"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"

In Books and Publishing class we had to write a bio paper on a living author. Since most of my favorite authors are dead (Hjortsberg, Shiner, and Crews a few among the living), I picked ol' Harry Crews, which I would. The complete first draft of this had about four more pages of his actual biography, but that made it far too long to be turned in. A quite chop-chop job and it was left to this.


~•~
(1st Draft)


CRW 321 - 001
January 27, 2009
Author Case History


"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"


Harry Crews is an unusual author who is linked in an essential manner to the particular place of his youth. This is immediately evident in the title of his published memoir, Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Harry was born in Bacon County, Georgia, a place where men would shoot each other over disagreements about fence lines and coon hounds. At a time when the rest of the country was just beginning to suffer the effects of the Great Depression, folks in Bacon County had been living that way for more than a few generations. Prospects looked bleak, and, if the crops failed, families were destitute.

At the age of 5, Harry suffered from a debilitating illness, one that would influence the rest of his life, and deeply reflect in his fiction. He contracted a fever accompanied by severe muscle contractions which would leave the county doctor to declare that Harry would never walk again. This declaration brought family and friends to his bedside, all staring at him in a disturbing way that would give Harry a unique perspective on how society viewed its peripheral elements, the people mainstream society called "freaks." The characters in Harry's fiction almost always displayed some deformity or grotesque trait (Crews, Childhood).

Harry described his father--a man who turned out to actually be his step-father--as a good man but a brutal drunk (Crews, Childhood). His mother eventually grew tired of his drunken tirades and packed up her family one night and made her way to Jacksonville, Florida, where Harry lived until he graduated high school.

He enlisted in the Marines, later commenting:

"Being good, southern, ignorant country boys, we did the good, southern, ignorant country thing: we volunteered as quickly as possible, anxious as we were to go and spill our blood in the good, southern, ignorant country way. (Introduction, Classic Crews 12)

It was during his three years in the Marines that he began to read everything he could.
Following his discharge he attended the University of Florida, where he first began writing fiction. He took a creative writing course with Andrew Lytle--formerly the teacher of Flannery O'Connor. Looking at one of Harry's early stories, Andrew Lytle told him he should burn the manuscript, saying, "Fire is a great refiner." (Goss, Pop Culture Florida 16)

A number of years later, after Harry had his first published novel, The Gospel Singer, he returned to the University of Florida as a teacher in the English department, where he taught for the next 29 years. During those three decades he published a total of 17 novels, a collection of fiction, an autobiography, and 4 collections of nonfiction. He was known by students and faculty alike as a hard-drinking, cantankerous man, who taught with the same fire and passion with which he wrote and displayed in his work. His life was always on the verge of overshadowing his fictional creations. He embodies the term Flannery O'Connor used to describe her own Southern characters, "a large and startling figure." (O'Connor)

The novels of Harry Crews could perhaps best be described as a sub-genre of the Southern Gothic. "Grit-Lit," as some critics have termed the work of Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and early Cormac McCarthy. Works that mix great amounts of violence, dark humor, salacious subject matter, and grotesque characters. Although not all of Harry's novels have these elements, they certainly all have at least two or three of them.

Having a life that seemed to be straight out of his own novels caused Harry no small amount of conflict with the academic hierarchy, as well as more than a few publishers, editors, and agents. His first five novels were all published by William Morrow, the next thirteen would be published by a total of seven different publishers. Only three of those seven were major houses; Alfred A. Knopf, Harper & Row, and Simon & Schuster. The main factors of his conflicts with publishers and editors could be seen in his refusal to cut particularly violence scenes or graphic subject matter such as rape, castration, and brutal dog fighting ("A Writer's Face", Georgia Review).

With his nonfiction work, Harry fared no better with publishers. In 1976, while on assignment to write an article for Playboy, Harry began one of his infamous drinking binges. When he woke up a few days later, he found a tattoo on a hinge in the the fold of his arm. He included the tattoo in his expenses billed to the magazine, much to the dismay and anger of the editor (Dennis Miller Show).

