Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write about Africa"

A devastating (satirical) masterpiece of African literary tropes in GRANTA, which came up in one of TN Coates' great comment discussions.

How to Write About Africa
By Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

..........
There's a lot more. read the full post HERE.

Writing Under The Influence: Jonathan Lethem Ponders a Good Side to Plagiarism

Washington Post
Writing Under The Influence
Jonathan Lethem Ponders a Good Side to Plagiarism

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 16, 2007; C01

No, no, Jonathan Lethem concedes, he's not really in favor of plagiarism. At least not the deceptive, thieving kind.

But he does want to spark an argument that will "explode the word."

The Brooklyn-bred novelist ("Motherless Brooklyn," "Fortress of Solitude") is fascinated by what he calls "the mysteries of authorship -- the idea that things arise in culture that don't quite belong to anyone."

This fascination helped inspire his new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," in which four identity-seeking 20-somethings in a Los Angeles rock band latch onto some striking words and images that don't quite belong to them, with consequences no one involved could have foreseen.

It also drove Lethem to make a more serious argument about "the fundamental appropriating nature of creativity" in a lengthy article that ran in the February issue of Harper's, titled "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism."

The subtitle is no joke.

After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against "those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other," Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he "stole, warped, and cobbled together" from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings, reporting, for example, that the "culture as a market" quote derives from "The Tyranny of Copyright?," by Robert Boynton, in the New York Times Magazine.

Lethem's piece is a brilliant stunt, a high-concept attention-grabber. In a letter to Harper's, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig -- one of the best-known public advocates for less restrictive copyright laws -- called it "beautifully crafted" argument that "teaches more about the importance of what I call 'remix' than any other work I have read."

Still, Lessig had a small bone to pick.

It seems some cherished words of his own had been appropriated, words the professor declined to specify but which constituted "the only sentence I have ever written that I truly like."

Ouch.

Lethem apologized.

Yet he couldn't resist ending his published response with a continuation of his argument.

"There are no quotation marks around the elements in a Robert Rauschenberg collage or around Quentin Tarantino's swipes from lesser-known movies," he wrote. And T.S. Eliot's immortal "The Waste Land," famous for its highbrow literary liftings, "has only end-notes -- which, I suspect, are much less often read than the poem itself."
'Searchers' on Mars

He's a harmless-looking fellow, this novelist-provocateur, especially compared with the brooding youth featured on the front cover of "You Don't Love Me Yet." Body stiff, no hint of a smile, shirt buttoned in the neck-choking fashion that inexplicably took hold a couple of decades back, the younger Lethem stares out at potential purchasers as if to say: Don't read this book, it's your loss. I'm too cool to care.

The midlife version -- at 43, he's "not a young writer anymore, but I'm not that old" -- has rounder features and a bit more bulk on his compact frame. Over lunch at Cafe Atlantico, Lethem (pronounced "Leethum") radiates seriousness about his work. But he also laughs easily and seizes the occasional opportunity to make fun of himself.

Was he ever part of a musical group, he is asked, when he was his characters' age?

"Barely," he says. "For just a minute, I was a kind of pathetic frontman for a band. My vocals could best be described as sub-Lou Reed mumblings."

His preoccupation with artistic influence, he says, really began with "a completely personal instinct or leaning, which is that I've always liked collage art." He likes seeing "chunks of recognizable things in a new matrix," whether in a painting or a Bob Dylan song. And because he believes this kind of aesthetic borrowing is "very near the center of the impulse to create in the first place," he finds it strange that some artists appear embarrassed by influences and feel the need to "overstate their originality."

Take, for example, his own first novel.

"Gun, With Occasional Music," Lethem says, was reviewed as being "a cross-fertilization of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick." People would tell him, thinking it's what he wanted to hear, that his work was far more original than such a simplistic comparison could possibly convey.

"And I felt like saying: 'Well, actually, I was kind of trying to do Chandler meets Dick! I'm really glad it was clear what I was doing!'"

Or take "Girl in Landscape," the 1998 novel Lethem calls "a very deliberate attempt to rewrite John Ford's movie 'The Searchers' in an interplanetary context."

When plotting "Girl in Landscape," he used what he calls a "traditional kind of literary appropriating move, which you could call the 'Mary Reilly' move." He's referring to the Valerie Martin novel that retells the story of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" from the point of view of the maid.

"I did 'The Searchers' from the point of view of the Natalie Wood character," he says. "On Mars."

And Ford's film was just one of his starting points.

Lethem goes on to cite "a number of books that I adore" with teenage girls as protagonists, among them "The Member of the Wedding," by Carson McCullers, and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," by Shirley Jackson. Then he points to the even bigger -- yet totally unconscious -- influence of "one of the greatest novels ever written."

"I also, inadvertently, rewrote E.M. Forster's 'A Passage to India,' " he explains. "I constructed the book around a rape that may or may not have happened in a secret place."

"So this is a book that is all influences. And yet it's all mine."

Okay. But to get back to that Harper's piece: Influence is one thing, but surely plagiarism is another -- isn't it?

Yup.

"It's a provocation for me to be using the word 'plagiarism' the way I do," Lethem says, "and you could argue that I'm damaging its usual, more precise function." Employing it was "a way to get attention."

And yet:

Plagiarism is also a "rubbery" term he wanted to define as "value neutral" in order to confront the question "What's the good plagiarism and what's the bad plagiarism?"

Bad plagiarism, Lethem believes, is something we know when we see it. It doesn't add value by transforming the borrowed material into something new. It is deceptive, in that it refuses to acknowledge its influences. It can feel, particularly if the plagiarizer is a big cultural fish, like the worst kind of theft.

