Peering Blurrily...just peering blurrily

Malcolm Gladwell uses this term in his New Yorker article, "Something Borrowed" (worth reading: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/22/041122fa_fact) and builds his argument in a typically coherent essay.

"The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life."

He uses the example of a Tony award-winning play called "Frozen," by Byrony Lavery (can that name be real?), to argue that a new work can be legitimately made borrowing gathered ideas--without attribution. After all, he says, nothing is absolutely original.

(This is interesting: when I copied from the article, this link pasted with it:
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/22/041122fa_fact#ixzz1OFgSLb5Z. Hey, New Yorker, I was going to cite!)

I ran across it not on the web, but in the large print library book What the Dog Saw by Gladwell. I found the following articles in that anthology also worth the read. Click here or check out the book:

• The Art of Failure http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/08/21/2000_08_21_084_TNY_LIBRY_000021523
• Late Bloomers http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
• The Talent Myth http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/07/22/020722fa_fact

Towards Avoiding Plagiarism:
Gladwell, Malcolm. "Annals of Culture: Something Borrowed : The New Yorker." The New Yorker. N.p., 24 Nov. 2004. Web. 3 June 2011. <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/22/041122fa_fact>


Gladwell, Malcolm. What the dog saw and other adventures. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print.

Labels: access v. ownership, book review, intellectual property, new media, plagiarism