In the first week of August, 2007, The House Next Door asked Damian Arlyn, publisher of Windmills of my Mind, to join our bullpen. I had been meaning to extend this offer for some time, but didn’t move until Damian began publishing “31 Days of Spielberg,” a series of critical/biographical articles taking readers through Steven Spielberg’s career, title by title. The project’s ambition and the critic’s lucid style convinced me and House co-editor Keith Uhlich to enlist Damian immediately and send Web traffic his way via stand-alone links to each new article.
This week, a discussion thread at Spielbergfilms.com accused Damian of taking descriptive phrases and sentences from Warren Buckland’s book Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster without attribution. Damian accepted the charge and posted an explanation and apology here. He says he has corresponded with Buckland about the charges and has removed the problem articles from his site until he can “revise them so as to satisfy everyone (hopefully) that they have come from me alone and from nobody else.” He intends to continue publishing “31 Days of Spielberg,” picking up where the series left off.
Unfortunately, the nature of the charges means that this site can no longer endorse “31 Days of Spielberg.” The House Next Door will not publish any more stand-alone links to the Spielberg series, and Damian’s name has been removed from the masthead.
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