And good plagiarism? Think of Shakespeare's borrowing from Ovid, he says, which helped produce "Romeo and Juliet," and the subsequent borrowing by Leonard Bernstein that produced "West Side Story."

"If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism," Lethem wrote in his Harper's piece.

Except that he didn't write it, really.

As he acknowledges, he flat out stole that line from U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner.

Listen to Jonathan Lethem hold forth long enough and you'll come to understand that he sees the question of literary borrowing as part of a larger dialogue between private property and "the commons." He thinks that artists who take an absolutist position on copyright are complicit in "what is essentially an attack on the public good" -- the privatization of things "that should belong to everyone."

He's talking about copyright-obsessed corporations like Disney, which Lethem likens to a creative roach motel ("cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out"). He's talking about environmentally essential wetlands paved for private profit. He's talking about private fortunes exempted from estate taxes because they were supposedly amassed independently of the social fabric surrounding them. He's talking . . .

But hold on.

The man is supposed to be on a book tour here.

Time to get back to that lyrics-challenged rock band in L.A.
'Monster Eyes'

"You Don't Love Me Yet" is, among other things, Lethem's deliberate attempt to change gears after his previous novel, 2003's sprawling, ambitious "Fortress of Solitude." Lauded as "melancholy and marvelous" by New York Times critic A.O. Scott, "Fortress" tells the story of two motherless 1970s teens, one white and one black, growing up in the same not-yet-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood in which Lethem's idealistic and somewhat clueless parents chose to raise him and in which he lives today.

Many young fiction writers go straight to the autobiographical well, but Lethem waited -- and it paid off. "I couldn't have written 'Fortress of Solitude' without developing certain tools as a writer," he says. But when he'd finished, he was ready to be done with fathers and sons and Brooklyn for a while, to write something "mischievous and defiantly playful" once again.

The result was "You Don't Love Me Yet," an almost weightless tale of four Los Angeles band mates trying to negotiate that disconcerting, exhilarating stage of life in which parents are invisible, identities mutable, careers nonexistent and relationships about as stable as hydrogen.

Its one nod to seriousness?

Plagiarism is a central plot element.

To summarize briefly: Lethem's protagonist, Lucinda, is the bass player for a musical foursome so fledgling it hasn't yet settled on a name. To make its debut, the band needs more songs, but its perpetually malnourished songwriter is blocked. One of the other musicians sums up the grim situation this way:

"We're turning thirty and we haven't done anything. Look at Bedwin. He can't even feed himself, and he's our genius."

Help arrives after Lucinda is hired to answer a "complaint line" set up as part of a performance art piece. She gets attached to one of her regular callers, mesmerized by tales from his dysfunctional life. "I have this condition called monster eyes," the complainer tells her one day, and he goes on to explain that whenever he gets involved with a woman, he wrecks the relationship by boring in on some attribute of hers that he can't stand.

Cut to a rehearsal. Bedwin has written new music, but no lyrics.

"Monster eyes!" Lucinda finds herself calling out as the band hits the chorus. "Best thing I ever did for you, was get you out of range of my monster eyes."

She appropriates more of the complainer's language for more songs, and the band is on its way. But who, exactly, deserves the credit for this development? File under "mysteries of authorship." It's the kind of cultural collaboration that fascinates Lethem.

And it's all the more fascinating because -- as the author of "You Don't Love Me Yet" is quick to volunteer -- the novel itself started out as someone else's idea.

More than a decade ago, when Lethem was living in Berkeley, Calif., working in a bookstore and starting to write, he became friends with a grad student in English named Amy Greenstadt. "I had this idea that I wanted to make a video," says Greenstadt, who's now teaching at Portland State University, "but I didn't have the confidence to do it on my own."

So she asked Lethem if he'd like to help.

Greenstadt's idea originated with TV ads she'd seen for a New York "confession line." She thought: What if there were a really terrible band -- the kind, say, that did grunge covers of Joe Jackson songs -- and one of the members got intrigued with the confession line? She imagined many confessers, not just one, but when she and Lethem started working on the story together, "we came up with the idea of the one annoying confesser who eventually shows up and tries to join the band."

Neither of them knew anything about video, but they liked the idea of a collective art project, so they decided to bring in more collaborators. After a few weeks, however, "the whole thing just died, as these things often do."

Well, not quite.

"I'm very compulsive about narrative," Lethem says. "I don't leave a lot of unfinished stories lying around." A few years ago, he asked if he could use the material. Greenstadt readily agreed.

"He's the artist. I never would have done anything with it," she says -- though she did find herself "a little sad" that he changed her confession line to a complaint line.

Greenstadt says she finds Lethem's ideas on artistic influence and cultural borrowing intriguing. When he came through Oregon on his book tour, she invited him to speak at Portland State on the questions raised by his Harper's piece.

Still, she has a bottom line.

"As a teacher, I need to have plagiarism mean plagiarism," she says, and laughs. "We can't be messing with it."

[M&C NOTE: ORIGINAL ARTICLE APPEARS BELOW]

Jonathan Lethem--"The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism"

HARPER'S MAGAZINE, February 2007.

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

—John Donne

LOVE AND THEFT (by Jonathan Letham)

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Charing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book, but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately, the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”

My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The passage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote, containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.

Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October '38,” Waters said. “I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin' Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There's been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out—Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot's poem is a vertiginous mélange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser's “Prothalamion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser's most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot's use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud's psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We're surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.
USEMONOPOLY

The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole; second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea.

