Wired: “The Church of Scientology has managed to yank references to anti-Scientology websites from the Google search engine.”

How to be creative: keep an untidy desk

Let’s face it, my study is a mess. Lots of computers surrounded by piles of paper — magazines, books, letters, drafts etc. My wife (a supremely tidy, organised administrator) despairs of me. When people come to stay (or even come to dinner) I have to ‘tidy’ my study, which basically means sweeping all the piles into containers and placing them out of sight. This of course is a disaster for me because the act of sweeping the piles into boxes scrambles what is in fact a sophisticated filing system.

But now comes a marvellous New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he of The Tipping Point) arguing that there are very good reasons why creative people are great pilers of paper. Excerpt:

‘Why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.’

So there! Why I feel six inches taller already.

Lovely essay by Richard Posner on plagiarism. Makes the point that most creative endeavour involves borrowing ideas from others — which is why nobody ever wrote a popular song who did not ‘borrow’ from what went before. This is why the copyright mania now sweeping the world is nuts. Here’s an excerpt:

“Plagiarism,” in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work[~]for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I’m using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony: “on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her” becomes “on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.” (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot “stole” the famous opening of Shakespeare’s barge passage, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burn’d on the water” becoming “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble.” Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s “quote” extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Hear, hear! And while we’re at it, here’s a nice satirical piece on the subject by Steve Mirsky.