Plagiarizing about Plagiarism

You could write a column entitled “When it comes to songwriting, there’s a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism” any day of the week, and I believe I have, though I only stole the idea from the KLF (or Negativland or Bob Dylan, or Jim Jarmusch or Jonathan Lethem or David Shields or  David Markson or Shepard Fairey or . . . )

We build culture from culture, and let’s stop acting as if any one of us owns it.

David Shields, from Reality Hunger:

This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedomthat writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.

A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. Or writing a book about destroying capitalism, but being told it can’t be published because it might harm the publishing industry.

Mr. Shields, of course, is not original. Just check out Jonathan Lethem’ s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.”

Or my piece, wholly indebted to Lethem,  entitled “Appropriation.”

Or David Markson, in Vanishing Point (at page 12): “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. As is already more than self-evident.”