Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Eileen Wakes and it is Saturday
Sunday, 29 August 2010
The Start of Saturday in PB
DOUGLAS’ PRAYER CELL
Saturday, 28 August 2010
The Last Friday Piece From Port Brokeferry
Athol Stuart walked once more round the green. It was late and he was tired. He picked up two empty beer bottles and dropped them into a bin. There were lights on in some of the trailers, but mostly it was dark and only the faintest sound of music coming from somewhere, maybe a radio playing.
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Another Friday PB piece
(Yet another Friday night piece from Port Brokeferry)
BUSINESS AT BERLIE’S
Thursday night at Berlie’s many of the rides had been free, at least to start with. Thursday night was always the same, first Thursday of the run. It was about announcing the arrival of the fair. The rides were a little longer and sometimes ran with only three or four people on them. And being the first night, the smiles of those working the stalls were a lot brighter. Making a splash is what Thursday was about, so that Berlie’s would be the talk of everyone’s Friday and that would bring them back in numbers to Berlie’s at the end of the working week.
Friday night was different. It was about making money now. There was a new zeal in the stall-holders as they urged the people of Port Brokeferry to spend spend spend, with the promise of prizes that only ever looked good at the fair where the lights were bright and the music loud. And Friday-night rides did not run until they were full, all the cars filled to bursting and ‘one more in here’ the boy with the leather satchel across his shoulder called.
Kelso was working the dodgems. Looked like he was dancing the way that he moved between the cars, skipping from the bonnet of one to the other. Girls called to him and waved when he turned their way. He flicked his hair from his face – they liked that – and he made jokes with them, and steered their cars into the paths of others, skipping away at the last minute before the girl-scream collisions.
Some cars got stuck. They’d turned the wheel too far in the one direction and could not work out how to get the car out of the jam they were in. Kelso kept a look out for them, then hop-scotched his way to the stuck car and twisted the wheel with an easy expertise, as if by magic setting the car back on course. The boys scowled at Kelso’s superior skill; the girls flirted with him and they called him sweetheart and touched his hand, pretending it had been by accident, and laughing too loud when they did. That was how it was in every place they stopped, how it had been with Evelyn, a whole year back.
They came drunk to Berlie’s some nights, girls in groups with too short skirts and too much make up. Ended up without their clothes, some of them, in the dark of one of the trailers, waking to what they had done and regretting it mostly. Kelso had regretted it too, sometimes. Evelyn was one of those times. They’d got carried away. He’d been drunk, and that explained the tattoo on her arm. He’d forgotten that he’d done it.
‘I thought it meant something,’ she’d said in the street.
It hadn’t. Not with any of them. Just part of the way things were. Except then there was Grace. That was different. He couldn’t really say how it was different, except that he had thought about her for a year. Maybe it was all tied up with the growing sense in him, that he wanted more than the merry-go-round of Berlie’s, but alone in the dark of his trailer he had spun stories of how life could be better and in all those stories he was standing hand-in-hand with Grace.
Then Evelyn said she thought his name scratched under the skin of her arm meant something.
‘Over here, Kelso, over here.’
Two girls in matching jean jackets and white skirts and white shoes, called to him, blew kisses for him to catch and laughed as their car turned away from him.
‘I was drunk,’ he’d told her when she came to his trailer late on Thursday. The lights of the fair were out and Grace had gone home. The air in his trailer smelled of her, the smell of Grace mixed in with the smell of oil and cooked meat and cigarette smoke. ‘We were both drunk,’ he said.
‘Fuck,’ said Evelyn. She was crying. ‘I’ve been wearing your name on my arm for a whole bloody year and all you can say is we were drunk!’
He wanted to say he was sorry. It wouldn’t help, he understood that, but he still wanted to say it. Instead he shrugged his shoulders, as he had done when they’d met in the street earlier. It wasn’t what he wanted for her, but maybe it was easier than telling her about Grace.
She called him heartless and bastard and cunt and she kicked things over in his trailer, broke things. He didn’t stop her. She deserved that.
