I am trying to do more with this space. right now every time I sit down to write in it I just come up with this really stilted "academic" or "writing for strangers" voice that really annoys me. I could solve this, I guess, by pretending this blog is my best, closest friend and that nothing I ever tell it could be irrelevant. I think this voice would be warped though by the fact that no one wants to hear the thoughts of someone whose best friend is a blog.
I actually had a thing planned out that I wanted to write about, and I was going to wait until march 1 to do it because that's when my review of light boxes was posted. it's now...the last day of march, and I am finally getting to writing about it. in the review I talk about how the book "uses salvador plascencia's premise as a kind of symbolic grammar." I wondered, kind of, what shane jones would think of this review, and he quoted some good parts and basically didn't say anything on his blog. so I guess that means that my assertion that he's sort of plagiarizing people of paper in some way is correct. I don't know. the whole thing I was going to write here is about how "plagiarism" is way too difficult to define, especially for someone who creates.
when I read light boxes it really bothered me that he had taken so much from POP, and I'll tell you why: because I worry so fucking much about whether my shit is original. and seeing another person get published and blurbed by some pretty cool people who just ignore the fact that it seems to take a lot of its core ideas from another book just rubbed me the wrong way. I will just tell you that I know jack shit about "the industry" or whatever other forces might be influencing this, but to my eyes, it seemed as though I was being tacitly permitted to rip off whatever book I thought worked well and use it for my own devices.
then I started writing the review and, though it was easy for me to come up with examples of how the books were really similar, I thought about how I was pointing out ideas rather than names, or even just really vague motifs that came up in both books and that could reasonably not even have anything to do with each other. it was all incredibly vague, the feeling I got of plagiarism - and I do mean "feeling," and not any kind of quantifiable evidence. that's sort of when I realized it's all very tricky.
there is probably no other way to investigate what the creative process is than by asking the question of how a creator is influenced. and the crazy thing about this is that our brains are not, I don't think, built for this purpose of being original. I mean you cannot have a thought that is altogether original; everything in your brain arrived there from somewhere else and the most original thing you can do is make a new connection.
also, when something comes at you and enters your brain (I'm using really highfalutin technical language here), it doesn't distinguish what kind of source it is, to the point that it will conveniently "label" it for you. we all know this when we realize our own false memories of things that happened to someone else, and we only read about it or saw it on TV. the brain does not take in something and go "don't use this, because you didn't come up with it" - when you sit down to create, the brain draws from everything at once.
which makes me, personally, feel pretty trapped sometimes. it's gotten to the point where, whenever I come up with an idea that doesn't suck, I try to check or verify somehow that I didn't steal it. last time this resulted in me discovering that I had ripped off vonnegut (his "becoming unstuck in time" idea, not those exact words but similar enough), and also the Biggie, discovering yet another way I tried to rip off DFW.
the thing is, this is all based on a model of literature that might be sort of "wrong," a way of looking at literature as a product, rather than some kind of codependent organism that evolves like everything else on this planet. if you're making a "product" of course you can't rip off anyone else, because there are copyright issues; but obviously art should not be a product in this sense. so why are we - or why am I, I guess - going around seeing if people are ripping off other artists all the time?
because, really, when I read shane jones' book and got over the similarities to POP, I thought it was extremely genuine and sincere, which is a quality I require in art. and if it was building on another book so what? like I said before, you can't have a totally original idea in your head, just new combinations. light boxes has some new combinations that POP didn't have, so really, it is a new part of the growing organism that is art.
at the same time I am anxious that I'm just changing my view so that I can justify ripping off DFW, so that it isn't so much "ripping him off" as it is carrying on a tradition that he articulated and that I totally, completely agree with. I'm still putting my own life into it, my own thoughts, the things I want to get across, but I so agree with DFW's goals as far as fiction goes that I feel it would go against myself to just decide not to emulate them because they're not totally original.
then I think, this is kind of how artistic movements get started, right, people with the same vision of what art is. and no one accuses them of ripping each other off, do they? I don't know. but I really would feel more comfortable if there was an entire movement, and not just DFW, attached to this vision of what fiction should do (which is basically a humanist thing of trying to allow some kind of communication on a basic emotional level through writing).
this post should be way way longer but I am a busy student and teacher and have not enough time. I will probably continue writing about this stuff in future posts, though.
thanks for reading, blog, you are my BFF.
