Plagiarism, Millenials, and PR, oh my!

When a  high school student plagiarizes, it would be expected her/his teacher would catch it and fail the student's sullied paper.  In college, plagiarism might mean failing the entire course.  Indeed, I knew a fellow graduate student who failed his dissertation and lost his PhD - forever, at any university - because he copied a single passage from another's dissertation without citation. 


Helene Hegemann, 17 years old, wrote a novel about a 16 year-old girl involved in the drug and club scene in Berlin. Hegemann copied many, many passages from the published Blog of a person writing about drug life in Berlin who used a pseudonym to protect his job and his family.   When confronted she admitted she had copied from the Blog.  She claims her generation sees things differently.  They can take what they need,  mix and match to make new things.


Her novel, Axolotl Roadkill, is now number two in Germany.  The teen-aged author copied from another, and admits it.  She says her generation sets a new standard of using whatever they need to create change, with no apology.   Indeed, her novel is proclaimed in Germany as being "definitive" of her generation. 


Seated opposite me in the physical therapy clinic waiting room this afternoon was a distinguished looking elderly gentleman.  Maybe eighty. I  noticed his reading material.  "Axolotl! "  I said.  "Yes, yes, it's interesting",   he responded.  "There's hope yet." 


So, what have we learned here?  A gifted teenager writes a novel.  She copies what she needs, with no annotation and no apology.  Her writing is current, and crazy. Where she got it makes no difference to readers of all ages.  Her book is # 2, risen from # 5  last week.  She has achieved a position authors of greater novels have not achieved in their lifetimes.    


Tomorrow I'll buy a copy of Axolotl Roadkill, in spite of not wanting to contribute to blatant plagiarism.  I want to find out why this novel means "there's hope yet" to a person my age.  Thus I am drawn in.

Mixing. Not Plagiarism!

Comes now Helene Hegemann, 17 years old, and within the last few weeks, a controversial best-selling author. Her novel, Axolotl Roadkill, is about a 16 year-old girl involved in Berlin’s under belly of clubs and drugs. The book is a hit in Germany, fifth on Der Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list.

Amazing, not because Hegemann is only seventeen, but because of another surprising factor. A blogger accused her of taking whole passages from another’s blog and novel. Others discovered many other passages she had taken. Accused of plagiarism, she readily admitted her novel contains unacknowledged material from others’ works, but said she was just “mixing.” She said she is part of a new generation who mixes and matches to create new things. She said, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

A knowledgeable statement. Powerful. Which, incidentally, she failed to attribute to Airen, who wrote it, and also wrote the blog she took things to "mix", and who also wrote the novel Strobo from which passages were taken for “mixing.”

OK.  We’re still not at the surprising part. The shock is , Helene Hegemann’s novel Axolotl Roadkill, is a finalist for the $20,000 Leibzig Book Fair Award for fiction. A member of the jury said they were aware of the plagiarism charges before they chose her novel. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said mixer Hegemann.

Wow! If you try to check the originality of that statement you’ll find it’s quoted for two Google pages only in connection with the Hegemann plagiarism debacle. If you look at Amazon in Germany you’ll see those who bought Axolotl Roadkill are most likely to also buy Airen’s Strobo. New generation of mix and match DJs in writing, and learned contest juries agreeing? Hype rules. Help! Teachers, writers, circling the drain here.


Here is the New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html


Here is the blog showing what was taken. Doesn’t matter if you don’t read German – it’s all quite clear.  http://www.gefuehlskonserve.de/axolotl-roadkill-alles-nur-geklaut-05022010.html

This is a departure from what I normally write - but this truly frightens me for the sake of copy-righted protection of one's creative works.

Thinking of Legacy Takes Courage

But then, almost everything takes courage as we grow older. Today a colleague told me a story  of her relative who left a legacy of nothing but alienation and disaffection.  In a vast family, only four people attended her funeral. I was both enthralled and dismayed by the story and couldn't help wondering what legacy I'm leaving.  And how many will attend my funeral?  Will they bring flowers?

Slogging out of that swamp, I'd like to point out we've been sculpting our legacy since we were five, and it's doubtful we can leap up in our latter years and alter what we leave our descendents, either in material possessions, which is the least important, or in worldly knowledge and understanding of the love we give them in memories of us. Do we always realize what is most important, too late?  Probably. And will our descendents appreciate the legacy of our lives?  Certainly not fully - at least not until they are themselves are as old as we are.  And so it goes. 

I only hope to  be remembered as the person I know myself to be. 
 
William Butler Yeats said :
I pray -- for word is out

And prayer comes round again --
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.

It is believed that one's true poetry emerges in old age.  If this is even remotely true for poets - why not for all?  Artists, musicians, physicians - we all know older people who continue to accomplish remarkable works.  Some poets who produced great creative works well into their eighties and nineties were Alfred Tennyson, George B. Shaw, Marianne Moore,  Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost,  Robert Graves, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman. Contemporary poets Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou are writing and publishing in  their 80s.  


"Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers." From  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=3869

"One of Stanley Kunitz's greatest loves was gardening. 'It's the way things are,' he once said, 'death and life inextricably bound to each other. One of my feelings about working the land is that I am celebrating a ritual of death and resurrection. Every spring I feel that. I am never closer to the miraculous than when I am grubbing in the soil.' Kunitz was 99 years old when he published his last book in 2005. He died the following year."   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nihqt3Ct2KU.  from Poetry Everywhere – Garrison Keillor. See Stanley Kunitz reading "Touch Me," the final poem in his final collection.  It is a meditation on the passage of time, beautiful and honest. 



Touch Me


Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

T. S. Eliot, Hugh Kenner, and Star Trek

                       
                       human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

        T.S. Eliot    "Burnt Norton"  Four Quartets

Reading Eric's story about his miraculous find of Four Quartets, (comments of the last entry - read for yourselves, Eric tells it better) recalled a time when T.S. Eliot and especially "Burnt Norton" were the center of discovery for me.  1963, UC Santa Barbara, graduate course in Eliot with Hugh Kenner, leading Eliot scholar.  He loved Eliot's "Burnt Norton" and he handed this poem to us as the gift it was - one that always surprises me with yet more to give.

"Burnt Norton" diddles the mind: time past and time future are always in time present.  But, to be conscious is not to be in time, because time constantly flows and consciousness implies a fixed center around which time must move.  Fool around with that idea for awhile and you become a writer for Star Trek, a quantum physicist, or at the very least - appreciative of a poem written in 1943 by a poet known for his astute aesthetic, not scientific, understanding. 

"Burnt Norton" arose from a war-torn England, from a poet questioning the place of religion - God's presence among the burning buldings and the dying.  If he turned to the abstraction of indefinable time as evasion, or as hope, or merely for survival, we understand, and are grateful.  What we learn is how  prevailing the reach of poetry.  How persistent. It brings new ideas forth in the worst of times, and these ideas can transform us many, many years later when there is no longer any connection to the times that precipitated them. 

Is this what Hugh Kenner taught me about T.S. Eliot?  Yes, one tiny aspect, perhaps.  Because of his teaching, reading Eliot is part of my life.   "Ash Wednesday" is a reading I place above ritual each Lent.  I seem to pick up "Prufrock" at the end of summer, before the new term begins.  I read Eliot.

As I grow older, certain poets become more meaningful to me; I am grateful for their continued presence.  Interesting that they may have written those poems I now love when they were in their twenties.  How could they have been so wise?