship. Later, Calhoun said the FBI murdered Marilyn Monroe. Kjellberg tried to pin Calhoun down on the big issue that was raised yesterday, about when are Parker pieces poems, and when are they not. Since Calhoun, author of Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography, seems to be the No. 1 scholar in the trial, his words would weigh heavily on the case. Kjellberg read a statement Calhoun had previously given: "...the definition of poetry is general and vague. Whether an item should be deemed to constitute poetry is inherently a personal, subjective determination but is informed by and depends upon an individual’s personal background, education, taste and judgment I believe that certain items are not poetry, are not actually poems.” This same statement by Calhoun was raised before, and it prompted Kjellberg to ask, “When you said that, were you referring to the more objective classification, or were you talking about what you've sort of characterized as the subjective, whether something is poetic to you?” This follows what Calhoun had said earlier, and was played for the court yesterday; Calhoun said he believed the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance were both poetic. Kjellberg asked him, “Would it be accurate to say that when you said "the definition of poetry is general and vague," you meant poetry in some more subjective sense, poetry in terms of what moves the individual reader or strikes an individual as poetic?” Calhoun said he agreed with the statement. He also agreed with pretty much everything that Kjellberg asked. Calhoun had said earlier that what Silverstein classified as poems, were not poems in his opinion. This debate lasted quite awhile. Calhoun said, “a poem is one thing, but poetry is art… but a poem isn't necessarily a work of art. Poetry is a work of art.” He went on like this to Kjellberg, who raised the issue again of how Silverstein and Calhoun differed on the question of poetry. The Bio-Bibliography does not classify as poems some of what Silverstein called poems in his book, Not Much Fun. “News Item” made about its fifth appearance in the trial. Like a bad penny, it keeps turning up. Today it was Kjellberg’s turn to read, “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.” He then asked Calhoun if “News Item” is doggerel. Calhoun said no. “That in itself,” Calhoun went on to say, “just by itself, would be called a couplet because the last two lines rhyme. A couplet can be doggerel, but it doesn't have to be. A lot of authors will use couplets for doggerel verse. But doggerel is kind of like a poem, versus poetry. Something may be doggerel or it may not.” Earlier, Silverstein had stated that “News Item” was “a wisecrack” and not a poem. The deposition continued in this fashion until Calhoun was asked the million-dollar question: which Parker pieces were “poems” or “poetry.” Calhoun was read a list of titles, and was asked his opinion of them. Time and again, he said the pieces were poems or prose -- or neither. Sometimes they were called “squibs” – which was never really clear to me. Calhoun was shown issues of the old Life humor magazine; the publication Parker contributed numerous pieces to in the early Twenties. Calhoun came across as confused and utterly waylaid by Kjellberg’s questions, at one point saying to the attorney, “I don't know what you want me to say. Tell me what you want.” To which Kjellberg replied, “Just the truth.” The next section of the testimony felt like a car spinning its wheels in deep mud. Calhoun attempts to classify free verse and poems, going back on his earlier statements. The questions go over Parker’s famous “Hate Verses” at length. He is asked about Silverstein’s “Complete Chronology” that appears at the end of Not Much Fun; the same question was asked of many of the other witnesses during the past seven days. Calhoun says he would assume that this list is all of the poems of Dorothy Parker, if he was a reader. Silverstein’s lead counsel, Mark Rabinowitz, of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, asked the next questions of Calhoun. The two went back to using the terms “poems” and “poetry” as interchangeable. Rabinowitz asked, “How do you explain to me how in both of these affidavits the words “poetry” and “poems” are used interchangeably and sometimes in the same sentence, referring to the same subject?” To which Calhoun replied, “I was asked for my scholarly opinion, not a popular opinion. I have two vocabularies, one that I would use for that, and I was hoping that would be the scholarly vocabulary you wanted. I knew what I meant when I made the distinction between poetry and a poem. As was pointed out before, some of them were not used correctly.” The two disagreed over the two affidavits, going over the replies that Calhoun had made earlier. They talked about the scholarship of Silverstein, which Calhoun seemed to be mildly dismissive of. Calhoun was asked to clarify more of his earlier statements, which he seemed to have a hard time recalling. Calhoun said that one of Parker’s funniest pieces in Not Much Fun, which came from a letter she wrote to her close friend, Robert Benchley, should be called a poem. However, he did not include it in his book, because he couldn’t find a copy, and only read about it in Marion Meade’s bio, What Fresh Hell is This? That is also where Silverstein first saw it, and prompted him to locate the 5-page letter in a Boston’s Mugar Library. Meade’s bio was entered into evidence earlier, and referred to often. Rabinowitz said, “Every single one of your misstatements or your mistakes have in fact changed what was otherwise on the record in favor of Penguin's position, haven’t they?” Calhoun said he “had no idea” about that, and Rabinowitz continued, “Have you ever expressed in writing your intention to write four volumes compiling the works of Dorothy Parker prior to your affidavit that Mr. Kjellberg had you sign? Have you ever expressed that before… my point is, you, in fact, told me were you looking to retire. And that you were not looking to make your academic career anymore; that that was in the past?” Calhoun replied that he had written to the NAACP around 1985 expressing this interest, however, he denied Penguin Books had promised that they would publish his new collections of Parker material, if he ever compiled them, in exchange for favorable testimony in this case. Kjellberg took over a brief line of questions, working on the definition of poems. Calhoun stated that poems on a page, how they are formatted and set off, from margin to margin or indented, can help clarify them as poems – or not. This went on for a good 20 minutes, with Calhoun looking at how Parker pieces were presented in old Life magazines to determine if they were, indeed, poems or not. After listening to Calhoun say, “There's a huge difference between a poem on the page. Sometimes there are even decorations around it as opposed to prose on a page. These "Hate Verses" they don't look like prose when they are written,” it helped me make up my mind: the man is making this up. He seems backed into a corner, and trapped by his previous statements. He was, in a sense, saying that how Parker pieces appeared in magazines, set down by typography, would determine their worth as poems or prose. It was Rabinowitz who pointed out that Calhoun was not being clear about this point at all, and compared the original sources from the 1920s with the books from 1995 and 1999. The end of Randall Calhoun was anti-climatic. The TV screen just flickered off and he was gone. It is shocking to me that in all of higher education, academia, colleges and universities coast to coast, that the very best expert to be found on Dorothy Parker was this man. I have to kick myself, because I once crashed a literary society gathering composed almost entirely of college professors, and I rolled my eyes. However, any one of them would have jumped at the chance to be deposed in a trial like this if they could talk about their author for six straight hours. However, somehow I don’t think this is the last we’ll see or hear from Calhoun. After the testimony, Judge Keenan just had a few activities left. Both sides submitted more material to him. This included charts prepared that compared poems in the two books and Calhoun’s book, with item-by-item page numbers. The plaintiff’s attorney submitted a summary of figures, to try and figure out estimated damages. The defense objected to this. Richard Dannay, Penguin’s lead attorney, made a motion to dismiss the whole case. The judge denied the motion, but told him his rights are preserved. The defense said they were sending the judge 30-plus books. They also entered into the official record the 2006 edition of the Deluxe Edition of the Portable Dorothy Parker. I’d know that sweet Seth cover anyplace. The judge set Oct. 9, 2007, 2:30 p.m. for oral arguments. So the end is not in sight, yet, for this to be over or to the next stage. Then the judge addressed the courtroom. He said he knew he was “tart” at the beginning of the trial (he really laid the smackdown on the attorneys the first minute he took the bench last week). But he made no apologies. Judge Keenan, speaking to the room, said his wife is a retired schoolteacher. One thing he learned from her, he said, was that on the first day of class “if you are tough with students at the beginning of the school year, they are good the rest of the year.” He complimented both sides on behaving and getting along. He said it made for a better trial. I will miss the stunning view of Manhattan from Courtroom 20C of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse. All week, I was the lone spectator in the gallery almost the entire trial. From my front-row seat I could clearly see out the large windows all the way to Times Square, where Dorothy Parker once walked. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments
The Dorothy Parker Copyright Trial rolled into its second week today, but the end is in sight. Judge John F. Keenan today predicted it would wrap up tomorrow or Thursday. The final live witness was called today, Penguin Books president and publisher Kathryn Court. The courtroom also got its first look, via video monitor, at Randall Calhoun, a professor and Parker researcher who’s name has hovered over the entire case. I was eager to hear Court’s testimony. After 30 years at Penguin, she is one of the best-known people in the New York publishing world. Many editors at major publishing houses have worked under her. In this trial, Stuart Y. Silverstein vs. Penguin Putnam Inc, she is the only one of the three major players in the mess who is still employed by the company: Jane von Mehren, her former executive editor, quit in 2005, and she fired senior editor Michael Millman last year. Both von Mehren and Millman were called to testify last week. Court was a good witness. In a white sweater, eyeglasses, and with the trace of an accent, she looked the part of a publisher. She didn’t appear to be nervous, and answered the questions smoothly. Plaintiff’s counselor Christopher D. Mickus, of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, examined Court. Mickus followed a similar line of questioning from von Mehren and Millman, showing a 1996 internal company memo from a Penguin in-house attorney that reminded the staff of copyright and fair use guidelines. In addition, Court was shown the Viking-Penguin author’s guide, which also has a copyright and fair use section. This strategy was designed to show that senior Penguin staff was made aware of U.S. copyright laws. Once again, the facts of the case were brought out. How Penguin was shown Silverstein’s manuscript in 1994 of Not Much Fun, which purported to find 122 “lost” Dorothy Parker poems. Court agreed with the scenario that was presented, that von Mehren brought the book to Court and Millman. Court said early on they had wanted Silverstein to be part of the larger project, which became Complete Poems, published in March 1999. Court said she was never shown Silverstein’s manuscript. Mickus asked Court about the famous Aug. 4, 1999, letter from von Mehren to Silverstein. The letter said that Penguin would want to publish a complete collection. This would rule out just publishing the uncollected poems Silverstein had located. Court said there were discussions about Silverstein being part of the larger project; this indicated Penguin would rather he be the editor of Complete Poems, a role later filled