Kelso helped the two girls in jean jackets climb out of their car at the end of the ride. He could see their pants as they lifted their legs over the side of the car. One of the girls squeezed his hand as she stepped unsteadily on to the flat surface of the dodgem floor. He smiled and let go of her hand.
Sunday, 22 August 2010
Friday night in PB
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Angry - Not Me
THE SOURCES OF YOUR IDEAS
How should a writer of fiction credit the source of his ideas, given that all ideas have their source somewhere?
In academic works it is customary to credit sources in a bibliography at the end of the work, or in footnotes at the bottom of each page or tagged on as an appendix. Those are the ‘club rules’ for that type of writing. But for fiction the issue is very much more complex, not just because ideas come at us from all over the place, but also because there are times when we do not even know that an idea we have has its source in something specific.
There is an excellent book called ‘The Road to Xanadu: A study in the ways of the imagination’ by John Livingston Lowes. It basically goes to enormous length to dissect Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of The Ancient Mariner’ and to show the sources of Coleridge’s ideas in the poem. Coleridge read voraciously, sucking in everything he read, digesting it, feeding his creative sub-conscious so that when he wrote the poem what he wrote was informed by everything he had read even when Coleridge himself was not always aware of how much his reading influenced what he wrote. At over six hundred pages long, this text by J L Lowes is an excellent illustration of how it would be close to impossible and patently absurd for fiction writers to credit the sources of all their ideas in the way that academics do. All creative ideas have their source in something else. An imagination needs fed before it can begin to work and what feeds it is everything, including everything seen or read or heard. As a result a writer does not always know where his/her idea comes from. Crediting creative ideas in the way that academics credit their ideas (and the way that J L Lowes has done for Coleridge) doesn’t make any real sense…unless you have a very specific interest in researching or knowing this aspect of a work. It is certainly not what the average fiction reader wants to trawl through – over 600 pages of footnotes for a single poem – unless the fiction reader has a very particular interest in how the imagination of a particular writer works.
If a writer was to contemplate crediting every thought and idea that fed into the writing of a novel, he would never be done, especially if he were a writer who was thorough in his self-reflection. So what does a writer do? Yann Martell acknowledged the spark for his novel ‘Life of Pi’ in a foreword. I thought that was a generous and honest thing to have done, but the anger of the ‘plagiarism police’ was not assuaged, rather it was fed; and I am certain that there were many other ideas in ‘Life of Pi’ that had their genesis in something else that Martell read and are not credited in the same foreword. I, myself, have never tried to hide the ‘sparks’ for my own works, whenever I have been aware of them, and I have taken flack for two of my stories because they have their source in something else and I have not tried to hide their source. I am not here whinging about that flack, but I do believe that those who have been angriest and loudest in attacking me, have not got a sure grasp of how the imagination works, how creativity works, or of what constitutes plagiarism.
Visual artists allow themselves to be influenced by the works of other artists. It is accepted that artists do that. Film-makers do it, too. It is done because that is how creativity works. Shakespeare recycled the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet' and wrote his own words into the poetry of his play and came up with something that was better than all its sources and was 'his own'. Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' clearly has many sources including Boccaccio's 'Decameron' and the poetry of Petrarch and Dante, and the work of Ovid and The Bible. We are here talking about two of the giants of English Literature and how their imaginations worked, responding to written works that already existed in their world. If writers today were honest, they would admit that they do not create in a vacuum and that the ideas they have do not come out of nothing, but instead come out of everything that they have seen, heard, read. Writers should be allowed to do this, otherwise how could they really function? As to crediting their sources by attaching something to the created work for every idea, that doesn't really make sense when 'everything' has a source elsewhere (even if the sometimes the source is somewhat oblique).
Just Another One
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Back To Work
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
KERRY IN PB
Monday, 16 August 2010
Yet More From PB
Sunday, 15 August 2010
STANLEY FISH: PLAGIARISM IS NOT A BIG MORAL DEAL
WAS SHAKESPEARE A PLAGIARIST?
