[lbo-talk] more Churchill

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Wed May 17 17:38:09 PDT 2006


On 5/17/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> On 5/18/06, info at pulpculture.org <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
>
> > Does anyone here know Churchill personally? Know more about what he's like
> > in person?
>
> I don't know him personally, but I attended a reading he gave at City
> Lights books last December in SF, and I found him a mesmerizing,
> compelling speaker who is extremely articulate. He has an impressive
> recall for statistics, which make the allegations mentioned in the
> piece Doug just posted all the more disturbing.

I speak out of my experience as editor: errors and omissions -- including omissions of citations that would constitute "plagiarism" if uncorrected -- are everywhere in manuscripts, including those by noted scholars with "an impressive recall" for many things. It's just human nature. When I spot errors and omissions, before or after getting them online, I simply correct them on my own. Such corrections are editors' job, not just authors', imho.

Writing for publication isn't an individual job. It's work of collaboration between editors and authors (and sometimes readers, too -- I appreciate their notes when they alert me to errors and omissions in pieces that I failed to identify and correct before publishing them).

Sometimes, I edit very lightly; other times, I edit very extensively; yet other times, what I do is not so much editing as rewriting. That's how things are in publishing.

So, I'd say that Ward Churchill should have gotten himself better editors.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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