Last month I really enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's essay in Harper's "The Ecstasy of Influence", where he used the words of others (credited in the end) in an essay about plagiarism. I also listened to him on the podcast of To the Best of Our Knowledge (where I learned, really late, that it's pronounced "Lee-thum")
Anyway, Jonathan Lethem will be doing a Q&A over at the Jane Magazine forums today at 4pm EST.
Also, aside from the fascinating issues raised by Jonathan's essay, I was delighted to find one of my favorite quotes in it: "Collage is the art form of the 20th Century", a quote I originally heard in one of my favorite movies (and plays), Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare. In the play/movie, the quote is attributed to Donald Barthelme, and I've come back to the idea again and again while living in and observing the early 21st (and often thought it applies more to our century than the last). In his essay's bibliography, Lethem gives this credit:
"the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries...I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals."
I just found it totally appropriate in the context of the essay that even this line was altered and then re-appropriated to defend the popularity of an art form that its original author (if Barthelme was the originator) could only dream of. (I know, they had sampling when Barthelme was alive, but it would be hard to argue that this quote was more descriptive of his times than ours.)
Anyway, neat.
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