Tommy Schnurmacher
All right we just spent the last half hour talking about Canadian copyright law, and now we're going for another view of the topic from someone who encourages his students to plagiarize. In fact he takes points off their marks if they don't. He has an unusual oeuvre including Uncreative Writing, Managing Language in a Digital Age, which speaks to the topic of where the lines are drawn between authorship or appropriation or if they should be drawn at all. Another work titled Fidget is a transcription of every move of his body over a 13 hour span and still another title Soliloquy, which records every word he spoke over the period of a week. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and invited to the White House and he has been appointed the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art. He joins me now. Kenneth Goldsmith, good morning.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Hi, good to be here again.
ts
OK, great to have you back. Right off the bat, tell me your feelings about plagiarism.
kg
Well in academia, plagiarism is inevitable. You know, I just think we have to come to the idea that it does exist and as long as the internet itself is copyable and pastable that this, uh, is going to be a condition. There's no thwarting it. So the question is, you know, how are you going to get people to use that intelligently and responsibly, as opposed to try to sneak it by. I want to decriminalize plagiarism.
ts
OK so, how would you go about doing that? What do you tell your kids on the first day of class?
kg
Well I tell them they may not be original. Uh, basically though, what they have to do is... you know, they're all very good at plagiarizing. The problem is they're always trying to sneak it by. Now I say, listen, you must plagiarize and you have to tell me what decisions you are making, what your process is, what you're feeling about it. Let's talk about... We can put it all out on the table and you become... you need to become very responsible about it, and suddenly they kind of clam up and say, you know... they don't know what to say, because they've never had to, uh, frame it this way.
ts
What would you do with a book called Canadian copyright law?
kg
What would I do with a book that had something? Plagiarize it of course.
ts
OK
kg
I'd have them retype or rescan and to throw it out on to file sharing...
ts
OK
kg
...so everybody can share it.
ts
OK, so what would you do if you got a legal letter from the author?
kg
Well it would depend, I mean would an author sue a group of students? That would be a bad PR move, wouldn't it.
ts
So that wouldn't happen. So what about this. I was thinking about this for poetry. If I were to take your book, uh, the one I'm looking at right now, it's called Fidget, and just pick a page and write down the first word... write a poem by taking the first word of each line.
kg
Well I think that's too creative.
ts
Oh
kg
I would rather have you retype the entire thing, and then you could really learn something.
ts
OK
kg
You see, by taking the first word of every line...
ts
Right...
kg
You're just trying to fall back into your old habits and your own taste, and trying to make something wonderful. But you know, it's wonderful as it is, and if you rewrote it, you might actually learn something about solid writing.
ts
OK, but if I didn't want to learn something, I wanted to create something. No I shouldn't be creating something. Is that what you're saying?
kg
Well I mean, you can, but you still create something new when you rewrite or you retype something. That's a brand new work. There's nothing that's not new about that.
ts
All right, OK, now so if I took this book Fidget and instead of taking the first word of every line, I just retype the entire book.
kg
Mhm
ts
How would that be different from me reading the entire book?
kg
Well it would be an act of engagement, uh, with the book in a way that reading is actually very passive. You know I learned... I was once at Princeton lecturing, and uh, creative writing students were studying with one of America's best known novelists and they were complaining because of her lack of imagination. That a creative writing assignment that she had given them, an assignment to write in the style of Jack Kerouac. Now that's quite impossible to do, uh, you know, 60 years later, you know, in an electric age, and they went home the night before and they struggled to understand the assignment and tried to dash off something that seemed like Kerouac. And I thought to myself, well wouldn't it be better if they simply retyped a good chunk of On the Road. Wouldn't they have learned much more about the style of Kerouac than trying to be original, and my mind goes to the painters at the Metropolitan of Art who set up their easel in front of the Rembrandt in order to learn how to paint. Why can't writers do that as well? Somehow we've got to always be original.
ts
This is a quote by conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, who said, "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add any more." Do you subscribe to that as far as the written word is concerned?
kg
Well we're really in a place where language is... we've never been in before because of the internet, and, you know, there's too much language out there. And the idea now might be instead of to create more, is to manage that which exists and to repurpose it into something that becomes very our own simply by the act of repurposing.
