Expecting Rain

I should say that T.S. Elliot and Pynchon and David Foster Wallace all copyrighted their work and depended on the enforcement of those copyrights to make a living. But they all participated in a practice that challenged the legal notion of authorship and intellectual property.

Plagiarism doesn't mean just incorporating a portion of another person's text. It requires more than that. Modernist and Postmodernist poetics can be rife with incorporations without attributions but not be plagiarisms because that incorporation is now recognized as part of poetic practice. It is different when one is passing off another person's work as one's own. And we know the difference when we see it.

The fight over sampling in music is interesting because of the particular legal, social and economic situation. Why is sampling different that what T.S. Elliot does? Or Duchamp or postmodern artists in general? Good question. Wonder if it has to do with corporations and class and race?

the verve thing is a whole other issue sampling, where the last time track from the oldham album was directly used, and sampled. had he not told everybody nobody would have probably noticed and then after agreeing to to use so much he went and used more than what he agreed on. that been said the first 3 albums of his are some of my fav,and keys to the highway is a true british bob album. sampling is taking the bit from the record itself the same lick and putting in yours. i mean to go out and tell the world im taking this bit and directly putting into mine and basing a song around it, and the song is controlled by allen klein is not a good idea. they could have redone taking the bit out and chose not to.at least that is how i remember it taking place.
if hootie had not use bob name he would have been alright.

JP, I'll bite and hope I don't get burned again. What do you mean by "possession of a text"? If you aren't just messing with me, I'll do my best to answer you as soon as I fully understand what you are asking.

MMD, I do hope I properly understood what you were saying, and was wondering about the part I quoted above - "to determine that the text in question was in the author's possession", as you say. If I understand this correctly, this means, in old-fashioned terms, that someone owned this particular book (as a book, not as a copyright), or that we know for sure that they read it because we know they had access to it and we have witness accounts of them reading it. (Sorry to get so technical.) These days, an author could be alone in their room, at their computer, and access a huge number of texts.... would there be a scholarly method of determining whether someone gained "possession", if we can call it that, of a particular text, by accessing it online?

JP -- the thing to know is what the standards for poetic practice are in the artistic community. Incorporating lines from another artist in one's text can be allusion, creative use, a dialogue or refutation. It may reframe the original work, create meaning by putting it in a new set of relations.

But if the artist is simply reproducing the work, the heart of the work of another artist without re-framing, reworking it, then that is not in keeping with the spirit of the poetic practice.

Thus, maybe the author of the yakuza novel saw Dylan's incorporation of lines from his novel as both a compliment (validates the author's work as being interesting art, by no less than Dylan) and those lines are placed in a new context, made to create meanings in a new and different way. If you do know they are from that novel, perhaps they change the way you think of the narrator of the song. His character is now a mob boss. Thus the creation of a new meaning.

Perhaps if Dylan had taken passages from the same author's book and used them as the lyrics to the songs and the album was about Japanese gangster life -- well, maybe then it looks like plagiarism.

To Goombay's other good point, the artists who are alive and aware of Dylan's appropriations must recognize them as acceptable, artistic use (and be happy enough that Dylan saw them as an influence to not want to sue).

The post that follows yours (just above this post) is not a response to your question (quoted here). It was more general.

I now see what you meant. That is a good point. If you look at scholarship like this, you'll see references to the estate's of artists. For instance, David Foster Wallace's papers went to UT Austin. There, you can look at his notes. Other archives (like Nietzsche's) include his library and his underlinings and marginal notes. So there is that. But that is not possible with 99% of authors. And that's not what I meant really. I meant that one would have to make a reasonable case that Dylan was likely to have read and cited/incorporated that particular author's work. Then you'd want to say why Dylan did that. You'd need to show that Dylan did not read something else or just have the phrase in a colloquial way from being of that time, etc. And of course in the case of Jack London and TImrod, there is no need for that since the chunks of text are so large there is a very high probability that the texts are the same.

And the issue of digital, instant access to everything makes this kind of scholarship harder.

