Readers Are Like Nomads

I really enjoyed Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence (not particularly more that Cars, but at about the same level) because I thought that his in-depth look at the concept of 'plagiarism'  was interesting. Even though he made many of the same points that we talked about in class, his look at all of the different types of 'plagiarism' was well done and thought-provoking, especially in the 'Usemonopoly' section. Of the copyright laws, he says that few of us ever stop to think and question the "contemporary construction of copyright," and goes on to state that what we normally think of the copyright is not true at all, but that the copyright is "an ongoing social negation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in every incarnation." So, copyright. Is it a necessary evil? Maybe in the way we typically view the 'rules' of copyrighting...

Jess brought up the point in class yesterday that she might feel a bit weird if she were to walk in a bookstore and find that someone had taken her work and scrambled it up into something new and republished it. I think it might feel a bit strange for all of us because we think that our ideas are our own, but, to put it in Lethem's terms (attributed to Thomas Jefferson, of course): the copyright has now become a construct that people put so much faith in because they "view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other." I understand that someone can invent something 'original' and put a patent on it, but we've seen so many times now that the artist's work has been copied, changed, and reformatted so many times that everything becomes the product of the person who changed it because the new artist has applied his or her talents in some way or another to make it theirs. Lethem brings up this point in 'The Beauty of Second Use'. He discovered that the man who had taken his first novel and sculpted it to look like a gun was pretty amazing, no matter what he'd done to change Lethem's work.