Busytown: Less is more
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I don't know why anyone would feel sorry for Ihimaera. His plagiarism is from many sources, in numerous locations across the book. This is no mistake, it is deliberate. It is also a deliberate act against his publisher, assuming (reasonably) that they were not colluding with him.
Best, at this stage, to send it to the paper recyclers.
I think that there is a strong case for intertextuality, and it sounds like if he'd been open about his appropriation and reinterpretation of the works he'd have a much stronger work, but a thoroughly different work.
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I think she is inviting you to a swingers party
Ding dong!
I think that there is a strong case for intertextuality, and it sounds like if he'd been open about his appropriation and reinterpretation of the works he'd have a much stronger work, but a thoroughly different work.
That would have been fantastic. And it's interesting, because I think that is a major part of Ihimaera's literary kaupapa - see the bit in Guy Somerset's article where he raises the question of who owns history.
As far as I can tell, though, the "reinterpreted" quotations are mainly window-dressing, and the properly cited secondary sources, especially when it comes to the Tasmanian section, are used more or less uncritically, as pieces of "fact."
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To be fair, it's a lot easier to lift a melody unawares ('My Sweet Lord' from 'He's So Fine', for those who don't know) than it is to take whole sentences, tweak them and insert them into text. That's totally, uh, 'awares' on Ihimaera's part.
You mean like this:
In 1973, "Come Together" was the subject of a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Big Seven Music Corp. (owned by Morris Levy) who was the publisher of Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me". This was because it sounded similar musically to Berry's original and shared some lyrics (Lennon sang "Here come ol' flattop, he come groovin' up slowly" and Berry's had sung"Here come a flattop, he was movin' up with me"). Before recording, Lennon and McCartney deliberately slowed the song down and added a heavy bass riff in order to make the song more original.[3] After settling out of court, Lennon promised to record three other songs owned by Levy.[4] "You Can't Catch Me" and "Ya Ya" were released on Lennon's 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll, but the third, "Angel Baby", remained unreleased until after Lennon's death. Levy again sued Lennon for breach of contract, and was eventually awarded $6,795.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Together
The Beatles did a lot of intertextual stuff in this vein; 'Green Sleeves' and 'In the Mood' and 'God save the Queen' in "All you need is love", "King Lear" in "I am the Walrus", whatever in Revolution 9, and hiphop almost single-handedly changed the the industry and public's attitude. Most people would see this as nothing more than a money issue, leaving the richer artist the greater freedom to steal.
Well, it seems to me the tiny problem with that is that English isn't moribund.
So true, Although more standardized than Samuel Johnson's time, it's clearly a WIP. Your post also got me thinking about the freedom offered by an alphabet and the potential for nu werds.
actually, that sentence doesn't even compute. I'm just not in the crucifixion business.
Crucifixion as represented in 'The life of Brian', not that other guy. Stringing a guy up and letting him sing for a while..And yeah, still not the most appropriate metaphor, I just wanted to stretch the Christian thing...
Theft is art?
If you can afford the lawyers.
For the rest of us; acknowledgments. Guess Witi may have figured he's now rich enough to let his lawyers finish the job. Such is art within the western framework. I'm pretty sure if any legal shit goes down with this book Witi owes you a beer Jolisa for the work you've done in identifying 'oversighted' passages, As well as giving the book a huge public profile.
I find bizarro in the statement issued how Witi seems to believe he's going to get round all this by contacting the authors whose work he did not acknowledge to apologise for the oversight. Is that going to suffice?
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The University of Auckland does not care.
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or each word number of possible tenses
Just 12 active tenses, 12 days of Christmas, 12 male disciples...;)
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Even in that little purple sphere of words.....
When I saw the glorious southern seascape, glittering by day with sun-stars and glowing by night under the gleaming Southern Cross and that arching canopy of a million stars...
do I detect another false step, a modern sensibility breaking through the thin fabric of his historicism? Take a look at the sky - the Sothern Cross is far from the dominant feature - Orion out-punches it ten-fold - but one that was significant, particularly to mariners, because it was the constellation you never see in the northern hemisphere.
Would an early New Zealander, not a mariner, have found the Southern Cross dominant? I think not. Also, were are not actually under it much of the time, if ever. It rather hangs around the bottom, looking sullenly Antipodean.
As for your earliear response to my post, J. you refer to a great story. I haven't tried to read Whale Rider, but there was clearly a pretty good story in it. Is it that WI is a great storyteller who desperately wants to be, and is not, a great writer? Stranger and sadder things have happened. -
Who knocked the manuscript into shape? Who compiled the list of sources, and who checked it against the author's own notes? Was the manuscript read page by page?