It has been almost three years since Harry Crews's last book. An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings was published in 2006 by Blood & Guts Press, a tiny publisher in Los Angeles. It was printed in three editions: 26 lettered and signed copies hand-bound in goatskin; 300 numbered and signed copies in quarter leather with handmade paper boards, and then 2,000 copies in trade hardcover (Sauve).

This small number of his latest book belies the cult following Harry Crews has generated over his career. He has been sought out by such Hollywood luminaries as Sean Penn (who Harry dedicated Scar Lover to), when he was married to Madonna. Punk legends Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch named a short-lived side-band after Harry, using his novels as titles for most of their songs. Harry Crews was also featured in the 2004 documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, in which he relates three stories from his youth in archetypal Crews-style; that is, grim and gruff and full of unsettling humor.

Even if American Family is to be the final published work in his lifetime, the impact Harry Crews has made on modern American literature will be felt far beyond the range of those who have actually read, or even heard of him.

Another of his tattoos features a quote from the poet e. e. cummings, capturing perfectly Harry's bold attitude and brash outlook on what remains of his life: Beneath a grinning skull are the words, How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

When it comes time to meet him, I don't know if Mr. Death will really want to find out.


•


A Selected Bibliography

Novels
An American Family: The Baby With the Curious Markings (2006)
Celebration (1998)
The Mulching of America (1995)
Classic Crews (1993)
Scar Lover (1992)
Body (1990)
The Knockout Artist (1988)
A Feast of Snakes (1976)
The Gypsy's Curse (1974)
The Hawk is Dying (1973)
Car (1972)
Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971)
This Thing Don't Lead To Heaven (1970)
Naked in Garden Hills (1969)
The Gospel Singer (1968)

Non-Fiction
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978)
Blood and Grits (1979)
Florida Frenzy (1982)
Madonna at Ringside (1991)

•

Works Cited

"'A Writer's Face': The Letters of Harry Crews."

The Georgia Review Winter 2007.
Crews, Harry. Classic Crews.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

---. A Childhood: Biography of a Place.

Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Goss, James P. Pop Culture Florida.

Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press Inc, 2000.

Cummings, E. E. "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct."

The Dial Jan. 1920. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Sauve, Damon. "Fiction: Novels."

A Large & Startling Figure:
The Harry Crews Online Bibliography.
Jan. 27, 2009.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Dir. Andrew Douglas. 2003.

DVD. Anonymous Content, 2005.

The Dennis Miller Show. Fox Network. 4 Feb. 1992.
The Rough South of Harry Crews.

Dir. Gary Hawkins. 1991.

Videocassette.
North Carolina Public Television.

· • ·

Peculiar Crossroads

In archiving these papers, I come to find out I don't have a copy of the final draft of this one. A fact that annoys and pains me a little. I finished it at school, printed it, and saved it on a flash drive. That flash drive bit the dust and the printed copy was turned it. Being the final paper of the semester, it wasn't returned. [insert myriad frowny faces here].

This does mark (ha-ha) however, the first time i tried writing about the hitchhiking days and Yellowstone and Mark Em—I mean Marcus Amory...

Since we'd been writing parodies in Fiction II, I asked if I could make this assignment a parody as well.

(The references to Orwell in this concern Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma which we read for this class.)

The comment I remember most from Eric May (the teacher whose class this was for) was that there was no sense of Me in this story. I never had any description of Me-as-a-Character. Eric looked at me and, being a wide-girthed man, noted my height. "There's a low ceiling you talk about in the story, but was it a low ceiling to anyone other than you?"


