Posts by philipmatthews
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Unfortunately my 'Blasted Heath Cliff Notes' doesn't have a handy 'Bronté-saurus' at the end (moor's the pity), so much of Ellis Bell's gothic prose is a mystery to me - (though obviously "Thrushcross Grange" is a Yeats inflection)... Still it could have all ended much 'moor' happily if poor Heathcliff had been able to dry off by a Cath-heater!*
*(Tubular bowels anyone? he said,
taking the pith yet again...)Bloody hell. That must be a puns per square inch record.
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Incidentally, I didn't think your post on Second Sight was terribly impressive.
Gee, I would never have guessed. For what it's worth, the post has been radically revised. I've realised, via this discussion, that some things weren't as clear as they should/could have been -- my question being rhetorical or not rhetorical was an obvious one, and I was worried that some might think I was trying to mount a defence of Ihimaera's book and talk down the great contributions Jolisa has made. It was, I acknowledge, something that needed to be a two-way or multi-voiced discussion -- as it's been here -- rather than a stand-alone piece.
At the risk of being childish (let alone churlish), I would add that the thread got derailey -- there's a Shihad song in there somewhere -- when two external pieces were dragged into the discussion: Cauchi's last week and mine yesterday.
Anyway, I think this is about the end of it for me.
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I actually never saw much of a problem with Baldwin's films, for much the same reasons as Rob Stowell elucidates above (in fact I love the idea.)
Craig Baldwin's a genius in my view. The thing about Spectres of the Spectrum and other recent films is that he is now mixing his found footage with dramatic scenes he writes and shoots. Again, not to call him a plagiarist but to say that some may be unaware what is "his" and what is not.
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Oh Philip don't be a dick for God's sake. It's a historical novel that has been described to me by more than one able reviewer with three pages of stated sources that yet fails to reference a number of specific quotations. Quite aside from the fact that Ihimaera immediately apologised and set about contacting all his living quotees, whilst offering no criticism whatsoever of the accepted definition of what constitutes plagiarism in his line of work, I really struggle to see how you could take this book - that I haven't read - as a subervsive treatise on authorship.
Don't know if we needed the personal abuse. It was a serious question. I did wonder, when the story broke, if Ihimaera could have handled it differently. I figured that with your expertise, you might have a view on whether it could have worked as a po-mo treatise on originality, shared history, authorship, etc, had Ihimaera presented it as such.
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Philip, I haven't read Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Varanasi/Death in Venice, but am I right in supposing that all the allusions he makes are all to Thomas Mann?
Actually, here's Dyer himself, as interviewed on the Amazon page for the book: "Yes, the first part is a version of the Mann novella--the opening sentence is ripped straight out of the opening line of the original."
Jolisa: it's a great read, this and his brilliantly-titled Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. In his notes and acknowledgements, Dyer says: "There are some unacknowledged quotes in the text, most of which are too obvious to need acknowledging here." He then goes on to list seven quotes from Death in Venice which makes me think the unacknowledged quotes are from elsewhere. He also acknowledges Dean Young, John Lanchester, Nietzsche, Somerset Maugham, the Rig Veda and Gramsci. Good and eclectic.
This exchange early on, when Jeff is getting his hair dyed (very Death in Venice), is probably a signal to be on the lookout for quotes.
"Dyeing is an art like everything else. We do it exceptionally well. We do it so it looks real."
"That's Sylvia Plath, right?"
"Indeed." A hairdresser who quoted poetry. -
A more apposite example might be something like Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet a 1965 Corman production which consists largely of sequences from the 1962 Russian film Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms), the rights to which Corman had purchased.
Well, if he bought the rights it isn't really a comparison, is it? Much more apposite are the Craig Baldwin films like Spectres of the Spectrum that Cauchi alluded to -- constructed from "found" footage from Baldwin's archive of old SF and documentary film.
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Could it be that it's a great deal easier to match words than images? And that's what some commenters took exception to I think, the blindness to the obvious differences in the media.
I don't think "blindness" is fair, personally. As someone who's made a living at times writing about books and films I'm reasonably alert to "obvious differences in the media". One is words on a page and the other is pictures on a screen, right?
That sounds like an interesting topic for a broader conversation.
I guess I naively thought I might be able to get one going.
But isn't "plagiarism" a more narrowly literary rather than artistic or filmic concept?
That was the thing. We talk about plagiarism over here but, by and large, not over there. I've said versions of that about 20 times now.
The nature of the book and of the correspondences surely would have to have been quite radically different for that argument to have been even possible, but I guess that sure, if there had been some sort of rationale for employing what some would construe as plagiarism to critique these notions, then one would appraise the book accordingly. Clearly Ihimaera isn't remotely interested in arguing anything of the sort, though, so the point is entirely moot.
Interesting. I take it from the first sentence you've read the book?
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But I also struggle to see how it correlates with the unintended 'correspondences' - to use Ihimaera's own definition - that Jolisa spotted in The Trowenna Sea.
The correlation is that both David Cauchi and myself came into this discussion interested in talking about the ways in which originality and appropriation in contemporary art and originality and appropriation in film are perceived differently to originality and appropriation in writing. That a possible case of plagiarism in a film is much more nebulous than a case of plagiarism in a book is that basic point.
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And to suggest that the world of literary criticism and fiction is behind other media in its reflections on what constitutes originality and authorship ignores a staggering number of critics and authors - Joyce, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, to name but four - who spent much of the last century banging on about these very things. I hardly think that any of them would find the Ihimaera example especially interesting because it doesn't offer any sort of critique, implicit or explicit, of the status quo accepted by the publishing industry and academia.
So if Ihimaera had been able to argue that his use of what he called "correspondences" was a strategy intended to critique the status quo of the publishing industry and academia, to challenge ideas of authorship, ownership and originality, would your view of his new book be different? This is one of the questions I've wondered about these past few days.
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(The tendency to take a naive definition of a concept, prove the naive definition is incapable of dealing with a pathological case, and then announce that the concept is bankrupt isn't particularly impressive.)
No idea what this means, sorry.