But Jefferson's vision has not fared well, has in fact been steadily eroded by those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other. The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law is its almost limitless bloating—its expansion in both scope and duration. With no registration requirement, every creative act in a tangible medium is now subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your child's finger painting, both are automatically protected. The first Congress to grant copyright gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which could be renewed for another fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is the life of the author plus seventy years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that each time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain, the mouse's copyright term is extended.

Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on reproduction as the compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn't because there was anything fundamentally invasive of an author's rights in the making of a copy. Rather it was because copies were once easy to find and count, so they made a useful benchmark for deciding when an owner's rights had been invaded. In the contemporary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement—we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one—and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

At the movies, my entertainment is sometimes lately preceded by a dire trailer, produced by the lobbying group called the Motion Picture Association of America, in which the purchasing of a bootleg copy of a Hollywood film is compared to the theft of a car or a handbag—and, as the bullying supertitles remind us, “You wouldn't steal a handbag!” This conflation forms an incitement to quit thinking. If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or downloading music is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own arguments would be as ethically bankrupt as the MPAA's. The truth lies somewhere in the vast gray area between these two overstated positions. For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of “intellectual property” leaves the original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the record companies, who fear the cassette-tape manufacturers, who fear the online vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most quickly from the intangible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist's labor. It has been the same in every industry and with every technological innovation. Jack Valenti, speaking for the MPAA: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word “copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation's shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

A few years ago someone brought me a strange gift, purchased at MoMA's downtown design store: a copy of my own first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, expertly cut into the contours of a pistol. The object was the work of Robert The, an artist whose specialty is the reincarnation of everyday materials. I regard my first book as an old friend, one who never fails to remind me of the spirit with which I entered into this game of art and commerce—that to be allowed to insert the materials of my imagination onto the shelves of bookstores and into the minds of readers (if only a handful) was a wild privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three years of writing, but at the time I'd have happily published the results for nothing. Now my old friend had come home in a new form, one I was unlikely to have imagined for it myself. The gun-book wasn't readable, exactly, but I couldn't take offense at that. The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me—the strange beauty of its second use—was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The's gun-book. There's no need to choose between the two.

In the first life of creative property, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. After the commercial life has ended, our tradition supports a second life as well. A newspaper is delivered to a doorstep, and the next day wraps fish or builds an archive. Most books fall out of print after one year, yet even within that period they can be sold in used bookstores and stored in libraries, quoted in reviews, parodied in magazines, described in conversations, and plundered for costumes for kids to wear on Halloween. The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they've been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own—artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not “having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle”), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. “Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become “real” without being actively reworked: “Does it hurt?” Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: “It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney's protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.

This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.

Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies—like those that sustain open-source software—coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.

The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don't maintain that art can't be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.

The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned—a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.

What's remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places—in run-down neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classic example is commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A gift economy may be superior when it comes to maintaining a group's commitment to certain extra-market values.
THE COMMONS

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein's theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we've paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They're not just an inventory of marketable assets; they're social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud's syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.

Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers' notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?
GIVE ALL

A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran's finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were—and remain—rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger's rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted? The fertile spirit of stray connection—one stretching across what is presently seen as the direst of international breaches—had in this case been snuffed out. The cold, undead hand of one of my childhood literary heroes had reached out from its New Hampshire redoubt to arrest my present-day curiosity.

A few assertions, then:

Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of a rare success.

A corporation that has imposed an inescapable notion—Mickey Mouse, Band-Aid—on the cultural language should pay a similar price.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.

Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itself.

Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty.

The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? What would they be worth if some future Dylan worked them into a song? Should I care to make such a thing impossible?

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.
* * *
KEY: I IS ANOTHER

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in red. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.
TITLE

The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom's “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.
LOVE AND THEFT

“. . . a cultivated man of middle age . . .” to “. . . hidden, unacknowledged memory?” These lines, with some adjustments for tone, belong to the anonymous editor or assistant who wrote the dust-flap copy of Michael Maar's The Two Lolitas. Of course, in my own experience, dust-flap copy is often a collaboration between author and editor. Perhaps this was also true for Maar.

“The history of literature . . .” to

“. . . borrow and quote?” comes from Maar's book itself.

“Appropriation has always . . .” to “. . . Ishmael and Queequeg . . .” This paragraph makes a hash of remarks from an interview with Eric Lott conducted by David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, and incorporates both interviewers' and interviewee's observations. (The text-interview form can be seen as a commonly accepted form of multivocal writing. Most interviewers prime their subjects with remarks of their own—leading the witness, so to speak—and gently refine their subjects' statements in the final printed transcript.)

“I realized this . . .” to “. . . for a long time.” The anecdote is cribbed, with an elision to avoid appropriating a dead grandmother, from Jonathan Rosen's The Talmud and the Internet. I've never seen 84, Charing Cross Road, nor searched the Web for a Donne quote. For me it was through Rosen to Donne, Hemingway, website, et al.

“When I was thirteen . . .” to “. . . no plagiarist at all.” This is from William Gibson's “God's Little Toys,” in Wired magazine. My own first encounter with William Burroughs, also at age thirteen, was less epiphanic. Having grown up with a painter father who, during family visits to galleries or museums, approvingly noted collage and appropriation techniques in the visual arts (Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Stuart Davis), I was gratified, but not surprised, to learn that literature could encompass the same methods.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

“In 1941, on his front porch . . .” to “. . . ‘this song comes from the cotton field.'” Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.

“. . . enabled by a kind . . . freely reworked.” Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression. In Owning Culture, McLeod notes that, as he was writing, he

happened to be listening to a lot of old country music, and in my casual listening I noticed that six country songs shared exactly the same vocal melody, including Hank Thompson's “Wild Side of Life,” the Carter Family's “I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” Roy Acuff's “Great Speckled Bird,” Kitty Wells's “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” Reno & Smiley's “I'm Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” and Townes Van Zandt's “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.” . . . In his extensively researched book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, Nick Tosches documents that the melody these songs share is both “ancient and British.” There were no recorded lawsuits stemming from these appropriations. . . .