by Colleen “Mikki” Breese. Court said the compilation copyright was never discussed. She gave the green light for Complete Poems to go forward. She said the company felt secure in its rights to publish the poems, which they cleared the permission of those that they wished to include in the volume. This was with Parker’s estate, which is controlled by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mickus went over the production of Complete Poems, and how Breese and Millman used Not Much Fun as the basis for a large portion of the book. Court said she signed off on the book, without direct knowledge of how it was produced. “We publish 300 to 350 books a year on our list,” she said. “Many, many things that cross my desk are given to people I trust.” At this point, Judge Keenan jumped in. He asked Court if she fired Millman because of the Silverstein lawsuit. She said she did not. Court was asked about the seven printings that Complete Poems went through, before Judge Keenan ordered the book’s recall in June 2003. Court said she attended regular meetings that discussed reprinting, and would likely have been present when the decisions were made to print more copies as part of inventory control. Mickus pointed out that some of the printings took place after Silverstein had alleged copyright infringement. If Millman had told Court of the lawsuit, she did not remember. Next, Court had a very brief cross-examination from Penguin’s lead trial attorney, Richard Dannay, of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman. His first question was a short one: did Penguin have the rights to publish Complete Poems? Yes, she said. Court was asked how a manuscript was prepared, even books from other publishers that were anthologies and collections. Was photocopying used as a timesaver? “That didn’t matter,” she said. It was done to be “quicker, more accurate… the most straightforward and accurate way to do it.” As far as she knows, that is how all publishers of anthologies assemble manuscripts for collections, which was the same thing Millman said on Friday. Court was asked about the market for “complete” collections that publishers create. “Anybody who admires an author… you want to read everything that writer wrote,” she told the court. Dannay was finished, and Mickus returned for another few questions of the witness. Court was asked about the copyright of Silverstein’s compilation. “The poems contained in Mr. Silverstein’s book were all the uncollected Dorothy Parker,” she said. “That was my understanding… we had no reason to disbelieve it” that these were not all the uncollected poems stated by Silverstein. Dannay stood up for the cross-examination. He handed Court a hardcover edition of Not Much Fun, and had her turn to the back, to the Complete Chronology section. This was the same section that came up during Gillian Blake’s testimony on Wednesday, over the opening sentence: “This is a chronological list of all of Dorothy Parker’s poems.” “It implies that this is all the uncollected poems of Dorothy Parker,” Court said. “That this list included everything, Dorothy Parker poems and verses.” Court was off the stand in a little more than an hour. She could be the final witness to appear in person in the courtroom, as our next witness was on a video monitor. I have been looking forward to laying eyes on Randall Calhoun. I have his book, Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood Press), and recommend it to anyone who is a serious Parker aficionado. What Calhoun has compiled is a voluminous amount of sources for Parker material, everything from poems and stories to her many screenplays. He put all this together in the 1980s, and finished the book in 1992. Because of this book, he is cited as one of the preeminent Parker scholars in the country, and was sought by both the defense and the plaintiff as a witness. In March, attorneys for both sides went to Muncie, Indiana, and took his deposition. Calhoun is an assistant professor of English at Ball State. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Western Illinois, and his PhD. in English at Ball State. Like the other Parker scholar, Colleen Breese, he also taught writing and composition. One thing I found extremely interesting about Calhoun is that for the past few years he has been teaching Ball State students “off campus” – which was his way of saying, they are guests of the state, and incarcerated at Pendleton Correctional Facility. He teaches these prisoners freshman composition; whether or not Dorothy Parker is studied behind bars did not come up. At times he appeared nervous and anxious, repeatedly rolling up and down the sleeves of his gray sweater. Calhoun looks to be in his mid 50s, with gray hair, eyeglasses, and perfect manners. He chuckled a lot at his own remarks. Silverstein’s lead counsel, Mark Rabinowitz, grilled Calhoun about the documents the professor turned over. Of the approximately 4,500 pages, almost none of them were about Calhoun’s book. He said he had thrown them away, or recycled the paper. Next, he went into how he began compiling the book more than 20 years ago. He read the three Parker biographies and went to microfilm readers to review old newspapers and magazines, searching for Parker poems and stories. This was eerily similar to how Silverstein began. Calhoun said he first became a fan of Parker in 1967, when she died. He was a junior in high school and his teacher read some of her poems to the class. He was hooked. In college, he read the Portable Dorothy Parker. “Politics has entered everything,” he said, “even the academic world, as you might guess. I think there are four Twentieth Century American poets, all women: Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, and Sara Teasdale, whom I think are awfully fine poets. But they're being dismissed now as authors, and I kind of developed an interest just by reading them… Parker is generally left out of American Lit surveys, that sort of thing.” In 1988 he contacted the NAACP about editing the complete works of Parker, and they were receptive. However, he did not get much further with Viking-Penguin. “I found out there was a lot of in-fighting and jealousy among publishers and copyright holders,” Calhoun said. “I got dismissed once by Penguin by saying ‘you're a hick from Muncie, Indiana. You wouldn't have the ability to do this sort of thing.’ And, finally, I said to hell with it. It wasn't worth what I was fighting… I got nothing except obfuscation and maybes, and I had no luck getting anybody interested in that sort of thing.” But Calhoun pressed on, compiling his book and finding an academic publisher, Greenwood Press. A few years later, Penguin did publish a collection of Parker’s stories, and in 1999, Complete Poems. By this time, Calhoun would be a player in a different light, as a witness in Silverstein vs. Penguin Putnam. He was contacted by Silverstein’s legal team, and was sent an affidavit to sign, saying he would be partial to helping the plaintiff. In December 2004, he said he was looking to retire and not pursue adding to his academic reputation further. He was teaching at state prisons. He received a phone call from Silverstein’s attorney, and they spoke of Penguin. His interest in Parker was far in the past and he was hoping to retire. He signed an affidavit stating he would help Silverstein’s case. However, the newfound interest in Parker stirred something in Calhoun, got his juices flowing again. For whatever reason, he said, in June 2005, he spoke to Penguin’s attorney, Thomas Kjellberg. This infuriated Team Silverstein, who had a signed affidavit from Calhoun saying he would assist them. Apparently, Penguin’s attorneys contacted Calhoun at least three times. Calhoun said he was thinking about writing another book. “When all this has come up, I went back and reread all of Parker's work,” he said. “And I think she's a better writer than anybody knows, and so, yeah, I think it might be fun to do.” Calhoun signed a second affidavit, for Penguin, which stated he had in mind editing four more volumes of Parker material: separate ones for sketches, reviews, essays and prose, as four separate volumes. This contradicted his earlier affidavit he had previously signed. It appears that Calhoun was now helping Penguin, not Silverstein. Was it because he believed Penguin would publish his books, if he helped them? Later in his testimony, Calhoun sounded confused and mixed up. “The truth is to this very day, I didn't know who you are, I didn't know who he was, I didn't know who was fighting,” Calhoun said. “Nobody would talk to me. I didn't understand what was going on… I didn't know who was fighting whom over what. I've begun to see a little bit right now.” Calhoun said the Penguin attorneys did not suggest he write a book for the company. Silverstein’s attorneys presented telephone records that showed Calhoun calling a 212 area code, which is Manhattan. There was a 43-minute phone call, followed by others. Apparently, it looks like both sides were fighting for the services of Calhoun, who both believe is the most prominent Dorothy Parker scholar in all of academia. Calhoun had both sides chasing after him to be their star witness. At one point, Calhoun even joked about getting a free trip to New York City, which really riled everyone up. It was unclear if Calhoun was merely an opportunist, seeking to please Penguin because he may get a book deal, or if he just did not understand the facts of the case when he initially agreed to help the plaintiff, Silverstein. What both sides needed of Calhoun was his determination of what poems and poetry are defined as in the mixed-up world of Mrs. Dorothy Parker. The entire afternoon was taken up with a lively debate over what is a poem and what is a verse. What is a “non-poem” and what is “free verse” in Calhoun’s view. The crux of the issue is that Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography and Not Much Fun are different. Calhoun and Silverstein do not agree on what poetry is. Calhoun called Silverstein an “anthologist” while the book he produced, after almost 30 years of teaching English, is more scholarly. Calhoun could call a Parker piece a poem or a “prose squib” and get away with it, because he was a professor of English who had studied Parker more closely than anyone else. There was a philosophical discussion of poetry. “Is it a poem? Yes,” Calhoun said. “Is it poetry? No. Poetry is more about aesthetics and beauty… it was written as a poem, but it is not poetry.” Calhoun said real poetry is, “beautiful, sublime, it appeals to the human soul.” And in his full-on professor mode, Calhoun brought in everything from Pulp Fiction, James Dickey, and Dylan Thomas. When he brought up Oscar Wilde and Ezra Pound, I was secretly hoping he’d recite some on the spot. Calhoun was on a roll as he started in with the greats of modern poetry, and gave a pretty decent sophomore-level poetry class rant to the assembled courtroom. Calhoun told the court, as if he was in a lecture hall: “The kind of things that Dorothy Parker wrote in the Twenties at one time would have been considered the only poetry there was,” he said. “The iambic pentameter, the trio lets, little exercises like that. People consider those poems. Other authors who were writing at the time, most notably somebody like T.S. Eliot, people made fun of. You can see in her works, "Oh Look, I Can Do It, Too (Showing That Anyone Can Write Modernist Verse)." And those two terms, poetry and verse, are used against each other. In fact, in some ways, she's just a versifier. That's not a poet.” Calhoun cited “One Perfect Rose” as an example of good poetry. But then he looked down his nose at the poems in Not Much Fun. “They were probably lost for a reason,” he said. “They aren’t very good.” Calhoun’s video testimony continues tomorrow. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments
