Plagiarism Career Strategies

We are led to believe that the pressure to up the ante caused a speciously esteemed writer formerly of The New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer, to make up quotes from Bob Dylan, as well as re-use his own writing  for two separate publications.

I thought there was something odd when Lehrer quoted the Dylan story on two separate interviews on the occasion of his latest book's publication. I’d never heard that tale of how “Like a Rolling Stone” came to be written, and as a Dylan semi-literate, I thought I’d heard every detail.

Making up quotes is one thing, punishable and condemnable to stupidity for perpetuity, but I want to address the second point. The self-plagiarizing--which isn’t actually plagiarism--perhaps, it’s just as stupid. Maybe my indignation is to realize Lehrer got paid essentially twice, and couldn’t bother to do his job (writing!) and was arrogant enough to just rehash something without thinking twice. Don't tell me he simply cut and pasted. He knew what he was doing.

With so much opportunity for miraculous second chances in the publishing industry, plagiarism, or even plain old misrepresentation, has become a career strategy. Even the reporter* who caused such a scandal at the NYTimes took the opportunity to blog about the missteps of one whom he must believe can help foster and reinvigorate his stained career in journalism.

I’ve been told of a famous fiction writer teacher and medical doctor from a hallowed school who regularly stole from his best students’ work. The power structure prevented anyone from calling this guy out. Several times I’ve found my work copied and used on websites word for word with no attribution given to me such that I stopped thinking about it. I would imagine that this happens frequently on the web. There’s a certain amount of pride maybe, that someone thought enough of what I’d written to reuse it elsewhere--but geez, at least they could have given me proper credit.

I almost laughed when two people on NPR said that they thought this would end Jonah Lehrer’s career in journalism. Before I finish this blog he’ll be up and running again, with little recall of his indiscretion.

Lehrer with his Oxford Rhodes and ivy league anointment, will not suffer for it in the long run. Inevitably, someone will grant a pass to this writer and say, “he's only human”--which will really be saying, gosh darn, this guy is so talented, the profession can't afford to lose him. He'll have a remarkable rebirth via an eager agent and publisher who will temporarily and theatrically condemn him publicly, while they slap him commiseratively on the back and  plot his reemergence.

Disappointed are all those writers with integrity but without Lehrer's pedigree who face diminishing opportunities to earn something for their hard work. 

*Jayson Blair, fallen of the NYTimes

Must I Write?

There is something almost self-defeating and pointless to the idea of producing art for a market place. One must either already be established or they have to get established, taking some slow road to publication through journals or the proliferation of web outlets. Blind optimism and dogged determination are the factors that must reign because if you don't want complete obscurity, you need to try to fit yourself in.

I can be accused of hyping (maybe too often) the books that the major news media hypes, while generally overlooking the obscure, humbler publications that are put out by little known publishers. But on occasion, browsing a bookstore or a review site, I come across a work by accident and the writing to me is as original, interesting and compelling as the hyped one I set out looking for. I take heart in that. If the New York Times Book Review christens a book by making it the front page review, and everyone falls in line, that doesn't necessarily guarantee book sales or even that the book in question merits the attention--I always wonder about the back room machinations of those choices. Was it one top editor's favorite read that week or did the publisher promote it with enough advertising money to make it appealing? So many of these books then never catch on, so what does that author do?  

Authors are inclined to have to do their own hype and marketing strategizing, whether they are in a featured NYT book review, or published by the Unknown press (I suppose self-publishing comes into this, too, although the lack of an extrinsic vetting process leaves me dubious about self-published writing). I can surmise that in the realm of promotion, at that point the writer probably simply wants people to pick up their book and read it. If there are only a handful of fiction writers making a living at their writing, what is the point of trying to do it? Well, I go back to my original motivation, and I feel like if it's art that you are creating, that can sustain you in and of itself. Maybe not. Still, I've decided to play the game but I keep my eye on why I'm doing it--it's that call that Rilke suggested in "Letters to a Young Poet":

"Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all--ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?"

Writing in the web sphere, it's second nature for me to develop a constant stream of ideas about how to promote my work. For me, this is a combination of curiosity and fascination with this technological medium at my fingertips, but I recognize this can also be a huge resource drain. Yet I always remember when I didn't have this outlet, not so long ago. As distracting as it is, I keep it in check and have to pull back on occasion to remember my artistic calling and goals. I suppose if I had the publishing world clamoring to my work, I wouldn't get so caught up in the notion that I'm writing this and someone out there can read it if they like. Sometimes that's enough.

Short Story Purgatory?

A. O. Scott’s piece in the Times, “In Praise of the American Short Story,” trumps out yet again a silent consensus that the short story has been getting short shrift for far too long--note that’s the “American” Short Story. But to keep mentioning the denigration of the short story only ghettoizes it some more. The tide is probably turning as these things do, over time.