ts
OK, let's talk about repurposing. Would this be repurposing: OK, a friend of mine going through his, uh, aunt's apartment after she passed away found a piece of paper actually a menu and a manifest from a cruise ship that, uh, his grandmother had been on and that had the names of everybody on the cruise ship: their first name, their last name, their servant's name, etc. If he were to read that manifest as is without changing, would that be a poem?
kg
If you wanted to call it as such I think it would be and I think it would be a very fascinating document, an elegiac, and already it reminds me of the roll call on the Titanic, you know, sea travel from another time, names that no longer exist. You know that's sounds very beautiful to me and very meaningful. By the way, this is not about no meaning; language doesn't exist without meaning. So, whatever you do with it, uh, it's going to to be meaningful, and whatever selections you're making with this type of writing are going to be personal because it's you that's choosing! I'm not against, uh, meaning; I'm not against personally expressing one's self. You can't help but express yourself. (I just think writers try too hard.)
ts 6:54
Kenneth Goldsmith is my guest. He's written a number of books on uncreative writing. Is it hard for people who are used to being told to be creative to be told the opposite?
kg
Well you know I find it's really liberating from limit. It's OK for you to do this. It's OK for you to plagiarize. It's OK for you to take someone else's words. Uh, you know, everyone's doing it all the time anyway. Every time we forward a colleague's email, we're kind of plagiarizing their words. We never used to forward emails. We're taking what everybody's saying: we're forwarding links; we're cutting and copying and we're retweeting. Even the retweet, we're retweeting something that's not our own, we're retweeting somebody else's. Language is now a shared and communal experience, and this is very very new I think--I think we come to adapt ourselves to expressing ourselves with words that aren't ours and it's OK.
ts
Now, is there a difference if you are retweeting and you know exactly, if I did something you retweeted and if I could see where it came from originally? Or is it any different if you take off the name of the person who actually wrote it and pass it off as yours?
kg
Well you can do that too. I mean that the minute you put language into the digital sphere, all bets are off. If you don't want that done, either attributed or not attributed, don't put it online, honestly. The minute it's online, it's fair game for anyone, and you can't control it.
ts 8:17
Your questions for Kenneth Goldsmith. We'll find out about the... what happened when he went to the White House, a fascinating story as the are the fascinating books he's been writing, I hope you join the conversation 504-790-0800, text your comment to 514800, poet and professor Goldsmith, my guest. We're getting lots of text questions for you, 504-790-0800, text your comment to 514800. Tell me about your trip to the White House.
kg
Well I was able to do some uncreative, uh, reading in front of the President of the United States, and he appeared very much to enjoy it.
ts
What did you do?
kg
Well, I did a little set of poems about the Brooklyn Bridge, an American icon. I read, uh, a Walt Whitman poem, a Hart Crane poem, and then I read a poem of mine called "Traffic," which is a exactly one is giving a traffic report, it was just a transcription of traffic reports from the New York area over the course of 24 hours. And the president seemed fairly uninterested in the real poetry, of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane...
ts
(Laughs)
kg
...But when it came to the traffic report, he and the rest of the room lit up and began applauding wildly for a traffic report.
ts
(Laughs some more)
kg
That was very remarkable. So it was actually the, the most meaningful of language to them. The real poetry really meant nothing to them, but the sound of traffic reports hit a nerve.
ts
That was real poetry now. I also want to talk an occasion when I saw you in New York City at St Marks on the Bowery when you were standing up beside the wall and you played Michael Savage, uh, talking about you.
kg
Yeah.
ts 10:11
Could you describe that?
kg
Well you know it was just a, just a morning zoo or shock jock, I guess he's some right wing radio guy, um, you know, that says that basically I was emblematic of the problems of the Obama White House and that many of the nation's problems here in America were being embodied by the fact that a plagiarist was in the White House!
ts 10:38
And so you played that tape while you stood there.
kg
Yeah, I sort of out-lynched this guy, and just sort of let him hang himself by his own stupidity: it was clear.
ts
Stan on the line with a question; good morning.
stan
Program with a question. I just wanted to clarify. It was Obama that you were at the White House with the President?
kg
Yeah.
stan
OK, your books are original. Aren't you contradicting your own provocative. In other words, without original, uh, writing, we've nothing to plagiarize so are there two types of people in the world: those who enjoy creating and those who hate it and then look at plagiarizing as a godsend.
