TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "plagiarism"
“Unoriginality was much more ancient than I had originally suspected.”
Over at the NYTimes, Drew Christie has a fun video op-ed called “Allergy to Originality.”
When reading a 1976 oral history book called I Wish I Could Give My Son A Raccoon, he came across a line that seemed really familiar: “We’ve always been hewers of wood and the drawers of water.” He went home and checked his bookshelves:
I grabbed off the shelf a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 masterpiece, “Blood Meridian.” Right there in the first paragraph of the first page was the line: “His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water …” I thought I had uncovered some secret, cracked a code. As McCarthy himself said in one of his rare print interviews, given to The New York Times in 1992, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books.” After a little more research, I found out this same line about hewers of wood and drawers of water appears in a much older and more well-known book, the King James Bible, in Joshua 9:23. At first I thought McCarthy had copied this woman’s line, but in reality, she had likely taken it from the Bible as he probably did. Unoriginality was much more ancient than I had originally suspected.
Filed under: originality, plagiarism
(via Aiden Livingston)
On the “self-plagiarism” of writers
Show me an artist/writer who has not re-used dialogue or images or music or gestures and I will show you an artist who has no obsessions—aka, a pretty shitty artist. You know who was an awesome writer and wrote kickass dialogue? Shakespeare.
From Hamlet:
POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.From Troilus and Cressida:
PANDARUS: What says she there?
TROILUS: Words, words, mere words.I could dig up more examples, but really, I rest my case here.
Exactly! As Hitchcock said, “Self-plagiarism is style.”
(via maudnewton)
(Source: explore-blog)
Remember that post about Banksy plagiarizing his “On Advertising” piece? Well, it’s not that simple: Banksy actually gave credit to Sean Tejaratchi’s zine Crap Hound, in the back of the original publication, but when somebody retitled the piece and typed it out for the web, the attribution got lost. Worse yet, Banksy originally contacted Tejaratchi about using his work, but the contact got lost in the mail. Here’s Tejaratchi:
I realize “Banksy stole the quote!” is much more dramatic and satisfying than “Banksy made a poor stylistic choice in his book layout, causing confusion years later! He attempted to inform me but had the wrong address!” The man’s not an imbecile. This would have been an absurdly clumsy and doomed attempt at plagiarism. I will also say that in my recent, limited contact with Banksy, he’s gone out of his way to be clear, kind, and genuine, in every way the exact opposite of a twat.
So everything turned out okay, but it goes to show, you just can’t be 100% certain about claims of plagiarism.
I think Sean handled this well, but it reminds me that just minutes ago I saw illustrator Ray Frenden crying foul against David Pogue for Pogue reviewing some obscure Wacom Cintiq competitors a month after Frenden reviewed them. (It was brought to my attention by a twitter follower suggesting that Pogue read my book, which turned out to be a joke, but suggesting that reading my book makes you a plagiarist makes me a little touchy…) ANYWAYS…because there’s no actual cut-and-paste plagiarism, we just can’t be clear on what happened here until/if Pogue tells his side.
There are a number of possibilities, among them: 1) sheer coincidence 2) Frenden’s post made big waves and Pogue happened to get the tip through echoes of the post that didn’t credit Frenden 3) Pogue said, “Hey, this is a great review, I’ll rewrite it for my column.”
(The bigger question is: if #3 is true, do we/should we care? Nothing illegal happened, Pogue isn’t depriving Frenden of any livelihood, and whether good or bad, this sort of thing happens constantly in journalism…)
The internet—not to mention culture in general—is, of course, a gigantic copy machine and that which is posted will be copied. As always, I emphasize that reactions to a plagiarism (imagined or real) are always more interesting and tell you more about the parties involved than the plagiarism itself.
“Banksy on advertising”: a plagiarism
UPDATE: turns out this wasn’t plagiarized after all, just poorly attributed. Read more→
It looks like that wildly popular Bansky quote on advertising was plagiarized from a piece by Sean Tejaratchi in the zine Crap Hound. Tejaratchi color-coded the passages lifted (pink = indirect; yellow = direct) but the Bansky piece wasn’t color-coded or annotated, so I took the liberty of clearing things up a bit by adding color outlines to the Banksy piece from the original book and annotated numbers to both. Compare and contrast.
Tegaratchi:
It’s hard to know how to feel about this. My first thought was, “Hey, Banksy reads Crap Hound!” Then, “What the fuck is going on?” Then, “Am I a real person? Am I actually happening?” And finally, “Am I a beautiful flower angel sent from heaven to inspire Banksy?”
As problems go, it’s a pretty nice one to have. I like Banksy’s art and ideas. I’m flattered he liked my writing and my sentiments, and I’m happy others liked the quote enough to post and forward. I’ve seen forums where people are debating the passage, including rebuttals from ad-agency twats. It’s on wikiquotes and a hundred blogs. My essay never would have had that impact on its own.
The downside is that Banksy’s name is always on it. Seeing my writing credited to someone else makes it a little less magical. Same with knowing that one day (maybe soon, since the issue in question is being reprinted), I’ll get to hear how I ripped off Banksy.
The fact that he’s an “elusive mystery artist” doesn’t leave me many options. I found contact info online, but so far I’ve only received bounced messages.
My goal is to set the record straight online. There will be no lawyers or threats of legal action. I’ve tried not to jump to conclusions, or angrily denounce Banksy, or the Internet, or the terrible unfairness of the universe. Maybe a ghostwriter was responsible for lifting it. Maybe an attribution was lost in layout. (On the other hand, my words were rearranged and tweaked. How does that happen accidentally?)
Good for Tegaratchi. Here’s hoping this helps a little with setting the record straight.
(Thx to jndevereux.)
