Cassie Edwards' Last Hope Fades

The Cassie Edwards situtation has finally reached a pinnacle to which my tired brain can no longer aspire in its flights of outrage. At last, she has won my pity. The Smart Bitches have finally found both a fiction and protected source. If that weren't enough, it's a Pulitzer prize winning novel, Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge, still in print with Houghton Mifflin. Eeegods, folks.

I can't help but wonder if perhaps Edwards never thought it would go this far without somebody catching it. Or if, perhaps, she figured she'd pull the cutie once, then got a little relaxed when it passed, and maybe succumbed to deadline fever. But at this point she can no longer hide behind doing research and being unaware she had to cite it. I can think of no circumstances under which anyone, particularly a writer by trade, copies large numbers of passages nearly verbatim from a Pulitzer winning novel and has no knowledge of this being wrong.

It's too sad to be funny or even pleasant in a justice-is-served way anymore. Yes, even I can't feel much beyond a numb sense of sorrow.