kg
Well, you know, it depends. You know I also want to talk about plagiarism also being relative to economies, you know. I mean plagiarizing a bestseller and putting at risk millions of dollars worth of revenue is a very different game than the very value-less game of poetry. You know, really, nobody, which is the game I play, of course, really nobody cares. When we talk about copyright, we tend to take a blanket approach. It's either all good or it's all bad, and in fact it's rather nuanced and rather subtle, mostly depending on the economic condition.
ts 11:54
This illuminates rethinking subject matters right or wrong that you think on your own is more important, because of the internet and tweeting, it is important to rid oneself of the same pigeonholed, predigested garbage
kg
Yeah, you know, I tend to agree with that, and I think the conversation and discourse does have to become a little bit more subtle. If I had property that is worth millions of dollars, I'd probably want to protect that as well, but I don't, so I'm free of that and my field is free of that. Why would we hold on to such ridiculous notions when there's nothing at stake. That's not... We can afford to be experimental and open minded, uh, in poetry
ts 12:34
And this one, uh: take it from a typist, copy typing goes through the eyes and fingers without passing through the mind. There's no learning involved.
kg
Well it can be, um, I can't imagine that there's no learning involved. There's learning involved in, uh, everything, whether you open yourself up to that learning, and the act, the physical act of typing, um, is is, uh, is... Writing is a physical act, and when we retype something we realize that our body itself is involved in the writing. You know, writing is often invisible. That tends to make it visible and physical. I think that's very important.
ts
Marcia is on the line and has a question for you.
marcia
Good morning, I'm a poet and I'm in love with what you're saying and think it's very interesting as I've been struggling for years to keep people from plagiarizing. Uh but what I'm interested in is thought about a person I've heard of your work was where the line is between, you know, the banality of evil and the comic of banality. To me a lot of what you're doing while it's uh, it's sort of cutting edge in that it's right on that uh, on that fissure between the useful and the uh deconstructed. What do you think about banality, what is the definition of the useless?
kg
Well...
marcia
...
kg
Thank you, nice question, and I think it's, uh, that's the beauty of art, I think, in its uselessness. You know our culture is so hooked on use, and so hooked on purpose. There's almost no space for uselessness... I think art gives us a space and opens up I think a meditative even a political space, no productive, and I think it's incredibly important.
ts 14:23
Kenneth Goldsmith, uh, if you have any questions or comments, join the conversation 514-790-0800; text your questions or your comments to 514800. Professor and poet Kenneth Goldsmith, my guest, text 514800. This question says I agree with your guest, anyone who publishes anything online knows the risks. They do it regardless then they should complain. They should not put anything online, problem solved. What would you tell that texter?
kg
I think they're right, you know you don't have to put things online, you know that paper is the real radical way to go, for... hand-write everything out and send it in the mail, fax. Well, there are some great ideas here.
ts
What was your motivation for the book Soliloquy?
kg
Well I speak so much and I wanted to see what a human produces over the course of a week when they actually speak. What does it look like? You know, it's never been done before, so I taped everything I said for a week. It came out to be over the top flirtatious and it's a terrible document, 500 pages that say almost nothing about you. All is gossip.
ts 15:30
And, you put the book up for sale?
kg
I put it up for sale, and I also put it on the internet if anybody wants it. All my books are available, you know, for free. You can't sell things like this, who would buy it.
ts
What are your current projects then?
kg
Well my current project is working on the rewriting of a beautiful book, uh, by Walter Benjamin, called the Arcades Project, a book about plagiarized or appropriated about parents in the 19th century doing the same process for New York in the 20th century.
ts
And where you taking the material from?
kg 16:08
Well I'm taking it from books that are written during or about New York in the 20th century, and I'm just lifting, without credit, the most interesting parts and organizing them together in ways according to subject matter.
ts
And you're going to post that on the internet as well?
kg
Of course, of course it all goes up on the internet. I'm to have it, but I don't want to create a Creative Commons license. I don't like that. I don't like licensing of any kind.
ts
(laughs)
kg
The Creative Commons is just another form of copyright, when I try to get away from copyright.
ts
All right, a pleasure talking to you as always, Kenneth Goldsmith, professor of the University of Pennsylvania, must be some course. Coming up Felix Schnab(?) and Hewlett Pointer(?), chairman of the SDM joins us got a personal finance expert, Kelly Keene(?) joins us. She'll make sure you avoid financial hangover in the new year. Fascinating episode with Kenneth Goldsmith.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
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