In an old cowboys and Indians movie I once saw, I remember a cowboy throw his saddle onto the back of his horse. In between the saddle and the horse was a blanket, and underneath the blanket were a couple of burs that had been picked up someplace. When the saddle landed on the blanket on the back of his mount, the cowboy found out what it’s like to have a bur under your saddle. I saw that same look in a U.S. Courthouse today, as the #1 and #2 Penguin Books executives took the stand for a whirlwind hour of testimony in the ongoing Dorothy Parker Copyright Trial. Subpoenas have been issued like parking tickets in this case. Today they brought in the Penguin Group's worldwide chairman and Chief Executive John Makinson all the way from London, and David Shanks, the chief executive officer of the Penguin Group (USA), all the way from Soho. Makinson probably spent more time in the first class lounge at Heathrow than he did in the witness box, but at least he can tell his friends at the next Cambridge alumni reunion what a U.S. federal courtroom looks like when you sit next to the judge.  I was kind of incredulous that the plaintiff in the case, Stuart Y. Silverstein, actually was getting the two most powerful men in the company to come testify. For Makinson, who said he has never even laid eyes on the book at the center of the lawsuit, Dorothy Parker Complete Poems, his testimony was delivered without emotion or drama. He was on and off the stand in about 35 minutes. Shanks spent even less time under oath, about 20 minutes. Neither witness looked comfortable on the stand. Also in the courtroom for the first time during the trial was Alex Gigante, Penguin Group USA’s senior vice president for legal affairs. His name has come up every day in the trial, as he has taken an active part in the case since 2000. However, Gigante was not called as a witness, and departed with the two executives. Silverstein’s lead counsel, Mark Rabinowitz, of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, took charge of the case and examining the two witnesses. Shanks went first, leaning into the microphone and giving short, direct answers to the questions. I don’t think he elaborated on more than one response. Shanks said that Penguin USA publishes more than 2,500 books a year, and he does not concern himself with the editorial side of the business. To just about every question that Rabinowitz asked about Complete Poems, Shanks said that people underneath him were overseeing the matter. He was asked about the December 2001 Wall Street Journal article about the case, the first international coverage the lawsuit garnered. Shanks said he didn’t recall it, and that he did not show it to Makinson. He said he only recently discussed the suit with Makinson, after a talk years ago about the substance of the case. Shanks told the court that the company attorneys he spoke to said Penguin had a very good case and he didn’t need to worry about it. Rabinowitz wanted to learn how much Shanks had briefed Makinson on the case. Not much, it turned out. Shanks said he did not talk about Silverstein, the book, or the copyright issues with Makinson. He did speak with Gigante since he is the in-house counsel, but Gigante assured him they had a good case. Shanks said Makinson was “upset that he had to fly from England to testify,” but he did not offer any deeper insight into their discussions of the case. Judge John F. Keenan, who is hearing the case, was the same judge who ordered Penguin to withdraw from sale Complete Poems more than four years ago. Rabinowitz asked Shanks how the book had continued to be published in the years prior to that, knowing that Silverstein was alleging copyright infringement, and was seeking legal redress. “We were advised by Alex Gigante that we could continue to publish the book,” he said, despite the pending trial. Printing history records introduced in court today showed that Complete Poems went through five printings between March 1999 and May 2001, almost a year after the first claim was filed against the company. Penguin issued more copies, ultimately going to a seventh printing in July 2002. The book was a hot seller. Shanks was done on the stand after 20 minutes. Penguin’s lead trial attorney, Richard Dannay of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, did not purse a cross-examination, and Shanks left the witness box. The court eagerly anticipated the appearance of John Makinson. Here was the #1 executive for the worldwide company, director of Pearson PLC, the parent company of the Penguin Group, and a man who oversees 20 companies. With perfect silver hair and in a crisp tailored suit and British accent, Makinson was the most polished of any witness in the trial so far. It was as if I was watching a BBC anchor deliver the news, and the news was that he never heard of this book or this man Silverstein, because he was too damn busy running a multinational company. Makinson ticked off his main job duties, none of which entailed keeping tabs on editorial problems and lawsuits emanating from the company’s outpost on Hudson Street. He explained the Penguin corporate structure and where he fits in with the other divisions (Makinson is on top). He said that while coordinating the activities of 20 companies, and since the company comes out with 4,500 books annually, he was not tasked with keeping track of the case. The first time he heard of it was when he read about it “in a press article somewhere.” He could not say if it was the international edition of the Wall Street Journal, which ran Lawrence Carrel’s piece on its front page in May 2001. He said he mentioned it to Shanks, wanting to verify that the case was “being properly addressed.” Makinson and Shanks discussed the merits of the case, but not if the allegations were true. He said he could not concern himself with the details of the case because Shanks was overseeing it. Judge Keenan asked him what “merit” meant, and Makinson replied that the defense of the case had merit. “I had left the matter in David’s hands and felt it was his responsibility to address it,” he said. In addition, Makinson claimed he was not told of the book’s recall; according to Silverstein, the first time this has ever happened at Penguin. Makinson said he became aware subsequently that the book was taken off shelves. Makinson was asked about editor Colleen Breese’s actions in putting Complete Poems together, where she detailed how she had photocopied Silverstein’s book, Not Much Fun. It was no surprise when he told the court he was not aware of this, and does not concern himself with operations at that level. “It concerns me that editors throughout the company act in a responsible manner,” Makinson said. “I think Penguin acted responsibly and with courtesy.” He went on to say that personally, he feels that perhaps Silverstein should have been given attribution in Complete Poems, and given some subsequent credit. His time on the stand drawing to a close, Makinson was asked several pointed questions. He did not discuss the case with Kathryn Court, the Penguin USA publisher, who will be a witness on Tuesday. He did not make any sort of investigation into the case, because it was in the hands of Shanks and corporate counsel. Furthermore, he did not have a role in the book, or any other in the company. “I don’t get involved in any title anywhere in the world,” lawsuit or not, he said. Makinson, who gave a deposition to the court in 2003, had some of his previous statements read back to him. He sat up straight in his chair, and with a steely gaze he spoke directly to Rabinowitz. “I believe Penguin was acting in an ethical manner,” he said. It was at this point that the plaintiff’s attorney asked the witness if he even knew the book that was in question. Makinson said he’d never seen the book, nor looked at it. So Rabinowitz took one off the plaintiff’s table and showed him a copy. With no cross-examination from Dannay, the witness was done. He and Shanks, accompanied by Gigante, promptly left the courthouse.  It was still early enough in the morning that Judge Keenan thought the court could hear the rest of Colleen “Mikki” Breese’s video deposition. Both sides have had this deposition in their hands since December 2001, but the plaintiff wanted all six hours played in open court. It was like watching an infomercial for a product you had no need for. Picking up the testimony where the tape stopped on Friday, Breese was shown her contract with Penguin, signed by Kathryn Court. Breese did not know she was the publisher. She also was shown a letter she sent to Michael Millman, the ex-editor who testified Friday that he oversaw the project. Breese said in the letter that she thought a book that compiled all of Parker’s poems was a good project to follow Complete Stories, which she also had edited. She was asked where the idea came from for the book. “Where does anyone get any ideas from?” she asked the attorney. “The idea came into my head.” Nobody at Penguin Books suggested to her that she compile Dorothy Parker’s poems. “This appears to be my idea,” she said a little proudly. It would be her last book for the company, and in reality, her last book for any other company. Breese said that she was never given Silverstein’s manuscript, which he gave to Penguin in 1994 and they turned down. She said she wasn’t sent it, and was not aware that Penguin had made a previous offer to him. Breese said she purchased a copy of Not Much Fun, and she did see Silverstein’s copyright notice. However, she believed this only covered his introduction to the book, because “he can’t copyright Dorothy Parker’s poems, just the introduction.” At this point, editor Millman told her it was OK to copy Parker’s poems from NMF for Complete Poems. She began work on copying the poems for the book, and assembled the package for Millman. It also came out that she never once met him in person, and seemed surprised to say that she wouldn’t know what he looks like if she ever did. The two did not discuss the legality of photocopying Silverstein’s book. The production of Complete Poems was an exercise in using a copy machine for Breese. She did no actual editing of the book’s contents, or clearing the rights with the estate of Dorothy Parker. She did not discuss specific poems with Millman, or where the titles came from (many, apparently, created by Silverstein). She spot-checked if Dorothy Parker even wrote all them – she took Silverstein’s research at face value, since his publisher, Scribner, was so reputable. If she had the time, she looked some of them up on microfilm, to match the poems with the NMF list of poems. But she definitely did not check the words, punctuation, or formats. Breese did not enter any of the poems into a text document on her computer; she merely made paper copies for Millman. Breese gave a brief history of her involvement with Dorothy Parker. It began in 1988 at the University of Toledo, when she began her dissertation on Parker. This became Excuse My Dust: The Art of Dorothy Parker’s Serious Fiction. She said she amassed a large volume of documents along the way, all photocopies that she obtained at the university library. As she said in earlier testimony, Penguin was open to a book of Parker’s poems, and when they said she could be the editor, she thought, “Wonderful, I already have 50 percent of them copied already.” She began her research back at the library. But the publication of NMF was a Godsend to her, the editor who had to drop a dime into the microfilm reader for every printout she dug up of old Parker poems. As she put it, “I was tired of making copies.” Breese sent the stack of copies off to New York to Millman. She reiterated that NMF was the source of the section of the book called “Poems Uncollected By Parker” and that Millman knew these all came out of NMF. She did not think anything more of this. The next section of her testimony got back to what Silverstein was asked in Day One of the trial: What is a poem, and what is poetry. At this, Breese perked up as if she was back in the classroom. She said this was something she used to discuss with her students. Breese was asked to define free verse, and she immediately quoted Robert Frost: “Free verse is like playing tennis without a net.” She was asked if there were conflicting definitions of what a poem is, and she agreed, with a roll of her eyes. This was something you won’t get by reading the transcript, which is a good reason to play the video in court. Finally, she was asked if she taught free verse to her class. “Yes, I teach Walt Whitman,” she said with a huff. Then she gave a short lecture to the court on poetry. She was asked if she thought Silverstein was a scholar, in her opinion. Breese was dismissive of that. “I used his book as a source to make clear photocopies,” was how she termed the task of assembling Not Much Fun. Breese was shown her dissertation, and page upon page of copies that were used for her bibliography, primary and secondary sources. She said she read all of Parker’s work and all criticism of the work. For the next two hours of the tape, the attorneys reviewed with Breese the work she did on Complete Poems. Time after time, it was shown that she did indeed photocopy NMF, warts and all. Even where Silverstein goofed, she copied that too. In the poem “Oh Look -- I Can Do It, Too” he dropped an entire line from the poem. In Complete Poems, that line is missing as well. Did she mean to leave it out, she was asked rhetorically. “No,” she said, “and I didn’t think he had either.” “I didn’t see that as my job,” she said. “Whomever they got as a copy editor at Penguin” should have gone line by line to check the poems, because Breese didn’t think she should have had to. She did not look at the original source of the materials. “I made Xerox copies from Not Much Fun,” she said. The plaintiff’s attorneys read Parker poems from the original sources and then compared them to what Breese used in Complete Poems. This was very tedious as they talked about Emdashes, capitalization, and line breaks. “Line by line?” Breese asked. “No. I did not do any copyediting in Complete Poems.” After Complete Poems was published in early 1999, Michael Millman sent about five complimentary copies to Breese, with a nice note. That was the last she heard from Penguin until 2001, when Millman called her to say there was a pending lawsuit. Breese was never told if the book was a success or not, and sales figures were never shared with her. No future projects were ever discussed either. On Tuesday, what could be the final live witness in the trial is due to take the stand. Kathryn Court, president and publisher of Penguin Group (USA), will be in court at 10 a.m. The court keeps a box of tissues in the witness box. But I don’t think this case will draw any tears from anybody, unless they are tears of joy when it is all over. