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

[Marc Piel]

Totalement d'accord!

Envoyé de mon iPad

Le 2 janv. 2016 à 09:28, Allyson <allysonk at mweb.co.za> a écrit :

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.
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> Bruce
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> On Dec 30, 2015, at 12:55 PM, 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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