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Main Argument: Everything is either borrowed/copied/ stolen/plagiarized

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Main Argument: Everything is either borrowed/copied/ stolen/plagiarized

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Artists almost always take inspiration from others

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Artists almost always take inspiration from others

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Inspiration can be subconcious resulting in an unoriginal product

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Inspiration can be subconcious resulting in an unoriginal product

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Plagiarism doesn't exist because if it did everything would be plagiarism

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Plagiarism doesn't exist because if it did everything would be plagiarism

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"Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never
experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating
out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how
deeply he or she submerges that knowing."(Lethem 235)

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Lethem himself copies other artists/authors in his text

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Lethem himself copies other artists/authors in his text

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(Lethem 246-252)

In the section "KEY: I IS ANOTHER"(Lethem 246), Lethem blantantly states what he uses from other people in his own writing. One example of this is him using the title of Bob Dylan's album "Love and Theft" as a section title for the first section. Moreover, that same album title is "nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrels"(Lethem 233)

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Artists draw inspiration from memory, and even if it isn't memory, they are most likely getting inspiration from something that already exists and building upon it to make it or call it their own, even if it isn't really their true original. This ties back to the idea mentioned that nothing is truly original, and to find the true original one would have to go back in time to extreme levels. Thus, every creation is simply an advancement of something existing

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"Visual, sound, and text collage-which for many centuries were relatively
fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)-became explosively cen-
tral to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada,
rnusique concrete, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism."(Lethem 235)

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"consider the remarkable series of "plagiarisms" that
links Ovid's "Pyramus and Thisbe" with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and
Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra,
copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked
by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we
want more plagiarism"(Lethem 235)

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"Nothing, he suggests, is totally original: everything is bound up with every
thing else, if not on the surface, then underneath, like the "lines of television cable
and fresh water" hidden by the "grid." "(Lethem 231)

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"Artists and writers-and our advocates, our guilds and agents-too often
subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths." (Lethem 246)

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"Cryptomnesia" is essentially the idea of unintentionally taking or using the ideas of others through memory or inspiration. What Lethem is saying about this is that all artists have taken inspiration from another source to begin with, whether it was intentional or not (Lethem 232).

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Jazz and Blues music were greatly subject to this, as sounds created in songs were free to be reworked and duplicated by other artists. This is the "open-source" culture because music can easily be deconstructed or create different versions of existing music with the freedom of this culture. This culture has quickly spread to DJs in London and New York as well (Lethem 234).

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"Higher Cribbing" is essentially the idea of themes being continuously recast by artists, whether it's from borrowing or stealing deliberately. Lethem uses the connection between Nabokov's Lolita and Lichberg's original version of i,t questioning whether he either deliberately stole and recast the themes used in Lichberg's version 40 years ago or if he unintentionally created a similar story. (Lethem 232)

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He is the author of "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism" and he is fairly bold and strong viewed on the ideas of plagiarism, inspiration, borrowing, etc.