Literature: January 2007 Archive Page

We thought that we would never see
A suit to compensate a tree.
A suit whose claim in tort is prest
Upon a mangled tree's behest;
A tree whose battered trunk was prest
Against a Chevy's crumpled crest;
A tree that faces each new day
With bark and limb in disarray;
A tree that may forever bear
A lasting need for tender care.
Flora lovers though we three,
We must uphold the court's decree. --J.H. Gillis, Judge --Fisher v. Lowe, 1999 (Letter of the Law)

Laws are weighed by fools like him.
He's gone too far out on this limb.

"The Little Book of Plagiarism" is inspired by several recent literary scandals, starting with the Kaavya Viswanathan affair. At 17, Viswanathan was paid a $500,000 advance for a deal that included a "chick-lit novel," but when that novel was published, attentive readers noticed that she had copied at least 13 passages from a novel by Megan McCafferty. Posner's eye also falls on Doris Kearns Goodwin, Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz and Stephen Ambrose -- all celebrated scholars who have been accused of plagiarism -- as well as on J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown, whose stratospheric bestsellers were the targets of infringement claims.

But Posner also reminds us that the roster of accused plagiarists also includes William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr. and Vladimir Putin. Both Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, he points out, "denounced plagiarism in words plagiarized from earlier writers." Only recently has plagiarism been elevated to its current high visibility, and only because the availability of search engines such as Google and the mass digitization of books "[have] made it at once easier to commit and easier to detect." --Jonathan Kirsch --'The Little Book of Plagiarism' by Richard A. Posner: Theft or imitation? A respected judge considers the possibilities. (CalendarLive [LA Times])

I was alone and fueling my own self-destructive spiral. Now, I did have one thing which granted me solace: my MUD. For those of you who don't know, I have invested several years of my life into an online roleplaying community. Yeah, I'm a geek. I own 20 sided dice, too. Anyway, what offered me my greatest joy at that time was a collection of items I had on the MUD. These items were unique, most of them one of a kind. Each of them represented a player who had come and gone that I had known and liked or memorable events to me. Each item of this massive collection held strong sentimental value for me. One night as I was sitting on the MUD, as asshole named Horak decided to exploit a bug in the code of the game that he used to deliberately destroy, irrevocably, all the items in my collection. All my memories of people I actually connected to over the past several years of my life when there was no one I could find outside of the MUD to. And those memories were all I had left of those people, each of them gone for good from my life. Those items destroyed were what I found comfort in during times of depression. Now they were all gone and never coming back.

So let me ask everyone who said she was justified this question: when that happened, should I have found Horak and strangled him in his sleep? Would that have been my best option? Could you honestly support me if I'd've done so? If not, how the hell can you support Mrs. Wright? --John Fish --"That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME! (John Fish)

John is a student in my Intro to Literary Study class, where we discussed Susan Glaspell's Trifles. It's a one-act play about the murder of a farmer, told from the perspective of two women who unravel the crime, which the playwright presents as revenge for the death of a canary.

Most of the class thought that the death of the canary was the last straw, and that the murder of John Wright was justified.

In class, I had the students all stand up and move to one side of the room if they thought the murder was justified, and the other if they thought it was not. When I asked of the John Wright had killed a baby, would his murder have been justified? There was a huge motion from "no" to "yes." Then I asked whether the murder would be justified if, instead of killing his wife's pet canary, he had killed a cricket. And what about if he had killed his wife's pet worm? The class was far less willing to excuse Mrs. Wright for wanting to get revenge for the death of something less valuable than a canary.

John's question goes even further... what if Mr. Wright had destroyed Mrs. Wright's virtual property?

We'll have to revisit this topic in class next time...

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.--T.S. Eliot --Tradition and the Individual Talent (Bartleby.com)

A student in one of my classes said that she had always been taught that poetry is an expression of emotion, and she's having trouble assimilating some of T.S. Eliot's claims.

