An interesting wrinkle,<br /> <em>or,</em> Again with the posse.
So Norah Vincent riffs on an old Jackson Browne lyric uncredited and Charles Pierce emails James Capozzolla pointing this out and Capozzolla decides to rib Vincent about it and posts Pierce’s email in its entirety with the headline or rather subhead “Norah Vincent: Jackson Browne Fan—And Plagiarist?” and now Vincent is tut-tutting over the outrageous slings and arrows that are let fly at established Fourth Estaters from the unwashed, the unpoliced, the unshackled. (Yes, I know blogtopia is self-policed by a fairly neat and effective smart-mob mechanism. But “self-washed, self-policed, self-shackled” just doesn’t have the same ring.)
—For the record, and not that anyone asked: I don’t think what Vincent did to Jackson Browne was plagiarism. Then, I live for the oddball allusion and the kick that the echo of a half-remembered snippet of something else can add to a piece. Nothing new under the sun and Fair Use and Devil take the hindmost or hang the consequences or whatever. Capozzolla was if a wee bit disingenuous still quite right to put that question mark after “Plagiarist?” But! Were someone to tag me for, oh, I dunno, stealing a parenthetical aside from Delany (it was just sitting there, honest, so plump and digressive), well, I’d cheerfully own up to it. And on we go to the next. —Not obsessively stew over it with conflicting rationales for a couple of days and then drag it back into the spotlight when online Wall Street Journal content is successfully held liable for libel in Australia. Dirty pool, that is, and we’re not even taking into account her refusal thus far to name those she accuses of the smearage.
So Capozzolla is right to take the incident apart in a fine and mighty dudgeon, and Vincent’s editor would do well to maybe take his phone calls on the matter.
(Psst. Mr. Capozzolla? Not to get all pedantic or nothin’, but it’s never “the hoi polloi.” Just “hoi polloi.” Verb. sap. and all. Not that anyone asked. But.)
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