An unlikely defense against plagiarism

• The best weapon against plagiarism is Google Book Search, according to Paul Collins in Slate.

Kicks off with a great line:

For any plagiarist living in an age of search engines, waving a loaded book in front of reviewers has become the literary equivalent of suicide by cop.

And goes on to make astute points about Google Book Search, whose merits have been hotly debated of late:

But wait, you might ask, don't people accidentally repeat each other's sentences all the time? It seems to me that this should not be unusual. Yet try plugging that last sentence word by word into Google Book Search, and watch what happens.

It: Rejected—too many hits to count
It seems: 11,160,000 matches
It seems to: 3,050,000
It seems to me: 1,580,000
It seems to me that: 844,000
It seems to me that this: 29,700
It seems to me that this should: 237
It seems to me that this should not: 20
It seems to me that this should not be: 9
It seems to me that this should not be unusual: 0

It seems to me that this should not be unusual is itself ... unusual.

Plagiarism is an endless debate with muddy lines of demarcation. Obviously it's not a great idea to copy chunks of text wholesale and pass it off as your own, but it does make me wonder if a lot of dilution will happen to writing in general if it has to be vetted by Google first. That, and who's to say that the technology is foolproof? It's manmade, so therefore it's bound to be flawed. It could either shove writing in a positive direction by increasing knowledge about writers' accountability, or it could simply be an easy excuse to kill something halfway interesting that dares to be inspired by something obscure.

Remember the old saying, "Originality is determined by the obscurity of your sources"? I wonder if this will continue to be the case...

Once more 'round the bend

• The Sunday Times sounds yet another death toll for the book.

Same old story, but with some interesting bits:

Jeanneney says that Google is not what it seems. Its search results are biased by commercial and cultural pressures. He has a point. Try this: go to Google Book Search and enter Gustave Flaubert. The first results are full of English translations of Madame Bovary.

The books of the English-speaking world are given overwhelming priority. Equally, Google’s main search engine produces paid-for sites. Google is a profit machine. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we don’t delude ourselves into thinking it is an entirely neutral source of information.

But there are even deeper issues revolving around the distinction between information and knowledge. “A search engine,” says John Sutherland, professor of English at UCL, “is not an index.”

An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results are the product of an algorithm with information. Parents will already have seen the power of the algorithm. Google has supplanted the textbook as the source of homework research.

It speaks

• Thomas Pynchon, among others, has come out in support of Ian McEwan.

Thomas Pynchon, who vies with J D Salinger for the title of the world's most secretive author, has broken his strict rules on privacy to join a campaign to clear the British Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan of charges of plagiarism.

In a move described by his British publisher as "unknown", Pynchon, an American who is never seen in public, does not give interviews and whose whereabouts are a closely guarded secret, sent a typed letter to his British agent yesterday to say that McEwan "merits not our scolding but our gratitude" for using details from another author's book.

More at the New York Times.

A mountain out of a molehill

• More accusations of plagiarism, this time aimed at Ian McEwan.

McEwan seems to have copped to it all along, anyway, so what's the big kerfuffle all about?

McEwan, 58, said Andrews was a source of "inspiration" for his novel and its characters.

"An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No," he said on his Web site (www.ianmcewan.com).

While researching "Atonement," his 2001 work shortlisted for the Booker prize for fiction, he came across "No Time For Romance" in an Oxford library and drew on its descriptions of life in a London hospital during World War Two.

"As with the Dunkirk section, I drew on the scenes she described," he wrote in his rebuttal.

"For certain long-outdated medical practices, she was my sole source and I have always been grateful to her."

He added that he acknowledged his debt to Andrews in the author's note at the end of "Atonement" and spoke about her in numerous interviews.

"My one regret is not meeting her," he continued. "But if people are now talking about Lucilla Andrews, I am glad."

Dirty rotten scoundrels, little green men

• The New York Press is shocked, shocked about plagiarism.

Robert Clark Young’s article makes the great point that literary plagiarists exhibit sociopathic behavior, in the compulsive reorganization of preexisting texts and presenting them as original works. He is careful, however, to not discuss sociopathic tendencies in writers who tend to do their own work (as if he’d get any to admit it). Still, it’s sad when pulped editions of plagiarized works sell for nearly $1000 on Amazon. People will indeed collect anything.

• The UFO craze is apparently on its last legs.

It’s a personal theory of mine that mankind creates boogeymen (benevolent or not) to explain the unexplainable. Ergo, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster all the way up through God and Satan; theories that swell with exoticism and promise, yet deflate the moment they encounter the needles of rationality and hard science. Healing balms, however, take many forms, so it’s really just a matter of choosing your demon. In any case, Douglas Kern’s article is a good read, and makes me nostalgic for those early days of The X-Files, when the Internet was still a rather intimidating new frontier.