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Other than the stolen content, the following posting is all mine

I'd never heard of Kaavya Viswanathan until yesterday and the news about her first novel's plagarized sections. (The Harvard Crimson, which broke the story, counted 10 examples of lifted material, but the NYT, which undoubtedly has more experience with researching purloined prose, counted 29.) I have heard her excuse: she accidentally "internalized" (ate?) work by someone else, and didn't know it.

As someone who's been plagarized, I'm not sympathetic. Once or twice is an accident, and forgivable (at least I hope so, since it's even happened to me), but not 29 times, not even 10. Decades ago, when I was writing for The Comics Journal, there was a guy (I honestly don't recall his name) whose reviews went on forever, rambling to the point of unreadability (par for the Journal), but for a time he appeared to be the editorial favorite. Until, that is, some reader who managed to stay awake through one of his pieces realized that it was actually Pauline Kael-- paragraphs and paragraphs of Pauline. His excuse: "I have a photographic memory, and when I write, sometimes I don't realize that I'm not making it up, but instead writing something I've read."

I have a photographic memory, but I can't remember.

This was also John Gardner's excuse when he got nailed for copying someone else's work in his biography of Chaucer. No one knows what Martin Amis' excuse was for lifting sections from the one and only novel by Billy Burroughs (William Burroughs' son), because Martin never had to answer for it (although Spy nailed him at the time). And of course, Alex Haley didn't exactly come up with Roots on his own, and Dan Brown is getting sued a second time for The Da Vinci Code, and . . .

Enough. Gotta get back to the new book I'm writing, about my stay in rehab. Right now, I'm at the part where I had my sex-change operation without anesthesia.

Posted by Steve Monaco at April 25, 2006 3:45 PM

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