Tasting with your eye: on the too much of reality

 

« Savoir  être  superficiel par profondeur. » I extract this maxim from Georges Salles “Le regard” – The look. The deep know how to be superficial – the English explains too much, decompresses the spring, here. English is a good language for punchlines, while French is one for epigrams.

I came upon the name Georges Salles in Adrienne Monnier’s essay about her late friend, Walter Benjamin, published by Mercure de France in 1952. Monnier was Sylvia Beach’s lover – two real live muses, Beach, of course, of James Joyce, and Monnier of a number of writers, including Walter Benjamin, who she first met in 1930 at her famous bookstore/salon. He wrote Monnier a letter when he was on his final flight from the Nazis out of Paris to Marseilles, and then, by a fatal misstep, by way of the Pyrenees to Spain.  

“I keep thinking of you not only in dreaming of Paris and rue de L’Odeon, for which I wish the most powerful and least solicited protective divinities – but also a many of the intersections of my thought.”

A muse in need of a muse.

Georges Salles’  Le Regard was a shared enthusiasm of Monnier and Benjamin. Salles was, officially, an expert on “Asian” art. He was also a great defender of the art of the connoisseur, an art founded not, for him, on signatures, on attribution, but on the ocular enjoyment – like the tongue, the eye has its pure pleasures. Salles was the grandchild of Gustave Eiffel, and the collaborator of Andre Malraux. However, a book about the sensual delight of the visible, published in 1939, was not likely to survive the sensual horror of the war.

«  The certainty of the amateur’s glance is neither more intellectual nor less organic than the selection of a gourmet. Everything happens in the shokc of an impression, confusing to our mind but distinct to our senses.”  Here was a man of a certain radical empiricism: thought follows the senses at a distance, as the kite, as spectacular as it may be, follows the string held by the child. The child determines, in the last instance, whether to bring the kite down or to let it go.

It is the last chapter of The Look that might have truly fired up Benjamin: the day. The author goes out of the museum, away from the paintings and sculptures, and into the streets of Paris to use his heightened optical sense. This return to life is I think something we have all experienced – although for me the experience is going from a movie that has really delighted me or moved me out of the theatre into the streets. Ideally, the movie ends at, say, eight o’clock p.m. on an early spring day. Ideally, the city is New Orleans or Atlanta – and I am in my twenties. The transfer from one realm of fascination to another is a curiously delayed passage – the streets “look” cinematic. This experience is described by no one better than Walker Percy in The Movie Goer. I know the streets that Percy’s character, Binx, walked around. I have a distinct memory of coming out of Prytania theatre dazzled by one movie or another, and walking back across Audobon Park to the apartment in the upper floor of one of the big houses that I shared with Frank. Frank is long gone in my life, a boat that has drifted away, but I do remember the elevation of common life that succeeded seeing some movies, that little extra around things – as Nietzsche puts it in the intro to the Twilight of the Idols, “nothing succeeds without some measure of exaggeration. The too much of force is proof of force.”

This is named, approximately, the “Search” in the Moviegoer. Binx, the narrator, calls it waking up and finding one is in a strange place. “The movies are onto the search but they screw it up.” Or sometimes, when you are young, they give you the impulse. Even movies shown on TV gave me that moment, sometimes.

It isn’t such a long distance from Georges Salles in 1939 in Paris (to whom Benjamin dedicated his last published bit of writing when he was still alive) and me in 1982, walking home from the Prytania movie theatre. An almost equal distance separates me from 1982 and 1982 from 1939. In Seven league boots, I go backwards.

Non-agression pacts: from Molotov-Ribbentrop to James Angleton

 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact has been burned into our intellectual history: here, at last, Stalin cast off the mask and Soviet Communism was revealed as a reactionary force. It has become a trope in the literature: how violent anti-Nazi communists, overnight, turned into pacifists.

However, a secret and parallel non-aggression pact was made after the war – this time, between the American military and intelligence services and various talented anti-communist Nazis. This pact was not officialized with any pomp – rather, it was the object of various “programs”, codenamed Dustbin, or Paperclip, or simply acted upon by various American intelligence agents who carried into the field America’s enduring racism and a hefty backwoods or Yale educated anti-communism.

