It146;s a steal

This fascination helped inspire his new novel, You Don8217;t Love Me Yet, in which four identity-seeking 20-somethings in a Los Angeles rock band latch onto some striking words and images that don8217;t quite belong to them, with unexpected consequences.

It also drove Lethem to make a more serious argument about 8220;the fundamental appropriating nature of creativity8221; in the February issue of Harper8217;s, an article titled The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism. The subtitle is no joke.

After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against 8220;those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other,8221; Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he 8220;stole, warped, and cobbled together8221; from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings, reporting, for example, that the 8220;culture as a market8221; quote derives from The Tyranny of Copyright? by Robert Boynton, in the New York Times Magazine.

Lethem8217;s piece is a brilliant stunt, a high-concept attention-grabber. In a letter to Harper8217;s, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig8212;one of the best-known public advocates for less restrictive copyright laws8212;called it 8220;beautifully crafted8221; argument that 8220;teaches more about the importance of what I call 8216;remix8217; than any other work I have read.8221;

Still, Lessig had a small bone to pick. It seems some cherished words of his own had been appropriated, words the professor declined to specify but which constituted 8220;the only sentence I have ever written that I truly like.8221;

Ouch. Lethem apologised.

Lethem8217;s preoccupation with artistic influence, he says, really began with 8220;a completely personal instinct or leaning, which is that I8217;ve always liked collage art.8221; He likes seeing 8220;chunks of recognisable things in a new matrix8221;, whether in a painting or a Bob Dylan song. He finds it strange that some artists appear embarrassed by influences and feel the need to 8220;overstate their originality8221;.

Take, for example, his second novel, Girl in Landscape, the 1998 novel Lethem calls 8220;a very deliberate attempt to rewrite John Ford8217;s movie The Searchers in an interplanetary context. I did The Searchers from the point of view of the Natalie Wood character,8221; he says. 8220;On Mars.8221;

OK. But to get back to that Harper8217;s piece: Influence is one thing, but surely plagiarism is another, isn8217;t it? Yup. Plagiarism is a 8220;rubbery8221; term he wanted to define as 8220;value neutral8221; in order to confront the question 8220;What8217;s good plagiarism and what8217;s bad plagiarism?8221;

Bad plagiarism, Lethem believes, is something we know when we see it. It doesn8217;t add value by transforming the borrowed material into something new.

And good plagiarism? Think of Shakespeare8217;s borrowing from Ovid, he says, which helped produce Romeo and Juliet, and the subsequent borrowing by Leonard Bernstein that produced West Side Story.

8220;If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism,8221; Lethem wrote in his piece. A line, he acknowledges, he stole from US Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner.
Bob Thompson LAT-WP