Of course, I am assuming that we are not talking about plagiarism -- as if I am using one of the new software/websites to determine if a term paper is copied from existing sources in the database (construed in broad terms). Instead, we are talking about literary incorporations of others' texts as literary references/appropriations/allusions. And this applies to our discussion in that what we would be trying to do is to make a case that the text (in our case, Dylan's) is meant by Dylan to be read in relation to whatever you think is being "quoted" there. Thus, the purpose of running down the sources for the incorporated texts is to better interpret Dylan's works. In fact, it would be the only way to know what Dylan's texts meant at all. The care you take in the identifying the actual source for a passage is crucial if you are making an argument that some text by Dylan means x or y or z because he is citing this or that work of Ovid or TImrod which brings up certain facts and meanings, etc.

Why am I assuming we are not talking about plagiarism? Because the way Dylan is incorporating texts follows the practices of modernism and postmodernism to a large extent. And it is so extensive and so coherent in its application that it must be seen as a literary style. The passages he is citing are far too well know (London, Huck Finn, Ovid) to be efforts to pass them off as his own. It is implausible.

But there is also the issue of poetic practices and the community standards that you've not addressed yet.

Okay, thanks MMD.
It's hard to even guess how likely it is Dylan's papers will ever be available for research, esp those post-BOTT. The famous notebook he wrote BOTT in apparently can be accessed for research, and there is some early to mid-1960s material around. There may be more that I don't recall, but it doesn't seem to be much, and next to nothing from the most debated works on this subject, 1997 forward.

I am sorry JP. I edited the post a bit and the part I added might further clarify. I will consult my friend who makes a living doing this with medieval poetry. His job is next to impossible, of course. I'll ask him about the process of identifying references/allusions in texts like those. Then I'll get back to you, probably by PM.

keys to the world, not keys to the highway my bad. ashcroft not clapton. an incredible album. why not nothing etc

I may have misread your post before this one. Here you are showing some radical colors. Really, really radical in a world of more or less absolute corporate (property) domination. I will say a little prayer for you, Tragos. If you don't post again after this, how long before I contact your loved ones?

I'm glad you should say so, in the light of recent accusations that to point out Dylan's likely sources is doing him a great disservice. Personally, I don't think it is. I'll freely admit I don't have the proper ways to express things in the same literary terms as you do, but I don't think it does him harm, nor would I want to attempt that.

Back when the Asia Series of paintings was published, I reasoned it might even have been a publicity stunt not to mention they were painted after photographs - they could be absolutely sure people would figure and there'd be an outcry in the press and that'd be free publicity. I can't prove that either, but I can see the possibility.

All these endless suppositions about what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn't are missing the point, I think. I guess everyone already realizes that there are legal grey areas when ideas are copyrighted.

But the point is this: Dylan could have written "inspired by..." or "select lines taken from..." in the liner notes to his albums. He didn't.

That is wrong -- the more so when others are paying him handsomely to cover his songs and use his lines in their own songs.

For me, the Dylan plagiarism enthusiasts, those who constantly wallow in this, are the lowest life forms in the Dylan community. They are the crazy aunt in the attic. I think the thing motivating their endless pursuit is basic jealousy - they want to bring Superman back down to earth.

I've been rereading Chronicles this week, and I am again completely blown away by the power of his writing. Yes, some parts of the book, like some of his songs and tunes, came from elsewhere. That doesn't matter one bit to me. His own words, which are the vast majority of the book, cover such a wide variety of subjects with such astonishing insight that it takes one's breath away. And the same thing can be said for his music. The words almost jump right off the paper.

The immense phenomenon that is Bob Dylan is simply much greater than a normal human being can even begin to comprehend - his genius is that vast. I'll keep enjoying the ride while lost ones try and derail the train.

Uhh... I don't think anyone is trying to derail the train, as you put it, or lessen Dylan's considerable genius or achievements.

For me, I'm simply saying that if you steal an entire sentence or paragraph or rhyming couplet, you should give a source for it.

