The P word
I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture.
– Benjamin Franklin on clergyman Samuel Hemphill
Not content just to read the review, I actually went out and bought (okay, stayed in and bought) Thomas Mallon’s great work on plagiarism, Stolen Words. A breeze of a read, it’s enthralling and erudite and funny to boot.
The last book of non-fiction I wrote, A Book of One’s Own, was about diaries, books so conspicuously marked by genuineness that they fairly resounded with their authors’ own heartbeats. After my years of living with diarists, plagiarists proved to be difficult, topsy-turvy company. How does one write a book about them? What does one even call such a thing? Not a Book of One’s Own?
Among other things, I learned that the word ‘”plagiary” originally referred to the kidnapping of a child or slave (though the most common analogy now drawn by authors is with rape), that plagiarism was among Olde sea dog/dope fiend Coleridge’s many fine impulses, that Martin Luther King swiped some for his thesis, and that the age-old creed publish or die continues to drive academics to very intricate nadirs (and their colleagues to do battle with equally dumb embarrassment when wondering whether or not to make a fuss). And now with the internet enabling rampant plagiarism amongst students, faculty are forced to great lengths to detect it.
Plus, I learned a lot more about Falcon Crest than is probably good for me, and that I enjoy saying “textual promiscuity.”
In addition to the revelation that near all plagiarists when caught red-handed haul out the defence of sloppy note-taking (as if any writer doesn’t know what he has or hasn’t penned by his own hand), lazy footnoting or the inability to find the quotation mark on their keyboard, one of the most interesting threads that runs through the book is the question of whether plagiarists want to get caught, or whether theirs is a special brand of cockiness: leaving clues for readers that should unmask the base deed, just to see how much they can get away with.
Then… just as I’d finished Mallon’s book, still wondering what twist of the ego pushes people to pilfer others’ words and toil, our pal Stuart, who’s no stranger to synchronicity, sent me a link to a wild story… [update: the suject of this story has requested his name and the link be deleted. I’ve nothing to substantiate the claims made therein, so I’m happy to oblige.]
And this is very funny.
And what was the story about the guy who kept submitting Peggy Atwood’s work to poetry mags, only to be met with constant rejection?
It is a baffling and so sleazy crime, and although it’s slightly more understandable when perpetrated by a desperate student than a professional author, I don’t know that we can talk of degrees. And in all cases, opprobrium seems a fitting consequence.
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Comment
- Wasn’t the tag line on Dean’s textism site something to the effect of ‘Intellectual Property is Theft’? Must make for some interesting dinner conversations, should the topic ever come up.
I guess theft is okay as long as you don’t make any profit from it…(?)
— Jerry Mar 30, 2:19pm # - Dr. King? Oh, no!
Caterina might be glad (based on her post about the pleasure of watching idolized people being cut back down to human size) but i really liked his theological papers and thought they should get more attention. Did he copy ideas or text from the original Martin Luther?
And the Laura-the-student-plaigiarist story…yikes.
— Amy H. Mar 30, 11:47pm # - How many profound thoughts have you of your own?.... Or are they just ideas presented by the ghosts of genius past – floating in the ether, where a willing heart and ear is lucky enough to pluck?
Words should never be toil. Should they prove so, it is because of an attempt to force yourself to speak in a voice not your own. This signifies weakness, lack of belief in one’s self, and one’s own true nature.
Wisdom’s focus is on the elaboration and extrapolation of the incessantly evolving. Elicitation. Take what comes before, consider, reflect and expand. This is neccesary to elevate one’s present self in any area of endeavor. Look over the next rise, beyond the rim of the cup, outside the box in which you reside. Only by melding the written past with the present of our minds can new ground of mind be broken. What I speak of is not plagerism. Know the difference. Go and do good things.
S
— Sean Mar 31, 2:29am # - Words should never be toil.
Spoken like someone who is not a writer. Words are not always toil, but when they are not, we should be suspicious of them, because chances are we aren’t paying proper attention. If profundity or originality of thought were the same as originality of expression, then I would surmise that a good 9/10 of great literature would have to be wiped from the face of the earth.
Self-expression, in any form, be it writing, painting, or music, should always have a measure of difficulty in it, because in order to express ourselves, we must also endeavour to understand ourselves, and if that comes easily, chances are fairly good we’ve missed something, and probably something important.
And the Peggy Atwood thing? That’s explained fairly easily by the fact that her work is mediocre at best. Her reputation and status has a lot more to do with her politics and her timing than the actual merits of her work.
— August Mar 31, 4:22pm # - What he said.
— mara Mar 31, 4:30pm # - On the assumption that ‘Peggy’ Atwood is a familiarized Margaret Atwood – August’s fatuous bologna reads like the excretion of someone who’s convinced himself he’s a writer because he types a lot.
