gossip_guy
VIP Member
Jack's Met Gala 2024 video popped up in my recommended videos. I hadn't seen it before, and since Jack's as uninformed about fashion as he is about literature, I was curious how bad it'd be.
Since the Met Gala's theme last year was based on a short story, Jack offers up his expertise to help people understand the theme and how it applies to fashon. Or, y'know...he just rips it all off.
The video intro isn't even over and Jack appears to be lifting words:
Jack on the Met Gala 2024:
"We get to judge from the comfort of our bedrooms, in the comfort of our worst outfits that we own, like, I'm in my full-on pajamas."
Eden Mor on the Met Gala 2023:
Hmm... Nahhh, must be a coincidence, surely.
Jack mentions that the Gala theme is based on the short story 'The Garden of Time' by J.G. Ballard. He says, "I had shivers all over my body whilst reading this." A vague, hyperbolic statement that he uses in like 60% of his reviews of things he hasn't read, so things are already looking promising for another critical masterwork from BookTube's self-crowned king.
Jack's intro to the author in question:
"JG Ballard was a really interesting writer. He was an English novelist, essayist, satirist and short-story writer and he was known for his quite provocative works that sort of test the relationship between human psychology and mass media."
He's literally just reading the opening lines of Ballard's Wikipedia entry and trying to pass it off as his own:
"James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media."
en.wikipedia.org
He then presumably thought, "I'd better not steal the whole thing from Wikipedia, that would just be silly." And so...
Jack: "He spent four years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War."
Brittanica.com: "Ballard spent four years of his boyhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai during World War II."
Jack says that he did lots of research into J.G. Ballard. He, unsurprisingly, doesn't actually cite any sources at all. He quotes two people a few times - Ballard himself, and John Gray (who's heavily featured on the Ballard Wikipedia page, not-so-coincidentally), and he does so in as vague a way possible: "John Gray said..." or "Ballard once said..." with no citation. It's almost entirely pulled from the Wikipedia page, or just grabbed from one of the links cited in the Wikipedia sources. He refuses to say where they said any of the few things he quotes.
He also has a tendency to quote a sentence from them, then adds a bunch of his "own" supporting thoughts sandwiched around it without mentioning that it's all pulled from the people he's quoting.
"I was doing some research and I actually found out that [Ballard] originally wanted to be a painter but he kind of had self-awareness and he realized that he wasn't the most talented with a paintbrush - he didn't necessarily have the ability to match his vision that he had for the pieces that he wanted to create. And so the philosopher John Gray actually said that he kind of sees J.G. Ballard's fiction as a gallery of sorts of his ideas. And I agree after reading some of his fiction it's so vivid and visual and it feels very cinematic."
Jack implies that he did a lot of research, discovered a little-known fact about Ballard, then found a supporting quote from philosopher John Gray (who's heavily featured on the Wikipedia page, not-so-coincidentally), and finally reached his own opinion which alligns with Johns. Only...it's all John's:
"Ballard always said he wanted to be a painter, but didn’t have the talent. But his books are galleries of images."
www.theamericanconservative.com
Jack added words, but they say nothing. He just padded the living fuck out of Gray's concise words with rambling repetition and then said, "And that's actually my opinion, too."
Without giving away how much he's borrowing and without the citations, it gives the illusion that he's done a lot of broad research on Ballard, and that it's a video essay full of his own thoughts peppered with brief supporting quotes, when it's just a few sources heavily stolen from.
Jack claims to have read some of Ballard's fiction for this video. But the only details he provides about any of Ballard's word are lifted from other people. Jack mentions that Ballard had recurring imagery like "empty swimming pools, abandoned casinos" - really specific examples to mention.
www.newstatesman.com
Jack took that from John Gray, too. In fact, between what's pulled from Wikipedia and lifted from Gray, Jack offers so little off his own detail about Ballard's work that I'd be shocked if he read the short story this video was based on, let alone anything else from the author.
At one point, he gives up on rewording the Wikipedia page and just slaps a screenshot on-screen and starts reading from it. He crops the screenshot to make it look like an essay extract and purposefully avoids mentioning where it's from - again, to give the illusion of him having done an academic deep-dive - but it's not hard to see exactly where he pulled it from. From the author intro, to the bio, to Ballard's cultural impact, Jack just reads a trucated version of the Wikipedia page with huge sections of copied text and calls it his own work.
