Story Published

As part of restarting my literary career, I just had a story published at Twist & Twain, Don't Worry, te Fix is In.

Jason Arday: If Possible, It Gets Even Worse

I suppose it's just as well Simon & Schuster decided not to pulp Arday's memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, because it raises questions that go beyond just plagiarism or even conventional DEI. Via the Washington Free Beacon,

The Free Beacon's findings include the fact that pivotal dialogue in the memoir's prologue is similar to lines spoken by a Thracian prophetess in the pulpy Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which was known for sex, violence, and bad writing. Just the News first reported last week that the seventh episode of the show, which aired in 2010, shared its title, "Great and Unfortunate Things," with Arday's book.

In the show's pilot, Spartacus's wife utters a prophecy to him: "That you are destined for great and unfortunate things, if you go to war." Similarly, per Arday's telling in the uncannily cinematic prologue to his memoir, the midwife at his birth insists to his mother, "This boy is destined for great things." Later in the memoir, Arday claims that in 2006 he traveled to Brazil with a nonprofit to deliver water pumps to poor communities. There, a woman tells him, "I can tell you're destined to do great things. But I also believe you're destined for very sad and difficult things."

. . . Arday says in his memoir that he was inspired by—and repeatedly watched—the Rocky franchise, which served as an avatar for his own hard-scrabble struggle. He also religiously viewed two hugely popular Australian soap operas, Neighbours and Home and Away, and writes that from doing so, "my understanding of the human experience expanded."

In its review, the Free Beacon found multiple instances of Arday, as he leveraged his astonishing life story as an accelerant to his swift ascendance up the academic ladder, never having made certain claims about his life until after particular storylines in these shows and films first hit the screen.

Among the other dramatic details from the book proposal that were absent from the published work was the claim that Arday survived testicular cancer. This rare malignancy afflicted the character Kyle Canning on Neighbours in 2021, a plot line that immediately followed another character on the soap suffering a testicular cancer scare.

. . . The bedrock of the Arday mythology is his claim of childhood illiteracy: He claims he could not read until he was 18. However, his ex-wife, Debbie McKenzie, said in an appearance with him on a British TV show in 2012 that he learned to read at 16.

In his memoir, Arday claims McKenzie first started teaching him to read shortly after they met when he was 18. That would have been between 2003 and 2004, roughly the same period when Neighbours ran a plotline about the character Connor O'Neill's secret illiteracy and his girlfriend's effort to arrange tutoring for him.

Additionally, Rocky II (which he became a fan of long before meeting McKenzie) reveals Rocky's illiteracy. Who practices reading with him? His girlfriend, Adrian.

The Free Beacon consults autism resaearchers who offer at least a partial explanation for what may have been going on:

Prone to fixations, autistic people often become superfans of narrow slivers of pop culture and other arcana. Research shows they also have a tendency to engage in "scripting"—memorizing and rehearsing, for example, lines from films or TV and weaving them into their everyday lives—and can form strong parasocial bonds with fictional characters. This can help them mirror and better comprehend real-life emotions.

The problem I see here is that from a medical standpoint, autism spectrum disorders are a pathology. According to the National Library of Medicine:

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a group of neurodevelopmental diseases. The cause of ASD is unknown, but several genetic and non-genetic risk factors have been characterized that, alone or in combination, are implicated in the development of ASD. Currently, no diagnostic biomarkers are available, and the diagnosis of ASD is based on typical features that include repetitive behaviors, and impaired social communication and interaction.

The Free Beacon piece suggests, though that this could be a reason for Arday's behavior, but not an excuse:

Gray Atherton, who is Cross's Plymouth colleague, said: "One possibility of an individual 'confusing' fantasy with reality could be that if an individual spends an inordinate amount of time engaging with a fictional world or characters, they may begin to relate to those characters or story in a way that can feel 'real.'" But Atherton cautioned: "It would be a stretch to characterize autism as a condition that would mean an individual genuinely confuses their own lived experience with those in a TV show, movie or book."

But here's the overarching question that the Free Beacon approaches but never quite asks: is an individual with this level of neurodevelopmental disorder capable at all of doing intellectual work at the undergraduate level, much less PhD, much less at a world-class university? Was Arday ever capable of doing ordinary course work? Roger Kimball asks a related question:

I say “his” book, but it was only incidentally his. A “book doctor” called Eve Claxton was listed as co-author, and it soon emerged that another co-author was that prodigious scribe, AI. More digging revealed that Arday’s dissertation was lifted largely from a 2009 PhD thesis by a Brunel University student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.

. . . I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive.

It's hard not to surmise from the evidence in the Free Beacon piece that Arday at 40 had in many ways the mental state of a child. If there's serious question whether he was ever able in his 20s to undertake ordinary undergraduate course work, I'm beginning to wonder whether he was even functional enough to know he had to plagiarize or use AI. The book doctor Eve Claxton was apparently behind his book, but she appears to have functioned primarily as an enabler and stenographer who filtered out only his most extreme claims. Robert Spencer comes close to this problem as well:

Yes, and it was a meteoric rise, and a spectacular fall, not because of Arday’s talents, or lack thereof, or because of the skillfulness of his lies and plagiarism. In fact, he wasn’t actually very good at either. His purloining of other people’s work was clumsy and obvious, and his autobiographical claims strained credulity well beyond the breaking point for anyone who dared to ponder them rationally[.]

I just don't see how he could have had the capacity to do these things himself if his developmental disorder was that extreme. Take another look at that photo at the top of this post -- the guy strikes me as just plain simple. He had to have had one or more puppetmasters-cum-enablers throughout his career. Who are they? . . .