I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

Ecclesiastes, 9:11-12

Bruce Frederick Cummings
AKA W.N.P. Barbellion, 1918

I wasn’t going to do a 9-11 post of any kind, but the following becomes one in a most peculiar way. Out this morning on teh internets, I came upon the above in a fairly old post at pseudopodium, concerning W. N. P. Barbellion (Wikipedia), the pseudonymous proto-blogger of Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919). Pseudopodium tells me that it is the epigraph to the DiaryJournal, which Ray is dishing up in blog form at Barbellionblog, where the epigraph is also not attributed. Whether the quotation is attributed in published copies of the book, I have no idea. Considering that Barbellionblog is conscientious and serious in its treatment of the DiaryJournal, I’m assuming that there is no attribution in the book. Improbably, even this becomes relevant, eventually. It’s going to be one of those.

Please note also that I am casually referencing an author at this point with whom I am entirely unfamiliar, just as though Barbellion were a household name. It happens that the Barbellion story (to be had from links above and below) is rather poignant and pertinent to the subject in hand, but that’s just (heh) coincidence. The casualness of the reference — though not my drawing attention to it — will become relevant to what follows.

The pseudopodium link is an anchor within a larger archive. A couple of items down the pseudopodium page, we find:

Tuesday Weld is mentioned glowingly by Satanic High Priest Anton LaVey in terms of her mesmerizing blond presence

- which was the second inadvertent reference to the actress Tuesday Weld (Wikipedia) in the space of a few minutes. I had only just had my attention drawn to recent allegations of plagiarism in a Wit of the Staircase post about Tuesday Weld from September 2005, which is before I began to read her, and which I had not seen previously.

The evidence – clearly and obviously a copy-and-paste from Wikipedia – would certainly indicate plagiarism to readers versed in journalistic or academic conventions. It is carved in stone. In a journalistic or academic context, this would undoubtedly be a career-killing offense, but.
But.
A single post, decontextualised, from a blog which was neither journalism nor academic publication. Wit, as long as I was reading, never made any such pretense, and should not be evaluated as if it pretended to be those things. Wit was a process of discovery for Theresa, I believe, in the same way that the archives of many blogs document the sharing of discoveries, for the author as much as the reader. This is not, I hope, a controversial view of a certain kind of blog.
Wit was a scrapbook, a confection of sources, discoveries shared, fascinations returned to, objects of fantasy and dream, originality, and eventually, a voice. Theresa’s voice as I knew it is entirely absent from the Tuesday Weld post, that much is true. The form of the post, however is quite familiar: it is a lazy post. A relatively lengthy copy-and-paste quote is followed by relatively little comment, sometimes with no comment at all. You’re moving fast, what more needs to be said? You click “publish”. Forgot to put in the attribution? Perhaps the question did not even occur to Theresa. We don’t know.
The Wit post in question was made, let us not forget, during the first three months of the blog’s existence. Isn’t the average life expectancy of a blog less than three months? Most bloggers, then, do not even know from first hand experience that those that do last more than three months are totally still learning as they go. Bloggers, particularly those like Theresa who gave themselves a very broad canvas, are still learning what kind of thing it is that they are creating. Almost six years in, I’m still mulling it over, here. Give the woman a break.

I don’t expect there are many of us who can claim with any confidence that every source of every word in every post, stretching back years, is correctly and fully attributed — that is, if we even care, or if we actually agree that full and exhaustive attribution is even a relevant requirement for the kind of creation that Wit, and many other blogs are undertaking.

Whether Theresa was a responsible and conscientious blogger, I don’t know — but I doubt that many reputations in this raggedy-ass, supposedly free-wheelin’, experimental space we have going here would survive the sustained hostile criticism which has been the fate of Theresa’s blog, if we weren’t around to explain away the words we leave behind, and the gaps, errors, omissions and silences around the words.

As I mentioned earlier, the quotation at the top of this post was unattributed in the pseudopodium post where I read it this morning. Knowing, however, that it was a biblical quotation, I obtained the reference by searching a plain text copy of the King James Version that I happen to have on my hard drive. At this point I discovered I had a 9/11 post on my hands. I could have gone to a full online text (for example), or a hard copy, but in the event, I used a copy that I think I picked up in a whole bundle of texts in a huge zipfile, off the internets. Probably. The point being, my quotation is not authoritative, even if it happens to be identical to the published text. Anyway, I copied and pasted the two verses I wanted from that file. I did not copy-compare the texts to confirm that they are identical. I cannot attest to the accuracy of either text. I have not read Ecclesiastes, in the King James Version, all the way through, for a very long time, if ever. I did not copy and paste from the pseudopodium post, which was the original seed of all this.

Should there have been attribution on the quotation, my source? Possibly. Will Ray be bothered to go and put one in? Given that there is no aggrieved author in the picture, and given that afaik Ray doesn’t read this blog, I think it unlikely. On the other hand, adding a correction now, to that particular post, would problematize my example, but that’s a whole other layer of the onion, and my head is hurting already. An attribution would be helpful, even if there was none in the original, in the sense that a visitor who did not recognise the quotation would be unclear as to its authorship.

The text of the King James bible and the content of a Wikipedia page might not have much in common otherwise, but they are both species of “common knowledge”. Somehow we are back to arguing over the uses to which “common knowledge” may be put. Paradoxically, the philosophical positions around the question are in themselves not common knowledge at all, but that’s by the way.

Happily, there are no fundamentalist plagiarism harpies calling for either Ray or myself to be drummed out of the Worshipful Order of Bloggers, nor should there be. Nevertheless, I’ve described a number of editorial processes above in which all manner of sloppiness and lack of professionalism are exhibited, not to say paraded before a horrified audience, mostly by the author of this very sentence. Obviously what we’re about will fail evaluations which belong to a different world. Even when our efforts are word for word identical to the authoritative source. Lest you think I’m attempting to speak from an exalted position of goodness and purity, you, the concerned reader, are cordially invited furthermore to root around in my archives for incorrectly attributed quotations.

Tuesday Weld

It’s all there, knock yourselves out. I’m sure you’ll find more than one, if you can be bothered. What difference would it really make? Where credit is not given, and should be, and where correction is actually called for, a responsible, conscientious blogger might well insert a correction, were s/he still alive to do so.

But time and chance happeneth to us all, right?

So yeah, what about that Tuesday Weld and her mesmerizing blond presence, harbinger of Satanic charisma! Who would have thunk it?
And it is tuesday, of course, and the first time that 9/11 has fallen on a tuesday since 2001.

Agenbite of inwit, already.
Everyone says “hi”.
(…you want attribution with those?)