The Emperor's new clothes are the latest fashion

We've been thinking a lot about our few but faithful followers these days. We think people deserve more than just occasional rants.

So, on a whim I've decided to share with you some of my more intimate work. My fiction is rather long, but I thought perhaps an excerpt from a poem of mine, a musing about the meaning of life itself, might compensate you - however modestly - for your kind attention and time.

Here it goes.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, it is a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.

(It's just a short excerpt, the poem is actually quite long. My editor wants me to shorten and "streamline" it, as she calls it, but it's my integrity what's on the line, so I'd rather leave it as it is.

We also haven't decided on the title yet. I want something timelessly evocative, she wants something "Gothic-sexy", as she calls it, like The Master of Elsinore Castle.
I'll let you know when we have decided.)

You may have noticed the language is a whiff archaic.
Your observation is quite correct: I wanted to convey the time-transcending nature of such questions.

To those among you particularly sensitive to aesthetics it may even sound vaguely familiar.
Well. that's how good I am (even if I say so myself). What I wanted to achieve is the effect of a post-postmodern pastiche, if you will, using historic formulae to accentuate the timelessness of the main theme.
Was I successful?
You be the judge.



What has gotten into me, you ask...?
Inspiration, my friend.
And being the intellectually honest creator that I am, I don't mind sharing its source with you.
It was an email discussing originality and the current state of literacy, sent by a forget-me-not we haven't seen in quite a while now (so her blog in this blogofleet is temporarily even off-view).

The email included a link to a complaint board of a site called Triond, where apparently people can publish their texts (of all sorts) in exchange for pennies. (And glory, of course, but that's a given.)
Here is the link:

Edgar Allen [sic] Poe plagiarized due to lazyness [sic]

-->

I would recommend reading it (it's very short), but here's the gist: a member published Poe's poem The Raven as if it were his own. Not one comma was altered.

Since the author - not Poe, the other one - apparently wasn't given the chance to speak for himself, I can only speculate about his reasons.
Perhaps - and I really mean this - he intended it as a "statement" of some kind.
(After all, Poe himself was accused of plagiarising another author, precisely with this poem - and Poe in his turn accused Longfellow of plagiarising him. For more on Poe - and plagiarism - see Why Is Plagiarism Bad?)

Or maybe it was an experiment - to see how long it would take people to notice.

Or maybe he acted out the ideal of J. L. Borges' dreamed-of writer and simply rewrote not Don Quijote but Poe's poem on his own, out of his own fresh intent and inspiration. (You really should read Borges - he expressed it much better than I.)

Or perhaps he belongs to the "different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new"...
That is how another plagiator, a financially and critically very successful one, recently explained her unacknowledged borrowing from a less lucky writer.

I have a few questions regarding this latter case. Like, her "generation" being different... different from what?
From the "generations" who knew how to read and write?

“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said she, when questioned about her perceived lack of originality.

Well said.
(And probably plundered from someone else, too.)

I am all for authenticity.
But shouldn't authentically re-writing someone else's authenticity involve at least an original - sorry, authentic - nod to the source?
The first authentic author could be made into a character in the work of the second authentic writer; or a character in the latter's work could quote her/him. Or something else. There are many ways of incorporating the sources of one's authenticity into a work. Surely a writer should have no problems with finding an adequate one?

I know, I know: I am missing the point - the point being that authenticity needs no nitpicking listing of sources... right?
In principle, I agree; but if you don't mind, I'll wait for the proponents of authenticity to waive their copyrights and their royalties, being as they are incompatible with such a democratically promiscuous view of verbal intercourse.

As I said, I don't know what Poe II would have to say for himself, he was never given the chance. But based on what the Berlinese author above had to say in her defence, I believe the actions of these mavericks of authenticity really do speak louder than the words they took out of someone else's mouth: they speak of a world where it took weeks for a reader or two among the hundreds who visit a website to recognise one of Poe's most famous poems - and none of those who noticed it were the editors of the publishing site.

And there is authenticity in the actions of these scribes (it is not an insult but rather an accurate description of their activity, from a time when there was a perception that writing down is not automatically the same as writing): they reveal a multitude of facets borrowed to act in place of a personal face. They reveal the horizon, the inexistent far shores, of a world where everything has been deconstructed to death, including personal responsibility and a sense of value - the value of the past, of actions past, of lives past, of the common experience accumulated through millenia.
Everything has been gleefully relativised in this "People's Century" of ours - and now the Gutenberg Galaxy itself is fast fading into the darkness whence it came.

Then again, there is a silver (thirty pieces worth of it) lining to this abysmal darkness: this way we get to read - and write - everything all over again. It may not be long before we even get - oh joy! - to make fire from scratch.

That's the glory of an age when TXTing is the lingua franca: you get to discover all sorts of untold beauties as if it were for the first time.

Much like with Alzheimer's, I am told.



IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT ENJOY:
The Code

(But if you liked Dan Brown, you probably won't. :)