A meditation on plagiarism

Intellectual property, that is to say the private ownership of words and ideas: it doesn’t sound like the kind of relationship with knowledge that a place of higher learning like a university ought to foster, does it? Besides, how do you even steal words, or ideas? They are hardly gone after you have snatched them. How about ‘lying about whose work it is,’ then? Perhaps that’s the crux of the matter. Producing knowledge requires an effort, which is usually defined as ‘work’. If anybody could simply claim the credit for the work of anybody else then the knowledge industry – which is regulated by market relations that monetise this credit in various ways – would cease to function. But surely the social good lies in the knowledge itself, not in its attribution, and besides the example of the anonymous authors of so much oral poetry, traditional music and contemporary street art, it is quite possible to imagine a utopian pinko knowledge industry where ideas circulate freely, thus facilitating and accelerating the production of more knowledge.

Because in truth, how can you locate the point of origin of an idea or a certain sequence of words except in the culture itself? Roland Barthes, circa 1968, in ‘The Death of the Author’:

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. […] [T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.

The following year, Michel Foucault began his essay ‘What is an author?’ by posing a question originally formulated by Samuel Beckett: ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ to which Barthes had replied in advance:

writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

Now I don’t want to dumb-down these two essays and their peculiar conversation to a couple of easy-to-digest snippets, nor ignore the specific historical and cultural conditions in which they were produced, at a time when what Foucault dubbed ‘the-man-and-his-work-criticism’ held full sway. But one could legitimately ask: if an understanding of intertextuality and the ideas of the death of the author and the author-function have been around for so long, why haven’t they changed the way the publishing industry operates, or forced a rethinking of what constitutes plagiarism in publishing and academia? Is it simply a case of those critics and those ideas having been cast aside?

I would say yes, and no. On the one hand, yes, the publishing industry has changed its ways not an iota, nor did Barthes or Foucault themselves to my knowledge ever renounce their name on the cover or the customary protections and moral rights afforded to a published author. Ditto Ihimaera. Hell, even Bansky has claimed these, albeit ‘against his better judgment’. But I think more profoundly the idea that authorship and its integrity matter has proved equally as resilient. Pierre Menard himself tell us that we can’t quite dispense completely with it – even as he goes about turning it upside down – by showing how differently we would have to read Don Quixote if we knew it to have been written by a 20th century Frenchman as opposed to a 17th century Spaniard.

Of course, you say? Well, yes. But consider how electronic writing and the Internet were meant to change all this, further unsettling traditional ideas concerning just who it is who does the writing and possibly killing the author all over again by circulating near-infinite variations on a near-infinite number of texts without a discernible point of origin, or a shred of attribution. This remains a source of anxiety, but I would argue it really hasn’t happened yet. If anything, people who write on the Web have developed a whole new and highly sophisticated sensitivity towards issues of textual attribution and historicity. I’ve touched in the past by way of example upon the edit history of Wikipedia entries, which shows an attention to intricate philological issues on the part of a writing community that consists largely – and I mean this in the most non-derogatory way possible – of amateurs.

The credible bloggers are also very careful to acknowledge their sources, and the manner in which they do so is interesting, for the hyperlinks provided often point to the pages where each discovery took place. It’s only by means of further hyperjumps, following a Star-Trek-like wormhole of sorts, that one is likely to get to the source proper, the location where that particular text came to be, the ‘mothertext’ if you will. Or not, of course, there’s always the possibility that one or more of the pages might have expired by then, but that for once doesn’t matter: it’s in that pattern of connections, however provisional and unstable, that one can glimpse a new way of mapping the 3-dimensional space where authorship and readership come to coexist.

I want to steal this talk again, and to discuss what the author-function of a blogger, amongst others, might be. I suspect we’ll find it is highly plastic and I’ll go as far as to reserve a word to describe this, allthor, an extremely catchy and MBA-friendly term that perhaps some of you might help me fill – I have but vaguest of ideas at present, save for the fact that I think it would be an interesting question to explore.

