Reality Hunger (64 page)
Authors: David Shields
Part of what I enjoy in documentary is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because one can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous. Let us see who controls the danger.
This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.
A major focus of
Reality Hunger
is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. Or writing a book about destroying capitalism but being told it can’t be published because it might harm the publishing industry.
However, Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations; the list follows (except, of course, for any sources I couldn’t find or forgot along the way).
Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do—all of us—though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.
Stop; don’t read any farther.
Numbers refer to sections
:
| 2 | Sentence about Unmade Beds: Soyon Im, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Seattle Weekly |
| 4 | Thoreau |
| 5 | Roland Barthes, Barthes by Barthes (who else would be the author?); “minus the novel”: Michael Dirda, “Whispers in the Darkness,” Washington Post |
| 6 | Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project |
| 7 | Lorraine Adams, “Almost Famous: The Rise of the ‘Nobody’ Memoir,” Washington Monthly |
| 8 | Mark Willis, “Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Reader,” http://fairuselab.net/?page_id=635 |
| 11 | Adams |
| 13 | John D’Agata, The Next American Essay |
| 16 | Second sentence: paraphrase of information conveyed in the foreword to The New Oxford Annotated Bible |
| 18 | D’Agata |
| 19 | D’Agata, in conversation 21–25 Adams |
| 26 | William Gass, “The Art of Self,” Harper’s |
| 27 | Adams; parenthetical statement: first line, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; second line: Darwin |
| 28 | first half of passage: D’Agata, The Next American Essay |
| 29 | Gass |
| 32 | J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello |
| 33 | Adams |
| 34 | Jonathan Raban, in conversation |
| 35 | Raban assures me that this Greene disclaimer exists, but I can’t find it. |
| 36 | Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story |
| 37 | Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book,” New York Times |
| 38 | D’Agata |
| 39 | Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel , the book that in many ways got me thinking about all of this stuff |
| 40 | D’Agata |
| 41 | Alice Marshall, “The Space Between,” unpublished manuscript; cf. last line of my book Black Planet: “All that space is the space between us.” |
| 42 | Kelly |
| 43 | Robbe-Grillet |
| 44 | Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy |
| 45 | Adams |
| 48 | Ozick, interviewed by Tom Teicholz, Paris Review |
| 49 | Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary |
| 50 | Robbe-Grillet |
| 51 | D’Agata 52–53 Gornick |
| 55 | Jim Paul, “The Found Life,” Bread Loaf lecture |
| 57 | Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage |
| 58 | W. G. Sebald, interviewed by Siegrid Löffler, Profil |
| 59 | Peter Bailey, “Notes on the Novel-as-Autobiography,” in Novel vs. Fiction , eds. Jackson I. Cope and Geoffrey Green |
| 63–64 | Robert Winder, “Editorial,” Granta ’s “Ambition” issue |
| 65 | Ben Marcus, “The Genre Artist,” Believer |
| 66 | Rachel Donadio, “Truth Is Stronger Than Fiction,” New York Times |
| 67 | Margo Jefferson, “It’s All in the Family, But Is That Enough?” New York Times |
| 69 | Saul Steinberg, quoted by Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country |
| 71 | Melville, Billy Budd |
| 72 | D’Agata |
| 73 | I’m pretty sure these lines, or something close to these lines, were spoken by Terry Gilliam in an interview, but I can’t for the life of me find the source. |
| 74 | William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired 75–76 Kelly |
| 77 | Robert Greenwald, “Brave New Medium,” Nation |
| 79 | D’Agata |
| 80 | Lauren Slater, Lying |
| 81 | Clifford Irving, interviewed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes |
| 82 | Picasso |
| 84 | Slater, quoted in David D. Kirkpatrick, “Questionable Letter for a Liar’s Memoir,” New York Times |
| 85 | James Frey |
| 86 | Dorothy Gallagher, “Recognizing the Book That Needs to Be Written,” New York Times |
| 88 | First two sentences: Mary Gaitskill, quoted in Joy Press, “The Cult of JT LeRoy,” Village Voice; the rest is Stephen Beachy, “Who Is the Real JT Leroy?” New York |
| 89 | Elmyr de Hory, quoted in Orson Welles, F for Fake 91 Slater, “One Nation Under the Weather,” Salon |
