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Wednesday, October 27, 2004
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MAMA REALITY
Regular readers know that UD has a passion for plagiarism. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that UD waits, panting, for Google News to post the next case of an eminent professor whose latest blockbuster was written by another eminent professor. Or by clerks, students, assistants ... anybody but the person whose name emblazons the book. It's not really that UD's all indignant about it, or that she enjoys seeing people brought low. Rather, UD perceives that each such case brings her a little closer to Mama Reality. UD calls "Mama Reality" that elusive realm of existence in which The True, The Real, and What's Actually Happening reveals itself. Like most pampered postmoderns, UD spends most of her time in an immensely pleasurable simulacral environment ... not just simulacral, infantile ... Do you realize that every evening, at around six o'clock, bells playing carousel music are heard all over UD's neighborhood, and a few moments later, the Good Humor man pulls his truck right up to UD's house? Do you realize that there's a restaurant with a bakery on the premises steps away from UD's house, so that each morning she can wander up the street and pluck a just-made cinnamon bun from their breakfast basket? The very fundament of UD's existence is confectionary. Yet she also craves contact with actuality, the way things work, the way things are, the real thing, the heart of the matter, the Joycean epiphany, the Wordsworthian spot of time, the Sartreian perfect moment, name your poison. Therefore, UD adores that rhetorical mode which Saul Bellow, in Herzog, calls "Reality Instruction." She loves it when tough guy writers slap her silly. "You dumb bitch! Wake up for once in your wasted life and see how things really are!" UD loves plagiarism stories because they always bring out this sort of writing, the sort of writing which allows UD to contemplate, masochistically, her disengagement from the real. Here are a couple of examples, written during various high-profile plagiarism cases: "If you want to live in the real world, a politician has to be cut a bit of slack. Realism dictates that any reader who spots unattributed passages has to concede a certain exculpation to the politician simply on the assumption that the politician did not write the material." [Thomas Mallon] "[W]e no longer have a culture of writing. Writing is now a specialty. So judges, politicians, businessmen, lawyers--and now it seems law professors--increasingly hire ghostwriters (whether they're called ghostwriters, law clerks, or research assistants) as specialists in writing. I am one of the dinosaurs who still does all my own opinion writing (and of course book and article writing as well). You probably are too. But let's face it: we're on the road to extinction." [Richard Posner] |