We need to look closer at who plagiarists are. It may help us more clearly understand what has been plagiarized and when.
The widespread pathology of plagiarism.
It’s not everywhere – it’s pretty much the same people doing it repeatedly. What’s disturbing is that people that get caught plagiarizing falling into one of two categories:
1)A student of some kind, taking a shortcut of some kind. Maybe not writing the paper, maybe just not sourcing it properly. Sometimes these students are not plagiarists at all, but they fall victim to the overstimulated self-importance of certain academics: for example, a professor once leveled an accusation at me that I had committed plagiarism because I dared use the word “parvenu” to describe the rise of Cicero within Roman society. Her basis was founded on nothing more than her personal belief that no state educated university student had the vocabulary or, for that matter, basic ability necessary to turn up the word.
2)A would-be writer who pathologically passes off others’ work as his or her own.
The confusion about bad documentation versus outright plagiarism
Material being free does not influence plagiarism either way. The people that do it likely prefer not to pay – but having to shell out for the goods doesn’t stop the compulsive ones anyway.
Still, there is some anti-plagiarist thought that has gone from hypervigilance into a misunderstanding of the nuances between plagiarized and documented.
A person quoting material is not plagiarizing – although that person may violate copyright, if too much material is quoted without permission.
Plagiarism is actually two criminal acts: a)fraud, passing someone else’s work off as your own and b)copyright violation, distributing work you do not have the right to distribute. Both aspects need to be there for something to be plagiarized.
A librarian is a far better resource on whether or not something constitutes plagiarism than is the average teacher or professor. Having direct experience with teachers from birth forward, I can tell you that there are a lot of things that we believe to be fact that are simply matters of opinion and teachers fall prey to this thought inversion all too often.
Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
More than one English professor has waxed on about Hemingway. His prose was tight, his story tragic, and his habits all of the masculine nature that heterosexual literate men seem to aspire to. When presented with my blunt observation that Hemingway, outside of literary laudation, bores the living shit out of me, I’m met with defensiveness and even hostility. But c’mon, if a date is anything like reading Hemingway… it’s a boring date where you walk away analyzing his insecurities for years.
This love of Hemingway seems to translate to a love of language. Words forming curls of image around specific ideas and descriptions. Just as all commercial perfumes smell of synthesized grapefruit and musk to me, all these laudable literary loves seem to tell the same story over and over, in the same way. I feel like language lovers are a secondary type of narcissist: they are so accustomed to the sounds of these homogeneous voices that they mistake the homogeneity for quality. Literary writing repeats sounds and rhythms. Like four chords of a pop song, the literary has its own pattern: write a catchy scenic intro, introduce a controversial subject and in the process reference personal upbringing whether or not there’s any reason to give a damn. If it involves disease, tragedy or violence, you’ve got yourself an award winner.
It bores me. As this is the year of doing what I like, and not what I should like, or told I’m should like, I’m putting it flat out: I get little to no pleasure out of “literary” fiction. Reading the stacks of highbrow material is just as stupid as carrying on with a sexual partner who just doesn’t care if I have an orgasm.
Genre fiction, on the other hand, may share the same plot across thousands of novels. It may use simple words. Nobody’s writing to show off in genre fiction, and because of that, I can actually show up at their page and have a good time. (more…)
Despite the rather buried publicity about your rumored breakdown, I can see from checking IMDB that you are working. Good for you!
Just in case you are feeling isolated, I thought you might want to try this book – while it’s more an excuse to buy crayons than it is self-help, it’s gotten me writing and enjoying it again (as opposed to just writing.) It’s also given me a place to stash the crazy that is legacy and tool to all creative types.
It’s normal to try it (the book) and quit a few times. It does good things but it’s kind of like cleaning a closet; everyone is surprised at all the stuff they packed in there. You do have to have some sense of “higher power” or you might find it doesn’t work. While not agnostic, I have agnostic moments – picturing a 12 volt battery does the job well enough for me.
