Q. You’re gonna love this: Sciencedaily.com has an article stating, “Worker bees, wasps, and ants are often considered neuter. But in many species they are females with ovaries, who although unable to mate, can lay unfertilized eggs which turn into males if reared. For some species, such as bumble bees, this is the source of many of the males in the species. But in others, like the honeybee, workers “police” each other — killing eggs laid by workers or confronting egg-laying workers.” You have opened a Pandora’s box. Although what just occurred to me is that this article, or even just that paragraph, could have been the genesis for a very interesting movie about bees.
Raymond Ogilvie, Philadelphia

A. What I have learned from this whole “Bee Movie” discussion is that bees have very confused and sad sex lives, and are much in need of intelligent design.

From Русский Журнал [RU] in a review of a Russian bookfare, my translation:

That [novel] which is now called a mystery is usually a mix of thriller, social commentary drama and elements of fantasy. Moreover, readers expect exactly this from a mystery. The famed “Menippean satire,” a type of dramedy that thirty years ago existed only in Master and Margarita and Altoist Danilov, seems to be becoming hegemonic.

In general, an average contemporary anthology would resemble some Afghan souvenir–a traditional rug, on which, along with ethnic motiffs, are weaved the conditionally-realistic automatic rifles and helicopters with humanitarian aid.

Over at Post Road, Brock Clark had written a review that had compelled me to get my butt over to the nearest bookstore without stopping for coffee or passing go.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a great, great novel, the kind of novel you wish you’d written, the kind of novel that makes other superficially similar novels seem bloated, lumbering, and besides the point…. Briefly (and it is a brief novel: 137 pages), it is about Miss Jean Brodie…who constantly talks about being in her “prime,” who says the girls are (or could be) the “crème de la crème,” who reminds them there “needs must be a leaven in the lump,” and, finally, is reduced to repeatedly asking the girls (as adults) which one them of them “betrayed” her…

And I haven’t even talked about the prose yet, which is hilarious, biting, lovely, usually at the same time. How can you not love a character like Sandy who, when an aged Miss Jean Brodie moans, “I am past my prime,” reassures her that, “It was a good prime”? How could you not love abook in which “The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter boxand there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house”? How could you not love a novelist who gives her characters only a handful of ways to talk about the world, and have that be more than enough? How could anyone not love such a book? It’s enough to make you hate the people you don’t, enough to make a man forget, momentarily, his broken pinky.

Lastly, but not leastly, the comics over at the Perry Bible Fellowship are delicious. Think Far Side.

Also, Kara Walker’s art seems to have thoroughly disturbed me and forever changed the way I look at silhouetted images. I keep expecting someone in this Chess Master cover to either fellatio or hang someone. Compare the below to Walker’s work here.

1. I write in my book about my paramilitary training at the Farm which included jumping out airplanes, firing a variety of automatic weapons, learning how to run or avoid road blocks, undergoing harsh interrogation sessions, and practicing escape and evasion techniques from an ostensibly hostile force in the woods for days at a time. All of these abilities, taught to my classmates and me by tough former military types, require endurance, the kind that makes you dig down deep and find strength and desire to push on despite overwhelming exhaustion, irritation at what you’re being asked to do, and feeling like you’re constantly trying to catch up. This, happily, coincides well with what is required on a book tour.

The entire post is well worth reading. Plame’s book–with sentences and pages censored by CIA blacked out–is out now. And despite the fact I rarely read the DC memoir genre (why bother? everything juicy will come out in the Sunday talk shows), the reviews for this one have me intrigued.

His real name was Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich. Then he changed it to something even more Jewish for his nom de plume. Something tells me this guy was unafraid of anti-semitism. Based on his stories, he seems unafraid of a great deal of things. Towards the end of his life, he moved to New York and saw his stories turned into the small English-language musical called A Fiddler on the Roof. This 2002 New York Times article discusses his resurgence in Russia.

Wikipedia quotes the following passage to illustrate his style:

“Pinhas Pincus is of less than normal height, with one small eye and one bigger eye. When he talks, it seems as if the eyes talk to each other; the smaller eye asks for and seeks approval from the bigger eye; and the bigger eye gives its approval of every plan or undertaking. When he first came to Nuremberg, there was no limit to his sufferings; he had to endure starvation, misery and personal insults from his German brethren. In Nuremberg he was protected from massacres, but was not protected from starvation.” —from An Early Passover, translated by George Zinberg

Here’s another one, with my own (rough) translation by way of M. Shambadal’s Russian version of “One hundred and one”:

The beautiful ancient river Bug, flowing in the South between the Dnepr and the Dnestr and falling, just like them, into the Black Sea, crosses two provinces–Kherson and Podol–in the exact spot where, spread about, lie two Jewish towns–Golta and Bogopol. Both settlements comprise one town really, yet the river has divorced them, torn the whole into halves, and the people bound them together with a bridge, so that both the settlements again reunited to become a single town: there you are, as if Bogopol, but wait five minutes, and you are already in Golta. And if you turn back–the same thing: a moment ago you were in Golta, and before you even have time to look around, there you are again in Bogopol!

For many years, Golta was considered a village, while Bogopol–a town. That was why according to the May 3, 1882 law, Jews could not settle in Golta anew.

From that time, Golta became very attractive for the Bogopol Jews, who were suddenly burning with the desire to settle exactly in Golta and precisely after the 3rd of May.

From that day forward, Bogopol Jews began to move to Golta in secret. Though they did not succeed. They were asked to go back and cross the bridge back into Bogopol: “Gospodin Itzko, kindly return to the Bogopol rabbi!” The Jews would either silently turn around and сurse, smiling, “China to Berdichev!” or,

“For pity’s sake!” the immigrant would say, “I’m a Goltan; for years now, I have my own small town at the yeshiva! I have how many relatives at the cemetery!”

