[ilds] All writers borrow, steal, plagiarise, etc.

[Allyson]

I think that the graffiti artist Bansky, and Pablo Picasso, say it best:


http://blog.grafflicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Picasso_Banksy.jpg




On 2015-12-31 01:26 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> I must disagree, Richard, with your premise about the writing habits 
> of “ALL writers.”   You surely don’t mean to make such a categorial 
> statement, so I’ll take it as a rhetorical flourish and not bother to 
> argue with you.  More importantly, there are obvious reasons for 
> copyright laws and the concerns about plagiarism, both of which you 
> seem to be ignoring.  People don’t like theft, and many writers see 
> their words/works as their own sacred property.  It was reported that 
> Harold Brodkey, onetime genius of American letters, would walk up and 
> down the halls of the /New Yorker/ and cry, more or less, “People are 
> stealing my sentences!”  He was an egomaniac and probably paranoid—but 
> no matter.  Still, he was rather upset, and he wasn’t joking, or so 
> the story goes.
>
> In my opinion, plagiarism is a question of ethics.  You simply don’t 
> take credit for another writer’s work and pass it off as your own. 
>  Lawrence Durrell, I’m sorry to say, was in the habit of doing just 
> that.  He knew better but persisted in disreputable conduct.  He was 
> indeed a great writer, whom I enjoy reading and talking about, but he 
> was also a plagiarist.  And, as you have rightly pointed out, he was 
> also a misogynist.  The man had his faults, as we all do.  My main 
> concern is why Durrell plagiarized and what the implications are of 
> this habit or need.  But why are we arguing about a 
> subject—plagiarism—which I consider patently reprehensible?  I don’t 
> accept your claim that it is normal behavior.  Why the debate?  I 
> blame it on T. S. Eliot and his statement:  “Good writers borrow, 
> great writers steal.”  That careless pronouncement gave license to all 
> kinds of nonsense.  By the way, I am not an academic, never have been 
> one, and I like to think I live in the real world, or some reasonable 
> facsimile of one.
>
> Bruce
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 30, 2015, at 12:55 PM, mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org 
> <mailto:mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org> wrote:
>>
>> I'm sorry to say that everyone is missing the point: ALL writers 
>> "borrrow" "steal" "plagiarise" "plunder" "copy" or whatever degreee 
>> of culpable offence you care to name and they do it for three very 
>> basic reasons: 1) they are humans and 2) all writers are telling 
>> their own story and 3) they (we) are all liars. We all do it when 
>> writing and we all do it when we are in the so-called "real" world. 
>> How many of you (I notice everyone writing here is a man) have not 
>> lied to your wife - maybe on some little thing, more likely on some 
>> big thing. And how many of you have lied to yourselves??? The answer 
>> is "very often" "too often" "just often enough" on exactly the same 
>> scale of culpability,
>> No doubt it is worse (more culpable) for an acdemic to steal someone 
>> else's research and to pass it off as one's own, than for a novelist 
>> to lift a description from another book (novel, poem, history, 
>> biography, work of philosophy) and put it into his own book in the 
>> words of a narrator, another character, or as a piece of descriptive 
>> prose. If you think LD was the only one to do it, then either stop 
>> blaming and finding fault with him, OR STOP READING HIM. If it's a 
>> disillusion that LD did it ALL THE TIME then I'm sorry for your troubles.
>> Academics should try living in the real world - or to put it another 
>> way, take their heads out of books and confront reality, or let 
>> reality confront THEM. But they live, not in ivory towers (the grants 
>> for those stopped some years ago) but in hermetically sealed 
>> cardboard boxes labelled "Go away I'm not interested in the truth" 
>> and on the other side "Keep out! No reality here!" That's why so many 
>> academics' wives have affairs.
>> A copyright question for your bedtime puzzle: "Tout un monde 
>> lointain" is the title of a work (commonly referred to as a cello 
>> concerto) by Henri Dutilleux. But those words are lifted, without 
>> acknowledgement, from a fellow Frenchman. If you don't know whose 
>> words they are, you should, but it doesn't matter. Does this "theft" 
>> of those 4 words invalidate the composition? Think about it: those 
>> who pursue authors punitively for their borrowings would have to 
>> castigate Dutilleux and refuse to listen to the work - a work, like 
>> the Alex Quartet, that is peculiarly beautiful. But surely it CANNOT 
>> be beautiful if it's founded on a lie???? Get REAL!!!!
>> And when it comes to people being trustworthy (and I'm sure no-one on 
>> this list would claim to being trustworthy) I'm surprised that what I 
>> wrote recently about my personal circumstances (written in an unwise 
>> moment to clarify this very point of the lack of a border between the 
>> real and the imagined, between truth and untruth, between what 
>> happens in "real" life and what happens in books) was leaked outside 
>> this list. The person who did so is, as I already knew, untrustworthy 
>> but making public what I stupidly assumed to be a privte admission 
>> is, in my opinion, worse than copying out someone else's work and 
>> claiming it as one's own.
>> RP
>
>
>
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