But in the meantime, what of Ihimaera’s indiscretions? Would it even matter that he neglected to credit those sources, were it not for the legal framework within which the publishing industry operates, or the possibly antiquated notions of originality and individuality that we choose to entertain in this particular medium? I think that even under those conditions it does, it would. For crediting a source, the site where some particular words came together in the way that they did, means also preserving a trace of the text’s place within the culture that produced it, of its genealogy. But as in a genealogy, the presentation of the copied text is better viewed as the re-presentation of the original, a facsimile perpetuating a forgotten past to an unknowing or unwitting reader anew, perhaps guiding them closer to a history they may well otherwise have lost.

Consider a remote and fanciful future where Menard’s Quixote survived while Cervantes’ didn’t, and furthermore there was no knowledge that the earlier of the two books had even been written. This is the kind of loss – of metadata, of history, of memory – that you would be measuring every day.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Well my boy, I’ve been writing this history, your history, since before I knew you. Actually, since just slightly before I knew of you, and I’ve kept in mind that there will come a day when you will read these many dreamed pages yourself, and wonder.

For me you’ve become something of a lodestone within this tale, it’s unravelling, and my understanding of the many whys it has helped me understand. And pivotal to that understanding is the question, why did he leave?

I know for certain now that discovering the fact of my Father’s demise in the years I first thought I needed to return to his family would have been a mistake, and too much information for my young mind to assimilate. While the plasticity of youth is a boon, it also offers opportunity for partial knowing to deeply gouge rows into which future misunderstanding is sown, the crop of adulthood become a weed.

Sitting here experiencing the gentle frustration of the adult with a child who will not sleep, I have wondered many times how I would cope had I a monkey on my back, and it is that single thought that has many times explained to me the why.

To find yourself sick, but tied to a family you did not expect, with a woman you would barely have known, would be impossible. Knowing that fact makes it easy to not blame him for leaving, and more importantly, to not blame myself. But the teenager? It is a very different knowing.

But my aunt with whom he lived, and my mother herself, were teenagers, the effect of his departure into the unknown and what became the very last time either of them saw him, was profound. My aunt laid the finger of blame on my mother I know, but in the confusion who can be certain.

My mother’s last memory of my father is his making his way along the road away from the house, abandoning them all. My aunt stands on the street, yelling, telling him to never return if he makes the choice to leave. My mother moved away from her too shortly thereafter, herself making a fateful decision.

I see this time now as the harrowing of paradise. The last glimmer in the illusion of peace my Boomers held onto, and it is an important part of our history. Their falling away from each other after the discovery that nothing was easy, and that they themselves were the greatest enemies of peace, must have been profound.

Thinking all this does not make the burden of knowledge any less my boy, but the gift you have given me, unwittingly, is the experience to see with clarity, and is something you should know I will long be grateful for.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Having only approached my Father’s family in my early twenties, I have found myself lightly equipped with small amounts of information about his full tale. Not wanting to further disturb an uneasily resting memory, and finding myself having a considerable degree of difficultly assimilating the details I did have, the bandage has been slowly removed over the last (near-) twenty years.

In large part the long duration of this tale and it’s unfolding, layer by layer, has been a ploy to enable the exposure to air of each small part of the greater wound to heal, or at least dry, before the next small cut can be revealed. But such is the way with writing histories of many living persons. There are many tales I would recall but for my conscience of the ripples the telling would cause. As I say, such is the way.

As a consequence, the discovery of details pertaining to the last few months of my Father’s life have been difficult. My understanding is that he found himself in a slipping downward, and was seeking a way off the heights upon which he found himself, a problem to which anyone who has experienced the noose of addiction will relate.

It was a time when surveillance of youth, and drug users in particular, had become a concern to Auckland Police, and early efforts were being made to ‘combat’ what was understood as the seamier side of the counter-culture (although, truth be told, to comfortable middle-class New Zealand the entire culture was pretty seamy).  And with surveillance comes intervention, and to 70s New Zealand intervention meant institutionalisation.

My impression then is, that in an effort to escape Auckland and his life there, my Father followed his younger sister to the East Coast, a place these days far from everything, but then a complete world away. And so it was that when my Mother returned from Australia my paternal Grandfather was enlisted to drive her from the airport, to collect me, and we joined him in early 1972, Tokomaru Bay.

