Blog

Apology for apparent plagiarism. Sources of literary variety.

By Samuel Johnson.

Dulcique animos novitate tenebo. OVID. Met. iv. 284.

And with sweet novelty your soul detain.

It is often charged upon writers, that with all their pretensions to genius and discoveries, they do little more than copy one another; and that compositions obtruded upon the world with the pomp of novelty, contain only tedious repetitions of common sentiments, or at best exhibit a transposition of known images, and give a new appearance to truth only by some slight difference of dress and decoration.

The allegation of resemblance between authors is indisputably true; but the charge of plagiarism, which is raised upon it, is not to be allowed with equal readiness. A coincidence of sentiment may easily happen without any communication, since there are many occasions in which all reasonable men will nearly think alike. Writers of all ages have had the same sentiments, because they have in all ages had the same objects of speculation; the interests and passions, the virtues and vices of mankind, have been diversified in different times, only by unessential and casual varieties: and we must, therefore, expect in the works of all those who attempt to describe them, such a likeness as we find in the pictures of the same person drawn in different periods of his life.

It is necessary, therefore, that before an author be charged with plagiarism, one of the most reproachful, though, perhaps, not the most atrocious of literary crimes, the subject on which he treats should be carefully considered. We do not wonder, that historians, relating the same facts, agree in their narration; or that authors, delivering the elements of science, advance the same theorems, and lay down the same definitions: yet it is not wholly without use to mankind, that books are multiplied, and that different authors lay out their labours on the same subject; for there will always be some reason why one should on particular occasions, or to particular persons, be preferable to another; some will be clear where others are obscure, some will please by their style and others by their method, some by their embellishments and others by their simplicity, some by closeness and others by diffusion.

Is feminism relevant for artists today?

For your consideration:

Journalists and broadcasters Anna Carey and Sinead Gleeson of the feminist podcast The Antiroom are joined by Alice Maher (artist), [gorse issue one interviewee] Jessie Jones (artist), Kathleen James Chakraborty (Lecturer, UCD) and Cristin Leach (art critic) to talk about the relationships between art, feminism, class and gender expectations. Retrospective exhibitions Eileen Gray and Lenora Carrington provide the impetus for this enquiry into feminist critique and its potential, to assess both exhibitions.

Tuesday 19 November, 7.00pm, The Workman’s Club. Free, but booking essential.

Laughter in the dark

Kevin Barry on the Paris Review blog.

For a long time I was trying to be the next great Jewish American writer. You know, the next Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. This was in Cork city, Ireland. As a pale ginger twenty-something. It wasn’t working out all that well, but I do think you have to write out your influences.

I’ve never agreed with this idea that a writer “finds his voice” and then just sticks with it and drones on in that voice for forty years. That sounds like death to me. I tend to let the story dictate the style. Back then, I let my idea of what a great writer sounds like dictate my style. I wrote these great sententious sentences, clause after clause after clause, under a black belly of fucking cloud, and I’d end up thinking, “What is this? Who wrote this? Who is this guy?” It certainly wasn’t me.

[Via @nemoloris]

NotFilm

New documentary on Samuel Beckett‘s Film.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on his only journey to America, to undertake one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his collaboration with silent era genius Buster Keaton on a short, almost-silent avant-garde film. The production FILM BY SAMUEL BECKETT, was beset with trouble from the start. The entire first scene was unhappily eliminated, and Keaton suffered terribly in the hottest days of a blistering Manhattan summer. The soon-to-be Nobel laureate Beckett never saw eye-to-eye with the legendary slapstick star, and the film they made – along with theater director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman – opened at the Venice and New York Film Festivals to a bewildered reception. In the decades since, it’s been the subject of praise, condemnation, and ongoing controversy. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches back to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

Life & empathy

Newsweek interview the mighty William Vollmann.

If William T. Vollmann ever wins the Nobel Prize in Literature – as many speculate he will – he knows exactly what he will do with the $1.1 million pot the Swedes attach to the award. “It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,” he says, sitting on his futon, chuckling, a half-empty bottle of pretty good bourbon between us.