The best writing often writes itself – the agony and labor come before and after that ecstatic possession.
Though effortlessness is no more sign of worth than lengthy toil, and great writing does get done in clenched bits.
The Griffin Trust Poetry Prize Foundation considers Atwood a peer of Anne Carson’s – you can’t get more confirmation than that.
Atwood:
”...Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn’t now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone’s been run over.
The century grinds on.”
In The Secular Night
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/atwood/poem1.htm
and:
“Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.”
You Begin
http://www.onlinepoetryclassroom.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=764
— Juke Moran Apr 4, 5:35am # - I really don’t see the connection between the quality of Atwood’s work and August’s, in my view, correct statement that real writing is indeed hard work, and the claim that good writing writes itself is pure hogwash. Only surrealist writing writes itself.
Of course writing is not hard work in the jackhammer on the pavement under a 105° sun kind of way, but to dismiss it as some sort of dilettante pursuit because it does not involve hardhats and greased muscles is ill-informed anti-intellectual snobbery.
(As anyone who’s ever sought to achieve perfect cadence and symmetry and clarity of thought over 300 pages, while doing battle with inner barriers and characters taking on a life of their own, will tell you.)
And perhaps unfortunately, it takes as much effort to write a bad book as to write a good one.
— gail Apr 4, 6:49am # - You really don’t have to post any of Atwood’s work; I am perfectly familiar with a substantial portion of her ouevre. Writing is indeed hard work. My first commission as a book critic (from the Globe and Mail) was only 400 words, but I slaved and agonized over those 400 words for more than a week before I decided they were good enough to send to my editor. He liked them, and the review was well commented on, but I’m still insecure.
Good writing and bad writing are equally difficult, and at times so is telling the difference.
I quote Jeanette Winterson:
“Art cannot be tamed, although our responses to it can be, and in relation to The Canon, our responses are conditioned from the moment we start school. The freshness which the everyday regular man or woman pride themselves upon; the untaught ‘I know what I like’ approach, now encouraged by the media, is neither fresh nor untaught. It is the half-baked sterility of the classroom washed down with liberal doses of popular culture.
[...]
The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so unreasonable to expect a percentage of that from us in return? I worry that to ask for effort is to imply élitism, and that the charge against art, that it is élitist, is too often the accuser’s defence against his or her own bafflement. It is quite close to the remark ‘Why can’t they all speak English?’ (“Art Objects” 15-16) ”
Atwood’s reputation, the force of her personality, and the power and controversy of her early politics blinds us to her work in the same way that ideology and the cult of personality can blind thousands, even millions, to bigotry, dishonesty, or even simple banality (take note of Canadian and American politics, on both ends of the spectrum, for examples of all). Have you read, say, “Lady Oracle” or “The Edible Woman”? They are appalling examples of clumsiness, and carelessness. What about some of her work in “Good Bones”? Take the short story “Poppies: Three Variations” for example. It is about as innovative as a high school creative writing assignment, and is so dull and pointless as to be almost unreadable. But I have no doubt that she worked hard on all those pieces.
We have an obligation to acknowledge that art takes tremendous effort on behalf of the artist, by giving as much effort as we can into understanding and experiencing it. As part of that effort, we also have an obligation to call out when it falls short of the mark. In many countries, and in Canada in particular, we have lost sight of that obligation, and have conferred on a certain group of writers a status of infallibility that they do not deserve.
Back to plagiarism: it can occassionally be a recognized technique of literary subversion. Kathy Acker used it, apparently to great effect (although I don’t care for her work either), and so does Mark Leyner. In some cases we can think of it as a kind of re-appropriation of words, removing from them their status of commodity by stripping them of their context and repositioning them, but leaving them otherwise unchanged. That may be the only way for some to make the point that the words themselves have a value beyond the money they bring publishers or the socio-political actions they can be used to trigger.
— August Apr 5, 4:01am # - “Martin Luther King swiped some for his thesis”
some? you call 49% of his thesis being plagiarized ‘some’? calling him ‘dr’ is an insult to everyone who has ever labored to produce an original idea.
p.s. guess whether his ‘i have a dream’ speech was plagiarized, too. yeah, you know the answer.
— warren Apr 6, 1:35am # - The best writing – but wait – this is writing isn’t it? And ad copy is writing, and television news is mostly written, and somebody somewhere must write spam I suppose as well. That’s all writing, but it isn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean composition, and I didn’t mean the creation of a written work.
Someone is writing a novel, someone has written a novel; and within the novel there may be good writing and bad writing. Both, at one and the same time.
We’re using the same word to cover the general act and its subsets. I’m pointing at the paragraphs, not the whole work.
