BloggingOn 11.2 - A New Take On Authenticity: Plagiarism

This blog was mentioned by Heather Armstrong in her interview with Rebecca Blood. In this post, Sarah Brown gives us her personal account of blog plagiarism. An excerpt:

This girl didn’t just try to pass off my writing as her own; she actually took the past four years of my life, rearranged them into a new sequence, changed some names (but, inexplicably, kept some, including MY OWN in a few instances), and then turned it into some fake fucked-up love story beginning with an inheritance from a cold grandmother straight out of a Jackie Collins novel, and, currently, having her finally finding undying 19 year old love with some fake guy she’s been fake in love with all her fake life.

Reminds me of seeing Pulp Fiction at a theatre in Cairo. My sister was there for a semester abroad, and we decided to go for a lark, curious to see what scenes might have been deemed inappropriate for Egyptian audiences ("I'm-gonna-get-medieval-on-his-ass," anyone?). Believe it or not, there wasn't a single scene missing or edited. However, someone had decided that Tarrantino's unsual narrative style needed a little tweaking - they had resequenced the entire film so that everything was now in chronological order. Kind of like watching Memento from end to beginning, but somehow more disorienting.