Don't famous authors with jobs in academia get grad students to compile all the local colour and historical stuff, so they can just stick to plot and character development and a few literary flourishes? Maybe his little helpers accidentally lumped some of their offerings together under a single reference?
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Spike, that's an extremely astute set of observations.
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@spike
Would an early New Zealander, not a mariner, have found the Southern Cross dominant? I think not. Also, were are not actually under it much of the time, if ever.
Very good point.
The Southern Cross is actually not that easy to find in the sky -- ironically, a lot of people looking at the Southern Sky for the first time see the "false cross" which is actually more "cross like" and a bit bigger. (Although the stars are not as bright)
In fact the easiest way to identify the Southern Cross is via the presence of the 5th star, which renders it slightly kite-shaped (epsilon-crucis, it is shown on the Australian flag).
The Southern Cross is actually the smallest modern constellation in terms of area.
On the other hand, the Milky Way is indeed best seen from southern skies (since the galactic center is south of the apparent celestial equator) and must have been stunning from a sailing ship on a clear, moonless light.
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(continued from above post) The overwriting is one thing (when it's not purple spheres and glittering stars, it's whales and rainbows) but the difficulty stepping outside of one's present-day understanding of the universe is quite another. And that's a perfect, subtle, example. Nice close reading!
I take your point about the distinction between story-telling and writing. There is something rather intimidating (to me, anyway) about having to sustain a historical thought-experiment over 500 pages, and I wonder if anxiety about being able to do so might have led to the surfeit of research and all that historical buttressing and scaffolding. I don't know. Perhaps the story could be told from the inside-out for better results... and/or as a series of linked short stories?
Maybe the thing is that he's good at writing what he's good at writing. For all that Ihimaera has come to disavow them, his early works still really work for me. There's a powerful love and compassion and warmth and also sly critique in those stories (and in the good bits of Whale Rider) that, while not to everyone's taste, is a distinctive 'voice' and a memorable one, and we'd be the poorer without it.
I see his discomfort with aspects of those early works, but I think if sentimentalism is how one finds one's stories, then one should embrace it, not be embarrassed by. But then I'm a sentimental soul.
As Oscar Wilde (another sentimental type) is said to have said, at least on greeting cards: "Be yourself; everyone else is taken."
And there's Judy Garland's version, too: "Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else."
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The REM track "Hope" is an unconscious rework of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" (and they give him a writing credit).
The Flaming Lips track "Fight Test" contains elements (shall we say) from Cat Stevens "Father and Son", again unconsciously (Cat sued).
I spotted both of those almost immediately, despite having no real musical skills - I wonder how the producer and band didn't, but I guess its the effect of repetition.
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I have never felt otherwise than engaged with Witi Ihimaera's 'sentimentality' - in his writing. I found his early works truly heart-enhancing - and the language he used, worked. Plus - as one of the earliest published Maori fiction writers (J. C. Sturm and Rore Habib were earlier) he was a huge role model. Like Pat Grace.
He didnt have to do this to himself, his reputation.
Spike - I agree with your comments.
Jolisa - you have been so astute!I've read this thread with great pleasure - and unhappiness. Craig's Samuel Johnson (now, *there* was a wonderfully-flawed-but humane-human!)aphorism does sum it up.
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I spotted both of those almost immediately, despite having no real musical skills - I wonder how the producer and band didn't, but I guess its the effect of repetition.
Same for me with "Shakermaker" by Oasis and the Coca-Cola song "I'd like to teach the world to sing". But Oasis' career has been one long pastiche-take ..
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To Tessa Houghton - I'm the Turnitin administrator for a university, and I think that breaking a novel into 20MB chunks and waiting for an hour for each comparison, then analysing the results, would be a job you'd remember for a while. However, I guess major publishers can do bulk deals with TII; the academic journals all do this now and so do lots of conferences vetting papers.
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Gene Autry's 1937 There's A Goldmine in the Sky.
Not that anyone ever claimed that Hoki Mai was an original tune. -
Gregor, as a matter of general curiousity, how does your institution treat recycling sections of a writer's own work, eg. delivering different versions of the same paper in different contexts? Although not very germane to Ihimaera, it seems a lot easier to plagiarise yourself than it has been in the past.
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O Joe Wylie! That was so poignant!