~•~



CRW: Writers on the Road
4/17/08
Creative Essay: First Draft

PECULIAR CROSSROADS


I first met my Dean Moriarty not long after I came off the road. I'd been hitchhiking again--perhaps my longest single stretch of hitching I'd done then, from the magic sweltering Gulf Coast South out to the splosh splawrsh of the rocky coast in Bolinas California where Marin County sticks out its little finger as if testing the waters of the Pacific and then up the angled coastline through Crescent City and beyond--to Seattle where I turned away from the coast and came back through the flat plains of eastern Oregon where it seems that on a clear enough day you could stand there on that dust bowl prairie and gaze back east all the way to the hills and caves of Utah. After a series of flaming Roman candle adventures that took me through a hospital stay (from a motorcade inconvenience that left me with cracked ribs and a headful of missing time) and the hallowed halls of an odd temple in Salt Lake City where the people smiled entirely too much for my comfort, I sat recovering atop a mountain in Colorado with some mad people just burning to live--to move--to experience what the universe conspired to give them. Then, after a few sunrises from those mountains of madness and delirious delights I took my feet back down to the ribbon of highway and shook my thumb for another ride. A few weeks later I had circled around again and was dropped off on the side of the road outside Three Forks Montana and went east into the hissing steam and glug-glug-glugalling of the mud pots and geyser springs of America's own fantasy nature playground called Yellowstone Park. No stranger place had i ever seen--no more wide-eyed had i ever been than when I first set foot in and feasted my road-weary eyes upon the yellow rock veined with hues of blues and reds and obsidian cliffs and porous rock and the steam whispers of holes in the earth that said pssst, pssst, c'mere and I'll tell you a story you've never heard of before and the bubbling waters of iridescent springs that flaunted their abnatural colors like some prehistoric alien peacock strutting and preening across the basins and valleys between proud and protective mountains. It was here, in this almost unearthly landscape that I first encountered the man who would be my Dean Moriarty. Marcus Amory was his name and it was him who blazed like a candle flame everyone else fluttered around like a frenetic mothswarm. I first saw the brightness of his flame my first night in Yellowstone. I had stepped into the small dark smokey lounge that was the employee pub, a wooden bunk house out behind the grandiose log cabin-style Old Faithful Inn, and let my eyes run slow across the walls laden with an almost indecipherable script hand-written graffiti and simple drawings that amazingly never crossed the border from the absurd and vulgar into crass and disgusting. I sat myself down at a table in the middle of the small room and bobbed my head to the mad jazz riffs blowing from the small speakers in the four corners of the room. I nursed a drink of melting ice and wondered what it was that brought me into this place. That same sense of looking--of seeking--of plaintive searching and never resting, never happy with what I've found because I am never really looking for a particular something, just searching out that indefinable anything. It's the seeking that interests me more than what it is that I find. So I sat in this dim, bopping, smokey room and drained the last of the cold water from the remaining ice in my plastic cup and about to cut out of the word-scrawled pub when this fellow I hadn't seen before slipped himself into the chair across the small squared table from me as if he'd always been sitting there and I just noticed him. A bushy-haired nice-looking guy with long fingers that belonged to a jazz piano player or Renaissance painter. He tipped a beer bottle up to his lips, set it back down on the table with a quiet thunk and let loose a bright smile that was the spark of his candleflame. "Hi, I'm Marcus Amory," he said to me and added a little nod to his shining smile. I nodded back to him and felt right off that I was looking at a mad character who just hopped out of a beat novel and appeared in the chair across from me. I nodded and tipped my cup of water in his direction. Without a pause from him to await any comment I might offer Marcus spoke up again and didn't waste time, as if words for him were an inconvenience in conveying what he wanted to impart. "Saturday around noon we're going to be having some fun at my room." He tilted the beer bottle up to his lips again and his eye glinted with a delirious delight. I sat there and for a moment thought I was the mark of someone coming on a little too strong. Like a single pretty girl hanging out at a party that vibrated with too much testosterone, where all the young dudes swung their dicks around with a little too much ferocity. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of something as open an invitation as that. "Oh, yeah?" I raised an eyebrow and held a slight grin to show I took no offense even if the invitation was something a little too personal for my interest, "And what sort of fun would that be?" Marcus Amory tossed his answer right out with such an obviously discreet reply that I would either be hep to what he was saying or miss it by a mile and a half. "I just got back from the Jerry shows in Palo Alto." I already wore a Cheshire grin when I finalized the date: "Noon, you say. I guess I'll be skipping work on Saturday..." Marcus Amory and I burned across the landscapes of Yellowstone, the mountains of Montana, and the soft geographies far beyond the physical realms like two mad cats setting fire to the blue note highways of some past poetic time. And as I sit here now, distant and remote from our days together, I reflect on our trips and conversations and lysergic-soaked eep hours of bright dark nights of our souls that seemed to be poured from the eternal archive of mystic experience and steeped in the tea leaves from a lush and exotic jungle where ideas not yet conceived of grow wild on tangle vines before bearing fruit in our minds. I ask the ghost of this memory that is Marcus Amory about those days and nights we spent seeding precious singular moments so that they might flower and bring the beauty of our ideas into being. Marcus Amory moved through place and thought with a fiery intensity and latched onto me through some cosmological ninth sense that told him I would be a willing and able psychonaut to join him on his acid-fueled ramblings down mountain highway and up cliffside trails. I reflect, conjure, and speak to this memory of my Dean Moriarty and question what rules define telling these stories. What defines truth and fiction? What boundaries were breeched and what limits were kept constrained when Jack Kerouac became Sal Paradise and began committing the stories of his life to paper? Where does the thinly-guised fact become fabricated fiction? If I were to write of Marcus Amory and myself--committed in story as Syd Persona--what would I reveal of the psychedelic intimacies he and I shared. And what of the others were who passed though, went along for a distance with, and stepped back with quiet apprehension from? Would I be transgressing any sort of personal privacy they might have reasonable expectation of if I wrote them into the narrative of this slipstream story of hand-painted mini-vans, stumbling glorious wanton hysterical along the boardwalks of Old Faithful's geyser basin and driving, always driving--? Marcus Amory was the maddest beautiful driver I've ever known, which was only appropriate since I viewed him as my Dean Moriarty around whom I fluttered and flipped and kept up the pace with--driving with one hand one the wheel, one hand pinching a joint, his head nodding and bobbing to the music and his smile fixed bright on his face. I think about those times and those events and those people and find myself, even typing this, going back and deleting certain information, altering some truths until their are partial fictions and considering what might be added to this to make it no longer a recollecting tale with minor factual details excised or metamorphosed into subtle fancy. What choices should I make in recreating certain events on the page?—