I work with a cluster of other artists scattered throughout the States. One is a photographer and soapmaker your own age. Two of us are in our late 30s; we knit, manage museums, write, perfume, create, tend children and don’t have any children.
I’m not going to mention sending this to you. If you’d like to interact, you’re welcome to use a pseudonym. I don’t need to know who you are – it’s not like I do now!
As for who I am… Anna Wintour would hate me. Agents and producers have spit on the ground at the sight of me. I take it all with rapturous glee. I’ve been through my own hell, some of my own making and some not. I’m sure this sounds familiar to you.
Your body language in photos suggests you are a person of poise and introversion – or your handler is. I do get the sense you have creative capacity. I’d love to see it or hear it – I don’t need to see or hear you for that to be possible.
Best regards and wishes for your health and happiness -
Let me make this clear: before you read this and project all kinds of assumptions on me – I’m in a reasonably happy place in my life right now. I’m not going to apologize for that or qualify it; if another person having any kind of stability enrages you, something is wrong with you. What I talk about below is my own experience with daily, persistent bullying at home and at school. Once I got away from that environment, the bullying slowed down and stopped altogether when I moved to Minnesota. What I experience here is random, high context social violence. It still pisses me off, but it’s nothing like the persistent teardown I had to deal with living in Northwest Indiana. Nobody has a preconceived role for me here so no one has a reason to try to force me to be anything but myself. I would guess – I have no data for it – that most adults really affected by bullying are to some degree still repeating the relationships they established in childhood in one form or another, or are still in those relationships that encourage the pattern of repetition.
The above is a video by Shane Koyzan, talking about his experience with bullying – and the experiences of others. I’ve been pretty up-front that in my childhood I was the target of emotional and physical violence inside and outside the home. It made for an atmosphere of constant fear. As Shane notes, adults had an attitude in the 1980s and 1990s that kids that were bullied “needed” to experience it so they could learn to deal with the real world. Now we know that that’s just a symptom of how messed up and unsuitable for parenting those parents were. Because letting this stuff slide – it really does do long-term damage.
My situation was less overtly violent (most of the time) but more complicated for a lot of reasons, too many to list here. I’m still guessing as to what the hell some people’s problem with me was. Most of it, ultimately, was that I refused subservience. This was not the conscious reason, just the primary one. I want to say “I made it worse for myself” by fighting back when I did. But that’s about as true as a rape victim “making it worse” by fighting back. It’s already bad – and fighting back lets you keep a sense of self by refusing to behave like a target/object just because someone has made you out to be one. Of course, since most people were only trying to force me into a subservient role subconsciously, all their conscious (and often not very smart) minds could put together was that I was somehow “uppity,” and “needed taking down a peg,” even though in the vast majority of cases I had done nothing to them personally beyond showing up in class and once in awhile having an interesting answer for the teacher. Smart people aren’t the submissives – and that pisses the monkeys off, thus all the anti-nerd violence in the past.
Moral: always fight back when you can. You may not win but you’ll at least feel better about yourself than if you didn’t. Also, “just ignore them” is bad advice that will only cause people to escalate. Better advice: work up an arsenal of ways to confuse the hell out of people.
So, as a response to the poem, this is my poem:
Dead Goat
Female through no fault of my own
collared as “uppity trash” based on one or two words spoken by my mother
the sticks and stones thrown, those were OK with teachers, OK with parents
as long as I didn’t do better than the favorites
for quarterback, starter, donor’s kid
under teacher’s watchful eye and full ear and full insistence
I stood still and silent to take the pelting.
Hiding couldn’t happen -
born too big, never dwindling
and it was a game, the few days I tried to hide -
Drag that goat out into the spotlight
for a full on beatdown. Most of it words.
Sometimes hands.
Oh sure, it got better -
for me. Just me.
I escaped. That’s how.
Thanks to me, the bullies have made it harder
for any other goat-slave to get the hell out.
Nobody’s an adult until age 25 unless you let the government use you up and throw your body away;
it’s that, or the endless slavery of debt now.
