Posts by richard
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I'd buy the "exciting new development in literary technique" explanation if it had come out first, before the "dog-ate-my-homework" explanation.
On top of that (apart from the plagiarism) no-one who has read this book has found it be radically different from countless other historical novels. Thomas Pynchon it is not.
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It seems his original contrition and apology have been thrown overboard -- Prof. I. now he has gone rogue, and torn up the script (presumably provided by Penguin?) in favor of a "very, very exciting new approach to creating a framework to those new fictions".
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Just saw that The Trowenna Sea is the number one NZ fiction bestseller -- not just for the week ending Nov 7 but also for the week ending Nov 14. The second week being the period when the Listener cover was everywhere and the story was widely discussed.
And then:
Not for much longer. Breaking news: Witi Ihimaera will buy back all copies of the book, Penguin removing remaining stock from bookstores.
"Up like a rocket, down like a stick"
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I find it hard to criticize Chauvel.
If you replaced Beenie Man (who caused a certain amount of controversy when he was booked to play at a venue in New Haven, now that I think about it) with some benighted act that advocated the killing of (oh, I don't know) people with different melanin levels from their own, I doubt the "artist" would make it as far as the duty free shop at Auckland Airport before he was turned round and put on a plane back home.
But that sort of clown probably wouldn't be invited to the BDO in the first place.
What really seems to be going on here is that gay rights (and the right not have people advocating killing you because you're gay would seem to be one of these) may have made it into our laws, but they are not yet taken as seriously as those that prevent discrimination based on race or gender.
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First Man to Stuff 50 Marshmallows Up His Nose (Carl Crowley)
Toxteth O'Grady, surely
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Philip -- looks like you are getting your discussion.
However, I think the reason there was no real definitional debate about plagiarism is that most people would regard David Cauchi's comments as fairly self-evident (and his "po-faced motherfuckers" probably didn't help either, but never mind).
Yes, you are allowed to directly reference other work, yes the standards for visual media seem to be, on the face of them, a lot more permissive than those that apply to text, yes plagiarism is hard to define.
And yes, what do we make of po-mo pastiche and Youtube mashups...
So, yes, there does seem to be an element of "I know it when I see it" in play here. But that is true of almost every abstract concept you try to boil down to a simple litmus test.
Further the situation here does not really seem to call the definition of plagiarism itself into question -- a) Witi Ihimaera teaches courses in which this sort of direct copying would likely land one of his students in substantial trouble, b) the quantity of copying involved is above the level that have landed other writers of literary fiction in controversy, c) he has not chosen to advance an "artistic necessity" justification himself, d) many of the borrowings appear to be the crudest sort of cut and paste copying, e) we have no idea exactly how much or precisely what was copied (to the extent that "more is worse"), and f) the people who might be invested in determining this (Penguin, Auckland University and Ihimaera himself) do not seem particularly interested in doing so.
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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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@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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Found myself thinking about Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night reading this -- since it is about academic ethics, and also for her characters' habits of tossing all sorts of quotes and allusions into their speech -- often uncredited, but very much in character.
[Never mind her somewhat antediluvian politics]
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And as that stately homo of English lit., W.H. Auden, once observed:
"Stately homo" -- Quentin Crisp, no??