The China to Berdichev reference, by the way, mystifies me a great deal. If anyone has any insight, I’d love to hear about it. In Russian, it reads: “А форфор на Бердичев!”

The Kherson province in question is, of course, the place where I grew up.

“Isn’t this great? What a tub? Wonder when they built it—must be before the war.”
“Is it safe, do you think?”
Matano smiles to himself. He looks out at the ferry, and allows himself to see it through their eyes.
Stomach plummets: fear, thrill. Trippy. So real. Smell of old oil, sweat and spices. So exotic.
Color: women in their robes, eyes covered, rimmed with Kohl; other women dark and dressed in skirts and blouses looking drab; other women sort of in-between cultures, a chiffon blouse, and a wraparound sarong with bright yellow, green, and blue designs. Many people are barefoot. An old Arab man, with an emaciated face and a hooked nose, in a white robe, sitting on a platform above, one deformed toenail sweeping up like an Ali Baba shoe. A foot like varnished old wood, full of cracks. He is stripping some stems and chewing the flesh inside. There is a bulge on one cheek, and he spits and spits and spits all the way to the mainland. Brownish spit lands on some rusty metal, pools and trickles, slips off the side onto some rope that lies coiled on the floor.
The tourists’ eyes are transfixed: somewhere between horror and excitement. How real! Must send a piece to Granta.
Same scene through Matano’s eyes:

Via Virginia Quarterly, where this noteworthy story, “Ships in High Transit,”* by Binyananga Wainana is available in its entirety.

*If anyone can tell me how or why “Ships in High Transit” is abbreviated as S.H.I.T, I’ll love you forever.

A couple of weeks ago, I fiddled with Kaavya Viswanathan’s book in a store and thought it looked like it would make for fun lazy day reading. When the New York Times Book Review ran a profile on Miss Viswanathan, I was glad to see that the author is young, beautiful and going to Harvard. (School choice aside, seems like an all-around success story to me. But I’m not criticizing–we can’t all go to small liberal arts colleges).

One of the more thoughtful responses to plagiarism I have found comes from Hellen Keller’s description of her own response to her inadvertent copying of a story that impressed her a great deal:

Indeed, I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own. For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling of terror, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book. Had it not been for the persistent encouragement of Miss Sullivan, I think I should have given up trying to write altogether.

My father believed that there was “nothing new under the Sun,” and that the best we could hope for was awareness of our ideas’ precedents. I am not quite as pessimistic as he was. Nonetheless, memory, impressions and our ability to recall our sources are mysterious at best, as many MF posters have pointed out time and again. My current day job for example involves me convincing my clients that my ideas are really theirs, giving them all the credit (particularly in front of their bosses), patting them on the back and extolling the virtues of their ingenuity until they feel compelled and proud to go and do exactly what I proposed, most of the time believing completely that the plan is their baby. This is surprisingly easy. And effective.

Memory works in funny ways. Any great idea is electrifying. It does not matter how old the thought is–the moment two previously unconnected neurons in my brain connect is the moment an idea becomes new to me. Most of the time, it will seem novel and original in the initial excitement of having thought of something. It is only after critical reflection and accurate recollection of the idea’s basis that I can at times become convinced that my improvement on the original is in fact at best a reinterpretation and at worst a neophyte’s rephrasing of the original in more common parlance. Given how many false flashes of brilliance I feel coming on a day, it’s sometimes surprising to see how few times I embarass myself by passing these half-baked ideas as my own. Without a doubt, there is a sifting process that must take place in a brain.

In other words, mate, the synapses have fired, the gun powder is in the air, but you’ve got to wait to see if you’ve punched a hole in the other ship’s bottom. (And yes, I am counting down the days to Dead Man’s Chest. Aren’t you?)

Getting back to the point, do the glitches in this sifting process really qualify as plagiarism? Take , for example, a few quotes from movies and books in current circulation.

“I coulda been a contender.”

“Make my day.”

“I think this is a beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“I’m ready for my close-up.”

“There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” (Particularly fond of this one, since speakers will try to cite it–to Mark Twain or Disraeli usually, though occasionally to other luminaries)

How many of these do you think are used by people who are aware of whom they are quoting? How many are now thought of as just things people say?

And for the few of you still with me, where do we draw the line? If I hear a man on the street say something brilliant and then use it in a story, is that plagiarism? If I see a man in a chat room say something brilliant, and use it, is it plagiarism? If I use something from a blog?

If, oh, hypothetically, I carefully research a historical novel and conduct many interviews in the process, hearing something from a survivor that I then reuse, am I a plagiarist? What if I come across the same incident in a book of oral histories? An interview? A description based on an interview used by a journalist for a different book?

In film, replicating a past master’s exact shot and image is considered a tribute. In visual art, a painter can “quote” a tradition. Whether intentional or not, elements of prior works incorporated into new ones are used to trace a work’s lineage–my father’s idea again of awareness of precedents as best we can do. In literature, all this seems to get tagged as plagiarism. The constant fear, the ever-present navigation of the line between acceptable and unacceptable use of others’ thoughts, the stringency of the rules in particular case of literature and writing–to what an extent are they paralyzing writers, who, like Keller, are terrorized by the possibility they are overstepping the bounds?

Free-for-all reuse of other writers’ materials is ethically unsavory, surely, but do we at times turn readings into plagiarism witchhunts? Or perhaps, the more interesting question is:

Why?