What choices did Jack make? What observations in On The Road are Jack's and which ones are Sal's? Like my ghostly memory on paper of Marcus Amory, Dean Moriarty was certainly a more beautiful, wild, be-bop-beat mad cat in many ways than Neal Cassady was. But then Neal Cassady wasn't Dean Moriarty anymore than Emma Larkin found George Orwell in her bumbling down the sweltering river of Burma (which isn't really a country at all anymore, except in the past of people's memories). Neal Cassady was a living breathing beautiful laughing angry asshole. Just like any person is. Dean Moriarty was a character, who really and truly existed only in Jack's mind, on the page, and in the hearts of anyone who opened themselves up to the story in which Dean rambles endlessly forever down some long lost highway of hope until he recedes to becomes but a speck on the distant horizon, and then it's goodbye to all that--at least, until the reader reopens the book and starts the journey all over again.


—I go searching, and try to find the truth in my own fiction, the fiction in my truth. And, in searching the canyons and highways of my memory and past I come upon a Southern crossroads, not farm from the ramshackle shotgun shack of Old Bull Lee and encounter Flannery O'Connor standing on the side of some dusty highway waiting for the Misfit to come back from the forest where he walked in with the Grandmother. Flannery tells me not to linger too long--and I don't. Crossroads aren't meant for lingering anymore than road novels are meant to leave their characters stationary for any span. But before I stick my thumb out again to catch a ride away from here and off to some place out there somewhere, Ms. O'Connor tells me, "The Writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. Their problem is to find that location." And then I know what it is I've been looking for all these years. Where I have sought to be. The peculiar crossroads where I will find my past present and future mingling with every highway road and trail I've even imagined, and the divine moment that lifts itself out from the swampy muck of confusion and obscurity and hangs there, just above the here and now, where it shimmers for a moment and then disappears as I keep going further. It's all a mirage, rising like heat waves on a desert highway. It disappears like a fleeting memory of the past that no one holds in their hearts anymore, no one speaks of, no one remembers. I think of Jack Kerouac, following me all these years since I first encountered him, and Sal Paradise who never quite existed for me even when I hopped in the car with him and drove out to San Francisco--him and Dean, Dean and Jack, Jack and Neal, Neal and me, me and Marcus Amory. Me and Jack. I grapple with my own secrets, my own untold stories, my own hesitations and I think back to Marcus Amory and the headlights showing only a small piece of the long dark night we travelled--only the immediate future of the road just ahead of us--and beyond that light only darkness and the mystery of what will be--what could be. I think of Marcus Amory, I think of Marcus Amory. I think of Marcus Am-or-ry.