There’s a lot written on the internet about ‘plagiarism’. I write a lot about it. Some of it shows good insight and intelligence and some doesn’t. It is a popular practice to reference and link to articles written in newspapers as a way of supporting a point of view. I read a lot of these, the internet scribblings and the newsprint. It is a subject that interests me and one that, it seems to me, is dividing academics and writers. We seem to be moving towards a crisis in our thinking on matters related to authorship and originality and ownership.
In an article in the New York Times by an academic called Stanley Fish (Stanley Fish: Plagiarism Is Not A Big Moral Deal), he cites a personal experience of seeing a couple of his written pages appearing in a colleague’s book almost verbatim. His upset at this theft has stayed with him and has fuelled his musings on the subject of plagiarism. I can understand his upset and I think he does have a case here: his written words were used without attribution and without permission, even if the chain of that theft meant that his colleagues were more lazy than criminal.
In the same article Fish cuts through all the philosophical and intellectual debate and dwells on the accepted ‘club rules’ for what is permitted in terms of copying and attribution. He compares it to the rules of golf (and I could not help but think of the film ‘Happy Gilmore’!) Fish is talking about words for the most part, and perhaps academic ideas. In fact he says: “But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some)”. And for me there is something important here that is missed by many internet writers who appropiate the support of people like Fish for their arguments against plagiarism, and that is the distinction between copying of actual words and the using of another’s ideas especially if we are talking creative ideas.
Shakespeare’s play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is not in one sense original. The plot in its entirety existed in several forms before Shakespeare decided to use them as the basis for a play. Even a cursory look at the source material for his play will demonstrate how much Shakespeare’s play depends on its source material. But he did not, I think, use the words from the source material. Instead he wrote his own poetry. For me, this means that Shakespeare is not a plagiarist. You may want to say that he ripped off these other writers; you may even have a view on that; but what he wrote was his own – his own words – and what he did with the material was original and fresh and new, and what he produced was superior to anything that had gone before.
Someone once said flippantly of plagiarism, and rather simplistically, ‘theft is theft’. The fact that notable academics all over the world are now writing papers such as Fish’s article, and disagreeing on the many issues related to plagiarism, demonstrates one certainty: the matter of plagiarism is not one that is simple. Many of the articles I have read are to do with academic plagiarism. The free availability of information through the internet and the ease with which this can be copied and pasted and the habits of illegal downloading of music and movies through computers by young people, means that there is a crisis in our universities in this regard. But to jump from that to saying that ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martell is plagiarism because he got the idea from another written book is a frighteningly hard body-blow for creativity.
The world of literature is dominated by writers who have appropriated the ideas of other people and who have then made them their own, given them new life or a different life. The rules that Stanley Fish talks about in his article do not obviously apply to this area of ‘imitation’. If a writer pens a story about punk androids that do not know they are androids, we are not then to assume that the writer owns the idea of androids thinking they are human and not knowing the difference. Another writer can come along and write a story or film about android children that think they are real children and do not know the difference. It would be absurd for this not to be possible. The thinking of Thomas Jefferson when he and his contemporaries were examining issues of intellectual property and laws to protect innovators, allowed for this: the free movement of ideas. Stanley Fish is writing about the verbatim theft of words or the lifting of academic ideas. Setting aside the ‘sampling’ debate of the new music and the new writers (Helene Hegeman), it is easy to see that the rules that exist in copyright laws apply to this specific type of theft and it is easy to understand those ‘club rules’. But the law regarding the use of another’s creative ideas is not and cannot be so clear cut; nor can any thinking on this matter be so removed from debate about philosophy and theories of mind and an understanding of how thinking works and how creativity works.
Stanley Fish says plagiarism is a 'learned sin'; but he is referring specifically to the obvious theft of another's words. He is not here addressing the creative use of another's creative ideas. It is not just that the issues here are greyer and harder to define; it is that creativity involves an artist interacting with the world and everything in the world; ideas of the creative kind are so dependent on that interaction and on the complex way that the mind works and on the acknowledged imitative element in art and on a recognition that there is such a thing as the creative subconscious, that issues to do with overstepping the 'club rules' are not ever so clear cut or so easy. That is why copyright law stipulates that an idea may be copied - because the alternative would be detrimental to the whole development of art and literature.