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Monday, July 23, 2007 at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments
Friday morning during Day Four of the Dorothy Parker Copyright Trial the courtroom of Judge John F. Keenan did not know what to expect of the first witness. Judge Keenan said, “I have no idea whether he’s hostile or not,” prompted by a memo from one of the attorneys in the case. The air of mystery was around a former Penguin Classics editor who was difficult to locate, didn’t return phone messages, and ultimately had to be served with a subpoena by Penguin to appear in court. This set up a bit of drama for the appearance in the witness box of the editor who had set in motion the events that would lead to Penguin’s ill-fated 1999 book, Dorothy Parker Complete Poems, and the lawsuit brought by the plaintiff in the case, Stuart Y. Silverstein. When the judge was done, and said that we would all have to wait and see if the witness was going to be hostile or not, up stepped the former editor to be sworn in, Michael Millman. Everyone had been anticipating his appearance in court, but after 1 minute I could tell he would be the exact opposite of what a “hostile” witness could be. (I really don’t know what a hostile witness is, except from the movies). Millman was open, friendly, gracious and pleasant. He spoke calmly and evenly as he laid out the events of 12 years ago that brought this case to life. At times he was apologetic and looked eager to please – the judge, the lawyers, the court reporter. He did not look comfortable sitting in the witness box, but he did try to relax. Silverstein’s lead counsel, Mark Rabinowitz, of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, asked the first questions. Rabinowitz is getting more relaxed and confident as the days go on. He is a little different from the opening day on Tuesday; I’d say he appears to be more comfortable shooting the questions out. Penguin’s lead attorney, Richard Dannay of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, is still the more intimidating of the two, but that is probably because Dannay looks like he has been practicing law for a lot more years than Rabinowitz, and is more of a courtroom veteran. Rabinowitz tried, without a lot of luck, to grill Millman on how hard he had been to find for the trial. Millman gave some personal reasons about why he was not easy to find in Upstate New York. Millman said he left Penguin in March 2006. “Basically I was let go. We came to a parting of the ways after almost 20 years.” He did not give a reason and was not asked if this lawsuit played any part in it. Then he gave a history of how Complete Poems came to become part of the Penguin catalog, and how it was created. Millman was a senior editor in 1996. He said that Penguin editors and authors were given a pamphlet that “sketched out” copyright guidelines, but he had no formal copyright law training. He was asked to read a letter that a Penguin in-house attorney had sent internally that outlined policy and fair use for editors to use copyrighted material. This same line of questioning was used on Wednesday on Jane von Mehren, Millman’s former boss, who also said she did not have very much copyright training at Penguin. Silverstein’s team is trying to show that Penguin told its staff about copyright law, but it did not sink in. Next, Rabinowitz had Millman lay out the specifics of the book. He said he first heard of Silverstein from von Mehren at a staff editorial meeting. He then got a manuscript of Not Much Fun (NMF). Millman said that what made sense to him was not to publish a small selection of poems that Dorothy Parker didn’t want to re-publish, but to have them be published as part of a larger collection of her work. This was discussed with von Mehren, he said. A letter was sent from von Mehren to Silverstein stating that Penguin wanted to publish a larger collection of Parker’s work, and they were inclined to use his manuscript as part of it. They also offered to hire Silverstein as the editor of the larger book, for $2000. This was around the same time as Complete Stories, which Penguin published in 1995 to great acclaim, and was the first “complete” collection of Parker’s short fiction. Millman said they were already thinking of compiling a “complete” collection of Parker poems because of this; it would be a “companion” to the earlier book. His understanding was that Silverstein rejected the proposal. At no time in the trial has it been suggested that there was any negotiations between the two parties; that Silverstein’s agent asked for more money, that Penguin countered with a better offer, or that there was any back and forth between the two. The project just suffered a quick death in 1995. Millman was asked to look at a copy of the Portable Dorothy Parker, which was a book that was on the backlist that he oversaw. He said that when he was first shown Silverstein’s manuscript, “I was very surprised.” He had never seen these 122 poems before. With Complete Stories underway, it reinforced the idea of having a “companion” to it. He was asked about the decision to publish Complete Poems: “I think I was the culprit who said I think we should do this,” but it was the editor-in-chief, Kathryn Court, that approved it. Next came the actual book editorial process. Millman said he often hired outside editors. Midwestern college instructor Colleen “Mikki” Breese came to his attention, as her testimony revealed in Day Three, sometime in 1993, around the time of the centenary of Parker’s birth. Millman then explained how Complete Poems was created. He told the Penguin contracts department that the poems were either controlled by Viking-Penguin or else were in the public domain. He got a signed agreement to publish them from the attorney representing Parker’s estate, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rabinowitz asked Millman if he had any conversation with anyone at Penguin about Silverstein having a copyright on his collection of uncollected poems and verses. “I just believed the material in question belonged to Mrs. Parker’s estate and Mr. Silverstein had no claim to them,” Millman said. He was asked if he made a decision to ignore Silverstein’s copyright. “As far as I could tell, the poems were all owned by the NAACP, or else had fallen out of copyright,” he replied. Rabinowitz tried to get Millman to say he ignored Silverstein’s copyright notice, but he could not. The timeline of events showed that Millman mailed Breese a copy of “Not Much Fun” when his 2001 deposition was read back to him. “It sounds like me,” he said with a big smile. “Convoluted and confused.” The attorney proceeded. Millman’s correspondence with Breese was read back to him, which shows he brought up NMF with her. Breese then photocopied the pages of NMF to use for Complete Poems. “Cutting and pasting” was first explained in a letter from Breese to Millman, as he explained, “…it was the absolute custom we did with all the Penguin Classics.” Then a letter from Breese was read, saying that she would not want to “direct readers to the competition” by mentioning Silverstein or his book in Complete Poems. Indeed, Penguin has never included Silverstein in any of its Dorothy Parker books’ end matter. Breese then sent the manuscript for Complete Poems to Millman, who ultimately sent it to the production department. The legal department did not vet it. The Complete Poems “A Note on the Text” was read back to Millman. He agreed with the statement that the book did not “faithfully” include mention of NMF’s existence. Rabinowitz then read to Millman the same words he read to von Mehren, which were from the Penguin catalog of the late 1990s and early 2000 that said Complete Poems claimed to present poems that had never been collected before, which was untrue, since NMF had been in print from Scribner since 1996. Next up to bat was Richard Dannay, who at one time, when Millman was still under the wing of Penguin, would have been looking out for Millman’s best interests. Now it appeared Dannay just wanted Millman to do his best to set the record straight, and shore up Penguin’s defense. From Millman’s testimony on Friday, it did not appear Dannay had coached him about what to say. Again, Millman was not “hostile” to the defense today. Millman was first shown an October 1996 memo he had sent to Breese. It was an annotated list of all of Parker’s poems. In fact, this was the “Complete Chronology” that Silverstein had compiled and used at the back to NMF. Then Dannay read the Penguin-NAACP contract that allowed for the publication or all these poems. “We were using Silverstein’s book as shorthand…” Millman said. “I said to Xerox that list to my assistant… we would use it as tear sheets” for the book production. Dannay asked Millman, did Penguin have the right to publish each poem? “Correct,” the witness replied. Letters from 1995 to 1996 were introduced that show Millman and Breese were working on Complete Poems, and that the NAACP had agreed to a contract to publish it. Dannay said the correspondence showed Complete Poems was underway before NMF was published. Rabinowitz had a very brief re-direct of Millman. The witness was shown paperback copies of both Not Much Fun and Complete Poems, held up by Rabinowitz over his head. Physically, he wanted the witness to look at the books, then said NMF retailed for $15 and Complete Poems for $16. However, NMF has half as many poems as Complete Poems, yet retails for $1 less. Were these two books comparable to each other, Millman was asked? “They didn’t seem to rule each other out,” Millman told the plaintiff’s attorney. “They were kind of going for two different markets.” Millman was done. He had corroborated his earlier testimony from 2001, and his remarks lined up almost exactly with what Breese had said. He didn’t think he had done anything wrong, because the copyrights were not in Silverstein’s control. To me, it didn’t look like had added anything new to the case. The courtroom was now ready to resume Breese’s video testimony from 2001. Papers were pushed aside. I should also point out, physically in the courtroom, there are thousands of pages of documents. There are photocopies of entire books and collections in evidence. There are hundreds of pages of evidence, all in big, thick binders, which are passed from attorneys, to judge, to witness. There have also been three court reporters working diligently to get down every word said in court. When all is said and done, there could be a million pages of documents generated from this trial, easily. The plaintiff’s side was now ready to resume playing the Breese DVD. She has about 4 hours of