Literary Clusterfucks 2013

Patronizing bullshit at that. It essentially implies that marginalized writers couldn’t possibly have free will or a sense of what plagiarism is or isn’t— it is, in its essence, a parody of progressive hand-wringing that ends up making marginalized people into children. Aimless’ post hints at another element that is bullshit: the very idea that the author is some kind of outsider to the rules of plagiarism because she is marginalized. Horseshit— the author went to Iowa. She was at the top of her game, in other words, and then willfully threw away her opportunities by engaging in plagiarism…. and it’s somehow the industry’s fault? Spare me

xpost

I don't think it's grotesque. We really know nothing about Bello and her life and income and her mental health. We're basing our thoughts about her based on our need for schadenfraude (especially when we get the rare chance to direct that schadenfraude at a black woman) and our assumption that plagiarists are singular dolts who deserve special punishment. I mean, she is clearly a dolt, and what happened to her is funny and probably deserved, but it's okay for there to be more to the story too.

essentially implies that marginalized writers couldn’t possibly have free will

no but it does imply that there isn't a level playing field

yeah but...obv ppl from marginalized backgrounds face greater challenges in publishing as everywhere else but to hold an instance of a person who was given far more opportunities than 99% of ppl currently struggling to work in the sector up as an example of that is grotesque imo.

or perhaps you could say that inequalities run deeper than you might expect, to include who might superficially appear to have had "more opportunities"

again, this is not to excuse plagiarism but to be a bit more empathetic about why fuckups fuckup

*to include people

Well, speaking as a professional writer...fuck plagiarists forever, no excuse is acceptable, end of story. Fuck outta here, someone else gets your spot now.

I don't really see why plagiarism is the only inexcusable crime, unaffected by systemic inequality. And I'm a former professional writer fwiw (which is nothing).

We really know nothing about Bello and her life and income and her mental health

But we know that she got a publishing deal, and we know that after fucking that up she got a chance at writing about that for a popular publication. If you don't think that's a position of privilege I don't really know what to tell you.

Tbc I couldn't care less about getting schadenfreude from this, what I do care about is that situation getting compared to ppl in prison. It's the pomposity and dishonesty of the tweet I'm reacting to, not the original writer's infractions.

yep

I get no schadenfreude from it, ftr. I hope Bello finds what she is looking for!

But cosign with Daniel’s post— she was certainly in a position of relative privilege, and she violated rules that would get any author nixed. I know that many of us have friends who are part of marginalized groups who are brilliant writers and who would absolutely be over the moon to have the advantages that Bello was afforded. There is nothing carceral about what happened to Bello.

The real carceral thinking in publishing is related to the legibility of marginalized voices to an assumed white readership— those who do not write to satisfy the white gaze (in its many forms) are either sidelined or punished when they attempt something different.

I hope Bello finds what she is looking for!

Well, she does know how to use Google

not really a direct response to the above, but some of these issues are why I'm looking forward to Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s new one: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/olufemi-taiwo-identity-politics-elite-capture.html

not really a direct response to the above, but some of these issues are why I'm looking forward to Olúfemi O. Táíwò’s new one: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/olufemi-taiwo-identity-politics-elite-capture.html🕸

I hope Bello finds what she is looking for!

― Halfway there but for you, Wednesday, May 11, 2022 5:57 AM (three hours ago)

hahahahahahahahahah omg lol

Not exactly literary but while we're talking comical acts of plagiarism

https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2022/05/duke-university-commencement-student-speaker-2022-similarities-harvard-2014-speech

copyright is kinda bullshit and people should be able to plagiarise as much as they want

this reads as if you think the work that writers produce is functionally indistinguishable, as interchangeable as the labor required to string popcorn using a needle and thread, except you are stringing words into sentences.

I meant legally rather than aesthetically or morally! But yeah, language should be free to use. It may have professional or social consequences, but I don't like it being a matter for the courts.

the legality comes in with the concept of just compensation for work performed. if something has no recognized value or no no known owner, you can take it without fear of legal liability, but if it has both a recognizable value and a known owner, then the taking of it without just compensation transforms into theft.

this is an interesting topic and I wish I had a better handle on the theory, but it feels like the balance, legally speaking, is too heavily weighted in favour of the 'owner' of the copyrighted work, although I appreciate that academic plagiarism is a different and probably much more serious offence than fiction plagiarism

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.

Genuinely weeping with joy as I type this: @believermag will live on, headed home to @mcsweeneys. We did this y'all, and now it's on every one of us to subscribe and keep supporting. OK LET'S GO GET A DRINK https://t.co/lRolzyySt2

— 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.