I took the debt. It was easier to live with than my so-called community.
I broke a lot of old traps – they lie to you about who you are, that’s one of them.
Then they lie to you about who they are, how they feel, what they want for you. They act like wanting things for you is any of their business.
That’s the other big trap. Or they just don’t tell you anything at all, mock you for daring to ask because they think it gives you no tools to defend yourself.
In every single case, these bullies want to help themselves to a piece of your mind and a piece of your life, your peace, your life, because for too many reasons and no reason at all what they have is not enough for them.
Maybe what they have sucks.
That’s not your problem – but they will lie to you hard, raining forth rocks of how little you are and what you have and why therefore, you owe them.
It is all bullshit.
It isn’t as easy to get out anymore, it isn’t as easy to break the traps.
Maybe that’s kind of my fault.
I never learned the games, the games girls play
because I still wanted to like me.
So when Maureen the Queen came around with her entitled bitch sting,
my only strategy for her attempting to nickname me “Beating Post”
was to tell her to fuck off.
It was all slavery or enslavement – I can’t believe how many people wanted me for their future secretary, or worse, mother of their child.1
She acted like no one had ever said that to her before, like no one had objected to her abuse. Oh, the trauma! Victim! Victim! Shriek to the teacher!
There were other, subtle things, asking me about how I dressed or to agree that band wasn’t as important as basketball
(To me it was all an absurd Roman circus, perhaps a lost circle of hell.)
When I could manage it, I just didn’t talk to those girls.
They were and often still are horrible people.
The gamers and grabbers, though, they were worse -
relentless yelling, grabbing my body, usually boys but girls too,
entitled by parents’ money and teachers’ silence
to amuse themselves upon my protesting person.
Oh, the whining when consequences did land -
it wasn’t like they did those things to a person,
not when the Goat was involved.2
The adults gently encouraged these gropings, graspings, screaming of “slut!” when I refused their touch -
“Boys will be boys!” and other rape-encouragements;
“This bullying is how you learn,” thus absolving themselves of all responsibility -
and learn what, exactly?
I learned that adults are no use and that my community was not to be trusted.
I learned that I am safest among strangers.
It’s been almost twenty years since then.
I’m still uppity. Maybe more so.
I live among strangers, and thank the gods for it.
Some parents – those untrustworthy adults of before -
want to know why I don’t return,
as though I should be grateful for the abuse.
I tell them, “There’s nothing and no one here.”
I hope they know that I count them as no one.
The scapegoat escaped,
and most likely got replaced.
I fear for her, that girl,
whoever she is -
fat and uppity and imaginative.
For me they had traps
and I had the privilege of heterosexuality.
If she’s the slightest bit gay …
landmines.
Poor goat.
I’m rooting for you to duck the barbed wire
before you graze somewhere safer, maybe California.
A reference to how I feel about having a child with *those specific people. Not a fan of motherhood for myself but I do not automatically equate all motherhood with slavery. [↩]
Or the Roach. Of course I knew about that. They were my friends first, moron. [↩]
Nathan Fillion at the 2005 Serenity premiere. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
E-readers, rampant piracy and just plain outdated business models have turned publishing into totally different animal from what it was, or what it has ever been fictionalized to be. Just like most actresses have bodies of ridiculous proportions, the characters themselves enjoy careers of ridiculous dimensions. The show Castle comes to mind. Castle is a best-selling, richer than God novelist who wines and dines beautiful women. Only his duties as a father hold him back from losing himself in the mirror ball of relentless glamor. So charismatic is both Nathan Fillion and his character that he co-stars with a cardboard cutout and no one seems to care. Book tours happen every few seasons because that’s what publishers do… in fiction land.
Now, to reality: the only modern novelist that falls in the “richer than God” category is Steven King. I’m pretty sure that most days of his life, his wife is lucky if he puts on some pants before he scratches his balls and heads over to the keyboard. His breath probably stinks, his glasses have smears and at this point in his career he likely does his damnedest to get out of book tours. No, we’re not discussing Neil Gaiman/Mr. Palmer here. Dudes that marry rock stars do not count.
