Stanley Fish, Wikipedia and My Rotten Soul
5 Jan
Back at work busily pretending to work. Fall for (as I often do) a Gmail Web Clip headline that takes me to Stanley Fish’s Think Again blog at The New York Times. In his post about the 10 Best American Movies of all time he praises Groundhog Day, smartly saying it’s a version of Pygmalion where “the the material the sculptor works on is himself.” Nice.
Without giving it much more thought I’m off again:
to pick up some Katamari Damacy wallpaper,
to find out if the puppets in the unofficial Dandy Warhols’ video for “We Used To Be Friends“ are as funny as I remembered,
to find out if Stanley Fish wrote Textual Power (he didn’t; Robert Scholes did),
then back to Wikipedia to read about Gilbert & Sullivan because I’m thinking of using Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy in my class,
which gets me thinking about Pygmalion because one of my books has a Pygmalion-esque element so maybe I should get some work done and see if there are is something I can learn from ancient Greece.
So: reading, reading, reading. Reading the Wikipedia entry about Pygmalion (mythology). Then I come across this line that makes my face hot. About how the movie Groundhog Day is a “Pygmalion story, but this time the material the sculptor works on is himself.” And I think to myself, “That’s a great line. I’ve heard that line before. Where have I heard that line before?”
I remember the Stanley Fish blog post and feel flushed with discovery. “Is it possible that a Renowned Intellectual Ass-Kicker steals quotes from Wikipedia?” What do I do with this information? Are there authorities (other than Fish, of course) who can be alerted?
Then more reading and I come to the end of the paragraph. There is a citation. Go back to the original Fish post and read it more carefully and quickly discover that the Wikipedia entry is, of course, a copy-and-paste job. You idiot. Stanley Fish doesn’t steal from Wikipedia. Wikipedia steals from Stanley Fish.
I know this, and yet in that moment it was
Tags: internet
It’s always more interesting to think of the distinguished as lazy or something less than distinguished. Then they might be on our level…
It’s tough, sometimes, to see the more successful up the ladder from you. I have a friend who was a pro soccer player. I learned from him first that brilliance is 99% hard work.
Had one just a couple weeks ago, in the middle of McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” It occurred to me that while everything in the novel feels very historically accurate, it could also be entirely made up and I’d never know the difference. It’s not like I’m going to fact-check it. This thought percolates for a while, and then I think, hey, maybe he just made up all these people and events and details, you know, like a fiction writer might do. Of course, later I learned that the entire novel was obsessively researched and that nearly every page includes a corroborating historical fact or specific geographical reference.
Lars is on to something. It reminds me of Farhad Manjoo’s book TRUE ENOUGH: Living in a Post-Fact Society (on order but I have read excerpts).
What I experienced was not professional jealousy, but a kind of internet-induced out-of-body experience where through linking I felt like some kind of super-authority.
After all, I’d been doing “research” right?
I see it all the time in student papers – but there, the causal arrows face the other direction.
I think the feeling of super-authority comes from being a customer. After all, readers are customers, whether we’re buying the NYT, a novel, or researching on wikipedia. It’s in our customer-nature to “shop wisely.” Sometimes that means finding errors and investigating connections that maybe shouldn’t be there. No customer likes to be had.