testimony from her 2001 deposition, I think, and the plaintiff wants to play the whole thing in open court. It is pretty boring. There is a lot of page shuffling, stopping, starting, and repeating of questions. About every 5 minutes she says something worthwhile. The judge is going to play a little bit each day, which we will watch, after the real witnesses are done. So on Monday we will see more of her. After watching Breese on the monitor for a few hours now, she is beginning to be a more sympathetic character to me. She looks like my grandmother, taking her reading glasses off and then putting them back on. Breese did not think she was doing anything wrong when she photocopied Parker stories and poems over the years of teaching. She just wanted Parker books to use in her classroom, and, lo and behold, an editor at Penguin said she could have her wish. It must have been exciting for her, a part-time instructor at a small college in Ohio, to be getting faxes and packages sent to her from a prestigious New York City publishing house to the English department offices of her college. Maybe professors in the department saw her working on a book about Dorothy Parker, and then a second one? Breese said that when Penguin flew her to New York to give her deposition, the company put her up at the Soho Grand Hotel. So Penguin spent more on her hotel bill than they did on Breese’s fee to edit their book. At one point on the tape, when she said she was no longer at Toledo University, Breese said she didn’t have an office any more. She looked pretty sad to say it, as if she missed university life. When the DVD fired up again, Breese said that while using photocopied material, it was always a problem to get clear copies, there was an “interest in clarity” to consider. Rather than use second or third generation copies, she wanted to use a clean book: NMF. Breese did not do what Silverstein did, go to microfilm to locate Parker’s poems and verses, she said, because copies from microfilm “are muddy or have spots” and that “none of them are really good.” She said she did not use any poems from original sources, that just photocopies of NMF were used. This would explain how she used the titles Silverstein gave to untitled Parker pieces, as well as using his punctuation and format changes. For others, she used photocopies she got from the Toledo library and others through academic inter-library loans. Breese was not asked and did not say that she actually owned any Parker books to make her photocopies from. Next came the line of questions I was waiting to hear, about when she learned she might be in hot water for editing Complete Poems. She said she did not learn that Silverstein had sent a demand letter claiming copyright infringement to Penguin. Breese said she became aware of the sticky issue much later. “My knowledge begins in May 2001,” she said firmly. Her claim was that during the months Silverstein was asking Penguin for documents, Penguin did not contact her about it. However, in the responses to Silverstein that were sent from Penguin before the lawsuit began, Breese was mentioned, as if she had a hand in helping Penguin explain herself. The trial is also showing what a neophyte to publishing that Breese was. How Penguin could use someone of this caliber to edit one of its most important authors is almost unfathomable. Breese said she did not know what line editors do. That was explained to her. Later, when Silverstein’s attorney asked Breese if she was aware that Penguin had approached Calvin Trillin, the renowned New Yorker writer, to write the introduction to Complete Poems, she said “no” with a blank look. (So Millman, after one of the most famous New Yorker staffers turns him down, he just goes with a women’s studies teacher nobody has ever heard of? Didn’t this raise a red flag with Jane von Mehren? Or Kathryn Court, the Senior Vice-President, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of Penguin Books?) Silverstein’s attorney tried to pin her down to when she learned of the lawsuit. Breese said she saw the May 4, 2001, article by Lawrence Carrel in the Wall Street Journal. However, she saw it first on a link on dorothyparker.com, when she was naturally curious about Parker and did a search for her online. She said dorothyparker.com came up, and she clicked around the site “just for curiosity” and saw information about the lawsuit. Breese said Complete Poems started when Millman called her. Complete Stories had been a success, a book she had compiled by also photocopying for Penguin as many Parker short fiction pieces as she could find by using the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Millman sent her Silverstein’s Complete Chronology to use; she said she checked it against the Reader’s Guide for any he might have missed. I had to laugh to myself when she said she didn’t locate any that Silverstein may have missed, after hearing testimony for four days about how fanatical he had been about locating “all” of her work. The DVD was shut off for the day, and the trial closed for a weekend recess. I was sad that not a single Parker poem had been read today. The courtroom had heard her words on the previous three days, read by the judge, the attorneys, and the witnesses. I’d like to ask the clerk of the court if he could read a poem of the day, perhaps after he is done with his “all rise” bit at the beginning of the session. The trial resumes at 10 a.m. Monday with some VIPs from Penguin taking the stand. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Sunday, July 22, 2007 at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments
On Day Three of the Dorothy Parker Copyright Trial the mood in the courtroom changed. Possibly this was due to the fact that the court has now heard from two witnesses and moved onto two more, one in the flesh and one on a TV monitor. For a third day in a row, I was again the only spectator who didn’t need to be there. The third day of Stuart Y. Silverstein vs. Penguin Putnam, Inc. began with testimony from Gillian Blake, the executive editor of Bloomsbury Publishing. Blake was the editor at Scribner of Silverstein’s 1996 book, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. Blake worked at Scribner for ten years, from 1993 to 2003, rising to the level of senior editor, before she joined Bloomsbury in 2004. Back in 1996 she was an assistant editor who inherited NMF from another editor who had left the company. The book was well on its way to publication when she took it over, Blake told the court. Blake, who has edited Owen King, Douglas Coupland, Andreas Klein, and Joanna Trollope, was confident and relaxed on the witness stand. She was a straight-talking witness who seemed to have a firm grasp of the case. Blake sounds like Kathleen Turner. Blake carefully examined each piece of evidence. Some were pieces of her correspondence from 12 years ago. At one point, as lawyers searched for an exhibit to hand her, she said, “I was just on a grand jury for a month. I know about this.” This is the exterior of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse. The reason for Blake’s presence in Federal Court was clear: she edited the book that the plaintiff is suing Penguin over. The first questions came from Silverstein’s lead counsel, Mark Rabinowitz of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg. This part of the testimony was only about one thing, the “Complete Chronology” that is at the back of NMF. This was the section that Silverstein was grilled about when he was on the stand on Wednesday by Richard Dannay, Penguin’s lead in the trial. This section is a list of what is purported to be all of the published poems and verse of Dorothy Parker’s career. Both sides have gone over this repeatedly, over the opening sentence: “This is a chronological list of all of Dorothy Parker’s poems.” The italics have driven everyone batty in this case, and today we learned it was Blake who ordered the italics put in. Here is why. “You can’t put a list like this in the back of a book and not explain what it was,” she said. It was done so readers knew what they were reading, “it was not an index.” She said the italics, she believes, did not exist in an earlier draft of the introduction to the chronology. Blake was shown a bound galley of NMF, and the “all” was not included. “It was my suggestion to clarify,” she said. Then Blake explained the conundrum she faced as editor. When Not Much Fun was sent out in bound galleys (these are preliminary books that are sent to reviewers, the media, and retail buyers) it did not have a clarified Complete Chronology, it was called Sources. This led to confusion, because the long list showed Parker pieces that were not in NMF; Silverstein had included Parker’s entire publishing career. Blake said people receiving the galleys were confused as to what the contents were, what was in NMF, and where it’s from. “We were trying to explain what is in it,” she said. “This is a complete list of Dorothy Parker’s poems, in addition to what is now in NMF.” This opened up a can of worms. And these worms were all squirming about what “all” means in the universe of Dorothy Parker’s oeuvre. According to Blake, this chronology was not meant to be a list of each and every single poem Parker ever wrote, it was merely to show the publishing history of poems that were in print. It was not meant to be as finely detailed as the be-all and end-all of Parker’s output of poems and verse. She was asked if this list was meant to show every piece she’d ever written. “We could never make claim to that,” she said. Another piece of evidence was then given to Blake, a letter that was sent out to all those that received those bound galleys 11 years ago, clarifying what the Complete Chronology meant. It showed that even back then, before the lawsuit, the book was giving the publisher a headache. Even the presiding judge, Judge John F. Keenan, stepped in. “Why was the word “all” there if you didn’t mean it?” he asked Blake. She replied this meant all the compiled poems. Then she gave a common scenario, saying that in publishing “this happens all the time” that when you put a “complete” book out there, another manuscript “comes out of the closet” of something you never knew about. The cross examination for Penguin was conducted by Thomas Kjellberg, of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman. After determining that Blake had remained in touch with Silverstein over the years, Kjellberg went straight back to the SNAFU over the Complete Chronology. Had she been brought up to speed about this issue lately? By Silverstein? “There is a lot of things you forget,” Blake said. “But it was enough of a back-and-forth feedback that I remembered it.” “My belief was…” she said, “A lot of lost manuscripts are found… though they are not truly “lost”… this list was adding to the compiled list of Dorothy Parker (works).” Kjellberg went back to the problems of the Complete Chronology, but Blake saw it as just more of what an editor does. “Putting out fires every day, that’s our job,” she told the court. “None of us ever thought we were making this claim” that this was all the poems Parker wrote, she said. More evidence was presented to her, including marketing copy and “tip sheets” for sales purposes, which stated NMF would be publishing previously uncollected poems. Blake was asked about the accuracy of Silverstein’s claims to his research. “We don’t even have fact-checkers in book publishing,” she said with a smile, as Kjellberg tried to pin her down of the veracity of a statement Silverstein made in the book’s pre-publication process. “I’m not a Dorothy Parker scholar,” she’d said earlier. The fact that more “lost” poems are out there came up again. “You never know when you are dealing with a (dead) author… that it could come around that there is more out there,” she said. “There could be more Dorothy Parker… this is everything we knew about.” Blake was just about done, when Kjellberg pulled out something I have been waiting to hear for the whole trial, a little piece of text Silverstein added to NMF that I always thought could be an “Aha!” moment for Penguin. In the endpapers of NMF this sentence appears, alone on an otherwise single blank page:
“Upon hearing of the poet George Crabbe’s death in 1832, the British home secretary (and later prime minister) Lord Melbourne declared, “I am always glad when one of these fellows dies, for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.”
