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I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture. – Benjamin Franklin on clergyman Samuel Hemphill

Not content just to read the review, I actually went out and bought (okay, stayed in and bought) Thomas Mallon’s great work on plagiarism, Stolen Words. A breeze of a read, it’s enthralling and erudite and funny to boot.

The last book of non-fiction I wrote, A Book of One’s Own, was about diaries, books so conspicuously marked by genuineness that they fairly resounded with their authors’ own heartbeats. After my years of living with diarists, plagiarists proved to be difficult, topsy-turvy company. How does one write a book about them? What does one even call such a thing? Not a Book of One’s Own?

Among other things, I learned that the word ‘”plagiary” originally referred to the kidnapping of a child or slave (though the most common analogy now drawn by authors is with rape), that plagiarism was among Olde sea dog/dope fiend Coleridge’s many fine impulses, that Martin Luther King swiped some for his thesis, and that the age-old creed publish or die continues to drive academics to very intricate nadirs (and their colleagues to do battle with equally dumb embarrassment when wondering whether or not to make a fuss). And now with the internet enabling rampant plagiarism amongst students, faculty are forced to great lengths to detect it.

Plus, I learned a lot more about Falcon Crest than is probably good for me, and that I enjoy saying “textual promiscuity.”

In addition to the revelation that near all plagiarists when caught red-handed haul out the defence of sloppy note-taking (as if any writer doesn’t know what he has or hasn’t penned by his own hand), lazy footnoting or the inability to find the quotation mark on their keyboard, one of the most interesting threads that runs through the book is the question of whether plagiarists want to get caught, or whether theirs is a special brand of cockiness: leaving clues for readers that should unmask the base deed, just to see how much they can get away with.

Then… just as I’d finished Mallon’s book, still wondering what twist of the ego pushes people to pilfer others’ words and toil, our pal Stuart, who’s no stranger to synchronicity, sent me a link to a wild story – eerily similar to the Neal Bowers case – about a person, going by the name of Amari Hamadene who’s been thieving other people’s poetry for some time, and getting it published in a string of different reviews. Having now been found out, he’s apparently gone underground.

And this is very funny.

And what was the story about the guy who kept submitting Peggy Atwood’s work to poetry mags, only to be met with constant rejection?

It is a baffling and so sleazy crime, and although it’s slightly more understandable when perpetrated by a desperate student than a professional author, I don’t know that we can talk of degrees. And in all cases, opprobrium seems a fitting consequence.

democracyarsenal.org —

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