The products of the later pact sometimes emerged in trials, and sometimes emerged in memoirs. The entire West German intelligence service began under Gehlen, a highranking Nazi Abwehr officer, pretty much where it left off in 1944, when Gehlen’s army – Hitler’s Army – was in mass retreat from Russia.

In Italy, the non-aggression pact was operationalized by the leading intelligence officer in Italy at that time, James Angleton, who had family connections in Italy who had connections to various highranking fascists. These fascists included many who, later on in Italian history, subvented neo-fascists groups, created various behind the scenes groups, and occasionally broke out into outright attempts at coups. Angleton’s friend, the “Black Prince”, Junio Valerio Borghese, famously plotted one of those coup, which failed in 1970, forcing Borghese to flee to friendly Franco’s Spain.

Another result of what one might want to call the Angleton-Borghese non-aggression pact was the American support for Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe, the effects of which have ramified over the decades. Violen Trifa, a Romanian Iron Gardist,  lead the youth wing of the Iron Gard in a merciless rebellion in Bucharest against the government in 1941. The Iron Gardists were ecstatically sadistic: Jewish prisoners were taken by the Iron Guard to the municipal  slaughterhouse. "There," White [an American correspondant] wrote, "in a fiendish parody of kosher methods of butchering, they hung many of the Jews on meat hooks and slit their throats; others they forced to kneel at chopping blocks while they [Iron Guardists] beheaded them with cleavers." Fourteen years later, after Trifa had found his way by various backroutes to America and become a bishop in the Romanian Orthodox Church and a standup anti-communist, he was invited by Richard Nixon to give the opening prayer at the U.S. Senate. Trifa’s is an extreme case – he denied for a long time being part of the Iron Guard - but the American military and intelligence forces in Germany and Austria after the war soon put into practice their own form of Ribbentrop - Molotov. And they kept their bargain with their former Nazi factotums. Walter Schreiber, who apparently gave good data from his biowar experiments on concentration camp inmates, was imported to the US and found employment with the Air Force. Unfortunately for Schreiber, the press got ahold of his past – a rare case in the fifties – and so the U.S. arranged for him to slip away to Argentina. Eventually, he ended up working for Paraguay’s fiercely anti-communist dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. A memo from the Pentagon showed the military exasperation with the pettifogging around such as Schreiber: “an organized medical movement against [Schreiber], emanating from Boston, by medical men of Jewish ancestry, I would suspect.”

 

These stories have been around since the late seventies – from John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret in 1982 to Ann Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip in 2014. The books are not, it should be noted, by academics, nor is there an academic sub-department dedicated to what happened to the Nazis, fascists and collaborators after WWII – in the popular imagination and in academic studies, what happened was the Nuremberg Trial. And, in particular, while Yale University, for instance, publishes a whole series on Communist spies in America, nobody mixes these studies with the study of the use, by an unelected American establishment, of Nazis in America, and elsewhere. This is no small blind spot – if we had a good, contextually rich sense of how the extreme right was supported after the war by its former enemies – the U.S., the U.K., France and the U.S.S.R – we would have a morally clarified image of the history of the last 75 years. We don’t have that.

 

But even from what we do have, we know that an American establishment long identified anti-communism as the guiding star of American foreign and domestic policy, much more so than democracy of “freedom”. As a result, Americans – liberals and conservatives – have a very distorted view of America’s “exceptionalism.”

Eye-traps - the dash in Emily Dickenson

 

When I first started reading Emily Dickinson in high school in the 1970s, she seemed to be either a tame poet, good for holiday cards, or a morose poet of the kind satirized by Mark Twain in Huck Finn, Emmiline Grangerford, with her creepy sub-Poe fascination with funerals. She was the farthest thing from the wilder shore of Walt Whitman, I thought.

I read Dickinson as she was edited and domesticated, starting with her first posthumous editors, her brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was only in the 60s that the wilder shore of Dickinson’s poetry started to emerge, beginning with the complete edition of her poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1960. Crucially, Johnson restored the dashes to the poems – which are to the poems what the axe was to Lizzie Borden. The dash, that punctuation interruptus, gave the poems back their sanguinary impulse. We could finally read Dickinson.

