Momentous Day

Yes a big thrill.

No it wasn't the fact that the full New York Times Sunday crossword was again completed in record time -- for the sixth week in a row I think. It's childish, I know but I do feel proud of being able to polish that off. And I remember first showing up to NYC and not even being able to do the easy Monday puzzle.

No, the thrill came from printing out a new draft of the novel. (The earlier revised drafts are piled to over a foot high on the shelf.) But this time it means I'm getting closer to a more final version that I can send around to a few readers and then publishers. Now a big read-through and a couple of inserts and then I'll see just where it stands.

But I took a break over the early evening and went to Chapters where I saw that Elizabeth McCracken's book In The Giant's House is out, finally. I first saw her work the Granta where her voice was as warm and seductive as baking bread. It will go onto my reading list.

I also came home with A Clockwork Orange, since I didn't have it on the shelf and it's really one of the required. (No Norton version of this one yet -- wouldn't that be a joy). I'll be reading that again soon.

Now I've reached the point where every time I turn around someone else is touching upon a theme of my new novel. Life does that. When I finally burn out I watch whatever movie is on to unwind. Late last night it was Sex and Lucia, a terrific Spanish movie with Paz Vega. (A writer theme) and recently The Talented Mr. Ripley (whoops, what did they do to the ending? It was like a guest who stayed way too long. Terrible ending.) But this movie touched on identity and Italy -- although the theme waffled between that and the intent bound with evil, and whether people can exist unethically, and so on until I stopped looking. Then a friend dropped by in early evening and talked about a movie she'd seen regarding a writer in Italy. (As you can guess a small part of my novel revolves around a writer and Italy.)

So I have felt a bit haunted by all of this. Nevermind. Tomorrow I get a fresh can of whup-ass start on this hard-copy draft. Not much can beat that optimism.

Plagiarism: A Rant

I skimmed recently five books on plagiarism and did a bit of net looking just now and it only confirms my opinion: Plagiarism is the result of bad teaching.

Let me explain by first giving a definition (although very problematic) of plagiarism. The University of Indiana presents this:

"To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use

• another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
• any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge;
• quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
• paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words."

The main problem I have is the first. Two families hate each other, the kids fall in love. What am I talking about Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story? Ideas cannot be copyrighted. Thus there is no need to credit the idea of the story in either case. Furthermore opinions are often general, and it would be useless for a student to find someone who prior to their paper stated a similar opinion. I agree with the rest of the definition.

The real problem though comes from teachers who assign papers like, "Write an overview of Optical Art in Europe" or "Describe how Magic Realists were influenced by Swift." The typical university student has absolutely nothing to draw upon for these papers except what the teacher presented in class or outside source material such as the net or books. Therefore, there is absolutely now way in which a student can fulfill this assignment without using other people's material. In this case they should credit every single paragraph of the paper, excepting the one where a student states an opinion about the material such as "I hate this," or "I think this is good." Allowing students the leeway to rewrite without credit is to allow semantic games with the definition of plagiarism. Oh, if I can find it on Wikipedia then I'll penalize the student but if the ideas are somewhat rewritten (although from my notes and texts) I'll give an A. You can't blame the students for this one -- they know nothing of the subject being assigned. Thus I think we must come to view the typical research paper as outdated, a dinosaur of the past that should and must be revised. This practice is wrong. It's bad scholarship. It sends a misleading message to our future scholars.

What is the solution? One is to teach students how to correctly and fully credit other sources, which will mean most every section of the paper. Another is to assign papers where a student can learn to write but is not forced to draw from source material. An example would be, if in high school, "Should schools have gym classes?" It's an area where every student will have an opinion as well as personal knowledge they can draw upon. They are not forced to head to the net. On the college level an example might be, "What art is better, Optical Art or Symbolist Art." While they might have to lean upon source materials to discover the aspects of eacy style, again the majority of the paper cannot come from those sources. A third solution would be to provide student with handouts and the paper can only cite the handouts -- nothing else. This way there is no danger of plagiarism from sources the professor is unable to trace. And it will be clear just what failings the student has in correctly citing material.

The Short and the Quick

Which is nothing short and nowhere near quick. It's called writing, yes that unruly sport. It's been a series of at least 14 hour days -- required, needed, desired. To quote a line in Hoban, "It goes."

I just whipped off two biographies of J.D. Salinger -- those of Hamilton and Alexander. Therein lies the quick because such things, while taking their authors years to complete, never take much time to buzz through. And reading them is like cheap sex in the bushes behind a meatpacking plant. There's something so dirty about them. Based on what I know, Salinger is merely weird in many respects. It appears he had a predilection for younger women with bob cuts and even travelled to California to meet a sitcom actress he developed a crush on. They had to escort him out. And so he writes on the Glass family -- never my favorite works and I tend to side with the Times reviewer who knocked that particular group of works. And recluses today, whether visual artists or writers are always somewhat odd. There's a bit of denial of the world combined with a male machismo that reeks of old-world Modernism in the worst sense. And all along, for his reclusiveness, Sallinger certainly appeared to play the media in order to keep his books going -- the problem is not so much his toying but that he did it so badly. Picasso or Hemingway or Nabokov were much better at the game. One thing the both books didn't really point out is although there are claims he worked in a cell-studio a quarter a mile from the house for hours each day, any time someone went to the door of his house he was there to answer it or in the case of one stalker, watching TV. Well, he was born in 1919 and it won't be long before as Capote said, he makes his death legal. Then we'll know whether he really wrote and if so what it was he wrote. I'm guessing, if it's more of the Glass saga that the world will be entirely disappointed. On the other hand, go read Ring Lardner if you have not. A great writer there (mentioned in Catcher).

I have also read a couple excellent things -- The Bat Tattoo by Hoban, worth a persue and it's stuck with me the past week more than any other thing I've recently read.

And I came across thanks, to the London Times, Angela Carter whose The Bloody Chamber is a virtuoso Baroque work that makes one want to start anew with the descriptions and similes. I'll be excited to read more of her.

I also note how Jeanette Winterson seems to be modelling her style on Carter who died in 1992. Likewise I began reading Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet and it seemed so much as though she were referencing Will Self that I had to put it aside. In her case it was more the use of his Fat Controller, albeit with a different name, that bothered me. Oh I'm sure they'll all deny it just as Mr. Ripoff denied stealing Scliar's plot of Max and the Cats. Well I'll continue to shake my head a bit as I return to writing.