Divorcing a Real Witch went to editors this week. Since then, the question asked most about the book: “So when are you going on tour?”
I really wish more people would ask, “Great, so how can I help you get the word out?”
Books tours… don’t really happen anymore. They didn’t all that much in the first place. While I am in the coming months putting together workshops on divorce and handparting ceremonies for Pagans that I plan to offer to metaphysical shops within a 500 mile radius (and perhaps anywhere with friends that have relatively few cats and crashable couches) but that will not constitute a book tour. That’s stuff I’m going to have to pay for myself. First, most of those shops require room rental. Then there’s gas, food, lodging, supplies… I won’t be able to offer my workshops free. Not only will I need to pay for gas for my car and lodging, there’s the matter of assembling the material in the first place.
My book especially will not get any special treatment. First, it’s not a glamorous subject: divorce. I write it as a journalist, not as a mental health expert, famous mistress or even as a Big Name Pagan. It’s a bummer to begin with and all too easily buried under the topic of same-sex marriage.
Next, It’s a first-time book from a first-time book author. I’ve been published before, but never something book length and more than 10,000 words. My publisher has no idea how this is going to turn out. They’re going on an educated guess based on my willingness to market the book and based on their current goals in their corner of the publishing market.
Because the publisher is relatively small and niche based, so is my marketing budget. To get them to help me with marketing I have to earn it. So that means the first 1000 copies have to come from my own marketing efforts. A book tour will not be how that happens.
How will it happen?
With a lot of help from my friends.
By help, I mean:
tell everyone who might have even the slightest interest in the subject of divorce from a non-montheistic perspective about the book. Yes, divorcees, of course -but sociologists, anthropologists, nosy people, non-denominational ministers, people coming out of long non-marital breakups, people preparing for marriage – tell them all. You can start by sharing this blog post EVERYWHERE.
Pre-order the book when pre-orders come available. No, really, that makes a MASSIVE difference in how long a book stays in print. I’m skipping putting in an index so you can get it to your e-reader with as much ease as possible. Yes, there will be a print run too.
Write about me. Interview me. Have me on your podcast or vidcast. Pester me to write something for your publication on this topic. Now is the time to hit me up. I give a great interview.
Ask me to come to your shop and teach a workshop – maybe something on “turning your ex from a toad to just that guy/gal you know.”
So no, I’m not going to have a book tour. That does mean that you can be part of what makes Divorcing a Real Witch successful – and through this I can bring some success your way, too.
This is an entry for the AbsoluteWrite blog chain. At the end of this entry, you can follow links to what my fellow writers are contributing.
“But it’s bullshit!”
She actually stomped her foot. I didn’t even see three year olds do that. “OK, why is it bullshit?”
“Why should what I wear make a different in whether or not I get promoted?”
I wanted to say I don’t know honey, it’s corporate. It’s what she wanted me to say. But I couldn’t do it. I knew why, and since I didn’t have the “make it easier on myself” impulse that the rest of humanity seemed to enjoy, I tried to explain without diving into layer after cultural layer. “It’s about demonstrating you’re serious about your job. Clothing is a language.”
“But that’s shallow!”
In my opinion, clothing used as a second nonverbal language is anything but shallow, especially when used for means more ambitious than signaling sexual availability. But she wasn’t prepared for that conversation – most people never are. “It is what it is. If you want to move up, you need to dress the part.” I couldn’t think of a simple way to put it, and I didn’t like the sudden role of having to persuade her of something that I thought most colleges taught when they did the job placement coaching at the end of the senior semester.
She stomped off, and I sighed. It was yet another demonstration that I was SO not Gen Y, and barely a thread hanging on to Gen X, where we wanted to be cooler than the Boomer, but were just getting to old and too smart to go with it. Someday, she might learn – it wasn’t about breaking the rules or knowing what rules to break. It was following the rules like a string in a maze, and throwing in your own knots. You didn’t get the scissors to clip the rules until you’d been to the end of the thread and back a few times.