The chronology of literature can’t be specified by dates of publication, which is why it has a strange causal structure. For instance, where in that chronology would I place the great book by Susan Howe – My Emily Dickinson. Howe’s book is in that rare vein of poet’s books – Williams In the American Grain, Zukofsky’s Apollinaire, Olson’s Melville – that shifts your vision and shows that the order one assumed is not the true order at all, at all.  For Howe, Dickinson was the most radical poet of the 19th century.

 

To make a comparison she doesn’t make – just as Georg Buchner seemed to invent the theater of the 1920s in the plays he wrote in the 1830s, so, too, Dickinson seems to have invented the lyric difficulty we associate with the poets of the end of modernism – poets as different as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich - around the time of the American civil war.

 

Howe adroitly inserts Jonathan Edwards into Dickinson’s intellectual background, and Emily Bronte as her true contemporary. One poet she doesn’t mention is Lord Byron.

Thomas Moore’s edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals was published in the U.S. in the 1840s. The letters were defanged, but the journals retained Byron’s characteristic skipping dash, for instance: “While you are under the influence of passions, you only feel, but cannot describe them, — any more than, when in action, you could turn round and tell the story to your next neighbour! When all is over, — all, all, and irrevocable, — trust to memory — she is then but too faithful.” Byron’s dashes, unlike Dickinson’s, have an aristocratic disdain for the mere plebe assemblies of rote classroom English. Dickinson, though, if she read Moore’s edition, would certainly have seen how they could work.

 

Jane Stabler, in an essay on Byron’s dashes, has noticed how they bothered his critics when he plied them in his poems. One of the critics used the term “eye-trap” for this use of dashes:

 

When the British Critic praised Byron for omitting the dashy “eye-traps” in Lara, the phrase “eye-trap” (from the 1750s, according to the OED) was used presumably as a variant of “clap-trap,” the extended pause that set apart moments of high emotion in theatrical performances, designed to attract the attention and applause of the audience.

 

On the page, Byron’s promiscuous “em” dashing resembles the visual appearance of the Shakespeare plays David Garrick prepared for the Drury Lane Threatre. Garrick used a dash to signal where an actor should pause for effect so that in his published adaptations, as Warren Oakley has shown, “[t]ypography indicates the location of each dramatic caesura, but is silent about the nature of the action filling the expressive pause … prompting the imagination of the reader”  

 

 

Of course, Dickinson was a pretty radical DIY type of poet, and may well have done without prompts. But I would love some genealogy of the dashes, on the lines of the way Guy Davenport, in his essay on Cummings in Every Force Evolves a Form, saw how Cummings saw the opportunity in the way Greek verses, as for instance Sapho’s, were published with scholarly apparatus in the Loeb Library editions.

 

"And when these early poems, none of which has survived entire but exist on torn, rotted, ratgnawn papyrus or parchment, are set in type for the modern student of Greek, such as Edward Estlin Cummings, Greek major at Harvard (1911-1916), the text is a frail scatter of lacunae, conjectures, brackets, and parentheses. They look, in fact, very like an E. E. Cummings poem. His eccentric margins, capricious word divisions, vagrant punctuation, tmeses, and promiscuously embracing parentheses, can be traced to the scholarly trappings which a Greek poem wears on a textbook page. Cummings' playfulness in writing a word like "l(oo)k"-a pair of eyes looking from inside the word – must have been generated by the way scholars restore missing letters in botched texts, a Greek l[oo]k, where the 1 and k are legible on a papyrus, there's space for two letters between them, and an editor has inserted a conjectural oo."

 

I think Dickinson unleashed is such a different spirit from Dickinson leashed that to read her poems in the normalized editions is not to have any true sense of her, if such a thing were possible.  Compare:

 

Wild nights – Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

 

Futile – the winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!

 

Rowing in Eden –

Ah – the Sea!

Might I but moor – tonight –

In thee!

 

As compared to this:

 

Wild nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a heart in port, —

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

Might I but moor

To-night in thee!

 

This is of course one of the famous poems. The referential strangeness – rowing in Eden? – is subdued, I’d claim, in the second version, just as the Wild Nights, a repetition that is divided by a repelling dash to create a sort of negative identity, is annealed in the double exclamation marks of the more conventional, the more romantic exclamation of the second version (Ah! the Sea!) The placement of the exclamation marks in the second version – and the erasure of the exclamation marks in the second stanza, after “done with the Chart”  - seems, similarly, to take us to the stylistics of romantic poetry, rather than the asperities that Howe sees in the Puritan doctrine underneath the lines, asperities that tossing away the Chart makes more vivid.

