A mixed bag of references today, Dear Reader:
First, Jonathan Lethem's Harpers piece: The ecstasy of influence: A Plagiarism, a moving reflection on the cultural commons of creativity, notable not least for its rare reference to Heidegger's theory of the "enframing" capacity of art, composed entirely of the (attributed) words of others, and recently referred to me by a friend pursuant to discussion of private ownership of things.
If it were all Lethem's original work, it would be a persuasive and thought-provoking essay on some aspects of the tension between notions of property and forces of creativity; it remains at least that in light of it's appropriated and repurposed constituent verbiage, and becomes also an additional work of art beyond its formal structure, a pointillist painting/sculpture/score of such an essay, that, upon inspection, blossoms into many essays addressing a broad range of issues in a variety of traditions and discourses.
It is, however, difficult to cite excerpts according to scholastic form (which is probably as it should be), and so no highlighted verbiage. Go read the whole thing.
That work begins by considering several stories sharing features we commonly attribute to one story by Nabokov, as a way to approach the question of originality, influence and appropriated content. In the lecture below, Slovenian rock-star philosopher Slavoj Žižek also touches on this idea, suggesting that often what cultural forces understand to be the primal version of a story, is just a more polished reworking of other, earlier stories or versions. His example is Antigone, which we non-classicists lamely take to be originally told in the Sophocles tragedy dating from circa 442 B.C.E., but, Žižek claims, the stories of myth of Antigone vary among more primordial sources.
Available courtesy of the Backdoor Broadcasting Company, Slavoj Žižek's very long lecture, entitled "The Wire, or the clash of civilisations in one country," delivered at the University of London last week, can be streamed or downloaded here. Succinctly, Žižek offers a far-ranging assessment of the HBO series, "The Wire" as a cultural phenomenon, as a text, and as a lens into contemporary society, touching on a wide range of contemporary, historical and cultural issues with an essentially Marxist analysis. Much of it is worth quoting, but, as the entire lecture is an hour-and-a-half long, transcription is challenging.
If you thought that was an excellent series, and are curious, like I have been, as to what makes a philosopher a rock-star philosopher, then check it out. Your time (except for those three or four times he plays a scene from the show, which the mic does not pick up, but you know those scenes anyway) will be invested well. Also, like myself, you may find that you disagree with his descriptions -- I don't think he got Omar quite right -- but, try to allow yourself to disagree and keep listening, because if you stop to argue you might not get through it all, and the many fascinating tangents might thereby turn into derails. For those of us who can afford to spend our attention on long philosophical lectures, plenty of time for arguing will remain.
Separately, while looking for an audio clip of a statement made by the President to a Disney journalist in December 2003 (and failing), I stumbled across The George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive (as well as this, somewhat more staid archive from the Presidency Project at UCSB), which led me to the Bots' delightful songs, Bushwack2 and Fuzzy Math. I suppose this is not, actually, entirely separate from the foregoing, as I stated at the top of this paragraph, for the search was occasioned by a destructive-writing project and related DJ-Pebkacery involving content repurposing, and I could not locate the target soundbyte, perhaps for Disney-related intellectual property reasons, perhaps just because my search was poor and lazily implemented.