The following work is fiction, part of the May 2012 Absolute Write blog chain. To read more zombie apocalypse stories, go take a look at my fellow writers’ blogs at the end of this post.
two members of the Marauders
No one goes out alone anymore, ever. No joggers, no pit bull walkers, no mamas with baby strollers. This means you don’t see cutesie Facebook posts about squirrels and bird feeders, or rabbits hopping down the street in the Warehouse District. No one really monitored the urban wildlife. A whole new species appeared in the ecosphere, since that’s what zombies are, really – and we were a little too preoccupied with our own survival to really worry about how zombies interacted with animals not already marked as food or pet.
Because of this, no one in Minneapolis thought about the turkeys.
At some point before the zombies got loose – or the meth heads with the extra bad batch, who the hell knows? – some turkeys did not flock so much as they formed a tribe in Northeast Minneapolis. Joggers called them “the marauders.” Their status ranged from curiosity as they clustered in front of Foster’s funeral home, to annoyance when you wanted to parallel park on Johnson, to risk when one of the males went nuts and periodically assaulted a postal worker.
Someone, in a spare incongruous moment of panic probably did see it coming. But one way or the other, the theory didn’t get communicated until after it started happening.
I can’t myself remember the name for it – it’s not mimicry, but in that area. It was first observed in England, when some damn bird learned how to peck the foil off the cream covers on delivered milk. Within a month, every bird of its species was pecking its way to creaminess. Within a month, birds across the ocean in entirely different flocks got the memo. I wasn’t a biologist before all this happened so I don’t have a whole lot of memory retained for the details of how these things happen. The Raptor Center stayed strong for awhile, because its caretakers really loved those birds. Eventually though, some zombies got out into the country-like parts of Saint Paul where bands of police officers don’t go shooting much. When the sanctuary went down, it went down hard. This left several large, hungry birds without regular food. Birds that hunted, like eagles, turkey vultures, and owls.
No one was that surprised when the vultures started in on the zombies. Carrion so fresh it was still moving, but dead? To a vulture, that had to be like self-delivering caviar.
Mike and I watched the Youtube clip of two vultures descending on a zombie, tearing it apart by biting into each shoulder. The birds were pretty rare before, especially this far north; no one has any idea what it will do the long-term vulture population.
The vultures became favored spirits with those of us who did neighborhood watch from the balconies in my apartment complex. If we saw them circling, sure enough a zombie would come shuffling. My neighbor the cop and I were seeing a lot of circling, and sometimes we had to make judgement calls about whether to shoot the zombie or leave it to our raptor friends.
Then on Thursday came the marauders.
The vultures had circled that day, as Joe the cop and I were chatting across our balconies between firing shots about how pigeons had disappeared but birds of prey were now everywhere. What used to be at most four or five turkeys sighted at once was becoming more like 20 or 30. “No real predators for them,” Joe opined. I shrugged and fired at a guy who was dragging his leg behind him. Even before the zombies, animals associated with distant wilderness would sometimes attempt the urban lifestyle. Bears wandered into Saint Paul from time to time, but not as much in Minneapolis. I’d actually seen a coyote the week before, but since it was smaller than the wild turkeys, my bets were still on the turkeys.
The zombie with the dragging foot paused, swaying in front of the red door of the old theater prop shop across the street. Joe and I both held off – we’d used enough bullets, and this one was not going down neatly. The next delivery of ammo and potting soil (we were growing our own food in small spaces now) from the mysterious guys in the Hazmat suits wasn’t due for a week, so we had reason to go easy. We also liked leaving a little something for our bird friends.
A swathe of turkeys circled the corner, coming down from 20th street as a fresh batch of vultures circled above them. I counted twelve, thirteen, fourteen vultures in the sky and eighteen turkeys on the street below.
“I almost want to shoot one of ‘em for dinner!” Joe joked. He hadn’t taken well to involuntary vegetarianism. I had to wonder how many living things looked like drumsticks to him.
