![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Notes
notes
1 The deliberate or accidental failure to do so can be costly. In 2002 the British composer Mike Batt was stung for what was rumoured to be £1,000,000 for allegedly plagiarising John Cage's 4′33″. Batt was taken to court by the John Cage Trust for copying Cage in “A One Minute Silence” on Classical Graffiti (EMI B00005YUGV), an album of Batt's compositions and arrangements, which he also produced, recorded by The Planets. Frank Zappa, on the other hand, contributed an “authorised” cover of the infamous tacet to a 1993 tribute CD of Cage's works entitled A Chance Operation (Koch 3-7238-2). Less easy to identify as a cover, quotation or sample of Cage's signature work is the “Two Minutes Silence” track on John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music No.2: Life With the Lions LP of 1969 (Zapple EAS-80701).
2 Unless, of course, you are paying to have this ludic labour done for you as well. Within gaming culture there is a booming industry in vicarious play, whereby low-paid surrogates do all the hard graft of getting up to the more interesting levels, at which time the actual game consumer can take over, without having had to endure the tedium of getting there. See Thompson.
3 The ongoing debate to do with sampling and copyright law is very much an issue of infra-mince. The threshold whereby a sample can be considered fair use is becoming increasingly subliminal. Work continues apace, however, to promote legal re-use and mixing of others’ work in the name of a revised concept of appropriation. Consider, in particular, the contribution made by culture-jam band Negativland to the Creative Commons Sampling Licence (see Haughey). Perhaps, after all these years, they have at last found what they’ve been looking for.
4 See the Wikipedia entry: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo>.
5 Visit Koons’ homepage: <http://www.jeffkoons.com/>. For Piccinini's homepage, see <http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/>.
6 See van Meegeren's and de Hoary's Wikipedia entries: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory>.
7 This observation has been made before, in 1963; see Havelock.
8 History also remembers Thomas Stearns Eliot as the author of The Waste Land, but perhaps it is time to re-open this case and reconcile a similar historical imposture. In his own time Eliot faced accusations of plagiarism in relation to his reliance on the work of Jessie L. Weston and James Frazer. Not to mention the abandon with which he plundered various Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights and poets. Roger Fry's advice that Eliot should append detailed explanatory notes and citations in the poem's Boni & Liveright edition was only in part an attempt to offset the work's notoriously demanding erudition (there were no such notes in the original Criterion publication of October 1922). There is a considerable degree of fessing up on Eliot's part too: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend” (see Eliot). It was perhaps not so well known outside of scholarly circles how much of Ezra Pound's hand was in the published version of the poem. This was evident in the correspondence between Pound and Eliot during 1921 and 1922. But it was even more dramatically revealed in the 1971 publication of the facsimile edition of The Waste Land manuscript and transcript. The degree to which Pound re-wrote large chunks of the text is obvious from the marginal notes and annotations; a degree of input that was overtly included in the subtitle of the book by Eliot's widow: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Eliot, of course, covered his tracks by dedicating the poem to Pound, with the suitably modish acknowledgement in another language, “For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro.” The “better craftsman” indeed. In his analysis of the dedicatory note of The Waste Land Michael Alexander identifies Dante's Purgatory as the source of the phrase “miglior fabbro” (Alexander 7). Whether modernist pedantry or wilful appropriation, the lack of any reference to Dante signals a withholding of one form of authorship in the context of a compliment designed to allude to another. Perhaps this was Tom's way of assigning an authorship to the poem that dare not speak its name. Maybe this accounts for the gesture of atonement in the last lines of the work: “Shantih shantih shantih.”
9 The acronym ICE stands for “intrusion countermeasure electronics.” The concept originated in William Gibson's writings, where it refers to the systems put in place by corporations to protect their online databases from computer hackers.
10 In a delightfully ironic recursion, the Wikipedia entry on Bouvard and Pécuchet points out how Flaubert's tireless copyists’ “search for intellectual stimulation leads them, over the course of years, to flounder through almost every branch of knowledge”: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet>.