Wikipedia provided the content for a third of the script for this video. Jack doesn't mention the name once. He intentionally avoids showing the logo or including a link. He knows what he's doing is wrong. He knows it's plagiarism. If he thought it was acceptable, he wouldn't be changing some words to try to hide it. He wouldn't be desperately avoiding just saying where he got it from.
After stealing the whole background setup from Wikipedia, Jack starts talking about the story at the heart of the Met Gala's theme: J.G. Ballard's 'The Garden of Time'. Jack's the self-proclaimed "Internet's Resident Librarian", so offering interesting critical interpretation of a 7 page short story should be a breeze.
Spoilers: Jack can't even summarise the fucking story without plagiarising.
Here's the ending to Jack's plot summary:
"Eventually they're reduced to cutting back the last flowers to temporarily fend off the mob but they no longer have any flowers left. Count Axel and his wife carefully put away all the relics of their life they put their books back on the shelves they put away their music and they take the last time flower."
Now here's Harper's Bazaar's:
I thought, 'Well, maybe they're just copying the words of the story?' So I read it, and...nope, Jack just plagiarised the words from Harper's Bazaar.
I did notice something else interesting while reading the story. Jack talks a lot about Count Axel cutting and chopping flowers over the course of 'The Garden of Time' and even pantomimes a scissor motion with his fingers to dramatise the point. Now, would you believe that not a single flower gets cut in this whole story?
"Finally he selected a large flower on the stem nearest the wall, removed his gloves and with his strong fingers snapped it off. [...] Count Axel plucked another flower from the time garden. [...] Axel stepped from the terrace, selected a time flower from the garden and tore it from the stem. [...] He picked the remaining flowers [...] plucking two or three of the smaller buds... [...] he plucked the time flower... [...] Quickly, Axel plucked his flower [...] Taking the stem between her jewelled fingers, she snapped it cleanly..."
The flowers are glass/crystal in nature, and Ballard only ever mentions them being picked, plucked and forcefully snapped. This isn't just a Jack thing, either - in a lot of the synopses and articles I saw when checking Jack's plagiarism, many people depict the Count cutting and chopping flowers like he's running round the garden with pruning shears, but it never happens. What in the Mandela Effect is this? It's so weird.
Jack might've noticed this, too, if he actually read the story and didn't just copy a summary from someone else.
Anyway, it's time for Jack to interpret this short story that he doesn't appear to have actually read:
"I think it's really a metaphor for human history and this cycle of creation and destruction that we have...created."
Really, Jack? Do you think that? Or does Alberto Patiño Douce think that:
web.archive.org
Now, Jack clearly offers this as his own thoughts and his own words. Nowhere in this video does he mention Douce or cite the source of this quote that he stole. Like most of the video, it's blatant plagiarism.
While discussing the many interpretations of the story, Jack then tosses in a couple of quotes to support his stolen ideas. The first he identifies as being from "one interesting article" with absolutely no further details:
He ponders a couple of other readings of the story's plot, then offers a different interpretation from what he presents as being from a new source:
He does not credit this source in any way, either. If you're wondering why he's intentionally refusing to say who wrote these different interpretations when he has the source links sat right in front of him, well, there's a simple explanation: They're all from the same essay by Alberto Patiño Douce.
Jack didn't want to tell people where the quotes were from because he didn't want people looking at the essay and realising that he was just stealing from Douce and passing off the writer's words as his own.
It's a common plagiarist's trick, too. Jack chopped up a stolen work into thirds, acted like one third came from one source, the second came from another source, and the final third was his own thoughts. It makes it look like he's providing a widely-researched video essay born of his own ideas when he contributed nothing, stole everything and blatantly tried to disguise what he did.
And by tossing a quote on-screen, he thinks he has a defence against plagiarism accusations - the logic being 'well, if I put a quote somewhere, or mention a name someplace, people can't say I was trying to take the credit'. All the while, he's refusing to say where (and in this case, who) any of it came from so you can't look it up the few sentences of the video he credited to someone else and see that he stole all of it.
You will not find a single cited source from Jack in this entire video. Not on-screen, not in the description and not spoken aloud by Jack.
He doesn't include any sources for the material he stole in the video description, but he does - hilariously - moan that his past intro music got a copyright strike (because he tried to steal it). Irony, thy name is Jack Edwards.
