Halcyon Imagines

Imagining blurring the lines between plagiarism and creativity...

 

...David Shields argued for such a blurring on Start the Week.  Shields believes that novels are irrelevant and that non-fiction has taken over. Living in an artificial and mediated world, he thinks we’ve become obsessed with reality.  But do the real stories we tell have to be our own and do they have to be true?

Shield asks where does plagiarism end and creativity begin?  Does it matter if some of our facts are other people’s fictions?  Storytellers have been reusing ideas and phrases for centuries; is it time to acknowledge that ‘borrowing nobly’ is the way forward?

 

Asking is the novel dead? is art theft? can you copyright reality?, a subsequent LSE event challenged Shields about his questioning of our basic assumptions about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing, and reading. This discussion about Shields' manifesto also explored wider complexities of art and literature in the 21st century and featured Geoff Dyer and Robert Hudson.

Imagining accepting the inevitability of death...

 

Acceptance of dying is perhaps one of the keys to the acceptance of living. 

Dylan wrote, in To Ramona, that "there's not use in trying to deal with the dying, though I cannot explain that in lights", although ironically, the earlier Dylan from whom he took his name told us to "rage, rage against the dying of the light".

Imagining drawing on three thousand years of wisdom...

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth", so said Goethe, as quoted in Jostein Gaarder's philosophy primer-cum-mystery novel Sophie's World.

Like AC Grayling cutting across the "-ologies", Halcyon is convinced that our framework for making sense of the world is best underpinned by a strong grounding in historical narrative. 

One example: without such interdisciplinary curiosity, how could we appreciate why Tolstoy had Pierre felt that he must try and kill Napoleon, even while Beethoven and many of the 19th century Romantic intelligentsia were waiting in the wings in adoration of the little corporal?