In a confession made many years ago my Grandfather admitted that he was dubious about the likelihood that I was his grandson, but being the man of his generation he is, he did the right thing and drove back to the Coast, itself something like a return journey for him – his family having farmed the country before the Depression. I imagine he must have driven from Auckland, to Te Aroha to collect me, and from there to Tokomaru Bay, a drive of perhaps 10 hours on some of the worst roads in New Zealand, with a complete stranger.

I’ve often wondered what they spoke about, my Mother and he, assuming they spoke at all. My own recollection of what it was to be a young adult leaves no doubt that the gulf between them would have been enormous, the generational difference likely insurmountable. And in turn, he would have arrived in Tokomaru Bay to find the same gulf between himself and two of his children, themselves living the idealised life of the flower-powered, turned on, and tuned in, long since dropped out.

F,FLP

 

By Request: Tarte Tartin, v.3

Well, I seem to have cracked it on the third attempt. This is what I did with my long weekend.

This one is sticking together fairly well, was easy enough to cook in my new non-stick, oven-proof pan. The pan might have been a key, it’s a “flash as” one from the Warehouse (of all places), and I’ve been using it for almost everything for a week or more.

There still needs to be a little work on getting the caramel just right, this one wasn’t right and “split” into toffee and butterscotch.

But if you’re wanting a decent dessert? I can declare this the most delicious thing I’ve made in ages.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

Back when I thought I might try to string this story together, an effort to understand a history and unravel my own subconscious both, I approached my mother and asked her permission. Whether she knew the depths of our joint past to which I would plumb is questionable, but she must have had an inkling, because she gave me a story of which I was completely unaware, and was a considerable surprise to me. A shot across the bow, as it were.

When we returned from Greece I remember living in another now long-demolished bach in what is today ‘downtown’ Mount Maunganui. It was a couple of street across from my grandparents, and it was one of those halcyon summers you remember as a child. Apparently this story started there.

For some reason we had moved from that place, which was ‘close to the action’ as it were, to Arataki – the suburb I would spend the remainder of my childhood. Arataki was the edge of the world in Mount Maunganui, with lots of state housing, and the general appearance of what they call these days ‘nappy valley’. The skies had circled to the near-perpetual grey of a New Zealand winter, and we were sharing a place with some other people. To this day I don’t remember who they are. But I do remember it being the place that my youngest brother took his first steps.

One of my most keen memories of that house is many adults turning up one day, and everybody disappearing into a back room. The lesson I took away being that children see far more than you might realise, and are more keenly aware of adult behaviour that you might expect. I knew then, as I knew as early as age five, the something specific involved in their secrecy.

From that place, we moved to what became our home until the late 1990s, a state house on the very edge of town, although these days it is buried in wealthy suburbia.

So why all this moving, I hear you ask. Well, it seems that my mother had become involved in some sort of Police investigation into the explicable adult behaviour I had mentioned. Her role has long been something to which she has admitted limited liability, but her tale to me (the one indicated at the start of this wee ramble), made something very clear to me. She was playing an extremely dangerous game.

Discovering the exact ins and outs of what happened is likely to never happen. This was an event of 30 years ago, and is likely buried deep in people’s memory. What I do know is what she told me, which was simple, and which I’ve come to regard as a moment of particularly lucid truthfulness in her retelling to me of the past.

Some local guys became convinced she was assisting the Police, and decided they would put a stop to it. They’d been making threats for a fair while, and must have decided to act.  They came to the house while my brother and I were at school (though where my youngest brother was, I do not know). They took her to a house in the country, and there, with her petrified at what they might do, they took out a kit, and began cooking up a dose. By now she’d figured out what they were doing. She had initially thought they were either going to scare her, rape her, or kill her, in ascending order of awfulness. But watching the guy with the spoon and the lighter, and wondering where the other guy was, she intervened. He must have been dithering with the spike, because she claims she looked him in the eye, pulled up her sleeve, dumping it on the kitchen table and just stated, “For Christs’ sake [Jimmy], just fucking do it. I can’t live like this anymore, and you can’t live like this anymore. Just fucking do it.”