Clearly, to some, this was Silverstein pointing his finger at the world, saying he had located and published “all” of the “lost” poems of Dorothy Parker. It could be a damning little statement to make. However, the question that Kjellberg was going to ask Blake was struck down by Judge Keenan. Rabinowitz got his turn for a final question. He cut right to the chase with Blake. He asked her if she had any idea how Silverstein chose the selections for the book, or which items he selected. He tried to ask her about one specifically, but she drew a blank, unless she could look at the index. The judge agreed. Kjellberg got the last question for Blake. He asked her if the Complete Chronology contains the known universe of all Parker poems. Blake looked at him and said, “No, I do not.” From Blake and her Michelle Pfeiffer looks, the courtroom shifted next to view a video screen for the next witness, who looked like she was in a Coen Brothers movie. We watched the beginning of a video deposition taken in December 2001 from Colleen “Mikki” Breese, a former instructor at the University of Toledo. Breese was the freelance editor who edited for Penguin two books: Dorothy Parker Complete Stories (1995) and Dorothy Parker Complete Poems (1999). The back-story of how Breese, a part-time instructor at a state college in northern Ohio, came to edit two of the most important books on Penguin’s backlist, is a quirky little tale of Xerox machines and phone calls. Breese said she earned all of her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UT. She also earned her PhD in English literature in Toledo, and taught writing, literature, women’s literature, and women’s history, from 1989-2000. At the time of the deposition, she was a public school substitute teacher in suburban Ohio. How she came to the attention of Penguin editors in New York City was via U.S. Mail. In her deposition, she said that she taught a course on Dorothy Parker, and routinely photocopied Parker’s works to use in class. “As a teacher it was difficult finding material,” she said. “I was going to Kinko’s making copies all the time… I thought it was time… I thought (a book) was needed.” Breese said she wrote a “To whom it may concern” letter and mailed it to the Viking Press in New York. (Viking was subsumed by Penguin years ago; Viking had published Parker’s books since before World War II. Breese would have been familiar with Viking if she had any of the old Portable Dorothy Parker books, that were part of the Viking imprint for decades). The next step is amazing: Penguin Senior Editor Michael Millman replied to Breese, saying in effect that the company would like to publish new compilations of Dorothy Parker material. By coincidence, Breese already had photocopies of all of Parker’s work. Her dissertation in Toledo was on Parker. And she was available. “I had already collected all the stories,” she said. “I made copies of them. Made a copy for Michael. I arranged them.” She compiled the stories into one batch of photocopies, and was paid $1,000 for her work. Complete Stories came out in 1995. This would lead to her next project for Millman, Complete Poems, four years later. The plaintiffs shifted gears with Breese at this point; it appears they are moving onto her work on Complete Poems. First, they showed her a copy of the Viking-Penguin Author’s Guide. This was the first time she’d ever seen it; her editor had never sent her one. The Guide is an outline of do’s and don’ts for authors working with the company, both legally and ethically. The questions turned to the litigation. She said she first learned that Penguin was being sued over the book she edited and compiled in the spring of 2001, when Millman left her a message on her answering machine. He said a lawyer would call her. Soon Penguin’s lead attorney, Alex Gigante, contacted her and told Breese what the case was about. The last question played in court was the most explosive of the day. From off-camera, the voice of the plaintiff’s attorney asked, “Do you fear that Penguin will point the finger at you and make you a scapegoat?” “Absolutely not,” said the former English teacher from Ohio. Testimony continues tomorrow at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 20C. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments
Splitting hairs. That is what Day Two of the Dorothy Parker Book Battle was about. This case is going to be decided by the narrowest of arguments when the case is played out. In the follow-up to Day One, plaintiff Stuart Y. Silverstein was grilled by Penguin Books’ lead defense counsel, while the second witness to appear, Random House Vice President and Publisher of Trade Paperbacks, Jane von Mehren, claimed to have been totally in the dark when she was working at Penguin and the disputed book, Dorothy Parker Complete Poems, was published on her watch eight years ago. It was a day of sparring and feints, but not a single bombshell went off in Courtroom 20C of U.S. Federal Court. When the first day ended, Silverstein’s examination by his attorney, Mark A. Rabinowitz of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, was wrapped up. Day Two begin with the cross examination by Richard Dannay, Penguin’s hired gun from Cowan, Liebowitz & Latham. Dannay drilled Silverstein about copyright law and the facts of how he compiled his book, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (NMF). Dannay begin by asking Silverstein what he was claiming to copyright in NMF, to which he replied the selection of an item, or not the selection of an item, is subjective. Silverstein said he is claiming his book is an example of subjective selection, and that is why it is copyrightable. Dannay disagreed. Dannay handed Silverstein a copy of Randall Calhoun’s book, Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography, a slim blue textbook that is playing as large a part of the trial as the two disputed books are. Calhoun, an assistant professor at Ball State University, published his book in 1993, three years before Silverstein’s book came out from Scribner. Calhoun’s book is essentially a listing of practically every article, story, poem, screenplay, and song that Dorothy Parker ever wrote. Silverstein’s book has a lengthy chronology of 99 percent of every Parker poem or verse; a chronology that Penguin is using as a wedge to hammer into Silverstein’s case. Dannay asked Silverstein how Calhoun classifies “Figures in American Folklore” which Parker wrote in 1921. Calhoun labels it as prose, while Silverstein calls this poetry. This is one of the key elements of Penguin’s case: that what Silverstein calls a poem or verse, other sources call otherwise. Dannay read the beginning of a disputed Parker piece, a short poem that was written into a guestbook at William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon. Parker always denied she wrote the poem, and Silverstein said as much in court. He also remarked that many times Parker chose the dramatic over telling the truth, citing a 1968 Esquire profile written by Wyatt Cooper, a close friend of Parker’s. Silverstein was asked continually to explain why others called Parker pieces poems or prose, when he did not. Dannay asked about one of the gems of NMF, “A Letter to Ogden Nash” that appeared in January 1921 in the Saturday Review of Literature, in an advertisement. (It is a classic, and Nash’s reply underneath it is even funnier). Dannay produced the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature from 1929-1932, and pointed out to page 1873 that the Guide called the piece a poem. Silverstein was not fazed. He said it was irrelevant that a “clerk” at the Reader’s Guide “classified” this as a poem, since another Parker item from the same month was called verse, not a poem. He said it was a clerk’s description. You can see how the morning progressed. Penguin showed repeatedly that what Silverstein called a poem, others called otherwise. Dannay introduced into evidence Marion Meade’s 1987 biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? Silverstein said that he read the book before he compiled NMF. It was in Meade’s book, Silverstein said; that he learned of the letter Parker wrote to Robert Benchley in 1920 from a vacation in Maine. He obtained a copy of the five-page letter, and he titled it “Letter to Robert Benchley” for NMF. Dannay pointed out that Meade’s index classified it as a poem, while Silverstein said, in his opinion; it was not a poem at all, but merely a letter. The second tact that Danay took was a major thrust of the cross-examination: how many Parker poems did Silverstein leave “out” of NMF, and how many other “lost” poems are there in actuality? He asked Silverstein about Calhoun’s book, which Silverstein had said on Day One he had read only after beginning his work on NMF research. Dannay asked how many items in Calhoun’s book appear in NMF? After much back and forth, Silverstein said virtually all of the poems in NMF are also listed in Calhoun’s index. Dannay said 118 of the 122 poems in NMF are also in the Bio-Bibliography; there is one minor discrepancy because the poem “Day-Dreams” that Silverstein called “Lost” had actually been included in “Enough Rope” (Parker’s first book). This is why Penguin used 121 and not 122 NMF poems in its Complete Poems. More hair splitting was on the way. Silverstein called out the Calhoun compilation, saying it had mistakes in it. There are more disputed poems between the two books, such as “Men I’m Not Married To” and “The Passionate Screen Writer To His Love” that were hit on over and over. Dannay had a hard time pinning Silverstein down to his most important question of the day: “Is there any work you determined to be an uncollected poem or verse by Dorothy Parker you left out of Not Much Fun?” Dannay asked the plaintiff. The honorable Judge John F. Keenan even phrased the question again: “When you compiled Not Much Fun did you leave out any Dorothy Parker poems or verses that were not previously collected?” It took almost 10 minutes to arrive at Silverstein’s answer: No, he did not. “There is no work I determined subjectively that was a poem or verse,” Silverstein told the court. When asked, he could not tell Dannay the names of other poems that he did not put into the book. The judge asked him again, “You don’t remember any?” to which the witness said he could not, and he collected everything that he determined was a poem or a verse. Silverstein was asked how many verses did he leave out of the Complete Chronology, which is a section of NMF that details the place and date of almost all of Parker’s poems and verse. Silverstein said there were none. Dannay drove home the fact that Silverstein was claiming that NMF would comprise for the first time all the uncollected Dorothy Parker pieces, that it would be the fourth, the final, and the largest collection of Parker poems and verse. The defense said Silverstein had claimed as much to his agent and his publisher more than a decade ago. Dannay asked him to name the items he found of Parker’s that were uncollected poems or verse that were left out NMF. Silverstein said there were none. For a second day, the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, which controls Parker’s estate, was brought up to the witness. Dannay showed that Silverstein had delivered to the NAACP lists that detailed the whole scope of Parker’s poems; however, the list was not 100 percent accurate, Penguin claims. It also came out that since the book was published, the NAACP has not been paid any royalties, and in fact, the only fee paid to the organization has been $275. Dannay also had Silverstein testify that the NAACP would violate his copyright if it published Penguin’s Complete Poems. The lightest moment of the day came when the defense entered two pieces of online evidence, both from dorothyparker.com: The 1999 Q&A with Silverstein and a book review of NMF written by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick. Danay read portions of the Q&A into the record. Also for a second day, girls with glasses will be happy to know that “News Item” was read in court again. This time by Dannay, who rushed through it to ask what Silverstein thought of it: “it could go either way,” Silverstein said, “as a poem or not.” Danay asked him if “News Item” – probably Parker’s most famous piece --- was a poem or not. Silverstein said “News Item” is a wisecrack, not a poem. Next, Mark Rabinowitz, Silverstein’s lead counsel, took up the rebuttal. He asked Silverstein to read the copyright notice that was on the bottom of every page of the manuscript that was mailed to Jane von Mehren at Penguin in 1994. This set up the next witness: von Mehren. Von Mehren was a senior executive at Penguin Books from 1994 to 2005; today she is at Random House and oversees scores of imprints, including the entire Modern Library. At the time that Complete Poems was in production in 1997 she was the Associate Publisher. Von Mehren and Silverstein had a correspondence going as he tried to place the book with Penguin. Von Mehren was questioned by plaintiff’s counselor Christopher D. Mickus of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg. He proved to be a smooth operator who kept the questions coming quickly. Mickus began by getting von Mehren to explain what the responsibilities of editors and publishers are. She said that when she ended her time at Penguin she was editor in chief. She agreed with Mickus that in her role she would have been in a supervisory role of all facets of book editing, including copyright issues, if needed. Von Mehren also read Penguin’s guide on what is fair use and what the guidelines are for using material under copyright. This established that the executive was aware of Penguin’s policies and standard practices on using copyrighted work, as well as what her duties were in the book production process. The plaintiff’s next step was