“. . . musicians have gained . . . through allusion.” Joanna Demers, Steal This Music.

“In Seventies Jamaica . . .” to “. . . hours of music.” Gibson.

“Visual, sound, and text collage . . .” to “. . . realm of cultural production.” This plunders, rewrites, and amplifies paragraphs from McLeod's Owning Culture, except for the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals.

“In a courtroom scene . . .” to “. . . would cease to exist.” Dave Itzkoff, New York Times.

“. . . the remarkable series of ‘plagiarisms' . . .” to “. . . we want more plagiarism.” Richard Posner, combined from The Becker-Posner Blog and The Atlantic Monthly.

“Most artists are brought . . .” to “. . . by art itself.” These words, and many more to follow, come from Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Above any other book I've here plagiarized, I commend The Gift to your attention.

“Finding one's voice . . . filiations, communities, and discourses.” Semanticist George L. Dillon, quoted in Rebecca Moore Howard's “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.”

“Inspiration could be . . . act never experienced.” Ned Rorem, found on several “great quotations” sites on the Internet.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted . . . out of chaos.” Mary Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein.

“What happens . . .” to “. . . contamination anxiety.” Kevin J.H. Dettmar, from “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism.”
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

“The surrealists believed . . .” to the Walter Benjamin quote. Christian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, a book that treats fannish fetishism as the secret at the heart of film scholarship. Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph Cornell's surrealist-influenced 1936 film Rose Hobart, which simply records “the way in which Cornell himself watched the 1931 Hollywood potboiler East of Borneo, fascinated and distracted as he was by its B-grade star”—the star, of course, being Rose Hobart herself. This, I suppose, makes Cornell a sort of father to computer-enabled fan-creator reworkings of Hollywood product, like the version of George Lucas's The Phantom Menace from which the noxious Jar Jar Binks character was purged; both incorporate a viewer's subjective preferences into a revision of a filmmaker's work.

“. . . early in the history of photography” to “. . . without compensating the source.” From Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of public advocates for copyright reform, and the best source if you want to get radicalized in a hurry.

“For those whose ganglia . . .” to

“. . . discourse broke down.” From David Foster Wallace's essay “E Unibus Pluram,” reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I have no idea who Wallace's “gray eminence” is or was. I inserted the example of Dickens into the paragraph; he strikes me as overlooked in the lineage of authors of “brand-name” fiction.

“I was born . . . Mary Tyler Moore Show.” These are the reminiscences of Mark Hosler from Negativland, a collaging musical collective that was sued by U2's record label for their appropriation of “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.” Although I had to adjust the birth date, Hosler's cultural menu fits me like a glove.

“The world is a home . . . pop-culture products . . .” McLeod.

“Today, when we can eat . . .” to “. . . flat sights.” Wallace.

“We're surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” This phrase, which I unfortunately rendered somewhat leaden with the word “imperative,” comes from Steve Erickson's novel Our Ecstatic Days.
USEMONOPOLY

“. . . everything from attempts . . .” to “defendants as young as twelve.” Robert Boynton, The New York Times Magazine, “The Tyranny of Copyright?”

“A time is marked . . .” to “. . . what needs no defense.” Lessig, this time from The Future of Ideas.

“Thomas Jefferson, for one . . .” to “‘. . . respective Writings and Discoveries.'” Boynton.

“. . . second comers might do a much better job than the originator

. . .” I found this phrase in Lessig, who is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who himself is characterizing a judgment written by Learned Hand.

“But Jefferson's vision . . . owned by someone or other.” Boynton.

“The distinctive feature . . .” to “. . . term is extended.” Lessig, again from The Future of Ideas.

“When old laws . . .” to “. . . had been invaded.” Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright.

“‘I say to you . . . woman home alone.'” I found the Valenti quote in McLeod. Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as ______ is to ________.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

“In the first . . .” to “. . . builds an archive.” Lessig.

“Most books . . . one year . . .” Lessig.

“Active reading is . . .” to “. . . do not own . . .” This is a mashup of Henry Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Michel de Certeau, whom Jenkins quotes.

“In the children's classic . . .” to

“. . . its loving use.” Jenkins. (Incidentally, have the holders of the copyright to The Velveteen Rabbit had a close look at Toy Story? There could be a lawsuit there.)
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

“The Walt Disney Company . . . alas, Treasure Planet . . .” Lessig.

“Imperial Plagiarism” is the title of an essay by Marilyn Randall.

“. . . spurred David Byrne . . . My Life in the Bush of Ghosts . . .” Chris Dahlen, Pitchfork—though in truth by the time I'd finished, his words were so utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another's distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

“Kenneth Koch . . .” to “. . . déluge of copycats!” Emily Nussbaum, The New York Times Book Review.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

“You can't steal a gift.” Dizzy Gillespie, defending another player who'd been accused of poaching Charlie Parker's style: “You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.''

“A large, diverse society . . . intellectual property.” Lessig.

“And works of art . . . ” to “. . .

marriage, parenthood, mentorship.” Hyde.

“Yet one . . . so naturally with the market.” David Bollier, Silent Theft.

“Art that matters . . .” to “. . . bought and sold.” Hyde.

“We consider it unacceptable . . .” to “‘. . . certain unalienable Rights . . .'” Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane Radin's Contested Commodities.

“A work of art . . .” to “. . . constraint upon our merchandising.” Hyde.

“This is the reason . . . person it's directed at.” Wallace.

