People in and around the Blowing Rock area were recently treated to a lively urban columnist’s work. Trouble is, they read it in the wrong newspaper. The column in question was “Chaste Mountain Whores” by CL columnist Quinn Cotton, published in our October 15 issue. In that column, Ms. Cotton observed that, in her view, downtown Blowing Rock has prostituted its formerly genuine picturesque small-town charm in exchange for tourist dollars.
In the column, Ms. Cotton wrote, “[The tourists have] traveled many miles to see this strange phenomenon called a simple mountain village, but just by their ultra-urban presence they make it false,” and noted what she saw as “an extreme, cartoon-like contrast in the hills between the locals and the people who come to peer at their habitat as if it were a zoo.”
The column elicited letters to CL, about equally divided between positive and negative reactions.
Meanwhile in Blowing Rock, after fielding comments about the column from some of the town’s businesspeople, Jerry Burns, editor of the weekly newspaper The Blowing Rocket, reprinted the column in its entirety, along with CL‘s mailing address in large, bold type. The only problem here is that Burns failed to ask anyone for permission to reprint the copyrighted column — not our editor, not the publisher, not the writer, no one. In other words, our column, or more accurately, Ms. Cotton’s column, was stolen.
When contacted by phone, Mr. Burns seemed oblivious to how copyright laws work and repeated a few times that he had “given you [CL] publicity.” When told that he owed Ms. Cotton payment for her column, Burns — who, judging from our conversation and his photo on the web, has potential to be a truly great Wal-Mart greeter — only chuckled and said, “No, I don’t think so.” Tourism, apparently, isn’t the only cheesy thing in Blowing Rock.
When asked to comment on the Blowing Rocket‘s unauthorized reprint of her article, Ms. Cotton said, “It’s just absurdly funny. I love their headline, too, where they say we “attack the village with a vicious attack”! Geez, you should need a literacy license to publish a paper. . .It shows the narrow-mindedness that so often lies below all of that “idyllic small town’ rot. All I can say is that I’m grateful to be living in a city!”
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2003.
