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Really Not About the Internet
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After you read this, which is Lethem's solid primer on copyright woes, I'd be curious to know who else sorta felt failed by the structural conceit, i.e. piecemeal plagiarism with the occasional personal embellishment. It had a point obviously--ideas are born of and built upon prior and concurrent ones, so who really "owns" an idea anyway, q.e.d.--and it obviously took him a long time, which Lethem himself acknowledges in the epilogue, more or less his big reveal:

“. . . spurred David Byrne . . . My Life in the Bush of Ghosts . . .” Chris Dahlen, Pitchfork—though in truth by the time I'd finished, his words were so utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another's distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

But for an article that's arguing that plagiarism is the default mode for writers at least, that it happens naturally, on both conscious and subconscious levels way beyond our control, that we should take plagiarism for granted, cut short the witchhunt, and concentrate on the ideas--well I got really caught up in the witchhunt! I found myself noticing some pretty harsh tone changes as he jumped from source to source, despite his best intentions otherwise. Plus you really don't need to know Lethem was lifting wholesale from DFW's "E Unibus Pluram" essay in order to see the word "ganglia" and all sorts of words and turns you wouldn't have seen a graf before and say to yourself something is most definitely up. Then maybe the clumsiness of it was the point, that you were supposed to feel the force of the structure even if you couldn't put your finger on what was happening exactly--but even that doesn't change the fact that for me, the focus moved from the ideas to the article's secret game. By that logic: Maybe it was my fault Lethem failed me?

I just got off the phone with Lady J, who gave me explicit orders not to make too big a deal out of this article. Well OK. To take this elsewhere: Lethem's secret game here sorta bleeds into ideas I've had about the daily gorefest that is internet meta-media, members of whom consider themselves something like watchdogs, but the majority of whom are really nothing more than thought-bankrupt firefighter-arsonist types. They read articles merely to figure out who and how and where they failed us, take interest in writer backstory merely to point out the hypocrisies, consider their job done only after fuck-the-point details-only "close reading" has yielded them concrete and bloggable evidence that somebody, somewhere, is a douchebag.

Anyway I don't think Lethem is a douchebag at all, J, and I don't read pieces just to find fault with them--people who do that pretty much disgust me. Which is why I'm struggling with the conceit so much, like if I can come up with a reason why it really works, the sudden self-loathing will cease. The best I can do for now, rationalization-wise, is putting Lethem parallel to the library scientist he describes midway through, who synthesizes several medical journal articles from several separate scientific disciplines, and comes up with the reason for why young women's fingers get cold (don't wanna know why he wanted to know that). That gets him off the hook fine, but I'm still left with this pretty shitty feeling that the internet's all-seeing eye has really fucked up the way I and a lot of other people actively read, i.e. closely but not deeply, talking loud but saying nothing.

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Labels: 2007, articles, copyright, internet, law