“The power of a gift . . .” to “. . . certain extra-market values.” Bollier, and also the sociologist Warren O. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is paraphrasing.
THE COMMONS

“Einstein's theory . . .” to “. . . public domain are a commons.” Lessig.

“That a language is a commons . . . society as a whole.” Michael Newton, in the London Review of Books, reviewing a book called Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book reviewers are another covert form of collaborative culture; as an avid reader of reviews, I know much about books I've never read. To quote Yann Martel on how he came to be accused of imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel Life of Pi,

Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York Times Review of Books [sic]. It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar. I forget the title, and John Updike did worse: he clearly thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review—one of those that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive . . . oozed indifference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise. . . . Oh, the wondrous things I could do with this premise.

Unfortunately, no one was ever able to locate the Updike review in question.

“The American commons . . .” to

“. . . for a song.” Bollier.

“Honoring the commons . . .” to

“. . . practical necessity.” Bollier.

“We in Western . . . public good.” John Sulston, Nobel Prize‒winner and co-mapper of the human genome.

“We have to remain . . .” to “. . . benefit of a few.” Harry S Truman, at the opening of the Everglades National Park. Although it may seem the height of presumption to rip off a president—I found claiming Truman's stolid advocacy as my own embarrassing in the extreme—I didn't rewrite him at all. As the poet Marianne Moore said, “If a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better?” Moore confessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others' work, explaining, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition.”
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

“. . . intellectuals despondent . . .” to “. . . quickly and cheaply?” Steve Fuller, The Intellectual. There's something of Borges in Fuller's insight here; the notion of a storehouse of knowledge waiting passively to be assembled by future users is suggestive of both “The Library of Babel” and “Kafka and his Precursors.”
GIVE ALL

“. . . one of Iran's finest . . .” to “. . . meditation on his heroine?” Amy Taubin, Village Voice, although it was me who was disappointed at the door of the Walter Reade Theater.

“The primary objective . . .” to “. . . unfair nor unfortunate.” Sandra Day O'Connor, 1991.

“. . . the future will be much like the past” to “. . . give some things away.” Open-source film archivist Rick Prelinger, quoted in McLeod.

“Change may be troubling . . . with certainty.” McLeod.

“. . . woven entirely . . .” to “. . . without inverted commas.” Roland Barthes.

“The kernel, the soul . . .” to “. . . characteristics of phrasing.” Mark Twain, from a consoling letter to Helen Keller, who had suffered distressing accusations of plagiarism (!). In fact, her work included unconsciously memorized phrases; under Keller's particular circumstances, her writing could be understood as a kind of allegory of the “constructed” nature of artistic perception. I found the Twain quote in the aforementioned Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

“Old and new . . .” to “. . . we all quote.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. These guys all sound alike!

“People live differently . . . wealth as a gift.” Hyde.

“. . . I'm a cork . . .” to “. . . blown away.” This is adapted from The Beach Boys song “'Til I Die,” written by Brian Wilson. My own first adventure with song-lyric permissions came when I tried to have a character in my second novel quote the lyrics “There's a world where I can go and/Tell my secrets to/In my room/In my room.” After learning the likely expense, at my editor's suggestion I replaced those with “You take the high road/I'll take the low road/I'll be in Scotland before you,” a lyric in the public domain. This capitulation always bugged me, and in the subsequent British publication of the same book I restored the Brian Wilson lyric, without permission. Ocean of Story is the title of a collection of Christina Stead's short fiction.

Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who'd taken offense at Bellow's fictional use of certain personal facts, said: “The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.” I couldn't bring myself to retain Bellow's “strength,” which seemed presumptuous in my new context, though it is surely the more elegant phrase. On the other hand, I was pleased to invite the suggestion that the gifts in question may actually be light and easily lifted.
KEY TO THE KEY

The notion of a collage text is, of course, not original to me. Walter Benjamin's incomplete Arcades Project seemingly would have featured extensive interlaced quotations. Other precedents include Graham Rawle's novel Diary of an Amateur Photographer, its text harvested from photography magazines, and Eduardo Paolozzi's collage-novel Kex, cobbled from crime novels and newspaper clippings. Closer to home, my efforts owe a great deal to the recent essays of David Shields, in which diverse quotes are made to closely intertwine and reverberate, and to conversations with editor Sean Howe and archivist Pamela Jackson. Last year David Edelstein, in New York magazine, satirized the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case by creating an almost completely plagiarized column denouncing her actions. Edelstein intended to demonstrate, through ironic example, how bricolage such as his own was ipso facto facile and unworthy. Although Viswanathan's version of “creative copying” was a pitiable one, I differ with Edelstein's conclusions.

The phrase Je est un autre, with its deliberately awkward syntax, belongs to Arthur Rimbaud. It has been translated both as “I is another” and “I is someone else,” as in this excerpt from Rimbaud's letters:

For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the authors!

Aboriginal Australian Culture & Tourism

Slate
Well-traveled
Going Native in the Australian Outback
The tricky task of balancing visitors' expectations of aboriginal culture with the real thing.
By Rolf Potts
Updated Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 11:22 AM ET


From: Rolf Potts
Subject: The Pitjantjatjara Word for Tourists and Ants Is One and the Same
Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 1:07 PM ET

Here's some advice for anyone hoping to capture the contradictions of Australian outback tourism within a single snapshot: Bring your camera to the base of Uluru—the massive orange-red monolith smack in the center of the Australian continent—and aim the lower half of your viewfinder at the large sign near the hiking trailhead. This sign, which was erected by the local Pitjantjatjara people, solemnly requests that you don't climb up the face of a rock that they consider sacred. Aim your camera at a certain angle, however, and the top half of your viewfinder will capture the knots of tourists who've decided to climb the rock anyway (aided by a safety chain designated by the Australian National Park Service for that very purpose).