 

 

the contemporary

 

It was the late nineteenth century social philosopher Gabriel Tarde who first suggested that the public and publics, which in earlier times were defined for the most part by their haptic proximity – all those salons and coffee houses – are formed, now, by the subordination of the haptic to another kind and degree of proximity, a social mode of temporality – simultaneity – that Tarde mentions in connection with the news.

News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, there is an important conceptual shift, in as much as news is connected, in English, to the new, whereas actuality is connected to a block of time we can call the “present”. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity,” but unfortunately he does not disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity in all its extension as a social form of time, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”.

However, we know that  ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. There is a curious paradox in following “the-same-time” – it is rather like following oneself on a walk. Is your walk separable from the you that walked it?

Yet the social temporality of the simultaneous is defined by the way it keeps moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under this baptism and curse. Modernity is the era in which the modern is invented.

The philosopher Vincent Descombes, in “What is the contemporary?”, takes a shot at defining this form of social time. He divides its meaning into two grand and different semantic regions. The first is from the point of view of history: “The contemporary is an age. It comes in the programs of history which include, as their last part, the study of the modern and contemporary world: the contemporary world appears as the most advanced point of the modern world.”

The second is “furnished by reflection on time.” Descombes takes a strongly Aristotelian approach to time. “There where nothing changes, there is no temporality. In fact, the notion of change imposes conceiving something like a temporal distance or a difference of times between many states of the world. Time is the order in which changes are made, an order of what is before and of what is after.

If one asks a philosophy of time for a notion of the contemporary, one would conceive the contemporary as a competition between many actual changes. To be contemporary would mean sharing historical actuality.”

Descombes language is in the abstract philosophical line, so that “worlds” don’t refer specifically to the history that we know of this world, but simply to ontic ensembles. In this way, the contemporary is lifted from its material anchors and one can talk of a contemporaneity in any world. This is useful, anthropologically – it at least lays out the terms of an anthropological project. But to my mind, what is useful about the notion of the contemporary is that it gives us a “quasi-transcendent” which we can see emerge in what Lotman called the semiosphere – in media itself.

Lyric apocalypse

 

Poetry, sez those who refuse to include the whole universe of the blues, rock, punk, emo, rap, dap, and other music in the poetry genre, is no longer popular, or read, or used, or culturally central.

I’m doubtful of those claims. Poetry is, I’d contend, what happens when a person thinks – poetry first, logic afterwards.

However, it is true that the lyric – and of a particular type, with the shrinking of the poem to the poet, to the poet’s word, a shrinking from persona to personality – has triumphed over other forms. Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus poems have their draw and make their mark, but the great influences are confessional, personal rather than persona centered.

That form of lyric has its price: the toll of suicided American poets alone is impressive: Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Jarrell. A lyric apocalypse. Robert Lowell only succeeded in avoiding putting the knife to his own throat by sheer luck: the manias and cruelties of his life are well known.

What I’m getting at here is: a poetry that throws off the mask is, perhaps, a symptom of something going on within the poetic system. Hart Crane’s children, in a sense, lost contact with the endurance at the heart of Whitman and Dickinson, the founding poets. A poetry that measures how much you cannot endure – this is the siren of negation, tempting the sailor to jump.

In “The Rational of Verse”, Poe writes: “Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness.” Poe is writing of the compensatory movement of sound in the rhythms of poetry.

I’d suggest that the birth of the lyric as confession originates in an infant trait studied in depth by the psychologist Katherine Nelson. Nelson was fascinated by the puzzle of infant amnesia – the fact that humans do not remember very much about their first years. In pursuing this puzzle, Nelson came across two academics whose child, Emily, showed great signs of precocity. The parents took to recording their girl’s monologues in the crib, before she went to bed, from the age of 22 months to the age of 37 months – something that would only occur to academic parents. Nelson was surprised to find that Emily’s “crib talk” – the monologue she repeated to herself as she went to sleep – was linguistically more sophisticated than most of her talk with her caregivers and other children. Nelson’s attributes this higher level of discursive quality to the fact that these monologues were not aimed at sleep so much as they were at understanding her “self” – what she had done, what she was going to do, what she felt, etc. As Nelson puts it, the themes of Emily’s monologues concern “what happened” (with its attendant linguistic markers of tense and temporal adjectives), “what is going to happen”, and “what should happen”. Into these person-centered themes she also introduces story themes from stories that are told or read to her.