One of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5. While the creator openly calls himself an agnostic, one of the reasons I like the show is that most of the characters (humans and aliens) have religious motives. One show featured a young monk who dies under horrible circumstances, but who likens his own suffering to the suffering of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Later, the monk's abbot forgives the murderer. The TV show's lead character is shocked that the abbot would be so forgiving, and sort of ashamed that he can't be that forgiving himself.

Fans of the show chatted on the internet... did this show mean that the show's creator, an agnostic, had some sort of religious conversion? Was he starting to believe in the faith he had rejected?

The creator of the show, who also wrote the episode, answered the fans... as an experienced writer, he can create characters who have faith, and he can tell a good story that hinges on that faith, without necessarily believing in that faith. He had told equally powerful stories about aliens sacrificing themselves for their own religious beliefs, but he didn't believe in the planets where those characters were supposed to come from.

Certainly, authors write from their own experience, and perhaps this guy had at one time known faith, or he was just a keen enough observer of people around him and stories that he has read that he was able to touch that segment of the audience that appreciated a moving religious story.

But I think it's a popular myth that great authors have to express their inner emotions in order to create great art, or that the greater the emotion, the greater the art.

People with terrible voices can sing "Happy Birthday" to their children, and it will be a meaningful expression of love, even if it is full of technical errors (off-key, off-tempo, the lyrics are wrong, etc.) that would drive from the room anyone else who isn't part of the family.

The same applies to poetry, or any other medium. For example, here's a singing performance, that's an expression of emotion yet is most certainly NOT good music.

Does her (decided lack) of singing ability have anything to do with her patriotism or her political competency? No. Would she ever make it as a lounge singer if she wasn't already a political celebrity? No.

I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. --William Wordsworth --Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Bartleby.com)

I'm taking a break from responding to an essay written by an "Intro to Literary Study" student who expressed frustration that a composition instructor (not me) who picked apart an essay about the death of the student's grandmother. When students are too close to the emotions that inspire them to write, they don't always see the value in thinking of the poem as a tool in which to re-create those same emotions in the reader.

Because of the popularity of audio books, Lowe commissioned Bill Uden, a performing-arts student at Carmarthenshire College in Wales, to record readings from her book in his college's studio. Lowe, who found Uden through a "blogging friend," began releasing the podcasts along with her regular posts this month.

And like many writers who publish their work online, Lowe isn't just angling for a book contract.

"It would be disingenuous for me to say I don't want to be read, so I'd be perfectly amenable to paper and ink, though I'd be adamant about releasing my work online at the same time," Lowe wrote. "At the center of my work is a strong conviction in open culture, freely available to all. --Katie Haegele --The word on technology: A new column on online literature (Philly.com)

The first installment of a bi-weekly column on digital literature.

Even Twain scholars seem to have missed his foresight on this subject. I discovered it by accident, in browsing through the 24 volumes of his collected works in the "Author's National Edition." In an 1898 short story called "From the 'London Times' of 1904," he describes an invention called the "telelectroscope," a gadget hooked up to the phone system: "The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." --Crawford Killian --Mark Twain, Father of the Internet (Tyee)

I enjoy teaching Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) each year, but I hadn't heard of Mark Twain's story, "From the 'London Times' of 1904."

Killian concludes:

It is all very melodramatic, but Twain clearly understood the basic concept of the Internet: effortless world travel through an electronic medium. Just past the centenary of his imagined "telelectroscope," we who surf the web should pause to thank America's greatest author -- a man ahead of his time in more ways than one.

The story is not a particularly good technological thriller, yet the story seems to be as much about Dreyfuss Affair as it is about the telelectroscope. Given that context, I think the story is worth a closer look.

The 1954 American Quarterly article "Mark Twain and the Austrian Edison" refers to Twain's interest in Jan Szczepanik. Szczepanik, the inventor whose death is blamed on the innocent Clayton, is not merely a character on Twain's story, but an historical figure, among whose many inventions was a forerunner of the television called the telelectroscope.