· • ·

A Tale of Two Lines

This one came about because I had just discovered the case of (Dr.) Brad Vice and the Flannery O'Connor Award controversy.

It's almost a compulsion with me to incorporate current influences on assignments.


~•~
(1st)


FICTION II
04/07/07
First Lines

A TALE OF TWO LINES
OR: THE FIRST LINE OF PLAGIARISM


First lines. Hookers. The tasty openings of a story or novel that are meant to grab the reader and all-but-force them to read on--the second, third, and all ensuing sentences until they have consumed the whole meal, paragraph by paragraph.

Somewhat recently, I read a short story titled "Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice. It was in a collection that won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. I was struck by the power of the words, structure, images, and just plain ol' deep dark story in the piece.

Here's the first line (two sentences, actually): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I have rarely been so moved by a story as I was by Brad Vice's. Briefly, it's about a self-admitted Yankee in the Deep South who, one night sitting on the front porch with a couple of others, she asks about the bugle she hears blow those three notes. It's the Ku Klux Klan gathering for a rally in the woods. The young Yankee girl talks the guy she's sweet on to take her out to see the rednecks in their long white sheets burn a cross in the forest. She, of course, gets more than she bargained for.

I looked into Brad Vice and his work and was almost shocked at what I found. I love it when research opens new proverbial cans of worms. This instance of delving into background lead me on a path through the swampy area of literature involving plagiarism and how nasty accusations are sometimes worse than the crime.

"Tuscaloosa Nights" is a short story that opens Brad Vice's collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. The collection was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Prize in 2005, only to have it rescinded a few months later.

This is a tale of two first lines, and the murky area where "fair use" becomes an unforgivable act of "plagiarism".

The first of these opening lines comes from a non-fiction work titled Stars Fell on Alabama which is a collection of real-life (i.e. "factual") instances that were collected and published in 1934. It was written in a style not often used at the time, but which gained mass popularity when, thirty years later, Truman Capote would use the narrative non-fiction style for his book, In Cold Blood.

Carl Carmer was a noted professor at the University of Alabama for a number of years and who fell in love with Southern storytelling. He traveled the state and recorded tales and events he heard and witnessed, various myths, legends, and superstitious of the place he called "Conjure Country". One instance he wrote about was a Ku Klux Klan rally that he witnessed.

In Part I: Tuscaloosa Nights, is the chapter titled "Flaming Cross". This opens with the line: "We heard them coming long before we saw them — three distant high blasts of a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

70 years later, a student (and native of the town) at the University of Alabama named Brad Vice, wrote his short story called "Tuscaloosa Nights". This was the opening piece in a collection of fictional tales that was to become not only Mr. Vice's doctoral thesis in creative writing, but also The Bear Bryant Funeral Train received the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award.

Dr. Vice's story begins with the line (two sentences): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I had a passing familiarity with Carl Carmer's book. Almost anyone from Alabama who reads history or local superstition literature has at least heard of the work. And for a student at the University of Alabama's creative writing program, it would not be something that could have been ignored.

So, cursing all plagiarists as vile and reprehensible people, I re-read Brad Vice's short story. I was still struck by the use he made of the descriptive sentences of Carl Carmer that Brad Vice used.

Okay, I thought, well how much of that is "plagiarized"?

I found Mr. Carmer's original work and read the chapter.

First line is lifted quite directly and deliberately, that much is certain. A few lines of dialogue in the ensuing scene. The closing of the story is closely mimicked:

"We rode on in silence. The lights of town seemed friendlier than the flames we had left behind on the river bank...." (Carmer)

"They were running toward the river, toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross, leaving us alone in the terrible silence." (Vice)

I thought, there it is. Plagiarism.