Saturday, 14 August 2010
Yet more thoughts about ideas
THE SPREAD OF IDEAS
Why do writers keep details of their current writing projects under wraps? Some will tell you it is because they know that other unscrupulous writers may steal their ideas and they fear this. But they often keep the details secret even from their friends, too, so they are either saying that their own friends cannot be trusted, or it is something else. Sometimes it will be because they don’t wish to lose the need to tell it through the writing by already having told it through the spoken word and I get that. But just maybe they also know a truth that is not often admitted when writers get all protective about their ideas. Read on.
I have just finished reading a very interesting article called ‘The Economy of Ideas’ by John Perry Barlow. The sub-heading for the article reads: ‘A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)’ It is articulate and intelligent and thoughtful and thought-provoking. I was put in touch with the article by a one-time librarian called Neil – thank you, Neil.
The article is apparently used in University Law courses throughout the US and it raises a lot of questions about where Copyright law is headed with the digital age upon us. Well worth a read, though it is many pages long and covers a lot of material. You can find it here (You can't just tap on the link I have highlighted. You have to copy and paste it into the bar above. I do not have the technical know-how to make it a direct link, sorry.): http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html
One of the things John Perry Barlow touches on is the nature of ideas. Ideas are viral, the article says. That is their nature and that dictates the way they behave. And thinking of ideas in this way makes a lot of sense. Ideas want to spread, the good ones more than the bad (the strong more than the weak… there’s a whole evolution thing going on with ideas, too.). When my cousin was growing up, David Bowie and Marc Bolan were new and big on the scene. I favoured the Marc Bolan look… a sort of glamorised hippy… but my cousin favoured the Bowie look (all that Ziggy androgynous thingy). I did find the Bowie look interesting, but not as interesting as my cousin. And he was not alone. He and thousands of others rushed off to the hairdressers to have their hair dyed and cut a la Ziggy and he started wearing make-up and girls’ clothes. The idea was to look like Bowie and he sort of did - he was tall and as thin as sticks... but even the small and the dumpy looked a little like Bowie, too. My cousin and all those others were infected with the Ziggy virus. Only when a cure was found (a new virus fighting off the old) were the girls’ clothes consigned to the bucket, and the girls’ make-up, too.
The point is that Bowie’s idea to dress and look in a certain way was contagious. Once it was ‘out there’ the idea spread and very quickly others were using his idea. That is the way of ideas. It maybe explains, amongst other things, why we have had a rash of teen vampire books and films recently – not just the exploitative nature of those industries but the infectious nature of a successful or good idea.
I went to see ‘Inception’ the other day. I thought it was brilliant and very clever. The specials were only marginally spoiled by having been so big a part of the trailer and thereby having lost a little of their wow factor when actually seeing them in the context of the film. The guy who made the film is being hailed as a highly original mind, and there is a lot about the film that is exciting and ‘new’. But there is equally stuff we have seen before. It is like the film has been infected with ideas from elsewhere. A train suddenly driving up a city-street; an eroding cliff-face, but the cliff is made of old and decaying buildings; the military style storming of a snow-bound bunker-style fortress – all of these, I think, I have seen before… but maybe the film is being cleverer than we think… because these things in the film are part of the dream sub-conscious of one of the characters… and we would expect these ‘outside’ ideas to have infected his way of dreaming in precisely this way and maybe that is what the film-maker is showing us: that ideas creep into our head from everywhere else and we can’t help that because it is done at the level of our sub-conscious as well as our conscious thinking.
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Back to Friday at Port Brokeferry
ANOTHER THOUGHT
CHEGGERS PLAYS UNPOP
(For UK readers: See what I did there?)
