Lethem post response

Thanks for trying out this experimental blog post assignment with me. I wasn’t sure what you might find, but some of you had very insightful things to say about the differences between Lethem’s concerns and those of his sources. Of course, the purpose of this assignment was twofold: one, I wanted you to begin to familiarize yourselves with library research tools, and two I wanted you to continue to work on your close reading skills, particularly your ability to make connections while simultaneously drawing distinctions. I hope that, in addition to looking for the title of the source that Lethem used, you spent a bit of time trying to figure out where you might locate that source. It sounds like some of you were able to find books and articles online, but I’d also encourage you to find out where you can go in the library to get physical copies of such things, since not everything you’ll want to research will be available online. We’ll work on that more when we hear a Rutgers research librarian’s guest lecture in October. Regarding close reading, I think you all would benefit from even greater specificity when you explain the significance of a quotation. Rikab and Gabby both make interesting connections in their posts. Rikab focuses on a passage that describes how the project of the intellectual is to combine material in interesting ways like those in Borges’s short story about the Library of Babel. What stands out here is that Rikab extends the connection to think about its broader significance to Lethem’s point about the intellectual “commons”: originality is not the goal, communication and connection is. One could take it a step further to consider the applications of this standard beyond artistic production, especially since the original source is talking about medical research. What are the stakes of intellectual property for a field like medicine, where sharing information could potentially save lives? Pointing out distinctions, such as those between artistic production and scientific research, puts you into a better position when you’re trying to explain the significance of a connection. In your blog posts and your papers, you should be answering the question “so what?” Why does this point matter? For instance, is Lethem pointing out the absurdity of treating ideas as property by drawing a comparison between ideas and physical objects? What does it mean to “own” an idea? Is it even possible to be original, according to Lethem?

Lethem Reading

I choose to research a passage from the section titled  "The Commons". Lethem's purpose in writing this section was to show often ideas and works of others are stolen from the commons, a public source of knowledge, without being noticed since there usage is seen far and few.  Lethem makes the point of how essential it is for those in Western Society to give credit to the work they use and promptly states, "We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few." This quote is line taken from Harry S. Truman's "Address on Conservation at the Dedication of the Everglades." While in both instances this quote is used to defend the commons from being abused by individuals seeking personal gain the circumstances are completely different. While Lethem aims to protect the work of others in the academia world Truman used this quote in defense of national parks. The text in context means literal "raids on our natural resources" as oppose to resources found in the commons that Lethem describes. This usage of this quote in many ways highlights the point of this section. Even though this quote is on public record and easy to access anywhere its usage is rare, if not unheard of, outside of its original text. These factors alongside the completely different use of the quote make plagiarism of lines such as this one all to easy. 

Lethem Reading

The passage I analyzed was The Beauty of Second Use. After a quick overview of The Velveteen Rabbit, there are some distinct differences between the original message and the manner in which Lethem uses it in his text. The original text is quite tragic, a tale that tells the story of a rabbit that wanted to be desired and loved by its owner.  Throughout the text, the rabbit wanted to be “real”. He is informed by the “Skin Horse” that in order to be real, it must be loved by the boy.  The rabbit was disregarded up until one night when the boy lost one of his toys. Soon the two developed a strong relationship. However, the child falls ill and all of his belongings must be disinfected (burned). The text delves into many complicated topics within the rabbit such as identity crisis. At the end, the rabbit is made “real” as it wished, and revisits his old owner.

In the New Humanities Reader, Lethem ignores the emotional strings tied by Williams in the original text. Lethem uses the discussion between Skin Horse and the Rabbit seemingly to support the argument justifying “plagiarism” (to a degree). In Lethem’s text, it is said that “the value of a new toy lies not in its material qualities, but rather in how the toy is used.” (Lethem 219). In this case, it is describing how the value of any writing, any piece of art, etc. is not defined by its original intent, but rather how it is molded and used by other creators / artists. Lethem references The Velveteen Rabbit to further build this statement : “...by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby” (Lethem 219). He goes on to describe how this can be representative of two things, depending on one’s perspective. The rabbit is worn down due to extensive misuse (“from the perspective of the toymaker”) or due to love (“for others”). Similarly, many content creators see “plagiarism” as a misuse of their work while the people or the communities affected by a “plagiarised” piece see the new piece as an exemplification of the artist’s admiration for the original creator / piece.