Is this difficult?

The project of "pointing our his sources" can have different motives.
My argument with you has been focused on the ambivalence in your posts about the very fact that he has sources to be pointed out. You often times treat the fact that Dylan's contemporary texts incorporate other texts as a moral or legal issue rather than as a literary style or method.

If you are pointing out that there are incorporations/quotations in order to make a case that Dylan is a thief/plagiarist, then I might have a problem with that.

If, you are pointing it out as part of a project of understanding and interpreting Dylan's contemporary texts (in terms of a poetic style), then I have no problem with it.

Of course, I am open to the possibility that while Dylan is engaged in a Modernist-like writing style, he may, nevertheless, also have committed plagiarism (distinct from the "collage" style). One would have to know the difference and make the case.

You are also right when you say that there are some who deny the very fact that there are incorporated texts from other writers in Dylan's work. Some of those people are deeply committed to the author as genius idea I've talked about in this thread. To point out these incorporations threatens their whole framework for liking Dylan's work. For these people, pointing our the existence of sources does do harm, but that is not your problem. It is theirs.

I'll say it again: often, you confuse this latter type of naive objection to your "pointing out" with those who object to your tendency to view Dylan's writing style (an established, even old-fashioned by now, literary school and approach) as "stealing" and as a moral failure to cite and properly document his sources. That is the case with my objections to your posts, as well as a few others.

Now, the Asia Series, about which I know much less, seems to me to pose a difficult case. It is common for artists to make their own versions of other paintings -- especially important paintings. Art history classes are full of these cases. And painting a photograph that is someone's artwork is not really different than that. There are older and different traditions involved in painting (the visual art world) than the one's I have been talking about and I don't have a lot of knowledge about them, but there are also contemporary conventions that are more directly connected to Modernist poetry. But, what I know about the Asia series leaves me with questions.

Hey panther, I know my post was really long. But there is a bit in there about the conventions of modern writing (and art) in which incorporating other texts, images, etc, in part or in whole, into one's work is part of the creation of a new art work. It is how meaning is created. So, T.S. Elliot writes a poem that is about the decay of modern culture. It is full of references to the classical poets, to the Bible. Then at the crucial moment, he cites next to one another a nursery rhyme, a colloquial phrase, another poet, a contemporary poet. In no case is anything footnoted or glossed as being "From this..." or "inspired by..."

Figuring out the sources, understanding how the meanings of those sources creates meaning in Elliot's poem, what Elliot's connection of those disparate sources means about the sources themselves .... all of that is the work of the reader.

Dylan is clearly participating in that kind of poetics.

Your fixation on only royalties and copyright infringement misses the point. Not the other way around.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act sure worked to indoctrinate a whole generation. Everyone has become enforcers for the corporations who own the content.

@MMD
The thing with the Asia Series was Bob's statement in the accompanying interview the he paints "mostly from life", which in this framework was generally taken as "this was also the case here". As it turned out, is was Life with a capital L, as referenced by Dylan himself by a work that stood outside the actual Asia Series.
http://gagosian.cdn.crvncms.com/__data/ ... 8bafe3.jpg

Do you happen to subscribe to ISIS magazine? If not, and if you're interested, I'd like to mail you an article I wrote on the subject.

Do you mean that he said something like "I paint mostly from life" and may in fact have been saying "I paint mostly from Life [magazine]"? I hope so, so much that this is true. It would be one of the funniest art jokes I have ever heard. How perfectly Bob Dylan it would be. And, do I understand you, that these Asia series painting correlate to photos in LIfe magazine as well? Oh, man, I hope this life/Life thing is true. Still, I wonder what the conventions are in painting for this kind of practice. Surely one is not required to "cite" the sources for one's paintings. Worth learning about.

I would be very happy to read your article. PM me and we'll figure out how to handle it.

^^
Wonderful, isn't it? Wonderfully Dylanesque.
Yes, I think the sceme was exactly like that.