Now I have to say at the outset that I have never ever been a fan of Keith 'Cheggers' Chegwin. In fact I have only ever found him to be a barely ignorable irritation. But I have been considering something that came to my attention recently and it involves the said Keith. You see, he has been posting jokes on twitter and has caused a bit of a stir because some of the jokes ‘belong’ to other people. Yes, we’re back with issues of ownership and copyright.
I have not investigated this particular matter too closely, not beyond a cursory reading of two articles on the subject of Keith Chegwin’s twittering, but it has once again forced me to think about this Intellectual Property issue. Laws regarding intellectual property were originally put there to ensure appropriate remuneration for the ‘originator’ of a piece of work – like a story or a poem or maybe even a joke (it’s broader than that, of course). But it was also meant to allow for the free movement of ideas. UK copyright law actually stipulates that it protects the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. UK copyright law even says that an idea may be copied, but it is the words that may not be copied. So, what does that mean here?
If Keith Chegwin has used these jokes ‘belonging’ to other comedians by adding something to the joke, and thereby changing the joke and ‘making it his own’, then this would, according to copyright law, be legitimate. However, if he simply reproduced the joke, unaltered from its original state, then that would be an infringement of copyright. As I said, I have not looked into the charges against Keith Chegwin so cannot comment on whether or not he has done wrong in posting what he posted on twitter. (In fact, I think I recall that in this matter Keith Chegwin was not actually claiming that the jokes were his and did in fact say that they actually weren't.)
What I can say, however, is that it seems odd to me that a joke requires such protection and this seems to me to be symptomatic of the litigious society we have moved towards. Groucho Marx jokes are frequently recycled and Tommy Cooper jokes, too, and catch phrases. Does any of this constitute ‘theft’ in any reasonable sense of that word? If at a dinner-party I tell a joke that I heard at a stand-up comedy show, am I infringing copyright in so doing? If I put it on a blog, does that make it more likely to be copyright infringement? If Keith Chegwin posts one of Jimmy Carr’s jokes on his twitter page, is Jimmy Carr deprived of any money through this use? Is Jimmy Carr’s reputation as a comic diminished in any way? Is he prevented from using the joke again so that his livelihood is compromised by Keith Chegwin’s posting of the joke on twitter?
Apparently Keith Chegwin’s response to charges of plagiarism here has been to label the offended comics as ‘precious’ and to admonish them to just write newer stuff. Does he have a point? Once a joke has been put into the public domain, presumably the comic has made his money out of the joke, and people have laughed at it, and if they have they have possibly wanted to hear more and paid to see that comic’s live show or forked out for his DVD… doesn’t that joke, put into the public domain, then cease to be owned by the teller of the joke? If it is exceptionally funny, will it not be passed from person to person, at work the next day or in the pub or over coffee? Isn’t that part of the battle that comics face, that tv forces them to always be coming up with new material because once it has been aired on television their material is quickly old and so of little use to them? Is it then churlish of these comics to be upset when someone else tells ‘their’ joke? What if someone else makes money out of their joke, or someone else's reputation is enhanced by the telling of the joke, does that then mean we are in different territory? If I tell a Jimmy Carr joke in a job interview, and thereby make a positive impression on the interview panel, does my getting of the job require me to in some way remunerate Jimmy Carr? It can very quickly become ridiculous when taken to its logical conclusion.
Don't get me wrong. Some protection is necessary, that was why Thomas Jefferson laid down guidelines for Intellectual Property legislation. But it seems to me, in this money-driven culture we move in, that what has been lost sight of is that the same law was intended to allow a certain freedom in the movement of ideas from one person to another. If I see something funny in the street, I can’t wait for the opportunity to tell someone what I saw and do so at the soonest next opportunity. When a great joke gets into my head, put there by Jimmy Carr telling it on national television, it begs for me to tell it to someone. I can’t wait to tell it, to make someone else laugh as I laughed. I HAVE to tell it to someone. That’s how jokes work, just as it is how ideas work – like a virus, spreading from one mind to another. That’s how jokes and ideas want to work and it would be absurd to think that a society could legislate against that happening… it would also not be desirable for society to so legislate. It seems a little absurd then to be thinking of protecting such things as ideas and jokes as though they were pieces of property like wallets, because they are not such things.
