M’s Comments (group member since Jan 30, 2009)

M’s comments from the Write, right, rites, reads group.

Martine wrote: "What I'm wondering about is whether Ginnie felt she didn't have to attribute her reviews because she actually wrote them herself, under a plethora of pseudonyms, and whether she deleted the comment..."

I'm reluctant to speculate on this particular person's intentions or motives. But I can say that the Irony review was from a fairly well-known professor of Int'l Relations, and the one I first noticed some time ago was from one of the Post's frequent major reviewers (Michael Dirda). I think it's unlikely that Dirda is a front for the scholar, or vice versa. So I doubt there's one master identity behind a bunch of other pseudoynyms... although it is indubitably true that I am both David and Donald.

...you do, Martine, bring up the point that sticks with me, too. Many times G has given cites; many times not. If we had a persistent failure to attribute reviews lifted completely, I'd call it sloppy but utterly explainable and even acceptable. I.e., cutting and pasting a whole review without a cite is easily fixed, and easily justified. In my correspondence, this person had noted a practice of reading which built a collage of responses, reviews from various sources around the web. I actually really LIKE that kind of reading -- and one of the things I very much appreciated was someone who gave me that sense of a critical context. (In fact, it's one reason I come to GR--I read through a range of reviews, to situate my own thinking on a book.) While many of us have noted our preference for the personal, in some ways a cut/paste collage approach to GR reviews seems fantastic. I'd dig it, any way, as it gets at something about the way I read, too.

The problem is that sometimes--not always, maybe even not often, but often enough to make it an issue--the reviews used the first-person, and G maintained the assumption of her authorship thereafter in threads, rather than fixing the cite. And in a few other instances, as Eddie has noted too, there's a re-working of one or more reviews to fit them together--a conscious shifting of pronouns to make it seem like an authored piece, for instance.

I'm not really into moralizing about her, as much as evaluating these acts. The practice of the former (collage) seems absolutely defensible, if cited, and the practices in the latter are not at all defensible... but neither are they cheap plagiarism. There's something interesting about how--even when we cut and paste from other sources--we are still performing our identity, something about who we are as readers... and that seemed to shade into the stickier, incorrect, and then wrong practices.

David wrote: "Mike, are you picking on me or flirting with me? Or both? I can't tell..."

What's the difference?

What's weird is that I liked Brian's version of that post better. David's had too much of that Salingering whine, while Brian's seemed more aggressively Rothian. Kudos, Brian!

Re Eddie's points about top reviewer: great article by Garth Risk Hallberg at Slate about Amazon reviewers and online criticism.

Great comments, all.

EDIT: so I post as a little flurry of smart posts pop on, and some of the things I'm saying Brian, MyFleshSingsOut, and Donald all said. So let's see the following as an "amen" and not the negligent self-indulgence it might seem to be.

I wasn't being insincere in raising the questions, yet I do think, if pushed into stating a firm position, that publishing whole verbatim chunks of other people's writing as your own violates community rules. Period. Still, I'm interested in why, as Shelly so precisely puts it (#5), *my* ego is involved. Why does it bother me? I see any number of more shameful misbehaviors daily, and particularly in this context (rather than a class, or a more-formally published piece) citing others seems annoying but easily-dismissed. I kind of prefer a plagiarist who seems to really care about books, who disseminates worthy reviews even if under a deceptive authorial persona, to the mindless trolling yahoos who flame-and-run, or to the notion of corporate flacks joining and participating in an online network in order to sell product, or to authors who join here merely to promote books and (sometimes) harangue readers. Why didn't I just delete the plagiarist's account, ignore reviews, move on?

It says something about what I want from this site, which intrigues me because I'm not particularly sure what I want from this site. [EDIT: See Brian, right above, for a very good answer.] Fit these issues of plagiarism into other debates: what is a review for, and what are comments on those reviews for?

I guess I'm also curious about why people plagiarize. I understand cheating--don't like it, but it makes clear precise Machiavellian sense. But inconsequential appropriation? I had a student once who would come to see me twice a week with questions about drafts for his papers. Each time, we'd spend twenty minutes playing around with ideas, structure, language. And he'd come back the next time with a new draft. Halfway through the semester, his roommate turned him in--this guy had hired someone to write his papers. He'd spend literally hours of time with me, then go home and spend time translating my advice to this other writer, and then repeat the process. He clearly cared about the final grade, but he also put so much work into the whole game--in some ways, he was *doing* the work of writing, and he was engaged in elements of collaboration we endorse (meeting with a prof, or with a writing group, for feedback) and other kinds we don't. Cutting and pasting from google--that's sloppy, stupid, usually painfully dull in both motive and outcome. But these other cases suggest something about the anxiety of writing, of being part of a writing/reading community, that I find very compelling. That I feel myself, in some way... I respond differently, but I understand this anxiety.

James Kincaid has argued that "[p:]lagiarism is best understood not as a sharply defined operation, like beheading, but as a whole range of activities, more like cooking, which varies from deliberate poisoning to the school cafeteria to mother's own" (see http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/ethics/purloined.html). I guess the instance we're addressing seems unlike poisoning to me, but I'm not sure where I'd put it.

(I found the above source, and a number of good articles, at http://www.indiana.edu/~tltl/projects/plagiarism/articles.html.)

Shortly after arriving at GR, I got friended by someone whose reviews--and the dazzling frequency and clarity of those reviews--were a pleasure to read. Shortly after that, I realized that a review I was reading in the Washington Post had actually been posted by that friend, without attribution.

I agonized for days. I contacted another friend, asked what I should do--out the person? contact the authorities?--and was advised to do a personal note. Good advice. I sent a personal note, got a shame-faced apology, felt a little priggish having made any noise about it at all, but, well, okay. All was well, and all was well.

Then another review came along, and ... I was paranoid. So I googled it, and found the original source. And then I began puzzling about, and found numerous odd thefts, an inconsistency I couldn't figure out (occasional attributions, yet some plagiarizing that reconfigured the syntax of the original better to fit the review), and so on. For months I kind of followed the person.

Why?

Why did I care? Why didn't I just delete the friend, move on with my life? I admit to an initial anger--a sense of betrayal of a common trust, or maybe just (to be honest) a fury that I'd been hoodwinked--but that quickly faded into a kind of puzzled set on-going questions:

--what made me care about issues of review authorship in a place like Goodreads?

and

--what is the status of the author, period?

and

--why am I worried about the rules? What the hell are the rules? Aren't we figuring out the rules? Couldn't we come up with some new ones? (Hadn't this person already wrote his/her own?)

and

--so on.

I'm an academic. I teach composition, and lit theory--so the status of the author is a troubled one for me, regardless. I beat my first-year students about the head and neck with the need to attribute, to write one's own thoughts, to attend carefully to the property of others. And I beat my lit theory students about the head and the neck with the death of the author and the rise of the reader and the complexities of intention, interpretation, blah di blah di blah.

So ... I guess I'm intrigued in how all that abstract shit manifests in concrete, pleasurable, painful, and puzzling ways at Goodreads.

You?