And yep, modern (from about 1890)kapahaka groups have borrowed tunes and set Maori to them. Not only 'Hoki Mai' - right up to "Blue Smoke" and "Pokarekare Ana"-
just as "God Save The Queen/King" also borrows its music-
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Just quickly...
Richard: agreed (about the numbers)!
Islander: I'm gonna leap in and defend Ruru Karaitiana here. Whilst the tune to 'Blue Smoke' has echoes of 'Carolina Moon', the melody is actually (mostly) different. Try playing the melody to 'Carolina Moon' and singing 'Blue Smoke' along with it -- you'll get stuck!
And don't forget that Gracie Bloody Fields knowingly ripped off 'Hine E Hine' with her 'Now is the Hour' -- so it went both ways! (Although, from memory, the tune is also similar(-ish) to a C19th French classical piece).
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David H - that is a very interesting take - and you're right!
I am now going to dissect - in a cherishing kindly listening sense - 'Blue Smoke " more (it's one of those family -known songs we wind up singing at takiaue.)Anyone appreciate the Ana Hato version of 'Hine e hine'? Can post it-
She was dying at the time, and the song is - redolent of that-
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Jolisa wrote:
And should excerpts always be marked in some manner in the text, or can they be spliced in as long as you note somewhere that you consulted the book?
But that is absurd, don't you think? Imagine reading a novel then coming upon a description that is suddenly in quote marks with a footnote or endnote! No, better that you write a novel using all your own words, even if you have consulted other works for information.
And i don't think novelists (providing they are not copying directly from others of course) should list all their resources, either. I think this reduces a novel to an assemblage of facts and diminishes the work of imagination that goes into it. A novel is not an academic paper, nor is it non-fiction.
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Sue,
I love reading the resources behind novels as it's often a way to discover some great non fiction reads
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I hate it when people engage in off-thread discussions, but I can't help myself here:
I am now going to dissect - in a cherishing kindly listening sense - 'Blue Smoke " more
When you do, try playing it on the piano or (better still) ukulele.
We mostly hear it played on the guitar with the chords:
Blue [G]smoke goes drifting by into the [C]deep blue sky,
And [D]when I think of home I sadly [G]sigh...But on the piano or ukulele you can play:
Blue [G]smoke goes drifting [G7]by into the [C]deep blue [A7]sky,
And [D]when I think of [D7] home I sadly [G]sigh...... which really brings up the melody. (For some reason it sounds like shit when you play these chords on the guitar -- I don't know why.)
You can do similar chord trickery in the chorus.
And (speaking... ahem... for myself) yes, please, to Ana Hato's version of 'Hine E Hine'!
Back on thread:
I love reading the resources behind novels as it's often a way to discover some great non fiction reads
There is possible danger for the novelist in this. I liked Pat Barker until I read the sources for her Regeneration Trilogy, i.e. Graves, Sassoon, etc. and realized how inferior her writing was to theirs. After reading the sources she seemed -- to employ the terminology of comparative literature -- a bit crap.
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@Gregor Ronald
What interests me is that Turn It In offers a "personal" service called WriteCheck for the purpose of verifying whether you have cited your material properly, and runs your essay through the same "pipeline" as the regular faculty version, for the cost of a few $$.
Ironically, this seems to provide a service that is mostly of interest to potential plagiarizers -- if you do steal something, WriteCheck will let you know whether you have personalized it sufficiently to evade (automated) detection.
Nice for TurnItIn, since they now have two income streams, but I am hard put to imagine a student who was not consciously plagiarizing that would use the service.
And never mind the IP issues associated with TurnItIn retaining the submitted essays as part of its corpus.
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Ukulele chords are always on topic, David. You know that.
But on the piano or ukulele you can play:
Blue [G]smoke goes drifting [G7]by into the [C]deep blue [A7]sky,
And [D]when I think of [D7] home I sadly [G]sigh...I play it in C, but transposing into your basso profundo cowboy G, I'd use an A minor where you've got A7.
It's sadder that way. Sigh.
After reading the sources she seemed -- to employ the terminology of comparative literature -- a bit crap.
Ah, but see, was it interesting crap? One of the things that my (ahem) professional studies gave me was the ability to appreciate a beautiful failure. There's almost always more to say about one of those than there is about something that succeeds in what it set out to do. And finding things to say is our business.
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You're reading it to literally. The Southern Cross metaphorically 'gleams' in the Southern Sky. Just like Witi Ihimaera is metaphorically the 'author' under the copyright act.
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