So, the background on Ballard is all Wikipedia, the details about Ballard's writing is all John Gray, the synopsis stolen from Harper's Bazaar, the analysis of the story itself is stolen from Alberto Patiño Douce. So far, none of this is Jack's own, original work and he's intentionally tried to hide that he plagiarised it. But there's still the fashion industry aspect of the video though, and Jack should have a lot of his own ideas considering he's well known for being all about fashion industry content and knowledge, right? (I'm kidding, of course he's not.)
Jack predicts that the Met Gala will have lots of floral pieces and clock motifs. Which, yeah, it's a story called 'The Garden of Time', that seems like a no-brainer. He branches out and says that he believes there'll be lots of old fashion pieces from the archives and worn again. He further theorises that we may also see lots of upcycled fashion and old pieces transformed into new dresses and outfits to tie in with the story's theme's of destruction and renewal, asAlberto Patiño Douce Jack astutely observed in the story. Jack ponders if people might take inspiration from Ballard's other sci-fi work, which seems like it's missing the point, but hey.
Wondering where Jack might've stolen these ideas from, I thought, "What would Jack do?" And the answer is usually: "The laziest thing possible." I mean, he stole half this video's script from Wikipedia. So I just searched YouTube for 'Met Gala 2024 theme explained' and grabbed the most popular video.
HauteLeMode's video was uploaded almost a month before Jack's. Of the very few videos on YouTube explaining the Met Gala 2024 theme, it's the most popular by a huge margin. It would've been the first thing Jack saw when he searched 'Met Gala 2024 theme explained'.
It's a video made by someone with a clear love for and knowledge of fashion, so it's no surprise that it approaches the content with infinitely more detail, depth and nuance than Jack's.
But it predicts that the Met Gala will have lots of floral pieces and clock motifs. He says that he believes there'll be lots of old fashion pieces from the archives and worn again. He further theorises that we may also see lots of upcycled fashion and old pieces transformed into new dresses and outfits to tie in with the story's theme's of destruction and renewal. Sound familiar? Jack's is essentially a hyper-condensed version of the same material.
Could it be a complete coincidence that two different YouTubers happened to come up with the same ideas for a gala event with a limited number of interpretations? Absolutely. A lot of fashion outlets likely would've made the same predictions based on their knowledge of the industry.
But Jack's not a fashion influencer, and it seem highly suspicious that Jack magically gained a knowledge of fashion overnight and happened to come up with all the same ideas found in the most popular existing video on the subject, and that's before you notice him using a bunch of the same on-screen images:
I mean, all the literature-based parts of this video were plagiarised, and that's Jack's supposed area of passion and expertise, so why would the fashion parts be original when he knows nothing about fashion?
He covers essentially every type of plagiarism in just one video, and that's just the stuff I found - I don't doubt there's more in there. It's amazingly brazen.
But I should point out that this is just one video. And I don't mean that in a 'This might be a one-off, he should be cut some slack' way. I mean, he built his BookTuber brand on stolen content ideas, he's been repeating the same reviews over and over for years, and his last video essay was a similar mix of shocking laziness and copied thoughts and ideas. How much of the rest of his content is just full of ouright plagiarism like this?
Since the Met Gala's theme last year was based on a short story, Jack offers up his expertise to help people understand the theme and how it applies to fashon. Or, y'know...he just rips it all off.
The video intro isn't even over and Jack appears to be lifting words:
Jack on the Met Gala 2024:
"We get to judge from the comfort of our bedrooms, in the comfort of our worst outfits that we own, like, I'm in my full-on pajamas."
Eden Mor on the Met Gala 2023:
A Met Gala recap from someone who knows absolutely nothing about fashion
The annual fundraising gala for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every first Monday of May, Hollywood’s elite flock to NYC, reminding us once again how out-of-touch with reality celebrities are.
dailyfreepress.com
Hmm... Nahhh, must be a coincidence, surely.
Jack mentions that the Gala theme is based on the short story 'The Garden of Time' by J.G. Ballard. He says, "I had shivers all over my body whilst reading this." A vague, hyperbolic statement that he uses in like 60% of his reviews of things he hasn't read, so things are already looking promising for another critical masterwork from BookTube's self-crowned king.