The Pitjantjatjara euphemism for tourists in their homeland is minga tjuta—"ants"—and from this angle you can see why: Looking up from the base of Uluru, the tidy lines of people inching up the climbing trail look like insects on a mound.

I, too, have come to central Australia as a minga tjuta, though I'm not here to scale the slopes of Uluru. Rather, I have resolved to spend the next week looking for a meaningful experience of Australian aboriginal culture. My guide for today, a Pitjantjatjara man named Wally Jacob, is late—so I've been killing time by taking photos of central Australia's iconic sandstone landmark and the dusty, red desert that surrounds it.

I've always prided myself on traveling independently in unfamiliar cultures, but joining a guided tour of aboriginal Uluru is something of a necessity: Indigenous people in this part of Australia are famously averse to the notion of random backpackers wandering onto tribal land without a formal welcome, and anthropologists have noted that Aborigines generally prefer busloads of superficial tourists (who buy a lot of souvenirs and are quickly gone) to more earnest seekers, who unwittingly traipse through ceremonial lands, make themselves at home, and ask a lot of intrusive questions. This cultural distaste for drop-in visitors goes back to the earliest interactions with Europeans in Australia. The first aboriginal phrase recorded by 18th-century British convict-settlers was warra-warra ("go away"), and Capt. James Cook noted in his 1770 expedition journal that, in spite of his attempts to interact with indigenous Australians, "all they seemed to want was for us to be gone."

Since it has become unrealistic for outsiders to "be gone" from this Australian landscape, local Aborigines have used organized tours as a way of retaining control over how visitors see their ancestral homeland. Besides competition from nonaboriginal tours—including camel treks and helicopter flyovers—local control is certainly not all-encompassing: Because of functional compromises in regaining legal ownership of Uluru from the Australian government in the 1980s, climbing the rock was never formally outlawed. And, given that 250,000 or so tourists ascend the sacred site each year in defiance of Pitjantjatjara wishes, it's safe to assume that many visitors are more interested in the scenic pleasures of the monolith than the aboriginal culture that surrounds it. During the tourist high season, the nearby hotel complex swells to become the fourth-most-populous settlement in Australia's Northern Territory—and more people pass by Uluru in a single week than Pitjantjatjara people of previous generations saw in a lifetime.

When Wally arrives—dressed in flip-flop sandals, dirty brown pants, and a crisp blue oxford shirt that reads "Anangu Tours"—he barely notices the crowds of tourists. Instead, he grins and points to a spot 20 feet away from us. "Ngintaka," he says.

I look to Keiran Lusk, the tall, salt-and-pepper bearded Australian who serves as Wally's interpreter. "Perentie lizard," he says. A couple of seconds pass before I see the wrinkly, long-necked reptile—a 4-foot-long creature that has probably been sitting there since I first arrived. "No worries," Keiran confides. "I didn't see him, either."

Now that the ngintaka has been spotted, a knot of tourists gathers. Several cameras flash at once, and the lizard flees. Wally shrugs, tugs a brown Billabong ball cap onto his head, and leads us down the hiking trail.

As we skirt the base of Uluru, I chat indirectly with the gray-haired Pitjantjatjara guide, asking my questions via Keiran. Wally tells me that he was born in the bush 53 years ago, then taken by his mother to a Lutheran mission, where he was given his European name. He tells me that he's tired today, because he was busy collecting spear-wood the night before. He tells me about his efforts to teach old traditions to Pitjantjatjara teenagers, who often prefer video games or hip-hop music to spear-hunting and bushcraft. These young people, he says with a weary giggle, are like tourists: It's hard to hold their attention for very long.

Keiran adds details and clarifications as he translates for Wally. "Modern improvements have had mixed results in aboriginal Australia," he says. "The younger generation is living on TV and junk food. They're losing a part of themselves because they've lost their connection to the land. Some of them are dying before their parents because of alcoholism or diabetes."

As he says this, Keiran keeps an eye on people in other tour groups, and he casually steps into the line of sight whenever someone tries to take Wally's picture. When I ask him why he does this, Keiran tells me it's not just an issue of respect, but also business integrity. "Tourists love to have aboriginals in their pictures of Uluru. It makes the photos seem more authentic. But if we let every random person take Wally's picture, people would lose an incentive for taking our tours. Plus, we'd never get anything done."

Wally leads us to a cave at the base of Uluru that is associated with the mala tjurukpa, or "hare wallaby dreaming," which describes an event in Pitjantjatjara prehistory. Such mythic stories of "dreamtime"—epic tales wherein snakes walk, wallabies throw spears, and mulga seeds seek revenge—are central to aboriginal religious and ethical beliefs, describing in detail the creation of the world and humankind's role in it. Celebrated in classic travel books like Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, these dreamtime stories are one of the most intriguing aspects of indigenous Australian culture.

The stories are also one of the most misunderstood aspects of indigenous culture. One hundred years ago, for example, European anthropologists believed that a central dreamtime story for the Pitjantjatjara involved the pungkalungu—giant, flesh-eating ogres who exacted revenge for misdeeds. As it turned out, pungkalungu stories were merely informal Pitjantjatjara folk tales—a local variation of the bogeyman, used to scare naughty children.

" 'Dreamtime' is an imperfect translation," Keiran tells me. "Tjurukpa, as the Pitjantjatjara understand it, is no dream. There's no good equivalent word in English; it's a kind of traditional law, which describes history, geography, and morality. Researchers estimate humans have lived near Uluru for 22,000 years, but the Pitjantjatjara believe that they have always been here, that tjurukpa is part of an ongoing condition, not a mythic past. This oral tradition is accumulated through years of ceremonial initiation and life experience, and it's one of the most technically and legally complex religious systems in the world."