The new context instilled by Lethem certainly helps his text flow; however, for me it seems as if Lethem’s culling of quotes builds his own agenda and takes away the power of the original texts. This shows that although he is pulling directly from other texts, others’ ideas can be used in a much different manner. This further promotes the idea of “plagiarising”, not in the context of copying directly, but rather, taking one’s ideas and using them to make your own.

Lethem Reading Assignment

Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" focuses on the question in society whether plagiarism should be considered influence or copying. Possibly, another person's work could be another person's inspiration further suggesting that plagiarism should not be considered copying. We should draw inspiration from each other rather than avoid each other's work. For the essay in particular I chose to look at the section "Usemonopoly," which held a different idea to the word "plagiarism." Basically, usemonopoly as explained in the essay means, "a government granted monopoly on the use of creative rights." Essentially, it is focusing on the idea of original work and the possibility of copyright for that work or business. There were mentions in this section that suggested that in fact copyrighting or plagiarizing someone else's is overall detrimental to society. It takes away the creativeness behind an individual and lets us only depend on each other rather than ourselves. Th overall public may feel negative effects from plagiarizing or the usage of "usemonopoly."

In addition to his argument of "Usemonopoly," Lethem goes into an example involving one of the main gentlemen that helped built America from dirt, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson saw plagiarizing an almost needed but should-be-avoided aspect to creativity. It is almost necessary at times to draw inspiration from someone else to truly make your piece of work a masterpiece. We learn from building off of each other's ideas. The use of "usemonopoly" almost coincides with this idea since creativeness only occurs when one draws inspiration. Yet, if plagiarizing could be avoided it should be otherwise we would live in a society where everyone is unoriginal and we would lack advanced innovation.

Lethem Reading Assignment

I studied and analyzed the first part of “The Ecstasy of Influence: Plagiarism”, “Love and Theft”. “Love and Theft” is has a segment of Michael Maar’s book “The Two Lolitas”. In the short segment, Love and Theft seems to take a little bit of the plagiarism aspect and focus on that. Whereas Michael Maar’s book seems to analyze how this phenomenon of appropriation. For example, a segment further down from the first quote of “a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger,” Micahel Maar seems to be fascinated with how the two books could have been so similar or what if the second book that Nabokov wrote was not published in the first place. “He could easily, at any rate, have crossed its author’s path. Heinz von Lichberg lived for fifteen years in the south-west of Berlin, practically in the same neighbourhood as did Nabokov,” (Maar). But Maar does not jump to any conclusions unlike what the passage is implying in “Love and Theft”. “Love and Theft” uses Maar’s analysis as an example of plagiarism and later goes on to talk about literature being plundered and plagiarized for a long time. This ties back to Donne’s quote that “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated”. Donne was a religious person and this was meant as a religious connotation, but Lethem used this quote to imply that nothing is original because everything is “translated into a better language”.

Lethem Reading Assignment

In Lethem’s essay The Ecstasy Of Influence: A Plagiarism I chose to research the section entitled “Usemonopoly”. The term itself is coined by Lethem earlier in the essay, and he defines it as a “government granted monopoly on the use of creative rights”, and he ultimately states that this, in turn, hurts the public. When I analysed the source he use in this piece in the key section, ideas such as “second comers might do a much better job than the originator” which was phrased by Lessig, who quoted Vaidhyanathan who himself characterized a judgement by Learned Hand to emphasize that people who “copy” may actually improve the original substance and make it of more value to the public. Even the quote itself is derivative of three different people to fit the ideals of this argument, and Lethem uses this to emphasize that by copyrighting/trademarking/patenting, etc, we are preventing the optimal results for a work on the public. Therefor, the public suffers most from the current use/restriction of “intellectual property” and “usemonopoly”.

To support his argument that trademarks are unnecessary, he dissects the seemingly contradictory argument/sayings of Thomas Jefferson. Though Jefferson considered copyright a necessary evil he thought it was useful as an incentive for people to create, however has blown out of proportion as “almost limitless bloating- its expansion in both scope and duration”. In referencing Jefferson's initial idea, he is showing how copyrighting, trademarking, etc. no longer holds the original intention, and that this is hurting the public domain’s progress. As used in the section, Jefferson is quoted  to upport that idea of knowledge on the basis of “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine,” as a principle argument as to why this unnecessary restriction poses no benefits as it is used today. These transformations help the reader best understand the true intention of trademarks, and how out of proportion it has been taken in society today (as a “usemonopoly”) and how ideas that are not restricted to one’s specific use hurts the potential for society as a whole.