Jack's intro to the author in question:
"JG Ballard was a really interesting writer. He was an English novelist, essayist, satirist and short-story writer and he was known for his quite provocative works that sort of test the relationship between human psychology and mass media."
He's literally just reading the opening lines of Ballard's Wikipedia entry and trying to pass it off as his own:
"James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media."
J. G. Ballard - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
He then presumably thought, "I'd better not steal the whole thing from Wikipedia, that would just be silly." And so...
Jack: "He spent four years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War."
Brittanica.com: "Ballard spent four years of his boyhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai during World War II."
Jack says that he did lots of research into J.G. Ballard. He, unsurprisingly, doesn't actually cite any sources at all. He quotes two people a few times - Ballard himself, and John Gray (who's heavily featured on the Ballard Wikipedia page, not-so-coincidentally), and he does so in as vague a way possible: "John Gray said..." or "Ballard once said..." with no citation. It's almost entirely pulled from the Wikipedia page, or just grabbed from one of the links cited in the Wikipedia sources. He refuses to say where they said any of the few things he quotes.
He also has a tendency to quote a sentence from them, then adds a bunch of his "own" supporting thoughts sandwiched around it without mentioning that it's all pulled from the people he's quoting.
"I was doing some research and I actually found out that [Ballard] originally wanted to be a painter but he kind of had self-awareness and he realized that he wasn't the most talented with a paintbrush - he didn't necessarily have the ability to match his vision that he had for the pieces that he wanted to create. And so the philosopher John Gray actually said that he kind of sees J.G. Ballard's fiction as a gallery of sorts of his ideas. And I agree after reading some of his fiction it's so vivid and visual and it feels very cinematic."
Jack implies that he did a lot of research, discovered a little-known fact about Ballard, then found a supporting quote from philosopher John Gray (who's heavily featured on the Wikipedia page, not-so-coincidentally), and finally reached his own opinion which alligns with Johns. Only...it's all John's:
"Ballard always said he wanted to be a painter, but didn’t have the talent. But his books are galleries of images."
Et In Arcadia Ego
From an interview with the philosopher John Gray: Why did you decide to include J.G. Ballard in this book, as an example of someone who uses myth as a central
Jack added words, but they say nothing. He just padded the living fuck out of Gray's concise words with rambling repetition and then said, "And that's actually my opinion, too."
Without giving away how much he's borrowing and without the citations, it gives the illusion that he's done a lot of broad research on Ballard, and that it's a video essay full of his own thoughts peppered with brief supporting quotes, when it's just a few sources heavily stolen from.
Jack claims to have read some of Ballard's fiction for this video. But the only details he provides about any of Ballard's word are lifted from other people. Jack mentions that Ballard had recurring imagery like "empty swimming pools, abandoned casinos" - really specific examples to mention.
The night that changed my life: John Gray on having dinner with JG Ballard
When I met the late JG Ballard for the first time, around 20 years ago in a Covent Garden restaurant, I found that he embodied everything I admired in his work.
www.newstatesman.com
Jack took that from John Gray, too. In fact, between what's pulled from Wikipedia and lifted from Gray, Jack offers so little off his own detail about Ballard's work that I'd be shocked if he read the short story this video was based on, let alone anything else from the author.
At one point, he gives up on rewording the Wikipedia page and just slaps a screenshot on-screen and starts reading from it. He crops the screenshot to make it look like an essay extract and purposefully avoids mentioning where it's from - again, to give the illusion of him having done an academic deep-dive - but it's not hard to see exactly where he pulled it from. From the author intro, to the bio, to Ballard's cultural impact, Jack just reads a trucated version of the Wikipedia page with huge sections of copied text and calls it his own work.
Wikipedia provided the content for a third of the script for this video. Jack doesn't mention the name once. He intentionally avoids showing the logo or including a link. He knows what he's doing is wrong. He knows it's plagiarism. If he thought it was acceptable, he wouldn't be changing some words to try to hide it. He wouldn't be desperately avoiding just saying where he got it from.
After stealing the whole background setup from Wikipedia, Jack starts talking about the story at the heart of the Met Gala's theme: J.G. Ballard's 'The Garden of Time'. Jack's the self-proclaimed "Internet's Resident Librarian", so offering interesting critical interpretation of a 7 page short story should be a breeze.
Spoilers: Jack can't even summarise the fucking story without plagiarising.
