pumpkinstrokemarrow

Lest we be too smug, we Brits. used to have the same thoughts as regards India. No way that they could look after their own affairs. Far too complicated. Far too backward. Need a few whites on deck to keep the ship of state on a steady course. And as for Ireland, a complete basket case. No hope at all. At least that was what we thought in 1922 or so - and look how well they have managed since then.

Back at the TLS, intrigued by a review of a book about copying. The book being by Marcus Boon, Associate Professor in the English Literature Department at York University, Toronto (http://www.marcusboon.com/), and the review being by Simon Jarvis, Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, Cambridge. In one of its politer comments, the review describes the book as being vanishingly trivial. It clearly got up this reviewer's nose big time.

Now I have no idea what the book is about, beyond it 1) running on about the large amount of copying that goes on and 2) claiming that copying is generally a good thing. Plagiarism is OK. And I have no idea if the book is any good but I would have thought that there is plenty of material out there.

Life is only possible because certain specialised chemicals can not only build copies of other chemicals needed to sustain growth and life but they can also pull off the trick of building copies of themselves.

Much of the interest of computers lies in their ability to copy and move around huge amounts of information without making any mistakes in the process. I don't need to bother to design the moon shuttle, I just pull the design off the NASA shelf and feed it into my factory.

While if I make a copy of the Picasso painting sold for £25 million or so the other day, a copy which cannot be distinguished from the original without the aid of a PET scan, I get banged up for fraud or worse. My picture, if I own up to copying it, might fetch £2,500 on a good day. What is all this about? I read once that the ancient Chinese were much more relaxed about copying. A good copy of a good vase was worth pretty much the same as the original. And, according to the DT, they remain pretty relaxed about copying, being rather good at eliciting the necessary information from western technology companies.

And then suppose I write an essay on Aristotle for a seminar at the University of the Fourth Age. No-one expects me to come up with anything original. All I am doing is making a patch work quilt of other peoples' work. Or building on the shoulders of giants, a practise made respectable by no lesser a mortal than Sir Isaac Newton. I suppose the idea is that I am supposed to do a bit of re-mixing. Not good enough just to quote greats chunks from said giants. And certainly not good enough not to acknowledge the quotes in a weighty bibliography at the end of the essay. But the point is, no progress without copying. Progress is a cumulative process. The world is far too complicated for it to be anything else.

I am sure that Mayor Boris could spin a decent article out of this lot - he seems to manage a fair output on top of his mayoral duties - or even a short book. Mr. Boon managed 285 pages, presumably including notes, maps, bibliography & etc & so forth. So that's the target.

PS: getting very nervous about the PC. All kinds of things have gone missing. And the only way to fire up Word seems to be to open a pre-existing document and click on new document... Not good that Windows can lose all kinds of stuff without producing a report for me. What kind of integrity control does it have? Or not have.