to put von Mehren there at the scene when Silverstein’s manuscript was on her desk, which she did. She told the court that she got the manuscript of Not Much Fun in 1994. That summer she went to an editorial meeting with Senior Editor Michael Millman and Editor In Chief and Publisher Kathryn Court. Von Mehren said she presented the book to the entire Viking-Penguin editorial staff during their weekly staff meeting. Not Much Fun was discussed, she said, and Millman saw the manuscript sometime after the meeting. Von Mehren explained that Millman worked on Penguin Classics and “knew something of Dorothy Parker.” However, soon after, they made the decision to publish a more complete book, a collection of all Parker poems and verse, and not just the uncollected one. “It didn’t make sense,” von Mehren said, to issue a volume of not-so-great work, when they could have a bigger volume with all the poems together. They wanted to include the bigger book in the Penguin Classics line, and to have Silverstein edit that collection. They made a $2,000 offer to him, which was the standard fee. No royalties were included. Von Mehren stated that they felt a selected or collected book made more sense as a publishing house. Millman was given the project as he worked on Penguin Classics. From this point on, von Mehren claimed to know less and less about the ongoing book proposal, despite her position of overseeing the group working on it. She was presented with old Penguin catalogues that listed Complete Poems. The marketing copy trumpets the addition of more than 100 previously unpublished Dorothy Parker poems. However, the catalogs came out four to six years after NMF was published. The witness seemed not to follow along that what the plaintiffs were showing her was that Complete Poems had been put on a fast track in the late 1990s, the same time period that Silverstein was trying to get NMF published with them. After he declined Penguin’s offer, his book came out less than two years later from Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. According to von Mehren, even though Millman had the manuscript in 1994 and NMF came out in 1996, she never raised the issue of NMF when upcoming Complete Poems were in discussion. Soon after, Dannay took over and began cross-examination of the former Penguin executive. Von Mehren was asked what she knew about Complete Poems when it was being edited. “Nothing” she said. Von Mehren was not clear on the freelance editor of Complete Poems either, who was Colleen Breese. In fact, in earlier testimony, the editor said what little she knew about the case came from a New York Times piece on Tuesday. Dannay took von Mehren through the copyright review quickly. She said she did not believe Silverstein had a copyright interest on the uncollected poems. However, von Mehren also claimed that in her 23 years in publishing, she has never been trained in copyright or other similar issues. The trial continues Thursday with more witness testimony. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments
Dorothy Parker in life was no stranger to courtrooms. In 1927 she ended up in one in Boston while marching against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Years later, in 1955, Parker testified in New York State Supreme Court during the Communist Red Scare. But Tuesday's proceedings at U.S. Federal Court at 500 Pearl Street were something else. Parker was the subject in the long-running copyright battle Stuart Y. Silverstein vs. Penguin Putnam, Inc. We have been tracking this case for 6 ½ years, which is getting close to the length of time the Algonquin Round Table was in session. Lately the trial has been a headline writer’s dream at The New York Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, Galley Cat, and TheStreet.com. But the only person to attend the trial today, who didn’t have to be there, was yours truly. Yes, there were 75 empty seats in the gallery of courtroom 20C of the Daniel P. Moynihan Federal Courthouse, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. High on the 20th Floor, with a sweeping Spider-Man view of four Boroughs and New Jersey, the action began today of what could be a ten-day trial. For all the background on the case, and why Silverstein is suing Penguin, read our background material here. Now, on with the show. It was exciting to finally get the trial going, after the numerous delays of the last couple years. In open court, the two sides would go at it, in front of the same veteran jurist who began the trial in 2001. Judge John F. Keenan looks like something out of Central Casting of what a federal judge should be, as if he is a New Yorker cartoon judge. Watching him was the best part of the day, as he made faces, cut off lawyers at the knees, rolled around in his chair, and ordered people around. He snapped at everyone today. His best moment was at the very end of the day’s proceedings, when he ordered his clerk to fix the damn courtroom clock, which is running 10 minutes slow. Judge Keenan doesn’t want to waste a minute in this case. Both the defense and plaintiffs had two attorneys each at their tables. Both sides were armed with copies of the two books in question, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Silverstein’s book, hereby referred to as NMF) and Dorothy Parker Complete Poems (Penguin’s book from 1999, that they were forced to withdraw from sale in the U.S. and Canada by Keenan four years ago). The defense was also armed with a library of Parker material: multiple copies of the new Deluxe Portable Dorothy Parker, Marion Meade’s biography What Fresh Hell Is This? and even the lesser Parker books by Barry Day and John Keats. They have Parker’s life at their fingertips. I liked that the plaintiffs went to all the trouble of creating giant blowups of Parker material, on big foam-core boards 4 feet high, of New Yorker pages, Parker letters, and book pages. The judge, with a wave of his hand, said without a jury present, he didn’t want to see them on the tripod the lawyers brought, so they sit unused in a corner. I want one. Or two. Judge Keenan started the trial on time with a smackdown to both plaintiff and defendants. He said, “The animosity... from each side is beginning to burden on hostility and must stop now…” He was furious that the two parties could not come to any pre-trial agreements as he’d asked for, which could stretch the trial into August. He also said he got an “insulting letter” from one of the attorneys, which appeared to tick him off. Then the attorneys began their opening statements. Silverstein’s attorney, Mark A. Rabinowitz of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, laid out his case in about 10 minutes. He said, “such conduct is unheard of” among Penguin’s senior management, all of whom are on the witness list and will be testifying later. He said Penguin possessed “actual knowledge” of the book by seeing its manuscript two years before NMF was published. “Penguin must now be held accountable for its actions,” he said, and that Silverstein is “seeking redress… seeking poetic justice.” His case will be not that he is claming copyright protection for the “sweat of the brow” of Silverstein’s work in locating 122 of the “lost” pieces, or of any copyediting, assigning missing titles, or punctuation. His case is that Penguin violated his copyright of the collection he created. Next it was the defense turn, headed up by Penguin’s top legal eagle, Richard Dannay of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latham, one of the nation’s top copyright attorneys. He began by saying he was “troubled that after all these years the case was not understood.” Soon after, Judge Keenan said to him, “you should watch what you say,” before letting him continue. His argument was that Parker herself created the “uncollected works” by not choosing them herself to re-publish. His case is that even though Silverstein picked the 122 poems of NMF, that does not matter, because it was Parker who, while living, didn’t act to reprint those poems and pieces: it was Parker who did the “collecting” and not Silverstein. Dannay said that Silverstein’s collection was not copyrightable because he claimed it was “all” of the unpublished Parker poems. As the testimony bore out, this was not true, as Silverstein missed at least two he didn’t know of, and others he did not judge to include. Danay also said that the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, which controls Parker’s estate, only got a one-time payment of $275 to use the work in NMF, and are not getting any further royalties. Dannay said that in seven years, Silverstein has not shown a poem that was not collected in NMF. At this point, Dannay began testing out his strategy, that Penguin was merely collecting the material for Complete Poems as it would any other anthology. Much had been made earlier of a statement by Colleen Breese, the Midwestern professor who edited Complete Poems, that she literally bought a copy of NMF, cut out the pages, and pasted them onto sheets of paper and photocopied them all for the chapter in Complete Poems. Dannay said Silverstein’s principle of uncollected poems is different from Penguin’s, with different selection principles; how can they print a “complete” book and not include uncollected work? Danay also claimed the NAACP is not getting royalties from the work, and would actually be in violation of violating copyright law by printing Silverstein’s work. By this point, less than an hour into the trial, the judge almost cut him off. “Legally you are not making an opening statement,” Judge Keenan said, “You aren’t telling me what you want to prove.” Dannay wrapped up, saying, “Penguin has not used a single word which it did not have a right to publish.” The first witness called was Stuart Yale Silverstein. He told the court he is a writer based in Los Angeles. He said he came to the project while researching a book on the Round Table, and named many of the members. Silverstein said Parker today is known more for her wit and quips than for her writing. He came to the book that would become NMF while researching Robert Benchley’s infamous reviews for the old Life humor weekly. Silverstein kept coming up with Parker poems from 1920 and 1921 that he’d never seen before, and realized, after checking them against The Portable Dorothy Parker and other Parker books, that these likely had never been reprinted before. He put aside the Vicious Circle book and focused on tracking down more Parker pieces. A name that will be coming up a lot in this case is Randall Calhoun, another professor from the Midwest, who edited and compiled a book for Greenwood Press in the early 1990s called Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography. Calhoun and Silverstein are at odds over a number of things, including what is the definition of a poem, what is free verse, and how many Parker pieces are there out in the universe. Silverstein told the court that he first read Calhoun’s book in late 1994 or early 1995, after he was well into the research of NMF. He said he collected “virtually everything” for NMF before he read Calhoun’s book. (Calhoun was deposed and his video will be played during the trial at some point). Silverstein did quite a bit of work to locate the 122 “lost” poems. He estimated it took 1,000 hours at more than a dozen libraries in Los Angeles and Chicagoland. Among them were the University of Southern California, Cal State libraries, and public libraries in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois. “I was pretty much a microfilm rat,” he said, because not much was on paper. He located lost Parker material in Ainslee’s, Life, the New York Tribune and The New Yorker, among others. This stretched from the spring of 1994 to the spring of 1996. At this point, about half the day, I estimate, was taken up with one topic: what is poetry. What is a poem? What is free verse? I fear that this will be a major point of the trial, if half of the first witnesses’ testimony was trying to clarify what exactly IS a poem? Silverstein was asked, how did he determine if a piece he found was a poem? “I would make a snap judgment if it was a poem, or not,” he told the court. This was the beginning of one of my favorite parts of the trial, reading Dorothy Parker’s own words into the court record. The first instance of this was a slam-bang selection, taken from one of the brightest spots of her career, when she was Constant Reader for The New Yorker. Silverstein, in a monotone, was asked to read from the January 7, 1928 issue. Part of what Parker wrote: “There is poetry, and there is not,” Parker wrote. “You can’t use the words good or bad, about it. You must know for yourself. Poetry is so intensely, so terribly, personal. A wise man, a very wise man – well, Hendrik Willem Van Loom, if you must have names – once said to me that if you have any doubt about a poem, then it isn’t a poem. Poetry is for you, for you alone. If, for you, it’s poetry, it will deluge your mind, drain your heart, crinkle your spine. It doesn’t matter whose it is.” A big portion of the testimony is going to focus on what is a poem, and did Silverstein have a say in what is, and is not, a poem to include in his collection. It was shown that some of the pieces he picked came from letters, from an advertisement, from the insides of a book review, and more. At one point, even the judge got to read some Dorothy Parker, which made most observers at least smile, particularly when he murdered “News Item” until Silverstein corrected him, “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses.” Which prompted Judge Keenan to ask, “Is it a poem?” Silverstein said Parker would say it was not, it was verse -- but he would call it a poem. The highlight of the morning was hearing, from the bench, the judge read out: Christopher Morley goes hippetty, hoppetty,
Hippetty, hippetty, hop.
