Can You Feel The Law Suit?

Publishers Weekly reported three weeks ago on the pending suit by Van Morrison against Chicago Review Press and biographer Clinton Heylin. By the sounds of it, there's stuff to object to, but Heylin should most certainly have heard about the difficulties that earlier biographers like John Collis and Brian Hinton and Steve Turner went through. Van's notorious about his privacy, understandably, and yet the line-up of biographers ready to face the lion seems undeterred. Fools. I have to admit, too, that I have a pretty fundamental distrust of biographers in general, many of whom are more interested in the salacious and the aspersive than the actual. Of all people, though, to go after Van is just askin' for it: the Man is notoriously litigious about attempts to intrude into his privacy or to write about his life or even to use his lyrics (in many ways, he's much like the Eliot estate, extremely protective). Ya gets whats ya asks fer.

The book has had limited release through Penguin in the UK, but the suit is attempt to stop US publication through CRP. Here is a brief description from the Van Morrison website, and here is a pretty useless review from The Independent, which offers very little about the book itself. Blender offers an equally unilluminating discussion here. The Guardian, however, has a more interesting discussion here (as one might expect from The Guardian); I particularly like the line, "the whole show is dressed up like a mugger in Gucci shoes, with footnotes and square brackets and all sorts of cross-references to lend the impression of professorial authority, all the while hiding the stiletto." Very nice.

I'm starting to think my pair of articles on the Man were very fortunate not to get me sued. ;-) Then again, I didn't give a whit about the man's personal life.