cut- and pasted from somewheres, quoted again in
Culture of the Copy, Hillel Schwartz, 1995
In it is an anecdote about Hellen Keller rewriting a Mark Twain story she
heard as a child.
Read if you care to:
To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass.:
St. Patrick's Day, '03
"...Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and
grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of
anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism!
The kernal, the soul -- let us go further and say the substance, the
bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances -- is
plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously
and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily
used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the
superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of
originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration
they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is
revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a
great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men --
but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of
it is his. But not enough to signify.
-Seein Sam Clemens.
> From: Steev Hise <steevATdetritus.net>
> Reply-To: rumoriATdetritus.net
> Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 15:16:48 -0700 (PDT)
> To: <rumoriATdetritus.net>
> Subject: Re: [rumori] the simple and post-modern
>
> Thu, 31 May 2001 found Vicki Bennett writing:
>
> ->One way in which the concept of recycled art is comparable with that
> ->of money is that we constantly are swapping around all this currency
> ->- notes and coins, but we all use it for different reasons or at
> ->different times and we all say that while we're using it it's ours
> ->and then we pass it on.
>
> An excellent analogy, vicki.
>
> who does the currency really belong to? the people of the
> nation that minted that currency. it belongs to all of us.
> individuals use it temporarily, but it's always flowing
> around and getting re-used. wonderful.
>
> smh
>
>
>
> Steev Hise, Head Chump
> steevATdetritus.net http://detritus.net/steev
> *Recycled Culture: detritus.net
> *Record Store: southtothefuture.com
> *Progressive radio sketches: radioluchalibre.com
> *Watching power flow: capitalletters.detritus.net
> *Democratic sound collage generator: soundbakery.detritus.net
> *** sig almost over ***
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> "Music involves living, its not just the execution of sounds in space."
> -Anthony Braxton
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>
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