Whenever I ask him politely to stop it, he
Says he can’t possibly stop…I wonder if he hoped for a good gangland murder trial to come onto his docket at this point? Multiple exhibits were entered in quick succession to the evidence. All were Parker’s original use of the disputed poems, or else the pages of books that reprinted Parker material. Among these from NMF was “Letter to Robert Benchley” which Silverstein said he found in Benchley letters in a Boston library. “It was a letter, but I liked it a lot,” Silverstein said. He also remembered that when he located it that it was around the same time as Alan Rudolph’s feature film, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, which made a point of the Parker-Benchley relationship. So he wanted to “shoehorn it in” to the book. The afternoon was bogged down in clarifying the debate about what constitutes a poem, and the judge seemed displeased that the plaintiffs were using scholarly English papers about poetry techniques that were written in 2002, long after NMF was printed. As the day proceeded, the timeline of the case was teased out more. In Los Angeles in 1994 at the ABA convention, Silverstein met Penguin executive editor Jane von Mehren, and pitched her his idea for the book. He told her about the compilation of “lost” poems and she said she was interested. Correspondence for the next several months proved that Penguin would offer him $2,000 for the compilation but not for a book, as the company wanted to print a collection of all her poems. He rejected the offer. The end of Day One neared as Silverstein recounted for the court his displeasure when he saw Complete Poems on sale in a Los Angeles area bookstore in 1999. He realized, just by reading the table of contents, that the company had lifted his collection practically intact. He estimated that of Complete Poems, 40 to 50 percent of the book is from Not Much Fun, which Penguin published in Complete Poems as one chapter called “Poems Uncollected by Parker.” Silverstein was asked to read Penguin’s “A Note on the Text” from Complete Poems, which says that it is the first collection of all of Parker’s poems. Not exactly true. Silverstein said that upon learning Complete Poems was using his collection, and going to as many as six or seven printings of the book, he took action and issued a demand letter to Penguin. The lawsuit followed. The case continues tomorrow. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments
Mark your calendar Aug. 8, for a party at the Algonquin...  Labels: events
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments
 We got this press release from our friend Dottie Lux. She is among the many new wave burlesque stars working the stages around New York these days. Dottie and her friends are now offering classes for would-be burlesque queens. Last year the Dorothy Parker Society teamed up with several burlesque stars at Parkerfest, and it was a lot of fun. Read on, and take her classes. This is the best press release you will read all month: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEemail: redhotsburlesque@hotmail.com phone: 201*615*9245 Red Hots Burlesque School of Shimmy
Takes You From Bashful to Bodacious Should you Bump first, or Grind? What's the essential difference between a 'Shake' and a 'Shimmy'? Do I have to look like Carmen or Dita to be a burlyq babe? And which is the proper way to tear off your underwear and throw it across the room? If you've ever dreamed of hitting the stage or the bedroom as a sultry superstar, this is the U. for you. Now you can learn the moves, build your confidence, get the behind-the-scenes tips, and have fun, as bombshell SCHOOL OF SHIMMY professor DOTTIE LUX, gives you the titillating tutoring you need to release the burlesque beauty inside. "A blast!...Express your womanhood!... " says the New York Times. "Learn how to shake it from the pros," says New York Blade. "The Red Hots made it such a body positive environment that my greatest takeaway was feeling fantastic about my self," says Shana, SOS Graduate. Now in its 4th year, The School of Shimmy has more than 15 graduates still performing in the New York burlesque circuit and with this intensive 4 class course culminating in a recital there will be another batch of boasting burlesque babes! As always we encourage and welcome people of all sexual identifications, genders, sizes and backgrounds to share in the experience. After all, burlesque is for everyone! This class is the perfect evening gathering and a great place to meet someone new.  School of ShimmyTuesday August 14, August 21, August 28, Thursday August 30 7pm-9pm $15-$30 No deposit necessary, but reservations are strongly encouraged. Email redhotsburlesque@hotmail.com for reservation. August 14th
Burlesque 101, $30 In this two-hour workshop, students will learn the history of burlesque, how to create a persona, working with props, costumes and basic choreography. As well as learning to build your burlesque attitude; feel great about your body, and an open discussion about increased confidence and positive thinking. The class is open to students of any age or gender who want to shake it on stage or in the bedroom. No previous dance or performance experience is required. August 21st
Burlesque 201, $30In this two-hour workshop, students are encouraged to come with an act or character in mind. We will develop personas and discuss song choice as well as having a hands on lesson on costuming and pastie making. The class is open to students of any age or gender who want to shake it on stage or in the bedroom. No previous dance or performance experience is required. August 28th
Burlesque on a Budget, $15In this two-hour workshop, students get all the secrets for smart shopping. Sure it does cost a pretty penny to look like a glittery goddess, but there are ways to improvise and also find the best deals! This class includes a hands-on demonstration on how to make your own pasties and bedazzle even the drabbest of garments. August 30th
Finishing Touches, $15Students get the opportunity to run their routines and workshop them for the recital the following week. This class also includes insider tips and tricks for getting and getting through the gig! September 5th
School of Shimmy Student Showcase. 8:30pm Slipper Room, 167 Orchard St, $5 Students take all of their knowledge from the classes before and apply it to a real live burlesque show at The Slipper Room, home of NYC's longest running burlesque show, Mr. Choade's Upstairs Downstairs. Visit Dottie's site and see Jo Weldon's amazing photos from a previous course.
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments
It seems like we have been following the Dorothy Parker Copyright Fight since we were a freshman in high school. Not really. Only six years. However, there is news to report. As TheStreet.com reported today, the case is going to a judge next week. Federal Court normally does not get a chance to hear poems get tossed around, but Dorothy Parker will be the subject of Silverstein v. Penguin Putnam Inc. In brief (and this is hard to do) Stuart Y. Silverstein compiled and edited Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. He offered it to Penguin Books, which publishes many other Parker books. They declined. Then in 1999, Penguin published Dorothy Parker Complete Poems, and used a photocopy of Fun as a section of the book. Silverstein sued them. He won a round. Then Penguin won an appeal. Then it went back and forth. The book was pulled from stores. And now here we are for what could be the final chapter. As TheStreet.com says today: "We don't think there is a copyright issue here. We think this is factual material that anyone has a right to use," says Alex Gigante, Penguin Group USA's senior vice president for legal affairs. "If [Silverstein] has found some undiscovered Parker poems, he's done a great bit of research, but everyone else has a right to use them." However, the copyright issue could decide a new wrinkle in copyright law. TheStreet.com says today: "The appellate court said there were some details Judge Keenan had not considered," says Silverstein's attorney Mark Rabinowitz of Neal, Gerger & Eisenberg. "The issue to be decided now is whether Stuart's selection of poems shows a minimal level of creativity. If we establish minimal, more than slight, creativity, then we have copyright protection for the entire compilation." And good news: your esteemed president of the Dorothy Parker Society will be attending the trial, notebook in hand. Watch this space for more developments. Labels: legal, news
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on Monday, July 09, 2007 at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments
Beat the heat by ducking into a cool theatre this summer to catch a new production based on Dorothy Parker material. It is part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival, which runs July 16 to August 5.
Those Whistling Lads: The Poems and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker is from playwright Maureen Van Trease. She says, "Let Dorothy and six lovely young men and women show you how - and how not - to handle them." The Parker stories presented include "Here We Are", "The Sexes", "A Telephone Call" (as you've never imagined it), "Dusk Before Fireworks", and "You Were Perfectly Fine". The staged reading is Friday, August 3rd, 1:30 pm at 312 West 36th St., 4th Floor, the Mainstage. Free Admission. Festival information available here. Labels: events, performances
Posted by Kevin Fitzpatrick on at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments
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