Our little Emily is, as it were, giving birth to all the forms of poetry – the epic, the dramatic, the lyric – in her monologues. Out of crib talk, Berryman ‘s sonnets and Plath’s lyrics. Helen Vendler wrote that the “lyric is the genre of private life: it is what we say to ourselves when we are alone.”  Emily’s crib talk, in a sense, precedes the private life – an in this sense the lyric does not derive from what we say to ourselves when we are alone, but is how we begin to have a private life that consists of saying things to ourselves when we are alone. The pulse and the heart are coeterminus.

Which leaves the question: why is the poet’s crib talk so risky to the poet’s chances of survival?

Here’s Emily in Episode 1.4 – Nelson divided the monologues into episodes.

1.    Maybe the doctor,

2.    Took my jamas (very soft) I don’t know.

3.    Maybe, maybe we take my jamas off.

4.    But I leave my diaper

5.    Take my jamas off,

6.    And leave them off,

7.    At the doc-

8.    My have get my check up,

9.    So we take my jamas off.

10.  My don’t know this looking all better

11.  (??) doctor, doc,

12.  The boys take back home.

13.  The, and we maybe take my jamas off.

14.  I don’t know what we do with with my…

15.  Maybe the doctore take my jamas

16.  My jamas off cause my maybe get check up,

17.  Have to to take my jamas

 

Talking oneself past the disaster that threatens to swallow us and take our jamas off – that is obviously both one of the functions of the crib talk and of the lyric invocation of existential menace. But lyric understanding might set up that menace, those disasters, all too often to endure, without a countering experience – say, of returning with one’s jamas intact. The “I don’t know” balanced by the “Now I know”, the passage into experience. But if we insist on returning to the I don’t know, that moment full of self’s lack of control –  if such is the movement of the lyric – and if we insist on staying there, in the negative – we might lose our practical ability to get out of it. Or rather, forget our practical ability that has, in the past, gotten out of it.  We lose touch with experience itself.

Only one aspect, of course, of the lyric apocalypse. But one to consider in these dark days.

A Sinead O'Connor song that reminds us of what is happening in Gaza, God forgive us. All of us, just looking away.

And to the spiirits of the 1500 slaughtered by Hamas, all we can do is beg and beg forgiveness for the slaughter of 20,000. We apparently need to learn the elementary things, for instance, the prohibition on human sacrifice.

And to the 22,000 slaughtered, the 50,000 injured, the 7,000 missing - there is nothing to say. How can we, the abettors, say anything? But of course we will, we are all big talkers, me too. Talk talk talk. Blah blah blah.

plagiarism - from pickpocketing to cut and paste

 

Everything converges in plagiarism. At least in the recent news. Plagiarism, to my mind, always makes for comedy – in that respect, it is like marriage, which traditionally falls at the end of comedy.  But the unlike minds, or like minds, that are yoked together in plagiarism struggle with quotation marks and intellectual property and fail the test of divorce and separtion, making for a mirror image of the marriage comedy. Plus, to me, quotation marks and IP - two of the golden themes of Derridian deconstruction, as a matter of fact - what is not to like in these tales?

Shakespeare, of course, had no pickpocket anxieties on this point. He could take North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Anthony and see how the passages about Cleopatra were eminently boostable, and boost he did. This was the lay of the land for some time. No educated person in Shakespeare’s audience would be likely to miss the North reference, transformed and made more glorious by the sun of Shakespeare – to quote another Shakespeare character.

