The Virginia Quarterly Review has Campbell’s entire essay The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality online. Many footnotes, many of them very funny. Like Lethem’s essay, some serve to credit the “original” source from which Campbell appropriated. (Note: Lethem’s were not some, but all; see entry Stitched, quilted, pastiched, erased? for more info and links.) That includes [25] Stolen and modified from Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.†for
…I realized just how crazy I had become—skeptical of every thought, wary of my every utterance, muttering “Ah, Nietzsche! Ah, humanity!†under my breath.
The story did not mention Nietzsche, but it could have. Have I mentioned before that I miss our old cat Bartleby…time out… a quick search reveals that yes, of course, I have.
More Campbell:
And if somebody asked, “but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?â€â€”couldn’t one answer simply: why?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
…
[18] I have a friend who, each time I make a remotely humorous utterance, says: “That’s funny. Where did you get that from?†This makes me sad.
…
[21] From which we get the word agoraphobia, which is the fear of being put to death for sharing interesting ideas in public places.
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Side note: VQR is up again this year for awards.
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We were up for awards and then, earlier this month, we did not get said awards. Ah, well — we got ‘em last year, so we’ll just leave them up on the mantle for another year until we can collect some more.
“…so we’ll just leave them up on the mantle for another year until we can collect some more. :)”
Which you no doubt will.
Thanks for the update, Waldo.
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[...] If you need some other ideas for writing, you could always get one from Jonathan Lethem’s Promiscuous Materials Project. (Some more background on this at previous entries here and here; i.e. links which I can’t re-link here right now.) [...]