Bits of flesh were falling off the zombie, and he was flailing and moaning. Normally at that point the vultures descended, but something was different this time. They were waiting. One emitted what sounded almost like a wail – and the turkeys on the ground below struck.
A cloud of gobbling brown feathers formed around the zombie. Joe and I both tried to make out a bit of decaying head or foot from our four story overview.
In ten minutes, the noise died down and the turkeys gobbled on up Central Avenue en masse, a few pausing to vomit up bits of cloth before running to join the tribe.
The vultures descended in their place, gnawing at odd pieces of bone.
Joe and I stared at each other in silence, both of us with our hands still on our guns.
Damn.
Joe recovered first. “For the first time in six months, I am NOT fantasizing about KFC.”
Check out yet more Zombie Tales from my fellows at Absolute Write:
The exercise in Sound of Paper today is not good for public disclosure. When that happens, I’m trying to find videos on creativity, art appreciation bits, photography, or blog posts from other people traveling the Artist’s Way path.
Today’s about writing badly resonates with me. I have been making the last few years the path of the beginner. I lived with two perfectionists growing up – and as a fat child, I was utterly imperfect, beyond correction, and I am still treated by them as though this is some infraction I have committed against them personally because I am not exactly who they demanded I be. (No, G.O.D committed the infraction – it was one of this little “f you’s,” that the Creative Force drops after it watches things go on for awhile – sort of like this particular f-u from God to free-will interfering conservatives.) Instead, I have pursued my life as my fat, highly organized yet at times messy and beautiful self.*
What I’ve also been doing is taking up things I kinda/sorta want to do but told myself I couldn’t. I’m actually glorying in the criticism I’m getting of the bad art in Spellcasting picture book, and the perspective is helping me with the play I’m doing a first draft of as I dive heavily into the revisions of the Divorcing a Real Witch book. I can do it badly! Yes! It’s way more important than making it perfect. Someone else can fiddle with formatting and duck away from actually writing because it’s not “just right.” I get the secret:
NOTHING IS EVER JUST RIGHT. THAT’S WHY CREATION IS NOT STATIC.
*I have a reallygood life. It’s way better than what those tools were trying to force me into. And I am grateful for the composite DNA from my ancestors, the subvert messages from the few really caring teachers at my school, and for the surprisingly subversive tone of Sassy and Seventeen magazine in the 1990s.
The exercise in Sound of Paper today is not good for public disclosure. When that happens, I’m trying to find videos on creativity, art appreciation bits, photography, or blog posts from other people traveling the Artist’s Way path.
Today’s about writing badly resonates with me. I have been making the last few years the path of the beginner. I lived with two perfectionists growing up – and as a fat child, I was utterly imperfect, beyond correction, and I am still treated by them as though this is some infraction I have committed against them personally because I am not exactly who they demanded I be. (No, G.O.D committed the infraction – it was one of this little “f you’s,” that the Creative Force drops after it watches things go on for awhile – sort of like this particular f-u from God to free-will interfering conservatives.) Instead, I have pursued my life as my fat, highly organized yet at times messy and beautiful self.*
What I’ve also been doing is taking up things I kinda/sorta want to do but told myself I couldn’t. I’m actually glorying in the criticism I’m getting of the bad art in Spellcasting picture book, and the perspective is helping me with the play I’m doing a first draft of as I dive heavily into the revisions of the Divorcing a Real Witch book. I can do it badly! Yes! It’s way more important than making it perfect. Someone else can fiddle with formatting and duck away from actually writing because it’s not “just right.” I get the secret:
NOTHING IS EVER JUST RIGHT. THAT’S WHY CREATION IS NOT STATIC.
*I have a reallygood life. It’s way better than what those tools were trying to force me into. And I am grateful for the composite DNA from my ancestors, the subvert messages from the few really caring teachers at my school, and for the surprisingly subversive tone of Sassy and Seventeen magazine in the 1990s.
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