Literary Clusterfucks 2013

probably much more serious offence than fiction plagiarism

why? fiction has different goals and techniques, but it is not less difficult to do well. if I found someone had just blithely appropriated large verbatim chunks of my novel as their own work and sold it to a publisher, with no permission, no attribution, and no compensation. I'd be furious.

oh same, but I wouldn't want to get the courts involved. 'dragged on Twitter' honestly feels like the right punishment nowadays, if social media has given us one thing it is a mechanism for instant ridicule that occasionally proves valuable

plus that publisher would almost certainly drop them as a result

it's precisely because the publishers chose not to publish when they discovered the plagiarism that this will end with the author just being dragged on Twitter rather than ending up in the courts. Presumably, any advances paid must also be paid back. When money starts changing hands and none of it is going to the real author then the courts get interested.

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— Kristen Radtke (@KristenRadtke) May 16, 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/16/john-hughes-i-am-not-a-plagiarist-and-heres-why

After Guardian Australia revealed parts of John Hughes’ latest novel, The Dogs, had been plagiarised from a Nobel laureate’s work he said the error was unintentional. It was then revealed that other parts of the book were copied from classic novels including The Great Gatsby and Anna Karenina.

Here we publish Hughes’ response to these two revelations:

Here is a famous sentence, the opening line to One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And here, from Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Paramo, a favourite of Marquez, this: “Years later Father Renteria would remember the night his hard bed had kept him awake, and driven him outside.” Plagiarism? A few words changed here and there. A few added, a few taken away. Influence? The distinction is not as clear-cut as the words suggest.

The recent discovery that I had appropriated passages from Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (2017) in my novel The Dogs without realising I had done so (believing them to be my own), and now these recent discoveries, not only disturbed me greatly (there is nothing more disturbing than discovering your memory is not your own), but have made me reflect on my process as a writer. I’ve always used the work of other writers in my own.

It’s a rare writer who doesn’t. Borges’ Pierre Menard, three hundred years after the original, wants to re-write Don Quixote, word for word. Jean Rhys wants to retell the story of Jane Eyre. Peter Carey wants to give new life to Charles Dickens. JM Coetzee, Daniel Defoe. It’s a question of degree. I’m probably closer to Pierre Menard when it comes to the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century, but regardless of indebtedness, it’s a great simplification to call this plagiarism.

what a bullshit artist!

Ooh, playing the Menard card

Plagiarism or influence? it's impossible to say

From F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

“He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

From The Dogs:

“She smiled at me then, one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you might come across once in your life, if you were lucky. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The whole piece is almost sociopathic

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/16/john-hughes-i-am-not-a-plagiarist-and-heres-why

At the very least, you know, don't plagiarise a famous passage from one of the world's most famous books

I like how he tries to change a few words at the beginning of the passage, and then just says fuck it and copies the rest word for word.

Also seems like he's trying to run with two contradictory excuses:

I adapted a lot of the early material but did not keep the notes on which it was based, so over the years many of the sources became so integrated I came to think of them as my own.

Like TS Eliot, I wanted the appropriated passages to be seen and recognised as in a collage as the Prince recognises it all has come before.

which, interestingly enough, that excuse is basically plagiarized from The John Laroquette Show, where he finds an old manuscript of his, sees it's good, decides to send to a publisher, and then the publisher says "this is Hemingway" and he realizes it was his typing final exam.

Real artists don't use footnotes

I used to wear that No Fear shirt

The absolute balls to compare "years later, a person remembered a thing" to lifting an entire passage of description.

"oh come on, who's actually read The Great Gatsby, really? they'll never know"

"I am a plagiarist, and that's okay" would have been better

^

I am a poserplagiarist and I don't care.

"oh come on, who's actually read The Great Gatsby, really? they'll never know"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdVgdVMPIs8

the way he plays the menard card is impressively brazen:
(a) bcz "rewrite" in this sense actually means "exactly copy word-for-word" (this being the joke borges is making) and not the kind of rewriting that somewhat mitigates plagairism
(b) bcz menard is fashioned so as to illustrate when a literary ideal (the remix) becomes an absurd symptom, and
(c) bcz menard is fictional!

