Litany: Part 2

I rather enjoy this poem. It's intriguing to me because he completely bashes any original love poem anybody has written. He's totally taken what should be the definition of a romantic poem and changed it, but he's done it in a funny way so it works. I'd never read this type of thing on my own, so it's something new to me.

What I find most interesting is that this is the definition of what Jonathon Lethem spoke about in his essay The Ecstasy of Influence. You see, Billy Collins has taken a love poem that I'm sure others have somewhat created on their own and morphed it into his own piece, the definition of what Lethem believes is correct.

The ECSTACY of influence

Lethem has written a piece of work about plagiarism apply named The Ecstasy of Influence, because the truth of the matter is that plagiarism isn't what modern definitions claim it is. According to Lethem, and I believe he's 100% correct, plagiarism is nothing more than the borrowing of others ideas, and being smart enough to write them down rather than simply voice them. Also, he comments on modern man's obsession (my words, not his) to monopolize everything, in the section of his essay that is titled '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.

Intellectual property, defined to me as ones individual thoughts and emotions, is something that Lethem clearly criticizes by saying it's used to 'justify' such trivial and personal things such as a pack of Girl Scouts singing campfire songs, and has even gotten to the point where a genetics corporation known as Celera Genomics has started to patent certain genes. Upon reading that, I'm hit with this thought. Really? Someone out there has gone so far as to patent a gene? What happens when (and it must happen someday, for though there are infinite possible gene combinations, that one specific one will be picked one day) someone is born with those genes? Do they get sued for all the money they'll ever make in their whole life? It's stupid and useless.

An amusing and quite interesting anecdote that Lethem recites is the story of his first novel. Apparently, a very talented artist as a gift to Lethem had taken his very first novel and carved it onto a gun, which he then presented to Lethem. At this, Lethem says that he is lucky enough that the world has enough room for both his first novel in print and on a gun, and he doesn't need to pick between the two. In my opinion, this is sort of an ecstasy for him, perhaps a strange fetishistic (yes thats a real word, it's the adjective form of fetish, I looked it up) connection between him and his first novel. It's interesting to me that he can enjoy such a small victory.

Stitch Bitch: The Questions

1) What meanings did the section titles hold?

2) Does hypertext have a different meaning than the one the author is using it as?

3) What did Stitch Bitch accomplish in the eyes of the author?

4) Who is Shelly Jackson?

5) Why use the title of Stitch Bitch? It sounds so harsh.

Stich Bitch: The Reaction

This is a very intense piece of writing. Every word is chosen carefully to get the author's point across. However, it is very hard to discern exactly what the point of this whole piece is, simply because he is way to fluffy and over-zealous with his words. I think that he's an amazing writer, its just that his meaning was lost in translation. I would love to know what the back story to the writing is, but I unfortunately can't deduce it on my own.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's views on writing can be used for blogging as well. For example, he says not to use flowery speech, which works for blogging because there isn't anything formal about it. Rather than use large words and stretch a sentence online, just cut it short and finish it. Kind of a lazy approach, but then again we're on the internet, how can you get more lazy?

The ecstacy of influence

I believe that Jonathon Lethem wasn't writing to say that plagiarism is bad, but instead he's writing to say that plagiarism is common and should be embraced. Not many thoughts will ever be truly original, they're in fact better, more modern thoughts. A very widely known example of borrowing thoughts is the Walt Disney company, as they took most of their stories from old wives tales and whatnot. I believe that this is what should be happening, everyone should be working together to reach a common goal instead of fighting against each other.

Plagiarism has been embraced so well by society because no person has had their own original thoughts. Every person has had the same thought at one time, so what Lethem suggests is that it's not stealing ideas, it's just taking ideas others have thought and solidifying them. I believe that we don't need to give credit to the others who had the thought, one because we don't know who they are, but two because it was your idea to put it into writing, and they're just dumb for not. It's an 'early bird catches the worm' type deal.

Litany

Why a crystal goblet and bread and knife?

What exactly does the author mean when he uses the term 'litany'?

Is litany a replacement for someones name?


You are, you aren't, you may be, but you aren't. I am, but I'm also not. You are still and always will be, somehow.

He's bashing the original poem. He doesn't seem like he's actually trying to write a love poem, it seems to me that he's instead writing to mock the original piece and succeeding very well. His opening is the regular love poem, comparing whomever to a bread and knife, a goblet and wine, dew in the grass and the sun in the sky. The strange thing is that the first 2 metaphors are odd ways to compare somebody, and they were placed before the 2 metaphors that actually made sense. Why would he put the 2 metaphors that made sense behind the 2 that didn't?