Keiran goes on to relate the dreamtime story of mythic hare-wallabies who visited Uluru and unwittingly found themselves in a feud with the mulga-seed men, the wintalka. The vengeful wintalka created a dog monster to destroy the ceremonial camp of the hare-wallaby men, and signs of the struggle are evident in the lumps and notches of Uluru's furrowed red slopes.

As stories go, the mala tjurukpa isn't particularly spellbinding, but Keiran tells me the purpose of tjurukpa is not to entertain but to teach lessons about respecting ceremonial rules or finding food. "Besides," he says, "you're only getting a small fragment of the story, which itself is connected with other stories. To fully understand the tjurukpa, you'd have to live close to the land for many years. Even then, tradition dictates what you can and cannot know. Wally may be a male elder, but that doesn't mean he has access to female stories and ceremonies."

I notice Wally has wandered off and is now rolling a cigarette under a tree near the Kantju Gorge water hole. "Piiwi," he says, as Keiran and I approach him. He points up at the tree, but it's several moments before I spot a pair of owllike tawny frogmouths—mother and hatchling—perched on a branch. Their coloring is so similar to the tree bark that I can just barely make them out. "She's moved," Wally says to Keiran. "She used to live in a different place. I've never seen her here before. And I never knew she'd had babies."

As Wally puffs on his cigarette and grins up at the piiwi, I realize that his very strength as a tour guide is that he doesn't really give a crap about tourists. Instead of trying to deliver standardized cultural information, the Pitjantjatjara elder is merely offering me the chance to tag along as he enjoys a stroll in his homeland. And, while a morning tour of Uluru can hardly do aboriginal heritage justice, Wally's keen eye for the land hints at a richer cultural story. His story is, in fact, the tale of the oldest continuous culture in the world—stretching well into the Pleistocene Age, when people lived with no permanent possessions, no food preservation, and no distinction between labor and leisure. It's a tale of the first continent in human history to be settled by sea travel, 60,000 years ago—and the intimate knowledge of climate, animal habits, plant cycles, and insect life necessary to subsist in a harsh land.

It's also a story that gets muddled by the noise of the modern world—though modernity seems to be popularizing Pitjantjatjara culture as much as it compromises it. Indeed, even though resort restaurants, camel treks, and tour buses would seem to diminish the aboriginal presence here, the constant stream of visitors creates an inevitable market of fascination in the local culture. Among the hundreds of historically distinctive indigenous societies within Australia, mass tourism has transformed the Pitjantjatjara into an antipodean equivalent of the Navajo—a culture that is celebrated and romanticized by the same public consciousness that threatens to dilute it.

When our morning trek concludes, Keiran mentions that I can buy into a more in-depth Pitjantjatjara tour tomorrow, where I'll be able to dine on witchety grubs, identify bush fruits, and learn how to throw a spear.

I decline—not because I don't want to do these things, but because of that old tourist irony: To get a proper taste of aboriginal culture, I feel I need to find a landscape that isn't so overrun by other tourists.

Bidding my Uluru guides farewell, I fire up my rental car and head east on the Lasseter Highway.


From: Rolf Potts
Subject: If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Arrernte Country
Posted Tuesday, March 6, 2007, at 11:22 AM ET

Travelers wanting to catch a glimpse of an aboriginal dance performance near the tidy Australian outback town of Alice Springs are usually pointed to the Red Centre Dreaming show, which includes a three-course buffet dinner and all the sparkling wine you can drink. Since the local Arrernte Aborigines don't feel comfortable sharing their ceremonial dances in front of a paying audience, the Red Centre Dreaming performers are brought in from the state of Queensland, hundreds of miles away. In cultural terms, watching Queensland aboriginal dances in Alice Springs is kind of like going to Denmark to watch a flamenco performance—but the tourists here don't seem to mind.

Though I'm trying my best to understand the cultural intricacies of indigenous Australian society, at times it can be hard to keep up with all the new information. Yesterday, while visiting Uluru National Park, I managed to learn a number of Pitjantjatjara aboriginal words, such as kapi, which means "water," and tjala, which means "honey ant." Today, having driven five hours to Alice Springs—a small increment on any map of Australia—I've discovered that these words are now useless. Here, in the local Arrernte language, "water" is kwatye; "honey ant" is yerrampe. For travelers hoping to learn about aboriginal culture while seeing the sights of central Australia, this can be somewhat befuddling—kind of like the "If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium" phenomenon of Western European package tourism, but without any easily identifiable frontiers.

Before the arrival of European interlopers, indigenous Australian societies spoke around 250 languages and 700 dialects. Though all these aboriginal subcultures shared a land-based nomadic lifestyle, similar religious practices, and some forms of intertribal trade, they never developed a collective sense of "aboriginal" identity, and broad cultural variations existed across relatively short distances. British settlers in the late 18th century, for example, noted that Aborigines on the north side of Sydney Harbor spoke a different language from those living on the south side. To this day, most indigenous Australians identify more with their historical kinship group than a general "aboriginal" identity, and the closest thing to a cultural lingua franca is English (which is usually pidginized, since its vocabulary isn't well suited to expressing the nature-based indigenous worldview).