But textual institutions eventually were pulled by the notion of property. Adrian John’s go-to book, Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates gives us a pretty lively history of the tangle between Protestantism, early liberalism, and property law that arose from one of those great opening moments: when, under William and Mary, and by the advise of John Locke, allowed the Press act, which required all written texts to be licenced by the Stationers, to lapse:

“It was not the first time this had happened, but the political circumstances were different now, and the law was destined never to be revived. John Locke, whose arguments played a major role in the Commons’ debates surrounding the act, repudiated it not only for imposing licensing—which he, like Milton, saw as a legacy of popery—but for fostering monopolies for both individual booksellers and the company at large. In rejecting the statute, Parliament therefore saw itself as upholding Protestant liberty and countering monopolies. But it made no alternative provision for the Stationers’ register itself. Suddenly the book trade found itself in a situation in which infringers of registered copies would face no legal sanction whatsoever. And at the same time it became legal to print and publish without being a member of the company at all. Internal regulation might have succeeded to keep booksellers and printers in line in the past, but now, in the speculative and entrepreneurial environment of 1690s London, it was never likely to prove sufficient. This was an environment in which new moral principles seemed to be advanced with every clutch of ambitious “projects”—and those projects soon pervaded the world of the book.”

These openings of the frontier – succeeded by rushes – are part and parcel of capitalism. And those who are most successful on exploiting this opening are likely to be the first to call for regulations, shaped to their own requirements.

For plagiarism to exist, one must have some standard idea of copying. Johns digs up the history of AI automata – which go back to the golden age of clockwork mechanisms. In particular, he describes one called the Microcosm – such a Silicon Valley-ish phrase! Yet this thing was built in the 17^th century by Harry Bridges. It was a complex of different machines:

“Built in the form of an ornate Roman Temple, in its fabric it contained musical automata, models of a carpenter’s workshop and landscapes with realistically moving figures, and accurate rotating mechanisms showing the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. It also boasted an orrery for the moons of Jupiter. It played music specially composed for its internal organ—or spectators could ask it to play their own. In all, it combined in one mechanism the principles of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and astronomy.”

To these principles were soon joined writing. All of these arts were under the possible sway of IP law, of course. Just as with our current new toy, ChatGPT, observers found the Microcosm a bit disturbing:

“The question became not the nature of original authorship, but the nature of copying. A machine this complex posed the question of what, exactly, the act of copying—of pirating—actually was.”

Ah, behold what a glorious legal thing the quotation mark is – I apply them and presto chango, instead of plagiarism I advance, on the great legal boardgame of life, to “fair use”!

Quotation marks, as we all know, falleth as the dew from heaven – and sometimes in the process of re-write they melt away. For underneath the words themselves are, supposedly, the ideas. Which the law must pursue as well – ideas, too, can be copied. Or can be generated concurrently. We all know the fierce academic battles – often taking on the hues of other social battles – that can arise from the claim that an idea is copied. In fact, it is hard to see how an idea could not, on some level, be anything but copied, since ideas need to breathe the communism of all that is mental and social in order to be. Yet we have, still, an idea of the original spirit, of inspiration, of genius, of all the old haunts, for say what you will, human life is unimaginable without haunting. And with haunting, exorcism.

It is an interesting thing, from the French perspective, that the whole idea of the dictée has dropped out of the American educational system (I know too little about the British one to comment). It is a puzzle to the Protestantized Yankee mind, such as mine, that the French teacher is  content to read, say, a passage in a Voltaire that the students are required to copy – as if literature were, after all, music and you need to play the scales. I think this tradition is petering out – although Adam, my boy, still does some dictée in his French classes, according to what he just told me. But copying is the one frowned upon, awful sin in the American curriculum. There’s a wonderful bit, in The Squid and The Whale, Noah Baumbach’s bittersweetbitter comedy, where the troubled teen son listens to Pink Floyd’s Hey You, copies the word and the tune, then presents the song as his own to his parents and eventually to a talent show, where he wins a prize – and then has to give it back when someone presumably younger than the fifty-ish judges points out where the song comes from.

This leads to the son – Walt – being remanded to therapy, where the therapist asks why he did it. He responds: “I felt I could've written it.”

“Therapist: So the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality. I see.”

Incidentally, to find that exchange, which I remembered from the movie, I went to google, found the script of The Squid and the Whale, and cut and pasted. We have the instruments to destroy our institutions of intellectual property at the heart of the machines that are ‘protected’ by our intellectual property laws. Walt not only copies the song and performs it, but he has recorded it on a tape recorder and learned it by stopping the tape, and rewinding it – copying a perhaps illegal copy.

Everything converges in plagiarism.