HERE'S AN IDEA
HERE’S AN IDEA
I was reading the last recorded interview with Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, and he was talking about an idea of his and how he owned that idea and if anyone else used that idea they’d have to ask his permission and if they didn’t then there would be attorneys to deal with. I think he was just goofing around and not being really serious, but I thought it worth thinking about.
The idea in question was one he floated in a very early story of his and then in the book that led to the film ‘Bladerunner’. The idea was that an android could exist and not know it was an android, think it was a human being. It is an idea that surfaces in many science fiction novels and in several films, too. But Philip K Dick claims it for his own and says he was the first to come up with that idea, citing the early date of his story as proof. Most of his other ideas he says are a rehash of ideas that were already out there.
I don’t know much about Philip K Dick but reading the last recorded interviews I did find out that he had a serious interest and more than a passing familiarity with philosophy and he made particular reference to Descartes somewhere which I remember being quite impressed with when I read it because Descartes was something I studied when I was a boy at university. And then I got to thinking, putting the pieces of my thinking together.
Descartes, in his bold attempt to arrive at some certainty of knowledge, asked the question (near the end of his quest) how do we know that our thoughts are our thoughts, how do we know that we are not a character in the dream or the mind of an all powerful all knowing being - God? In other words, how do we know that we are actually living human beings. It is a big moment in Descartes’ investigations and one that if ignored could bring his whole ‘I think, therefore I am’ conclusion tumbling down like a house of cards, and in a way Descartes seriously dodges the question by leaning on a ‘truth’ that for him, in the time and place and culture that he lived, was incontrovertible: God is good and not a deceiving God, so we cannot be deceived in thinking we are what we are.
Setting aside the weakness this brings to Descartes’ whole argument (more than a weakness, for it makes nonsense of his ‘Cogito ergo sum’) is this not the very same question that Philip K Dick’s android is about when it believes it is what it seems to be, namely human? At the very least, it is a version of the same idea, an asking of the same question: how do I know that I am really what I think I am?
So, it turns out that the idea is not in any real sense original, and nor is it something that can be said to be owned by any one person. It is an old idea in new clothes. In Dick’s own words, it is a ‘rehash’. And nothing wrong with that, I think, but it does throw again this whole ownership of ideas thing into question, and makes of it an absurdity, and leaves me once again thinking that ideas, because of their cultural roots, cannot be in any reasonable sense owned, that they inevitably owe something to something else. It also begs the question of what originality is precisely when we are talking ideas. What would an original idea look like if it was stripped of the novel way it was expressed, the particular voice of the writer for example, the particular words used? Would we discover that in fact very few ideas can be said to be in any meaningful way original?
And that is probably one reason why copyright law protects the particular expression of an idea (the particular words used and the specific order given to those words) but not the idea itself – it makes no sense to even think that an idea can be something that can be protected in the way that your real estate (property) can be protected. Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the first to look at Intellectual Property and the need for laws to govern this area of creativity, understood the difference. IP law was instituted to help remunerate the ‘innovators’ for the work that they do and by such fairness to encourage such innovation, but it was never intended that IP law would make ideas things that could not pass from one person to another freely. To think that it could or should do that is patently absurd and certainly not desirable if you have any understanding of what ideas are and how everything we say do and think is influenced by ideas that are not our own. Plagiarism, it seems to me, is to do with infringing this ‘copyright law’ and using another writer’s words and passing those words off as one’s own. Using someone else’s ideas is not the same and the precedents for doing this are many, from such giants as Chaucer and Shakespeare to Nabakov and T S Eliot, and everything in between and after and before.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Progressing
Monday, 9 August 2010
Even More Good News
Saturday, 7 August 2010
More Things Nice
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Something Nice
("The very clever text and unraveling story based on the famous 'Lewis Chessmen' kept me gripped and unable to put this book down."