The term telelectroscope predated both Szczepanik's invention and Mark Twain's story. Twain himself was an early adopter of technology, perhaps most notably the typewriter; to him, an inventor was a "poet in steel." Yet, cynical as always, in this story he demonstrates that the wonders of technology do not change human nature. As new types of evidence emerge, twisted human nature will continue to distort reason in the service of old prejudices. The crime story exists merely to set up this political statement, on a topic of great concern to literary figures and intellectuals at the time.

If I had the time, I might also investigate what Twain was talking about when he mentioned a "new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1899." Was that just a plot device to get around the double-jeopardy rule in the US legal system, or would the original audience have recognized it as a reference to something that was being debated at the time, just as the original audience would have understood the "French precedent" to be a reference to the Dreyfus affair?

The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don't care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They're increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can't match. They're not fancy. They don't have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. --Lev Gossman --Harriet Klausner (Time)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.

Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak. --Brian Boyd --Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique (The American Scholar)

Excess is possible in any discipline. A nuclear scientist who ignores ethics can do far more damage to the world than a literary theorist who is overly fond of semiotics. Perhaps there is a good reason why Boyd chose the invective tone for this essay, but I would have rather read an attempt to synthesize and seek common ground, or to seek out particular schools of literary criticism (Marxism? gender studies? ecocriticism?) that deal specifically with the nature of humanity in its environment. Any assertion that human behavior has a biological foundation is an ideologically charged claim, a rejection of the assertion in gender studies that gender is socially, so perhaps choosing this particular tone is Boyd's way of bracing himself against a likely backlash.

I don't know how Boyd's English department is doing, but English is the only non-vocational major that's still in the top 10 (according to the Princeton Review). Last semester my own English department had a huge influx of majors -- about as many new freshmen as there already were in our sophomore, junior, and senior classes.

I would like to see more English majors minoring in science, or vice-versa. But I've always tried to bridge that chasm. During my high school production of My Fair Lady, the cast bought T-shirts that were one color, and the crew bought T-shirts that were a different color. I asked my mom to do a sleeve transplant, so I could show my allegiance to both cast and crew. That sort of thinking served me very well as I worked on my Ph.D. thesis, which looked at technology as a theme and as a staging component in American drama from 1920-1950.

And while, as I stated earlier, it is possible to get overly fond of any theory, cultural studies that deal with robots, aliens, cyborgs, mutants, zombies, vampires are full of references to the biological. In the last few years, as the World Wide Web has become mainstream in the humanities, we have seen much less breathless gushing about the endless (but vague) possibilities in hypertext (see a rather snarky review I wrote a few years ago, critiquing the navigational hoops through which readers were forced to jump when they attempted to use an issue of the journal Kairos). While undergraduates rarely get much exposure to it, a close ally of the study of literature is the study of books themselves, or more generally the technical, social, and economic forces that influence what gets distributed as "literature". (I'm looking forward to Matt Kirschenbaum's forthcoming book, Mechanisms, but Nick Montfort's conference presentation on the role of continuous paper in early computer history is a great introduction to the subject.) Montfort and Ian Bogost have announced a series of computer game platforms. See also Shelly Jackson, Sherry Turkle, the body of existing scholarship on the study of MUDs, and the emerging scholarship on multiplayer games. While these studies are multidisciplinary rather than purely English, they are firmly rooted in the humanities. And while they don't focus primarily on biology, their emphasis on the materiality of the texts reminds us always of the embodied nature of the act of reading.

While this short list is not likely enough to redeem the excesses of all English departments everywhere, it does offer one possible direction that may avoid the obstacles Boyd sees in the path of traditional literary theory.

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
[...] --The horror, the horror of Iraq, in poetry (SF Gate.com)

Fascinating reading.