Month: March 2014

Thinking through the question of when creative influence becomes plagiarism, Rachel Hodin comes to this conclusion: “All we can say for sure is that it’s not only fair to take ideas and inspiration from others, it’s necessary for the survival of art”:

As humans, we take ideas, information, and insight from others every second of our waking days, and more often than not, this process is subconscious. For this reason, we have no authority to claim the right and wrong ways of drawing influence from others; all we can do is observe, and take note. And it’s worth noting that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were influenced by Tolstoy. Hemingway “took on board every technique that Tolstoy ever devised,” except he never took on Tolstoy’s themes when they weren’t true to him: “He could never imagine himself as a weak [man], and the idea of a strong man weakened by an emotional dependency was not within his imaginative compass.” Whereas Fitzgerald had no qualms about taking Tolstoy’s themes. And while there’s no clear answer as to why, Hemingway’s approach, when compared to Fitzgerald’s, just seems more genuine — and all the more so when you consider the fact that Fitzgerald’s writing never came close to anything Tolstoy ever wrote.

In a 2007 Harper‘s essay plumbing similar themes, Jonathan Lethem connects art to the idea of a “gift economy,” arguing against those who view “the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other”:

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.

Access to Lethem’s article is free for Dish readers this weekend, courtesy of Byliner. Related Dish on the subject here.

In an excerpt from his new biography of the late writer, Adam Begley suggests the reason why John Updike’s fiction could draw liberally from his own experiences:

Part of what allowed Updike the freedom to indulge his autobiographical impulse was his relationship with his mother, the elderly widow who tugged at Ecenbarger’s sleeve in the Shillington public library, eager to talk about her son, the famous writer. To say that Linda Grace Hoyer Updike encouraged her only child and nurtured his precocious talent is to understate and simplify an unusually close and complicated relationship. She helped him to become a writer (and he, when the time came, helped her, getting ten of her short ­stories published in The New Yorker), offering him yards of advice and unstinting praise from the moment he set pen to paper. She was, as he put it, “an ideally permissive writer’s mother,” meaning that he was free to write exactly what he pleased, no matter how painful to his family. When the biographer Ron Chernow, who went to see Linda Updike in Plowville in the early ’70s when he was a young journalist eager to write about Updike, asked her how it felt to pop up as a character in her son’s fiction, “she paused and said, ‘When I came upon the characterization of myself as a large, coarse country woman I was very hurt.’ She said she walked around for several days, brooding—and then she realized she was a large, coarse country woman.”

Commenting on Begley’s treatment of Updike’s 1977 novel, Marry Me, Peter Quinones notices one area where all is not revealed – Updike’s affairs:

It is, like much of Updike’s fiction, a thinly disguised account of actual events – in this case, his affair with Joyce Harrington.  To me, Begley’s account of this situation alone would make his book worth reading, but it leads into another area – one that I’m sure  future biographers of Updike will dive into with much gusto:  Begley’s decision to let Updike’s many lovers remain anonymous, with two exceptions – the aforementioned Harrington and Martha Bernhard, who eventually became his second wife.  He also  chooses to let the Ipswich, Mass. couples who were the models for the Tarbox couples in Couples remain anonymous.  Begley writes that he let the lovers remain unnamed in order to protect their privacy and, also, in order to encourage them to tell him about their encounters with Updike.  However, there isn’t very much in the book in the way of these encounters at all, a curious turn of events.  In any case, I’m willing to bet that future generations of Updike fans and researchers will want to puncture all this anonymity, whether justifiably or not.  It just seems like too broad an avenue of potentially important research.

The Dish recently featured Updike’s poetry here, here, and here. Update from a reader:

I just want to thank you and the Dish staff for featuring so much John Updike lately. I’m a huge fan of the late master’s and had the honor of meeting him a few years at the Book Expo America in D.C. (where he shared the dais with a young and freshly-minted U.S. Senator named Barack Obama). Of course, because I’m me and prone to tremendous bouts of asshattery when confronted with my literary heroes, I visibly terrified the gentle and always-smiling Updike by inexplicably asking if he had read Augusten Burroughs’s essay “Killing John Updike.” Even that famous and face-creasing beatific smile of his couldn’t dispel the discomfort I’d caused him, and so I slunk away miserably, happy with my autographed copy of Terrorist and glad I didn’t get the chance to open my stupid mouth near a future U.S. president.

(Video: Jeffrey Brown interviews Updike in 2003)

For researchers, the question is no joke:

Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado–Boulder professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and author of The Emotional Lives of Animals, believes [animals do have a funny bone]. In fact, he thinks we’re on the cusp of discovering that many animals have a sense of humor, maybe even all mammals. The idea that animals can appreciate comedy isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, considering some of the other groundbreaking discoveries scientists like Bekoff are making about animal behavior: They have found dogs that understand unfairness, spiders that display different temperaments, and bees that can be trained to be pessimistic.

As Bekoff points out, Darwin argued that the difference between human and animal intelligence is a matter of degree, not of kind. Or as Bekoff put it, “If we have a sense of humor, then nonhuman animals should have a sense of humor, too.”

A similar sentiment inspired psychologist Jaak Panksepp to enter his lab at Bowling Green State University in Ohio one day in 1997 and tell undergrad Jeffrey Burgdorf, “Let’s go tickle some rats.” The lab had already discovered that its rats would emit unique ultrasonic chirps in the 50 kilohertz range when they were chasing one another and engaging in play fighting. Now the researchers wondered if they could prompt this chirping through tickling. Sure enough, when the researchers began poking at the bellies of the rats in their lab, their ultrasonic recording devices picked up the same 50 kilohertz sounds. The rats eagerly chased their fingers for more. Soon, as the news media trumpeted the existence of rat laughter, people the world over were opening up their rat cages and engaging Pinky and Mr. Pickles in full-scale tickle wars.