Deborah Brandt, "The Broader Administration of Writing"

These are necessarily just quick notes before I pack it in for the night. Just listened to Brandt's opening plenary for the WPA conference. She was pulling her talk in part from her new book, Literary and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society, which I haven't read yet but which is now in my shopping cart. Part of it resonated with, if it wasn't pulled from, "'Who's the President?' Ghostwriting and Shifting Values in Literacy" (College English 69.6 (July 2007): 549-571), which I've assigned to undergraduate students and they've received with considerable interest.

Tonight there was something I haven't heard before--or if I have, it didn't sink in: the concept of "authorial residue." Brandt described two ghostwriters. I can't try to recapitulate those descriptions here, but I do want to remark on an assertion she made: that despite feeling that they were ventriloquizing the people for whom they were writing, despite the fact that the ghostwriters got no authorial credit for their texts (beyond a paycheck), and despite one ghostwriter's feeling sullied by the experience, both ghostwriters had some "authorial residue" from the experience, a sense that something of themselves went into the text and that the act of writing had an effect upon their persons. They experienced a pride of authorship.

I was intrigued by Brandt's choice of the adjective authorial rather than writerly: Brandt herself, in my estimation, was attributing authorship to these ghostwriters. That in itself is an interesting move, one that suggests something about Brandt's own philosophy of writing. But it is also an interesting argument, one that diverges from the Tel Quel tradition in which the author is a social construct, authorship a fiction, an attribute conferred from the outside upon those who meet the criteria of originality, autonomy, morality, and ownership. In contrast to Foucault's assertion that "the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society," we have Brandt suggesting that authorship is an experience, a perception/phenomenon within the person who has produced the text.

Everybody plagiarizes.

[Six months of blogsilence, and now I can't shut up. . . .]

Every smart, responsible writer works very hard not to plagiarize—not only because one doesn't want to be caught and punished but also because smart writers want to demonstrate the entire conversation they're participating in. And also because writers want others to see how hard they've worked to understand their topic. Etc. There's a host of good reasons for trying not to plagiarize.

But especially given the incredibly wide range of textual activities categorized as "plagiarism," every active writer from sources occasionally crosses the line. Really, can any of us swear that we have NEVER patchwritten?—never paraphrased too closely from the language of the source? That once we've acknowledged a source from which we're heavily drawing, we've ALWAYS made clear throughout the text exactly where we're working from that source and where we're not? How can those of us employing research assistants be sure that abstracts they produce are not themselves plagiarized? What about working with coauthors—what if one of them screws up and you don't know it? Etc. There's a host of ways that writers can plagiarize even when they're trying not to. Fully pulling apart a text from its source is a tough thing to do.

And then there is the publishing process. I am right now in the mad rush leading up to the book's being in the printer's hands, and it's terrifying as I try to make sure everything is as it should be. This is a moment where a host of mistakes could be made and could go to print. Plus there are other contributors to the book, good people all, who've done wonderful work. But even though their contributions are authored under their names, it's my name alone on the cover of the book. What if one of them crossed that dark, wavy line? And what about all the revisions that my editors have suggested?

Hence my blog title: everybody plagiarizes. I say that not in order to excuse plagiarism; plagiarism is bad. Rather, I say it as a way of arguing that we need to get a grip about plagiarism and not have a cosmic meltdown over the likes of a single unmarked quotation.

So if everybody plagiarizes, what happens when the plagiarism is detected? The almost-universal excuse from published scholars is "bad research notes." In Doris Kearns Goodwin's case, the excuse was "bad research assistants." At Harvard, for cryin out loud.

But in Chris Anderson's case, the response is to say "yes, I did." And then to explain how it happened.

Excuse me, but a hurricane of fresh air just blew across my desk.

Time management for the chronically overcommitted

Susan asks for an explanation of a Twitter entry forwarded to Facebook; here ya go.

I'm a longstanding user of the 43 Folders system. I can't immediately find the ur-post from that blog that explains the system (anybody else got it bookmarked?), but it's basically that you set up a hardcopy file folder for each day of the month (31 folders) and for each month of the year (12 more), and you file stuff in them so that you find what you need when you need it. Each day you check the appropriate folder(s). A great time hack. If this sounds new to you, browse the 43 folders blog; your time won't be wasted.

David Allen GTD junkies also espouse hardcopy planners, esp. of the DIY variety. I'm not there, probably never will be, as far as calendars go. Google Calendar is all I'll ever need.

But tracking a to-do list is an ongoing challenge and obsession for me, simply because I'm always profoundly overcommitted, hence always trying to find the best way to get as much as possible of it done. (I'm also still practicing the word "no," but it just sounds so wrong!)

A second problem with to-do lists is that I'm always trying to use them to discipline myself, to make myself do all the things that I think I should do every day--in order to earn my Wonder Woman badge for Girl Scouts, I suppose. It's hard for me to use the to-do list only for things that actually have to get done. The merit badge stuff just seems to creep in, especially when I'm using an electronic to-do list (Todoist, for example) that allows you to just add and add and add and add.

So what I've done is set up 43 index cards, 5x8, on the 43 folders principle. And I'm using Post-it notes to make lists on each of those cards. I don't want to write directly on the card, because deadlines change and to-dos move accordingly. (Besides, Post-it notes are purty.) Index cards, even the big 5x8s, fill up, felicitously discouraging me from scripting every dang thang I can possibly think of. I can lay the cards out any way I want, and somehow the physical handling and the IRL scanning makes my tasks - well, makes them more real. (The relays between material and virtual text is itself a matter of ongoing fascination for me. The most recent thing I've read, and one that wonderfully intersects with my interests in authorship history, is this highly recommended essay: Mandell, Laura. "What Is the Matter? Or, What Literary Theory Neither Hears nor Sees." New Literary History 38 (2007): 755-776.)

Now we'll see how long it works for me. Stay tuned for moment-to-moment bulletins.