Thus, a visit to Alice Springs can be confusing, since the town functions as an administrative center that attracts people from all parts of central Australia. Tourists browsing the souvenir shops and indigenous-art galleries along the Todd Street Mall might assume that the groups of aboriginal people dozing along the walkway are all hard-luck locals—an outback variation of the urban homeless—when, in fact, there's a good chance those aboriginal folks are themselves tourists to Alice Springs. One group lounging along Todd Mall, for example, might be a family of Pintupi speakers in town for a daughter's softball tournament; another might be Kaytetye women who've hitched in for land-rights hearings; a third group might be young Alyawarr men indulging in a one-week bender, since their elders don't allow alcohol on indigenous land. And, since more than 20 percent of Alice Springs' 30,000 permanent residents are of aboriginal heritage, all these visitors might have trouble relating to indigenous locals, who are known to drive Land Cruisers, live in suburban bungalows, and feel more comfortable speaking English than their traditional languages.

My guide here in Alice Springs, a handsome, 46-year-old Arrernte man named Bob Taylor, speaks almost no Arrernte. This is because, at age 8, he was forcibly taken from his Arrernte mother and—with the approval of the Australian government—sent to a home for "half-caste" aboriginal children in South Australia, where, for the next nine years, he was allowed to speak only English. More than 100,000 indigenous children, collectively called the "Stolen Generation," suffered this practice of enforced assimilation between 1910 and 1970. Unhappily trapped between cultures as a young man, Bob eventually found his calling as a chef and wandered his way to Europe, where he landed work at various five-star hotel restaurants in Holland. Ask him about this experience, and he'll tell you about the idiosyncrasies of his Dutch ex-girlfriends with the same affection and enthusiasm he uses to describe his Arrernte cousins.

Bob started his tour operation two years ago, as a way of embracing his heritage and taking a break from the boozy trappings of restaurant culture. His business, RT Tours, has a fleet of one 12-person bus; he is the only employee. Since this is low season for tourists, I am his lone client. Today we are driving 50 miles out of Alice Springs to West MacDonnell National Park, where Bob plans to grill kangaroo filets and teach me how to find bush food. I notice he's packed a didgeridoo—a long, wooden, tubelike aboriginal instrument famous for its growling, ethereal sound. From my research, I know that the Arrernte people didn't historically use the didgeridoo, but I don't mention this to Bob.

As we drive, the landscape outside our bus is spectacular: prickly yellow spinifex grass clumped in the dark orange soil; furrowed ridges of dusty purple rock; broad blue horizons. Twice the size of California, Northern Territory is home to just over 200,000 people (most of whom live in Darwin, on the northern coast), and the sense of dry, sprawling emptiness is visceral and humbling. Leathery kangaroo carcasses—roadkill, from the looks of it—fringe the roadside.

I ask Bob how it feels to be a child of the Stolen Generation, but he doesn't seem to want to dwell on it. Instead, he steers the conversation to his business and how he feels he's in a unique position to bridge two cultures. "Tourism is a great opportunity for aboriginal people to share their culture and create economic opportunities," he says. "The biggest problem is that we're not really driven by the dollar. Most aboriginal businesspeople are more interested in living close to the land, getting off welfare, and preserving traditions for future generations. I like to think that my business is an example of the opportunities that are out there."

"What kinds of people usually come on your tours?"

"Europeans. A lot of Germans, plus some Italians and French. For some reason, these people are interested in indigenous cultures from all over the world. That means my main competition isn't Sydney or the Great Barrier Reef, but places like Nepal and Peru. Aboriginal tour operators are trying to get the word out, trying to convince people that our culture is as old and interesting as you'll find anywhere. I just wish we could get more of you Americans to come out."

"You don't get many Americans?"

"American tourists out here tend to be older folks, who don't like hiking around and getting dirty. They're happy to see a dance or listen to a didgeridoo at their hotel, then fly back to Sydney. But if you want to understand aboriginal Australia, you have to come here for the land itself. If you don't experience the flies and the heat and the long distances, you're going to miss the point."

When we arrive at MacDonnell National Park, Bob dons a broad-brimmed felt hat and leads me on a two-hour hike along the steep, red-rock chasms. Here, we spot rock wallabies along the cliffs, examine the sandy foxholes made by kangaroos digging for water, and scan the landscape for bush food. Since plants don't grow much in the searing heat of the Australian summer, Bob breaks out a Tupperware jar containing fruits he's collected on other journeys. I can't keep up with the Arrernte words for all the food, but Bob points out that each fruit has an English nickname: bush fig, bush cucumber, bush banana, bush orange. As I sample the foods, I find that these names are somewhat arbitrary: The bush coconut, for example, is sweet and fleshy, but it resembles a tree gall; the bush tomato has an acidic, raisiny taste. Bob tells me that over 30 edible bush fruits are known to aboriginals in central Australia and that the European explorers who famously starved to death here in the 19th century died in a land where indigenous people had prospered for 20,000 years.

Leading me back out of the canyons, Bob sets up kitchen gear at a picnic area and cooks me a tasty lunch of seared kangaroo filets and bread dipped in bush spices. As I eat, he takes out the didgeridoo and begins to play, showing me how he circulates air through his nose to make a continuous breath. As much as I enjoy the spooky, reverberating music, I can't contain my curiosity. "I've read that the didgeridoo doesn't come from central Australia," I say when he's finished.

"You're right," he says. "It comes from the north, in Arnhem Land. But I've found that tourists want to hear aboriginals play the didgeridoo, regardless of where it comes from. When you run a business like mine, that's the trick: balancing people's expectations of aboriginal culture with the real thing. That's why a town like Alice Springs has galleries full of paintings from a culture that never had houses to hang them in."

"You mean all that aboriginal art isn't authentic?"

"It depends on what you mean by authentic. But yeah: If you want to see how tourist demand changes local traditions, look at the aboriginal art business."

The following day, I head into Alice Springs to do just that.
Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. His travel-themed blog can be found at Vagablogging.net.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2161053/

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