It’s often said that if you want something done, ask a busy person. I’ve had an example of this in the last couple of days.
If you've read my blog entry If You've Nothing Better To Do then you'll probably have taken a look at the two superb short films by Roy Zimmerman (pictured above, guitar at the ready) and Kylie Scott (also pictured above, lip-syncing Donald Trump as a drunken woman in a nightclub). If you haven't seen them, I strongly urge you to do it now. Just click here.
The ancient literary agent which still lurks in my dark soul was bothered by the copyright implications of ripping their two films from YouTube and slotting them into my blog. So I spent an afternoon on the internet tracking down contact addresses for both Roy Zimmerman and Kylie Scott. I wanted to be sure they weren't going to sue me! I sent off e-mails to them both and had generous and forgiving replies from each of them within 24 hours. See what I mean about asking a busy person?
The Kylie Scott episode was quite revealing. If you do a Google search on 'Kylie Scott' you'll get page after page of stuff about an Australian romantic fiction writer of the same name. The novelist Kylie Scott has been declared Australia's most loved romantic fiction writer for at least two years in a row. Now I've nothing against this particular Kylie Scott, whom I'm sure I'd like if we met. On the other hand it's hard to forgive her for displacing my old mate Di Morrissey as Australia's romantic novelist queen. I suppose that's show business, or something!
One of the oddities that emerged from all this was that the drunken woman in the night club Kylie Scott and I share the same problem. There is Another Peter Grose, much more distinguished than me. He is a former foreign correspondent (like me) for The New York Times (unlike me), as well as being a former editor of Foreign Affairs (unlike me) and a former adviser to the Jimmy Carter White House (again, unlike me). He is currently an academic at the Kennedy School of Government, part of Harvard University.
If you search for 'Peter Grose' on Google then on the first page you come to you'll see on the right my picture and a collection of my book covers along with the 'fact' that I was born in Sydney, Australia (true) on 27 October 1934 (rubbish, I'm not that old), which is presumably the real birth date of the Other Peter Grose. The Google search also lists a single book, Gentleman Spy (I wish!) I've asked Google to put all of this right, but so far no acknowledgement and no correction. Insofar as the biggest loser from all this is The Other Peter Grose, I hope he'll forgive me if I treat it as more his problem than mine. In the same spirit, I have a feeling that a few short years from now The Other Kylie Scott might be grateful to be taken for the shortly-to-be dazzlingly successful Californian, Kylie Scott.