Entertainment For Lively Minds
Don't plagiarise or take on loan.....
Enjoyed reading the interview with our Lord Steven Patrick in the latest issue. Having just re-read The Stranger by Albert Camus it struck me that the thoughts of Morrissey are taken almost verbatim from the final chapter where L'etranger (Meursault) reflects on his life and the fact that nothing really matters.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(novel)
While Meursault takes "responsibility" for his actions by accepting the consequences, the motivating philosophy alters the actual intent. In the end, Meursault realizes that everyone's life ends with death. By accepting this, he also deduces that the life one leads and the manner of one's death are completely irrelevant.
So is Morrissey's philosophy second hand? Any other instances you can think of whereby an artist assumes the voice of another whilst trying to pass as an enigma?
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I'll go further
Has any musician ever uttered an original thought?
Goodness, Gracious,
Great Balls of Fire?
A-wop-bop-a-loo-lop
a-lop bam boo!
I'll put it the other way round
Has any author ever written an original tune?
If it's acknowledged it's good
I've looked into many interesting ideas and thinkers on the basis of various musicians and their lyrics or interviews. This is a very healthy aspect of pop music: a door opening from entertainment into philosophy.
And seeing people put ideas into action (eg Crass, Throbbing Gristle) makes those ideas more appealing, as it demonstrates its potential in the real world, as opposed to being just "pie in the sky".
Plagiarising others' ideas without giving credit is just sleazy, though.
It surprises me that anyone
would want to interview Morrissey in the first place. He strikes me as being a pompous prat stuck up his own arse and in awe of his own legend. Get over yourself you tosser.
Beware, he bears more grudges
than lonely high court judges...
To mark their 60th anniversary Penguin published a series
of small books, long enough to hold a short story or two, that retailed at 60 pence each. I read the one that collected a few pieces by Camus. It included an essay that featured a line that described the relationship between trawlers and seagulls. A few weeks later one Eric Cantona uttered his most famous, self-defining quote.
The Truman Capote 'Penguin 60' is worth tracking down. It includes the essay that turned his name to mud in high society. It's one for a career suicide thread. Quite staggering.
I won
the whole collection of the Penguin 60s in a WHSmith competition.
The book collections were housed in lovely boxes, one for the contemporary book 'samples', one for Penguin Classics. A really nice set.
Could you look up the line that inspired Cantona, please?
It's somewhere towards the back. Camus mentions fishing boats or trawlers or fish or seagulls. It would take me about six months to track down my copy. That said, it's not all that important. It's probably not all that similar.
The Capote essay was an act of madness, or something similar. Heaven knows what he was thinking when he submitted it. His position in society, which obsessed him, disappeared overnight.
I would, but
..we've been downsized in the accommodation dept. and many/most of my books are in the loft, including these. Sorry :-)
This reminds me of the famous story....
that when Eric Cantona moved to Manchester United he mentioned thtat he liked Rimbaud and then received endless copies of Sylvester Stallone movies from generous fans.
I'd be amazed
if any of us had an original thought in our heads. Wonder who Camus "ripped" off? Cheeky Algerian.
We all have ideas that when we hear them expressed eloquently and succinctly by another resonate deeply. If we borrow their superior communication skills to convey those feelings does it diminish them in any way.
T.S. Elliott once said ;
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."
Couldn't have put it better myself
:)