So, a few weeks ago, I was surfing "USA Today's" website, and found a lovely interview with an author named Kaavya Viswanathan. I read the excerpt from her new book, "How Opal Mehta...", and I thought, wow, that'll be a great summer read.
Normally, I don't go for books that are covered in cotton-candy pink and complete with the "Curlz" font, but I liked the online piece from the first chapter.
You know it... we all like "light reads" during the summer. I kept promising myself that I'd finally re-read Jane Austen, but then the new "Harry Potter" came out, and then I had to re-read all of them again...you can see the problem.
This young author is now being accused of plagarism, which brings up a very interesting question for the blogosphere: is there any original thought left out here?
For example, check out the title for this blog entry; I've used the term "deja food" from Crescent Dragonwagon's most excellent cookbook ("The Passionate Vegetarian"), and I've also co-opted the title of a John Fogerty song.
Do I expect any patent or music industry attorney to show up at my door anytime soon? No, of course not.
I've just made a salad of steamed broccoli, whole wheat couscous, beans and tossed it around with a nice dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, oregano and salt and pepper. Am I the first person to do such a thing? Of course not (but it tastes damn good!).
And, if I pair that with some stuffed grape leaves (from "Trader Joe's", that I already have), I've just recreated a salad plate that "Whole Paycheck" charges $6.99 for.
But, I've also found that if you check out the blogs, and check out their links, and then check out those links...blogger plagarism is pretty prevalent.
Which brings us back to the original discussion...are there any original ideas out there, or are we just recycling the old ones?
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4 comments:
I think there are plenty of original ideas yet to be discoverd-that's human progress & advancement. But your question I think has a lot do with what value we place on words, and in what combinations. Kind of like music, hmmm? An infinite amount of monkeys typing at an infinite amount of word processors will eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare, theoretically. So it should be likewise possible to create a computer program that takes all of the words in the English language and combine them in any variety of ways, then copyright the results.
Personally, I think it's all about trust, and whose written words we trust.
Let's just say that the "New York Times" hasn't been the best in the past year or so.
As Reagan said to Gorbachev signing the IMF treaty: Trust but verify. Publishers should have more procedures in place to identify plagiarists, or outright fakes (like Jayson Blair), Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Glass. I know personally of a writer at a trade magazine who was fired for rewriting a press release and passing it off as his own work.
But, Madblogger, if ideas are the result of observation, all of our imaginations should be teeming over with fresh creative thoughts!
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