An additional fact is that his people did work out a deal with the copyright holders of the photos in question, in this case there actually were payments made, although no credit was given in the exhibition or catalogue.

That's an AWESOME avatar JP!!

Finally for a while:
In your question here, you are starting from the premise that Dylan is doing something new and unusual, idiosyncratic or illicit when he incorporates other texts, images, etc into his work. In this case, the image in the photo.

But, really he is participating in a common (and as I said, pretty old-fashioned) artistic practice. Most people in the literary and artistic world would not think there was something wrong with the incorporation of the photo image. They would ask what Dylan was doing with it. What does it mean for Dylan to "quote" (extending the idea to painting) the photograph in his painting ? What does it tell us about Dylan's art? Is it an elevation or parody of low-culture? Is it a comment on how the meaning of the painting changes when it moves from one medium to another? How does his painting technique and way of recasting the image change the meaning of the picture (still considering the image's meaning and Dylan's appropriation of it to begin with)? And so on.

That is unless Dylan was trying to conceal the source photo and pass it off as his own composition. But that makes no sense at all. In part, because if it was from a popular magazine, someone is going to find out (someone always finds out). And also because it is not as though Dylan submitted the actual photo as his own -- taking advantage of the photographer's brilliant photographic technique in order to get credit as a great photographer. Instead, he painted an image from the photo that is not so impossibly unique that he couldn't have come up with something similar on his own. The value is not in the image in the photo by itself. And having divorced it from the actual photograph, the value can't lie in the beauty of the print. The value of the painting must lie in the relationship between the painting and the photograph.

Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, what I said above was no judgement. Whatever anyone of us here on ER wants to call it, Bob-As-Plagiarist is one of his latest personae as perceived by the mass media. I think by this point he is toying with that to the extend that in terms of publicity, it works for him rather than against him.

Regarding the Asia Series photo vs Dylan's painting issue:

Well, of course, I see now that there is a debate that is live and open about the relationship between the photographer's property rights to a photograph and image in the photo of something real that the photographer doesn't own (the actual thing photographed) vs a different artistic medium that recast/quotes that image.

Shephard Fairey's famous Obama "Hope" print (lithograph? not sure what Fairey's medium is there) vs the journalist-photographer's corporation (AP I think) claim to own the likeness.

IF you look into that battle, I think you can se how a legal claims to copyright can become weirdly creepy in relationship to art. But also see the other side. The original photo has a really special and powerful composition and framing. The thing Fairey made makes that even more powerful, the colors, the reference to a kind of Sovietart style, but also Fairey's own guerrilla graffiti Obey campaign, All of that changes the meaning of the original photol. Yes, a tough call.

Can you give an example of Eliot (note the one 'l') citing another poet, or a contemporary poet, in one of his poems, word-for-word?

Yeah, I have a Master's degree in English, so I know what reader-response is. And, again, I'm not concerned about the legalities of it at all.

To state it again: If Dylan uses a contemporary's entire sentence, or copies a paragraph, he has ample opportunity, in the sleeve notes of a record or in the preface to a book, to identity it. It would cost him nothing to concede what he copied.

Please note that there is a big difference, in the common perception, between being inspired by something poetically, and copying something word for word. I realize this distinction may be culturally influenced and have different schools of thought in different disciplines, but aside from all that it's simply the right thing to do.

Note on his first album, Dylan says "I learned this from Rick von Schmidt" and then sings "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" with von Schmidt's arrangement and lyrics. That's the right thing to do even though he didn't need to for copyright reasons. (He didn't do so, however, with "House of the Rising Sun".)

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal

Edmud Spencer:
Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song. (from the Faerie Queen)

Eliot:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Dante's inferno:
So long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so many.
Here there was no plaint, that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the eternal air to tremble.

Eliot:
'You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!'

Baudelair, Les Fleurs du Mal:
Hypocrite reader! - my doppelganger - my brother!


And then there's Madison Cawein's Waste Land from which Eliot probably took the most.

.
Ezra Pound was another one who did this a lot, he even used quotes from John Adams in his work.