Here's the ending to Jack's plot summary:
"Eventually they're reduced to cutting back the last flowers to temporarily fend off the mob but they no longer have any flowers left. Count Axel and his wife carefully put away all the relics of their life they put their books back on the shelves they put away their music and they take the last time flower."
Now here's Harper's Bazaar's:
I thought, 'Well, maybe they're just copying the words of the story?' So I read it, and...nope, Jack just plagiarised the words from Harper's Bazaar.
I did notice something else interesting while reading the story. Jack talks a lot about Count Axel cutting and chopping flowers over the course of 'The Garden of Time' and even pantomimes a scissor motion with his fingers to dramatise the point. Now, would you believe that not a single flower gets cut in this whole story?
"Finally he selected a large flower on the stem nearest the wall, removed his gloves and with his strong fingers snapped it off. [...] Count Axel plucked another flower from the time garden. [...] Axel stepped from the terrace, selected a time flower from the garden and tore it from the stem. [...] He picked the remaining flowers [...] plucking two or three of the smaller buds... [...] he plucked the time flower... [...] Quickly, Axel plucked his flower [...] Taking the stem between her jewelled fingers, she snapped it cleanly..."
The flowers are glass/crystal in nature, and Ballard only ever mentions them being picked, plucked and forcefully snapped. This isn't just a Jack thing, either - in a lot of the synopses and articles I saw when checking Jack's plagiarism, many people depict the Count cutting and chopping flowers like he's running round the garden with pruning shears, but it never happens. What in the Mandela Effect is this? It's so weird.
Jack might've noticed this, too, if he actually read the story and didn't just copy a summary from someone else.
Anyway, it's time for Jack to interpret this short story that he doesn't appear to have actually read:
"I think it's really a metaphor for human history and this cycle of creation and destruction that we have...created."
Really, Jack? Do you think that? Or does Alberto Patiño Douce think that:
The Garden of Time
J.G. Ballard shares with Jorge Luis Borges the distinction of having been ignored by the Nobel Prize committee. T…
web.archive.org
Now, Jack clearly offers this as his own thoughts and his own words. Nowhere in this video does he mention Douce or cite the source of this quote that he stole. Like most of the video, it's blatant plagiarism.
While discussing the many interpretations of the story, Jack then tosses in a couple of quotes to support his stolen ideas. The first he identifies as being from "one interesting article" with absolutely no further details:
He ponders a couple of other readings of the story's plot, then offers a different interpretation from what he presents as being from a new source:
He does not credit this source in any way, either. If you're wondering why he's intentionally refusing to say who wrote these different interpretations when he has the source links sat right in front of him, well, there's a simple explanation: They're all from the same essay by Alberto Patiño Douce.
Jack didn't want to tell people where the quotes were from because he didn't want people looking at the essay and realising that he was just stealing from Douce and passing off the writer's words as his own.
It's a common plagiarist's trick, too. Jack chopped up a stolen work into thirds, acted like one third came from one source, the second came from another source, and the final third was his own thoughts. It makes it look like he's providing a widely-researched video essay born of his own ideas when he contributed nothing, stole everything and blatantly tried to disguise what he did.
And by tossing a quote on-screen, he thinks he has a defence against plagiarism accusations - the logic being 'well, if I put a quote somewhere, or mention a name someplace, people can't say I was trying to take the credit'. All the while, he's refusing to say where (and in this case, who) any of it came from so you can't look it up the few sentences of the video he credited to someone else and see that he stole all of it.
In a bizarre twist: That Harper's Bazaar article that Jack plagiarised? The author of that article also plagiarised Alberto Patiño Douce!
It's like a Russian nesting doll of plagiarism!
Like...you can't just say "it is often seen as..." and then steal someone else's writing for profit. That isn't a loophole, it's plagiarism.
But at least the author of that only stole this part from Douce, unlike Jack who practically lifted the whole damn thing with no credit, and stole from Harper's Bazaar.
It's like a Russian nesting doll of plagiarism!
Like...you can't just say "it is often seen as..." and then steal someone else's writing for profit. That isn't a loophole, it's plagiarism.
But at least the author of that only stole this part from Douce, unlike Jack who practically lifted the whole damn thing with no credit, and stole from Harper's Bazaar.