What I meant, and still mean, is the best writing – lyrical, profound, the music of it as thrilling as any other instrument’s. Just like the cello becomes one with the artist and the music and the composer and the whole string section and the orchestra and the audience – at that moment I think you’d find that a lot of musicians would agree, it’s best to simply get out of the way and let the music play itself.
The best writing is like that.
And I think you’ll have to look long and far and hard to find anyone who’ll insist that that writing, that kind of writing was drudged up from arduous labour.
Again, the labour’s on either side of it. Not that it’s not there. There it is – see? Balls of crumpled-up foolscap, the agony of the blank page, the little bonfire at the bottom of the garden. And editing, oh God – editing drains the life out of all of it. At times. But it has to be done, and editing is part of writing. But that isn’t what I meant.
Inspiration is not something that can be built, though it can be built toward – and it’s inspired writing that I mean when I say, again, that the best writes itself. It comes from outside the conscious, and consciously writing, self.
It should be clearer now that I didn’t mean that the best novels write themselves. And I certainly wasn’t demeaning the craft of writing. I wasn’t demeaning anything really, except tendentious and unnecessary derogation of someone else’s work.
I’m not Canadian, don’t know much about Canada’s internal politics, and I haven’t read everything Atwood’s written. She may well have written, and published, execrable things; and it may be accurate for a paid critic to call her work mediocre because those execrable things, when averaged in to her total literary output, even though offset by her most brilliant work, gives her an aesthetic score near the mid percentile. But that’s the only possible legitmate use of the word to describe her work, and it’s a stretch; and it’s at best a personal opinion, though it was given out as a judgement.
It’s likely August doesn’t share Atwood’s politics, yes? And I’m guessing he’s also more than a little bothered by her sexual politics, if I can separate those categories.
She’s mediocre because that makes it easier to dismiss her and her politics – that being the goal.
And what I originally wanted to say, and never got around to the first time, is that the two comments above my number 6 above, diametrically opposed in substance as they are, are united in toploftical pomposity.
So.
Writing is hard work, much harder than it seems from outside. The best writing comes out of nowhere, the rest is dug up from the black dungeon of the writer’s soul. Margaret Atwood will be defended from gratuitous cheap shots as long as I’m in the room.
As for plagiarism, I’ve already responded to that here, under a nom de plume.
— Juke Moran Apr 6, 6:02am # - Sorry for the misunderstanding, Juke.
Words are tricky like that.
— gail Apr 6, 9:17am # - Sorry indeed. I’ve come to believe that I’m somehow not having the same discussion you are. I find myself unable to distinguish between which paragraphs and stanzas are the result of intervention by the feckless Muses, and which are the result of human toil in anyone’s work but my own; and even then I’m not certain I could say. I suggest only that I have a certain reasonably flexible criteria for what I believe to be good, and what I believe to be bad. Perhaps you are a better judge of such things than I.
But I refuse to accept that my comments about Atwood are “cheap shots”, nor am I willing to accept the notion that I must dislike her writing only because her politics offend me; I disagree with much of what she says, but am by no means offended, nor do I consider political affiliation sufficient cause to dismiss the work of anyone. By the same token, I also believe political affiliation (and I will include “sexual politics”, whatever exactly that might mean, in that statment) is insufficient cause to embrace a person’s work as well. Your mileage may vary.
— August Apr 6, 2:03pm # - Being as how the US is currently enacting a tableau vivant, with animatronic accoutrements, of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, I’m just a little more tetchy about her very public, very definite, and very brave stance on what’s been termed “gender politics” and “sexual politics” – and what means, when I employ it, the legal and social oppression of non-males, where males is defined by a very limited criterial template that comes mostly from the Old Testament – than I might otherwise be.
That said I think things went a little oblique off the plagiaristical example, where I think Gail meant the dude was submitting already-recognized proficiency (Atwood’s poems) and getting turned away – lame on him – and you, August, thought that it meant the work was dreck and the unknown submitter’s rejection verified that. I took it to mean the shadowy skulking of plagiarists isn’t as recognizable as we’d like to believe it is.
So that the accusations of (Atwood’s) mediocrity seemed jarringly gratuitous, to someone who regards her as socially courageous and poetically intrepid.
And yes, embracing the otherwise-unembraceable out of a sense of duty and obligatory conformist p.c. imperative is lame. As is its converse.
First the embrace, then the reason why.
Cheers
— Juke Moran Apr 6, 10:03pm # - Je ne puex pas comrendre parce que une personne ferait plagarize. Si vous êtes un writter, ECRIVEZ ! Si vous n’êtes pas, alors ne faire pas. C’est simplement, non ? Haha ce qu’une perspective simpliste.
— Abdul-Rahim Apr 12, 5:43am #
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