I don't even understand this impulse. Like, even if you wanted to convey the same idea as a passage from Gatsby ... you're a writer! Write it your own way. This approach seems weirdly like more work.

reminds me of writing book reports in 4th grade where I'd just copy the encyclopedia and then change every 2 or 3 words to a synonym

Makes me think of something Sebald said in a lecture:"I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

Lots of things resolve themselves just by being in the drawer a while.

Except, well, not if it's from the fucking Gatsby you doofus.

Also that worked better pre-Google.

teachers can run work through online plagiarism detectors but apparently publishers haven't heard about those yet

I think the key word in that Sebald quote is “tidbits.” He doesn’t say to steal paragraphs.

yeah, I think a lot of literary inventions come from writers reading a phrase/sentence/image they think is amazing and trying to re-create its effect in their own words. Usually they fail. Sometimes they fail and something just as good or at least something interestingly perverse comes out. This dude sees a paragraph he likes and goes yoink.

reminds me of, apropos of the "typing class" tv quote above, people retyping or writing out a novel verbatim to help absorb the rhythm of prose

every source I've seen advocate this exercise recommends that you take some time afterward before doing your own writing so that your mind doesn't have exact passages in there

meanwhile, this guy's creating his novels by collage and then not keeping track of whether he's rewritten anything

(c) bcz menard is fictional!

rather a crucial point here

Here is a famous sentence, the opening line to One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” And here, from Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Paramo, a favourite of Marquez, this: “Years later Father Renteria would remember the night his hard bed had kept him awake, and driven him outside.” Plagiarism? A few words changed here and there. A few added, a few taken away. Influence? The distinction is not as clear-cut as the words suggest.

This example is hilarious! There must be dozens or hundreds or thousands of books in which someone "remember"s something "years later". Only three words in common, and common words! This was the best defense he could come up with?

Statement from the publisher:

https://upswellpublishing.com/category/news

This example is hilarious! There must be dozens or hundreds or thousands of books in which someone "remember"s something "years later". Only three words in common, and common words! This was the best defense he could come up with?

And the Rulfo line isn't even the opening of that book!

Right, good point!

I came to this thread because I had been told that my father Darth VaderJohn CandyHughes posted here.

Good longform piece about the Bello plagiarism case discussed above (may require free registration to read)

https://airmail.news/issues/2022-7-23/under-the-influence

I’m afraid I laughed out loud at this

But now I’m not so sure. I google it, and the first result is a link to Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence, a 2020 essay collection that contains this line: “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.” When I read Bello her line, and then Solnit’s right after it, she sighs. “I have a flaw in my writing process.”

Sad story overall tho. Something about the way she responds to a question about the umpteenth example of her doing this by talking about how she reacts “every time I get caught” made me think that this serial plagiarism has something in common with compulsive lying, in any case there’s obv a lot going on there. Not sure really what the publisher was meant to do with a book that was one-third c&p except spot it sooner tbh

The whole article is mind-boggling. The woman is either a scam artist or completely insane; the one thing she's not is a writer. And yeah, fine, she's got legitimate medical issues, but staring into her bottomless well of self-pity is giving me vertigo.

The punchline is great, though:

Jumi Bello is now working on a memoir.

Love this piece on AI fiction.

I know you were all reading this five days ago or whatever, but for those of us doing a weekend reading catching up: SO GOOD.

By @joshdzieza https://t.co/OjeUgXOBP6

— Jay Owens (@hautepop) July 24, 2022

You can see a clusterfuck where an author could win a prize for a novel where a lot of the grunt work was done via AI.

that's mostly cos prizes are stupid tho

Yes that's part of it.

My favourite American fiction is the pulp strand of stories churned out for money (SF, noir). Like how the piece maps out the update on this: one where Amazon inputs further pressures via their Algs, then an AI tool comes along to provide relief.

Meanwhile: https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/

I never expected to sympathize with "writer who plagiarized a history of plagiarism in her public apology for plagiarizing" but that airmail piece was very humanizing. I sincerely hope that she comes out the other side of this as a stronger person, and has another chance* to pursue a writing career if that's still something she wants to do.

*: Assuming she first puts in place whatever medical and interpersonal supports she needs to free her from this pathological behavior.

Frankly I'd like to see a ripple effect that goes beyond her — the agents who represented her, and the editor who bought her book, should also be getting the professional stink-eye for at least a year or two.