Lethem Reading Assignment

In the subsection of “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” titled “Usemonopoly”, Lethem uses the quote “everything from attempts” to “defendant as young as twelve”. The original source was fairly easy to find; I simply Googled the original author’s name and the title of the article published in The New York Times and the first result that appeared linked me to Robert Boynton’s article on The New York Times website. In Boynton’s article, he first prefaces the quote by describing an incident with students at Swarthmore College leaking confidential information online about the vulnerability of voting machines created by Diebold Election Systems during the 2000 presidential election. Because of litigation, Diebold threatened to sue and Swarthmore College had to pull the confidential information from their website. Boynton then writes this quote, explaining that copyrighting issues have plagued all fields of study and forms of entertainment.

Lethem instead starts off the “Usemonopoly” subsection with this quote to set the stage for his further discussion on the corrupt system of copyright in our world today. Lethem does make minor changes to the quote, such as removing an aside that Boynton had put in parenthesis, and removing and introduction to the Recording Industry Association example. They are made mostly to make the passage shorter and more concise, as the message of the passage still transfers in Lethem’s version. In an academic setting, this would be blatant and obvious plagiarism, as Lethem almost copies word for word what Boynton published. If Lethem did not cite the quote, it would also be appropriation, as even though it is not a direct copy-paste of the passage, the majority of it, as well as the major themes of the passage, transfer directly into Lethem’s paper and uses it as his own. 

Lethem Reading Assignment

From Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, I chose to research the passage titled “Source Hypocrisy, or, Disnial” (220). Using the key at the end of the essay, I found that a rather large section of Lethem’s writing had been directly quoted from another source: “Kenneth Koch once said...le déluge of copycats” (220). This quote, by Emily Nussbaum,  is appropriated from a book review of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch written for a section of The New York Times. Lethem seems to boldly paste this quote into his own paper, only changing the introduction of the quote to make the transition smoother. In Nussbaum’s article, she says this quote to emphasize how Kenneth Koch’s desire for curiosity and creativity manifests in his lyrical style of writing. In the context of Lethem’s essay, however, Koch is an example of a writer open to the idea that their works are heavily influenced and essentially not entirely original. David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Bob Dylan may also be examples of this as Lethem explains. Another quote that Lethem uses, “imperial plagiarism” (220), is from the title of a research paper written by Marilyn Randall. Randall uses this term to analyze the complexities of plagiarism; Lethem adds to this by giving an example of imperial plagiarism: the Walt Disney Company, coining the term “disnial” to describe this.

Lethem himself appears open to other writers influencing in his work. From his including of John Donne’s quote in the beginning, Lethem seems to have happily resigned himself to the fact that essentially nothing is original, and that everything is appropriated. His examples show how he “stole, warped, and cobbled together” (Johnson 225) other sources, but he also adds to what he copies in a creative way. In another context, this means that plagiarism is not definitively piracy and should not always be taken in its commonly negative context.

Lethem Reading Assignment

"Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publisher's notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply?" (Lethem 223). 

This passage is lifted from Steve Fuller's The Intellectual.  In this book, Fuller attempts to describe what classifies a person as an "intellectual". In this passage, he suggests that Dr. Swanson's skill in solving a biomedical research problem was not in doing original research, but rather in combining existing sources in a novel way.  In this manner, finding new combinations of existing material is just as intellectual as creating original research. In his citation, Lethem mentions a certain "Library of Babel" (Lethem 230).  The Library of Babel is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about a library containing every single possible combination of letters in books, within which every single possible sentence and thought can be found. Lethem and Fuller would interpret this as a sort of "commons", from which authors can derive inspiration. Rather than attempting to search for a new sentence or thought, it would be more efficient to search through the existing texts for insight. Lethem builds upon this by adding that authors should "ratify the ecstasy of influence" (Lethem 223), or accept that they are deriving from this commons. This is preferable to the avant-grade, which tries to hard to be original. Thus, novelty is not in finding new material, but rather creating new permutations of existing material.

As if to prove this point, Lethem takes this excerpt from Fuller, and combines it with a variety of other essays to form his own take on plagiarism. Very little of this constitutes his own writing, but rather he takes the role of a museum curator, finding different elements that work well together and gluing them together. To Lethem, this is the role of a writer. 