Then I read some essays on what legally defines plagiarism and what ethically constitutes it. Then I read both pieces again.

Nope, I thought, this isn't plagiarism.

Non-fiction work can only be considered legally plagiarized if it has been taken substantially in length without citation. And the events described in a work of non-fiction can be used in fiction without citing the written source. That;s the legalities of it.

Ethically, did Brad Vice steal Carl Carmer's intellectual property?

Dozens of authors copy Arthur Conan Doyle when they write Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And, not to forget the extensive Lovecraftian circle of writers and their shared creations.

A cornerstone of my personal opinion that Brad Vice did not deserve the accusation (and I wondered about a possible personal vendetta in this situation), is that in the collection before it was published by the University of Georgia after winning the Flannery O'Connor Award, there was an opening epigram in the manuscript which quoted Carl Carmer's book, Stars Fell on Alabama. To my personal way of seeing (and I detest plagiarism), this is citing the source work of the single story, and backs up Brad Vice's claim that his short story is an homage to Mr. Carmer. The fact that this epigram was left out of the published book from the University of Georgia is something that goes beyond Dr. Vice's ability as an author to definitively control.

A number of people in the literary community came out cursing Brad Vice and at least one made the statement that his Ph.D should be revoked as well as the O'Connor Prize. But far more in number were those who stood up in defense of Dr. Vice's book. One story out of nine had an accusation made against it. An accusation that falls apart when looking at any of the other versions of the manuscript that have been published in one manner or another (appearance in Five Points magazine, inclusion in his doctoral dissertation), because the cited quote by Carmer is present in those.

A lot of fuss and fallout from what essentially is an admittedly almost-identical opening line in two written works; one non-fiction, and the other, 70 years later, in a short story.

Is this a case of a Harvard student claiming she "internalized" over 90 instances of sentences from numerous other writers in a single book? No. Is it a case of lifting the core elements in a written account of an actual event years later in a fictional story. That's certainly closer to the truth, but I think it overstates a few things.

Carmer's work is a narrative telling of a real event. Brad Vice used that as the setting for a fictional story. The story contains a number of elements, and about four to seven lines that are very similar to the non-fiction account, but there is another level of story being told in Dr. Vice's tale that is not present in Mr. Carmer's work.

What I take from this in application of my own writing are a few key notes to remember.

The Paradox: Never use other people's work--factual accounts or fiction--without making it evident that I am doing so. A line from a famous song or a certain phrase may be used, but make damn sure that it's apparent where they came from. On the other hand, if the story is strong enough as an original piece, I can't be overly concerned with doing such because there has been so much "mash-up" in modern culture that even citing the source of something may be a pitfall of having used something that has been taken from somebody else already. Mark Twain noted, "A bad writer borrows from other writers, a good writer steals." I never took this to mean that it's okay to steal something from someone else. I understand it to be take what you need from where you need it so long as what you use it for is YOUR OWN WORK. That means be original in usage and voice, regardless of using anything from a source not your head.

And since the contents of my head (I can't speak about the contents of someone else's head because I'm not privy to such information unless it's been spilled on a page or photograph or canvas or in a series of musical notes) are a mash-up of everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think about. Everything.

On the other hand...it's becoming more and more acceptable in publishing to lie, and so without the ethics of attaining your own voice and ideas and work, copping a riff of writing from someone else draws a writer towards the ugly morass of Plagiarism. And that's a death-knell for an artist.

Brad Vice last not only his award, but also his job as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University over the fiasco (he now teaches English at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic). As he quotes about the situation, "Wrote a book. Caused a lota trouble. Stay tuned."

This is what the opening lines of a couple of stories lead me to discover, think about, and articulate in a way I hope says something useful.

I don't know as the line on what exactly is plagiarism can be clearly drawn as Here It Is, No Exceptions, but I certainly know plagiarism when I see it.

If you steal something without altering it significantly, or placing it within a vastly new environment, you've probably plagiarized it. If you haven't ever "borrowed" a bit of this or that from someone else, you probably have never written a single thing.


~•~


WHERE TO FIND THE STORIES:

"Flaming Cross" by Carl Carmer:


"Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice:


· • ·