He let her live.

F,FLP

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

I think if you had the impression that this story was mine and mine alone, you would be mistaken. While I have become the narrator, in truth this story is the tale of all my family. My thinking is, while we have become so very used to seeing ourselves as individuals, we cannot truly see ourselves in isolation. All the things that make up this fabric of individual lives are woven out of the threads of the lives of our forebears. Nothing is new or magical, though many may attempt to convince themselves otherwise.

My mother finds herself then, parent to a child she had not expected to have, a mirror of her own mother, except in the comfort of her situation. She tells a story of bringing me home from the hospital. She had received the customary baby-shower from her workmates (she worked until she was perhaps 8 months pregnant), but was too ashamed to admit that she would be adopting me out, and so secretly gave away my baby clothes and the things she had received. As a consequence I was brought home in clothes from the hospital, several sizes too small, a big 10-pound lad in a 6-pound bonnet.

We made do for another 18 years, she and I. Never bereft or missing the things we needed, but never completely fitting or comfortable.

I cannot say that it was an easy childhood, but it was far far from the hell some children are put through. I learned many things; such as thrift, the emotional value of objects as treasures, the value of a true friendship, not to want too much (for it only leads to dissatisfaction and anxiety, a lesson I had to re-learn many many times), to accept difference with calm, to see the world from the bottom looking up, and finally, to accept that everything is a veneer – true colours lie beneath the appearance.

It’s appropriate that my very first memory is from my return to New Zealand, in what must have been November of 1971. Strangely, it is a view of me being taken from a Sydney to Auckland plane. I am being brought out of the doorway of the plane, and carried down the gantry to my Grandparents, who will look after me until my mother can afford the airfare home. The perspective of the memory is external to me, meaning that I see myself swaddled in blankets being carried ‘towards myself’.

But this memory is so old that it has become genuine, a tale told to me when I was very very young, impressed for so long that I cannot shake it, and see it as how the event unfolded. In a way, I remember what someone else saw, imagined and etched into the mind of a pre-schooler. This means that my first memory is not my own, but is collectivised, a shared past and a reference point imparted to me by someone who had an entirely different picture in their own mind. And which is the more true?

F,FLP

 

Because it guided me for many years

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which you belong, and to that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and  to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

Marcus Aurelius, Book II, 4. Meditations.

 

Falling, Folding Leaves of Paper

It was in Balmain that my uncle and mother met again. He must must have been preparing to go to India and was a disciple in Sydney, now bearing the name Achurya Das. I have a photo of him holding me, his head shaved, the paint on his forehead, in the characteristic Krishna robes.

My mother tells the story of him returning from the temple. He carries in his hand dust, gathered carefully from the shoes of Prabhupada himself. She bent in for a closer look, and sneezed into it.

On another occasion he was waded out into a deep pond to gather a lily flower or lotus which he somehow does not touch with his hands, he returns to show it to her, a perfect flower, unaffected by man. She had a good poke around with her finger.

I would imagine that while Achurya Das had finally found the guru for whom he had been seeking, my mother was still without substitute for the Catholicism of her youth. Worse, her scepticism for religions other than Christianity appears to have been normal for a woman of her generation – deep despite the pretension to open-mindedness the Hippies represented. But for this I can hardly blame her, the her then hardly differs from many attitudes towards mysticism prevalent in my own contemporary society. In that regard, she was merely ahead of the game, yet again.

The most interesting upshot of her being in Sydney in 1970, apart from the obvious want to be near her older brother, was of course, me. Australia was then as it is now, more socially advanced than New Zealand. In particular, it accommodated young women in ‘the family way’ with a tolerance New Zealand did not. And so it was that my mother, like generations of young women before her, found herself there on the edge of that great desert, making the choice. Because while unwed pregnancy, and residence with our nearest neighbour until the shameful act is less evident, is a fine old tradition – safe and clinical termination of unwanted children was very new.

