It seems that Mario Marques is no longer merely a journalist – now he’s turned into a fiction writer as well.
It’s sufficient to read our complete correspondence to perceive that he’s changed his story whenever it suited his purpose and done everything possible to avoid doing the one simple and correct thing: The Mario Marques-Daniella Thompson correspondence <www.brazzil.com/daniv/Texts/Correspondence.htm>
To Mario Marques:
If, as you claim now (almost two years after the fact), you had access to an EMI discography you say I copied, why didn’t you use it instead of using mine? It could have saved you no end of trouble.
For the record: I never knew that EMI was Guinga’s publisher or that it had compiled such a list. The first time I read anything about it was on 3/2/2004, in a post by you in the Ranzinza weblog. This sounds suspiciously like a cover-thine-arse strategy on your part. Caught in flagrante delicto, you’ll say anything – no matter how reprehensible – to wriggle out of the mess you’ve created.
How about reproducing this alleged discography online so we can all see it? I, for one, am very curious to discover what’s in it, especially since you didn’t use it but chose to copy my discography instead.
Saying you’ve done nothing unethical is purely disingenuous. When you use someone’s work, there are two ethical ways to compensate the originator of the work: you either pay or you acknowledge the source (or both). You have done neither.
The year after your book came out, Gryphus published the songbook ‘A Música de Guinga,’ with a preface not by you but by Sérgio Cabral. For some mysterious reason, Sérgio also based his text on my research and not on that fabled EMI discography about which you’ve now begun to talk so much. Unlike you, Sérgio didn’t copy my format but merely incorporated the information into his text – he could have gotten away with no acknowledgement whatsoever. But being a bigger man than you are, he ended his text with this footnote:
”P.S. Baseei-me no trabalho realizado pela pesquisadora americana Daniella Thompson para incluir a discografia de Guinga no texto acima. A ela, meus agradecimentos.”
Now you announce that the omission has been corrected in the second edition of your book. Begging your pardon: what second edition? Did you or your publisher notify me of the second edition or send me a copy? No. Yet you complain that I have “continued bombarding your in-box” – a sheer lie. Anyone who’s read our correspondence knows that you initiated all the exchanges but one.
As regards our correspondence, you allege that I doctored our e-mails and published only parts of them. In fact, the very few things I left out were names of people and places that have no bearing on this issue; they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Everything else is there. Feel free to produce a communication between us that I have left out.
It seems that every time you had to pick a solution to the problems you had created, you chose the most difficult, unreasonable, and unproductive route. One is left with the distinct impression that you are bent on self-destruction. Of course, that’s your business. You’re a big boy now.
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(*) Daniella Thompson on Brazil: The Magazine of Brazilian Music & Culture <http://daniv.blogspot.com>; Musica Brasiliensis <http://brazzil.com/daniv>