For those of us in the trenches of fiction writing, short stories are the best--maybe the only?--game in town. It’s the one way to get yourself published though it doesn’t necessarily lead to the payoff of a novel’s reception. As for success? I think writing a good story and having it recognized is quite rewarding. I think because a story is short and has so many venues, as well it doesn’t have a single designated venue, it is looked down upon. But short story writing is where writers begin if they want to be published. It isn’t always the case that writing short fiction will get noticed, but there are many writers I admire who started out with short fiction and have largely become known for their novels (Philip Roth, Norman Rush, Paul Theroux, Ian McEwan, Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, to name a few). With a short story, if it appears anywhere at all, it’s usually in a journal of which there are thousands upon thousands, or it appears in a collection that is the sum of parts, i.e., what is considered inferior to a novel.

Under the Knife

Prescriptions for writing abound. “Eliminate repeated words.” “Never write a boring sentence.” These come from the Gordon Lish school of writing via n+1. In the Lish arena, the student would be asked to read their piece aloud until they came to a boring sentence--called out by the master with great mocking fanfare, undoubtedly--and the student would be forced to sit down.

In my fiction, I was eliminating repeated words because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, I had an editor once return a story with repeated words circled. As for never writing boring sentences, it’s never easy. Of course you can hold up these ideas to the point that you lose the sense of the writing, if you had it to begin with.

And that seems to be a prescription, too, to be clear about what you are going to write before you begin.

Another good idea might be to eliminate as many words as possible--I’m not talking about repeated words, but excess words--avoiding wordiness. Maybe you pare it down and rewrite it a few times. I’ve sometimes shied away from this procedure, if only because a first draft sometimes has a rhythm inherent in the linkage of sentences as written. Perhaps even a poetry.

Why is it that poetry is so often invoked in fiction writing--what does it mean exactly? I suspect I have a bias against poets because they can be so precious about their work, romanticizing their little gulag. Poetry is rarely exciting, to me. Poets seem like the martyrs of the writing universe.

Yet, I like poetry in fiction, if I understand it correctly.

What does it mean to say a fiction writer’s writing is poetic?

I look at E. L. Doctorow, because I’m reading Loon Lake at the moment. Besides the actual use of a kind of verse in the novel (although I’m not sure if it’s bona fide verse, in the sense that it’s made up for a fictional work), here is a passage that I would say is poetic:

“They were hateful presences in me. Like a little old couple in the woods, all alone for each other, the son only a whim of fate. It was their lousy little house, they never let me forget that. They lived on a linoleum terrain and sat in the evening by their radio. What were they expecting to hear? If I came in early I distracted them, if I came in late I enraged them, it was my life they resented, the juicy fullness of being they couldn’t abide...”

This also happens to be the opening to the novel. Which is where you are going to notice poetry and in a sniff decide if this is a book you should read, should a reading of such be your thing.

It’s not a fellow writer’s thing. He occasionally laments how writing is literary or maybe that’s too literary because he believes he is secretly a blockbuster writer who has a commitment to providing airport fiction as he sees this as the only way to break in to publishing.

I don’t get it. Those airport reads bore me. But I’ll also admit that sometimes the literary stuff bores me, too. The problem with those (non-literary) books is that there’s no love of language. Maybe there’s a bit of craft in storytelling--there would have to be, it seems--but generally the work feels mired in a lack of spirit.

Getting back to revision...How do these approaches necessarily lead to good prose?

The Lish school as I’m calling it seems to approach the writing on the level of sentence and word choice, which is fine, but what happens when you need to stretch your legs--which is where all good fiction should inevitably go? (this can be argued, and I’ll shortly contradict myself...) I think of this because another writer who I’ve been looking into again lately (leave it to the NYTimes to get me to dust off my shelves), Donald Barthelme, seems to write in this style that Cheever had a hilarious comment on (“The stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me. . . . Blooey. It’s like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago” (this in the Bookforum review of Cheever's ouevre)). What is it about this style that feels like McSweeney’s co-opted as if it were a province of their (some might say) elitist identity? I think this is what we talk about when we talk about being clever. It’s whatever no one gets, or gets in only their way, but that a clever writer can imitate enough so that only a select few think they get it. So many journals claim and decry cleverness in equal measure, that it ruins it for those writers of us who don’t necessarily look at what we do as trying to be clever; maybe that’s the point, that if you actually are good at what you do, not everyone is going to get it. They’re only going to see you as a wannabe... Maybe I’m hypocritically doing the same thing criticizing McSweeney’s.

I never thought of “Seven Dreams Under the Knife” as clever. I had a woman run away from me when she read it. (How’s that for intrigue?) But this is also a woman who had plastic plants and scant aesthetic taste and thought my minimally appointed rooms here in the Mission resembled Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Initially, I was flattered by these revelations; upon reflection, I’m guessing that it was a perception of “cleverness” dogging me.

Maybe I could have stretched my legs on that piece, but after all the prescriptions about revision, I considered it done. I saw it as a gem that I didn’t want to do anything more with than see published. Which, however humbly, it is, finally.

Toward Ephemeral Criticism

Reading with the intent to find something worthwhile to say about what I’m reading is unavoidable. What I am aiming to reveal is perhaps ephemeral. It is through this process that I became interested in writing, and this practice naturally led to wanting to write about books. Thus, I became by default, a book critic. Rather, I like to think, a book commentator.