Lethem Reading

“The idea that culture can be property-intellectual property-is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girls Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate for Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court-settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve.” (Lethem 217)

This passage appears in the Usemonopoly section of Lethem’s essay. However, it was originally written by Robert Boyton for one of his publications in the New York Times Magazine called “The Tyranny of Copyright?”. In the article, this passage is preceded by a specific example of how copyright laws silenced freedom of speech. Boyton then follows up with this passage in order to paint a picture of how copyright laws have invaded numerous aspects of everyday life in a negative manner. He also uses it as a bridge to introduce the idea of protesting limits on speech and creativity. However, the most profound takeaway of the passage is that it shows how contradictory the concept of intellectual property is to purpose to the age of Internet, the very thing that sparked made information available to the masses. Intellectual property allows for creators to hold on to their ideas and prevent the general public from benefiting from them to the fullest extent. Whereas, the information age we live in today allows for this free flow of ideas and creativity. On a large scale, the entire article seems to be parallel to Lethem’s broader argument about the modern obsession of avoiding copying others. Lethem utilizes this passage to briefly highlight the main idea of this section: License to use or own something exclusively is granting a monopoly on use or “usemonoply” that limits the possibilities of creativity for others. This ties into the larger idea of the essay whole. Lethem believes that when creating art, drawing inspiration from previous works is not only unavoidable, but also allows for art to evolve into something great. 

Lethem Reading Assignment

"...that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source (Lethem 215)".

The passage is taken from Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture. In the original text, Lessig briefly discusses the possible consequences of the judicial decision for photography. While the presumed permission leads to democratic technology of expression, the verdict of piracy will limit the technology solely to the professionals, and aid the growth of importance of photography over time. Accordingly, despite the fact that Lethem describes Lessig's work as radicalized, Lessig takes a rather ambiguous stance on the matter of visual art. Through the judicial decision, the subject of a photograph is rendered as a "public common" available for inspiration and reevaluation of the general public. Although the art form gradually became popularized because of the presumed permission, photography is less an important profession than a mere interest. On the other hand, Lethem utilizes this passage to apply the surrealist's ideal onto photography. Similar to Lessig, he emphasizes subject of photography as a "public common property". Yet, expanding the argument upon that, Lethem highlights the process of recreation by putting the subject in a different setting through lenses. In that way, the same object achieves revitalization through different photographers and different contexts. Same process can be said for literature work. What is commonly known as plagiarism can often bestow a new context and new meaning to the passage as Lethem did. Thus, rather than notoriously known as theft and piracy, appropriation can sometimes publicize or reinterpret a text. Yet, as plagiarism can't be arbitrarily defined as piracy, it should not be completely acceptable. In some cases where one copies some texts word for word without any personal interpretation, he  invades the common property by claiming it as his own.

Lethem Reading Assignment

“The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnered with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing” (Lethem 224-225).

This quote can be found in the section “Give All” of Lethem’s essay, lifted originally from a letter from Mark Twain to Helen Keller. Keller had been accused of plagiarism in her writings, and Twain wrote this to support and console her, saying that all human thoughts were inherently influenced by outside sources—and thus “plagiarized.” Lethem uses the quote to further his point that the idea of completely “original” writing, and all other mediums of art, is impossible, and to argue against the idea of contemporary copywriting. When we learn, we are taking in the ideas of those who came before us. Our thoughts are merely constructions of many different ideas strung together. While we may claim “originality” on our work and seek to claim the rights to their origins, the fact stands that the amount of influence leading up to our work is too significant to ignore. Lethem points out that the original intention of copyright was to “[assure] authors the right to their original expression, but [encourage] others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work” (Lethem 224). Our modern concept of copyright thus becomes paradoxical; if no one is allowed to create something even remotely related to the original work, then what was the point of sharing the work in the first place? We put ideas out into the world so that the rest of the world may see them and become inspired. And while the modern copyright does have a time limit on the monopoly of its idea by its creator, we cannot ignore the fact that this monopoly exists in the first place. Many of our discoveries have occurred over the course of history, carefully constructed by layering ideas one on top of the other until we create a complete product. From the model of the atom to the exploration of the universe, we have relied upon the proposals of our predecessors to give us a foundation to work off of. Lethem points to Keller’s work an excellent example of a new construction of thoughts derived from many influences by others. There are many ways to look at the same idea, and a million opinions can originate from a single one—it should not be our job to bar people from being influenced by others. Our “secondhand” thoughts can become something great, and there should be no shame in building off of the thoughts of someone else.