| 96 | Nic Kelman, quoted in Sara Ivry, “Pick Those Fawning Blurbs Carefully,” New York Times |
| 101 | First three sentences are from Brian Camp’s letter to the New York Times , “Is It Plagiarism, or Teenage Prose?”; the rest of the passage, except for the last line, is from Malcolm Gladwell, “Annals of Culture,” New Yorker . |
| 102 | Jonathan Lethem, interviewed by Harvey Blume, Boston Globe |
| 103 | Patricia Hampl, interviewed by Laura Wexler, AWP Chronicle |
| 104 | Susan Cheever, interviewed by Roberta Brown, AWP Chronicle |
| 106 | Gornick, “A Memoirist Defends Her Words,” Salon |
| 108 | D’Agata, The Lost Origins of the Essay |
| 109 | Hampl |
| 110 | Gornick, The Situation and the Story 113, 115–116 Marshall |
| 119 | Except for parenthetical statement, Motoko Rich, “James Frey Collaborating on a Novel for Young Adults, First in a Series,” New York Times |
| 121 | Cicero |
| 122 | D’Agata, The Next American Essay |
| 124 | John Mellencamp (!?) |
| 125 | The Commitments (the movie version); I haven’t read the novel. |
| 126 | Hemingway, interviewed by George Plimpton, Paris Review |
| 128 | First sentence: Lynn Nottage, quoted in Liesl Schillinger, “The Accidental Design of Rolin Jones’s Career,” New York Times |
| 129 | Jenni, quoted by Steven Shaviro, Stranded in the Jungle —29: http://www.shaviro.com/Stranded/29.html |
| 130 | Otto Preminger, (apocryphal?) advice to Lee Remick |
| 131 | Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner |
| 132 | Ross McElwee, interviewed by Cynthia Lucia, Cineaste |
| 133 | Dave Eggers, interviewed by Tasha Robinson, Onion; Eggers reminds me that he said this ten years ago in a conversation about semi-autobiographical fiction, and that he no longer subscribes to the sentiment expressed here. |
| 134 | “funny”: title of Rick Reynolds CD; “pretty”: title of Steve Martin album |
| 136 | Frank O’Hara, quoted in Jim Elledge, Frank O’Hara |
| 137 | Janette Turner Hospital, The Last Magician |
| 138 | Robert Lowell, “Epilogue” |
| 139 | Robert Towers, review of my novel Dead Languages in New York Review of Books |
| 141 | D’Agata |
| 142 | Frederick Barthelme, The Brothers |
| 143 | Dogme 95 manifesto |
| 144 | McElwee |
| 146 | Last line: Nietzsche |
| 149 | Reynolds, Only the Truth Is Funny |
| 151 | Martin, quoted in Bruce Weber, “An Arrow Out of the Head and into a Shy Heroine’s Heart,” New York Times |
| 152 | Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination |
| 153 | Adam Gopnik, “Optimist,” New Yorker |
| 154 | First two sentences: Jonathan Goldstein, performing on This American Life; I could listen to that self-generating/self-demolishing voice of his forever. |
| 157 | Wittgenstein |
| 158 | Walk the Line |
| 161–162 | Patrick Duff, “From the Brink of Oblivion,” unpublished manuscript |
| 163 | Mark Doty, “Return to Sender,” Writer’s Chronicle |
| 164 | Duff |
| 167 | David Carr, The Night of the Gun |
| 168 | Duff |
| 169 | Edward S. Casey, Remembering |
| 170 | Legal brief filed by Libby’s lawyers |
| 171 | Naipaul? Nabokov? The human condition? |
| 172 | Marshall |
| 173 | Duff |
| 174 | Elizabeth Bowen, “Mental Annuity,” Vogue |
| 175–177 | Duff |
| 178 | Tony Kushner, quoted in Adam Liptak, “Truth, Fiction, and the Rosenbergs,” New York Times |
| 179 | Osip Mandelstam |
| 180–181 , 183 | Bonnie Rough, “Writing Lost Stories,” Iron Horse Literary Review |
| 185 | Emily Dickinson |
| 186 | Irving Babitt, quoted by D’Agata in conversation as via negativa |
| 188 | Dyer, “A Conversation with Geoff Dyer,” self-interview, Random House website: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375422140&view=auqa |
| 190 | Raban, Passage to Juneau |
| 191 | Raban, interviewed by Dave Weich, Powells.com |
| 192 | Raban, For Love & Money |
| 193 | Gallagher |
| 194 | Jefferson, “From Romantic-Comedy Sidelines to Glaring Spotlight,” New York Times |
| 195 | Sebald, quoted in The Emergence of Memory , ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz |
| 196 | T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets |
| 197 | Joseph Lowman, quoted in Jane Ruffin, “Be More Shocked When You Don’t Lie,” Raleigh News & Observer |
| 198 | McElwee |
| 199 | Werner Herzog, interviewed on Fresh Air; I am equal parts Terry Gross’s investment in explanation and Herzog’s striving for mystery. |
| 200 | Picasso; Virginia Woolf |
| 201 | Email from Heather McHugh |
| 202 | McElwee |
| 203 | Geoffrey O’Brien, introduction to Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights; as is so often the case with me, I like the book, but I like the introduction as much or more: concision. |
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