You will not find a single cited source from Jack in this entire video. Not on-screen, not in the description and not spoken aloud by Jack.
He doesn't include any sources for the material he stole in the video description, but he does - hilariously - moan that his past intro music got a copyright strike (because he tried to steal it). Irony, thy name is Jack Edwards.
So, the background on Ballard is all Wikipedia, the details about Ballard's writing is all John Gray, the synopsis stolen from Harper's Bazaar, the analysis of the story itself is stolen from Alberto Patiño Douce. So far, none of this is Jack's own, original work and he's intentionally tried to hide that he plagiarised it. But there's still the fashion industry aspect of the video though, and Jack should have a lot of his own ideas considering he's well known for being all about fashion industry content and knowledge, right? (I'm kidding, of course he's not.)
Jack predicts that the Met Gala will have lots of floral pieces and clock motifs. Which, yeah, it's a story called 'The Garden of Time', that seems like a no-brainer. He branches out and says that he believes there'll be lots of old fashion pieces from the archives and worn again. He further theorises that we may also see lots of upcycled fashion and old pieces transformed into new dresses and outfits to tie in with the story's theme's of destruction and renewal, as
Wondering where Jack might've stolen these ideas from, I thought, "What would Jack do?" And the answer is usually: "The laziest thing possible." I mean, he stole half this video's script from Wikipedia. So I just searched YouTube for 'Met Gala 2024 theme explained' and grabbed the most popular video.
HauteLeMode's video was uploaded almost a month before Jack's. Of the very few videos on YouTube explaining the Met Gala 2024 theme, it's the most popular by a huge margin. It would've been the first thing Jack saw when he searched 'Met Gala 2024 theme explained'.
It's a video made by someone with a clear love for and knowledge of fashion, so it's no surprise that it approaches the content with infinitely more detail, depth and nuance than Jack's.
But it predicts that the Met Gala will have lots of floral pieces and clock motifs. He says that he believes there'll be lots of old fashion pieces from the archives and worn again. He further theorises that we may also see lots of upcycled fashion and old pieces transformed into new dresses and outfits to tie in with the story's theme's of destruction and renewal. Sound familiar? Jack's is essentially a hyper-condensed version of the same material.
Could it be a complete coincidence that two different YouTubers happened to come up with the same ideas for a gala event with a limited number of interpretations? Absolutely. A lot of fashion outlets likely would've made the same predictions based on their knowledge of the industry.
But Jack's not a fashion influencer, and it seem highly suspicious that Jack magically gained a knowledge of fashion overnight and happened to come up with all the same ideas found in the most popular existing video on the subject, and that's before you notice him using a bunch of the same on-screen images:
I mean, all the literature-based parts of this video were plagiarised, and that's Jack's supposed area of passion and expertise, so why would the fashion parts be original when he knows nothing about fashion?
He covers essentially every type of plagiarism in just one video, and that's just the stuff I found - I don't doubt there's more in there. It's amazingly brazen.
But I should point out that this is just one video. And I don't mean that in a 'This might be a one-off, he should be cut some slack' way. I mean, he built his BookTuber brand on stolen content ideas, he's been repeating the same reviews over and over for years, and his last video essay was a similar mix of shocking laziness and copied thoughts and ideas. How much of the rest of his content is just full of ouright plagiarism like this?
urfavepisces
Chatty Member
Can we not assume someone’s sexuality? From what I saw, Jack never claimed to be straight and bi/pan people exist
And even if he said it and it’s not the case, he might not have figured it out yet at the time or felt comfortable to publicly come out.gossip_guy
VIP Member
Jack: "I want to be a screenwriter."
Also Jack: "I never watch movies in my free time (which is all of my time since I'm unemployed and not a student)."
Imagine claiming that you want to work in film and be a screenwriter and making a video where you claim you'd made a concentrated effort to catch up on more classics and immerse yourself in film, then you just watch a handful of new releases on a plane, refuse to watch anything that's not in English and say shit like "I'll never watch Casablanca because I'll never be that bored". What a tool.
gossip_guy
VIP Member
Interviewer: "So what did you like about this book you recently read?"
Jack: "The better question is what didn't I love about this book? This book is like your grandma coming over with biscuits and a birthday card with £20 in it. The author is a majestic creature and a true, bona fide genius. Put me in a huge cardboard box, advertise my oscillating features and sell me in the summer, because I am a really big fan. If this were South Park, I'd be Stan Marsh, because I'm Stanning for this book."