I’ve consciously avoided (sometimes) writing negative criticism.

Critics’ negativity is easy--it’s easier to swing a sledgehammer than it is to dovetail a joint. And if a critic is so desperate to tear a work down, doesn’t that say more about the critic than the work in question? As Roland Barthes says in Mythologies: “[...] if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundation of a book, why become a critic?”

Criticism derived from a position of what the work in question is not is a sure way to go negative. This is like a demand for more of the marble to be left on the sculpture before Michaelangelo worked it away. Then there is the criticism that is merely comparative. Why draw the baseline so low that even those who can’t expect to be moved by anything unless it flashes on a screen or is operated by a remote won’t be interested?

I think of Joyce’s Ulysses, a work that has probably received more unwarranted criticism for the mere fact of it’s canon-wreaking status, and it’s presumed impenetrability, than from actual, considered, methodical and thoughtful readings.

Art takes time to digest. It’s not easy.

Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” (in the book of the same title) is one of those ground breaking essays that aspire to an ideal approach to criticism. 

Sontag makes the point in the essay that she only seeks to explore works that interest her, thereby largely avoiding the problem of negative criticism, perhaps. But maybe this has led to a lot of not talking about just how poorly written and conceived a work may be (say, a piece of fiction, James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning, for example). Talking about a bad work is unwitting publicity--it seems to be taken for granted that any publicity is good publicity, these days.

Skirting a whole boatload of problematic issues related to literary criticism, however, Sontag holds up film as offering possibilities for critical inquiry that do not follow in the vein of literary criticism, because, “cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms.” Further, “It also owes the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.”

I think this has changed somewhat in the forty-five years since this essay was written. I don’t dispute Sontag’s still relevant assessment of interpretive criticism, and in general, I would reason that an x for y translation (what an “interpretation” of a written work is, essentially) is often a logical way to attempt to understand a literary work. I think I understand Sontag is implying that the impulse to explain a written work through exegesis or elaboration is more or less merely a reiteration.

Sontag goes on to talk about form as a source for revealing the variety and character of a written work: “To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.”

The problem with attempting to discuss and deliberate formal innovation in a work of literature is that it might not be the thing that jumps up and bites you on the ass with its obviousness. Whereas an interpretative tack in criticism allows almost anything in the work to be taken for something else and elucidated into the light. A least common denominator view tends to guide the general and mass view of the work (For example: it’s published. It’s a literary work. It must have merit).

Milan Kundera, in Testaments Betrayed, and an essay on the abuses of Kafka criticism, addresses this pitfall as he discusses how Max Brod promoted a kind of lazy (and popular) critical reading of Kafka which soon became de rigeur for looking at his work, what Kundera calls Kafkology. “Kafkology is not literary criticism (it does not examine the value of the work: the previously unknown aspects of existence that the work reveals, the aesthetic innovations by which it affected the evolution of art, etc.) Kafkology is an exegesis.”

In The Art of the Novel, Kundera says that the “sole raision d’etre of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover.” Kundera makes an intriguing case for a revolutionary approach to writing a novel, through the examples of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others—which also address the formal challenges put forth by Sontag, however unlikely it is to be acknowledged by novelists writing today.

Sontag asks, “What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” The answer is a lofty goal. One that might seek to make every critic be an artist equal to the work they are reviewing. Sontag’s implication is that one needs to create an alternative work on top of the work under scrutiny. Isn’t it enough that the critic can enlighten us about the work in question? This is encapsulated in a remark Clive James wrote in the New York Times on this subject: “When you say a man writes badly, you are trying to hurt him. When you say it in words better than his, you have succeeded.” 

Sontag goes on to say: “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.” And, furthermore: “In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret”.

In its generally ungraspable ephemerality, isn’t film, rather, too open? Could it be said that because film is a visual medium that attempts to portray a representation of life through characters, that its presentation of this has multiple layers of nuance? Film looks, more or less, like life (or life-like). It is a much more passive medium than a work of literature. Reading a book requires a larger act of willfulness.

Film presents an overload of visual information, still much less than actual life; but in either realm, much is taken for granted, as if it is a priori. There are far too many details to claim the significance of one over another unless it calls attention to itself. It would be ludicrous to try to decipher the symbolism of John’s shirt.

This is clearly viable in literature: the reader is taking in one word at a time, one sentence, one sentence in the context of a paragraph, one paragraph in a chapter, etcetera. From a series of parts the reader extracts a whole, a unity (more or less). The intent is focused. What is brought to the work requires a leap of imagination toward being able to not reduce the story to words on a page—it requires of a reader to reach into their own imagination. Because in order to know that John has a red shirt, the author must tell us John has a red shirt, and therefore, impart a significance to that object through the tag of calling it out.

I think Sontag’s aesthetic brilliance let her get carried away by this notion of film as a kind of stand in for non-interpretive critical inquiry that literature should aspire to. Although I like the ideas she presents, I’m not sure the literary equivalents for what she is talking about are on most critics’ radar. It becomes more difficult when the slightly vague, poetic “luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” is a goal for criticism.