It often confuses liberal friends when I profess to being anti-abortion, but pro-choice, because the two are often characterised as mutually exclusive. But, trying to imagine the feelings of a young woman, largely alone in an unforgiving and partially alien city, finding herself with the choice to terminate my life, or not, the larger political argument is trivial. How would I consider her to have made any choice but the correct one? And so I often think of the potential lives destroyed by termination when reflecting upon my own, and reflect upon the manner in which my birth permanently and irrevocably altered the trajectory of my mother’s life, and I see there an act of great love, selflessness.

For not only did she decide not to end me, she further chose to keep me from a pre-arranged adoption favoured by the authorities of the day. And so while my uncle may have immersed himself in the mysticism of the exotic East, my mother surrendered herself to a fate much more complex, a path more difficult, that a great many women decline.

F,FLP

 

Kitchen Update: September

With Chef Du Plunge verging on 10 months old I decided that it’s probably time for another update.

“Things going well”.

Not much more to state than that really! I did, just this very hour, watch him pulling himself up from sitting to standing because he wanted to see what was in the bath. And that is very exciting. His Tauranga grandma predicted that he’ll likely “just get up and walk”, and the testament is a lack of crawling combined with the willingness to stand (and if at all possible jump up and down) at every occasion.

Mind you, I’ve likely jinxed the whole thing…

The main change since the last posting is that the wee man has gone to day-care and has been coming home with the expected constant round of colds. I swear little kids are basically Petri dishes… No colds or flu for the first two years we’ve been in this apartment, but pretty-much non-stop sneezing since we sent him to care! No drama but. It’s just wipe up the muckus, ensure he’s sleeping alright (not too much of a drama, he’s never really slept through the night and we’re kind of used to it), and get on with it.

He’s a great kid though. Rarely unhappy, laughs when he gets himself into a difficult spot (say by falling over sideways), loves his mum and dad, has learned to play “when you’re happy and you know it” and “catch”, and likes to join in when everyone laughs. What more can you want than that?

In other news, his daycare is in Newlands, and we’re thinking pretty seriously about making the move up there. We’ve considered our options, and we simply can’t afford an apartment that has enough space AND the safety this little guy needs – actually, let me rephrase that – we’d need a mortgage so large that we would leave ourselves no ‘wiggle-room’, so we’re heading to the burbs. Second Chef’s parent’s are looking like they’ll sell us their place, while they move to a different clime, and there’s something special about bringing him up in his grandparent’s house.

Too many Kiwis only see houses as assets, when they should see homes, you know?

So big changes afoot here in the City. I’m doing my best to stay true to the green values, so there is lots of debate about the best method of travel, shortest travel times, minimising use of our second-hand car and the like. All good really.

Image lifted from this crazy site.

 

Slow death by hypocrisy

What I’m finding most galling at the minute is the extreme levels of hypocrisy surrounding any discussion of climate change. Between outright deniers of poor intellect who cannot understand science, politically-motivated deniers who see that it is insane to continue to burn fossil fuels but do so in order to maintain their primary interest – themselves in the manner – and climate change opponents who often go to extreme lengths of make an arse of themselves and those around them, I have become highly cynical.

Worse, I think we’re all doomed. Climate change is inevitable, and we can only hope that the destruction it wrecks will only destroy civilisations, and not humanity itself (because the planet itself should remain viable for life, unless we really, really screw it up). Out of the wreckage should emerge a smarter humanity. We hope.

Having said we’re doomed, I’m doing my best to ensure that it doesn’t happen. I recycle. I cut back on consumption. I only travel as far as I have to, for work or play. I’m doing what I can to keep my air travel down. I purchase low-CO2 products because the market should be sending signals to the corporations that we aren’t interested in their shit.

You know, I do the “right thing”, and encourage (but do not demand) others to do the same.

I despair though, because self-interest is such that people will gladly see their children’s future pissed away for their own short-term benefit. They will jeopardise everything because they want a little more luxury (even simple things like fruits from out of season and shipped half-way round the world using fossil fuels) and are more interested in their needs than the likelihood that millions will die when the global climate changes everything we know.

So I despair, and wonder what in the hell I can do to make a difference. How I can, one man, change all this? And I gave up.