Interviewer: "But...what's the book actually about?"
Jack: "As you can see from the cover blurb, this book is about people. People and places. And ultimately, that's all life is. This author is like an enthusiastic cardio surgeon, because they really cut to the heart of the human condition. We love a good book."
Interviewer: "Right, but what actually happens in it?"
Jack: "Well, I don't want to spoil anything. You can check out my 5th YouTube channel for a 1 sentence review of it later this year though."
Interview: "And I believe you're writing your own book?"
Jack: "Absolutely. I'm Jeffrey Write. I'm Edgar Write. Call me the Write Brothers, because I'm flying into the sky of authordom in a plane I built with words. ...Did I tell you I got rejected from Oxford?"
Interviewer: "You don't say..."
gossip_guy
VIP Member
"I've always love all those Star Wars and definitely didn't suddenly start talking about it for the first time in my life because I'm being paid to! You might say I'm a Star *Whore* for Star Wars. Ba-dum-tssh. But I love all the characters and all the events that happen in the show I definitely watched! Lukas Skywanderer, R3-DPO, Captain Kirk, Okey-Dokey-Kenokie, Mark Vader - they're all great! I'd definitely give The Book of Boba Fett 5/5 on Goodreads!"
gossip_guy
VIP Member
Jack was so desperate to get back to writing and sharing that writing with the world that he locked it behind a paywall. Now he doesn't know what to write or share. I guess it's good that he's reaching out for feedback from the poor, gullible rubes who handed over money for this grift to help fund
The options are: In-depth book reviews (y'know, the thing he's been promising on his YouTube channels for years and finding every dubious excuse not to), shallow book recomendation lists (no doubt copied from elsewhere online), essays on literature (like the ones he's posted on YouTube that have been riddled with plagiarism, many of which he's had to quietly remove for that reason) or personal stuff about his life (so you can hear for the 38 billionth time that he "lived in Paris" or "moved to New York").
Jack's been kind enough to post a sample essay/book "review" titled: "What if you only have one story to tell? William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, reviewed" to give people an idea of the slop they'll be getting in the future if they hand over £8 a month. It's an ironic title considering how often he recycles his jokes, anecdotes and blurb reviews word for word.
What if you only have one story to tell?
William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, reviewed
jackedwardswrites.substack.com
In a completely unsurprising turn of events, for this essay he's basically just reworded Ann Patchett's introduction to the book and presented it as his own work (unfortunately for Jack, the Amazon preview for the Vintage Classics version of the book allows you to read the whole introduction to compare).
The whole thesis of Jack's essay/review: Some authors only have one story to tell. They reuse the same story ideas and explore the same themes and concepts over and over and that's okay because writing is an exploration of our own personal experiences. This is true of So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, who repeats a lot of the same story ideas across his work to process the grief of his mother's death.
Ann Patchett's intro: Some authors only have one story to tell. They reuse the same story ideas and explore the same themes and concepts over and over and that's okay because writing is an exploration of our own personal experiences. This is true of So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, who repeats a lot of the same story ideas across his work to process the grief of his mother's death.
It's his familiar plagiarist's trick again: Copy something, add nothing of your own, but reword and reframe it to present the whole thing as your idea and thoughts, then toss in a late quote from the source that you lifted all your ideas from as something you found while "researching" that supports "your" ideas.
"Upon researching the author’s literary legacy, I found that this was a consistent theme in his writing," Jack bullshits. No research took place. All the biographical information, essay ideas and even plot synopsis that Jack presents are just pulled from Ann Patchett's intro and reworded, and Jack didn't stray any further than the opening pages of the book he's reviewing to find them. All Jack added was quotes for padding and strained purple prose.
"It’s a quiet and underrated modern classic that demands to be read, and read again. I’m so glad I found it, or perhaps it found me," Jack writes, as though he's constantly discovering literature nobody else has, or the book fell into his lap through sheer serendipity. Mysterious stuff indeed.
Anyway, here's a screen grab of Graham Norton coincidentally recommending this very book on that episode of Between the Covers that Jack was on.
Some writers have one story to tell. Jack has no stories to tell, so just recites other people's stories as though they were his own, then acts like he deserves praise, awards and cash for his originality.