Radiohead and Samuel Beckett

In a paper I wrote during my MA, I argued that Samuel Beckett's writing career can be described as a process of deconstructing the theatre. Though I still have work to do to fully flesh out this claim (if I ever get around to it), Beckett's work suggests this to me because his work, especially toward the end of his career, becomes more and more minimalistic.

Through their repetitions, Beckett's early plays already subvert cherished theatrical conventions with regard to the plot model which requires rising action, climax, and falling action. Conflict is also a tricky concept in Beckett's plays. As his career progressed, however, he abandons more and more theatrical conventions. His plays get increasingly shorter and he begins to dissect his characters--rather literally.

In "Happy Days," Winnie is buried in a mound , without use of her legs. So body parts are disappearing in Beckett's plays. In "Not I," only a mouth is visible on an otherwise dark stage, and in "Breath" no character appears at all. There is only a stage covered in rubbish and the sound of breathing. At the end of his career, Beckett began writing radio plays in English, his characters finally completely disembodied and no longer physically present in the space of a theatre, existing only as sound waves.

Again, I'm not able to make the case fully that Beckett is trying to deconstruct the theatre in a linear and progressive way across his career. I'm not so sure the chronology of his plays allows this argument. But certainly his career trends this direction.

So this morning Radiohead's "The King of Limbs" hit stores, and I got to Best Buy thirty minutes after they opened to buy it (I still like CDs, or I could have bought it digitally on February 18th).

When I listened to it, I immediately thought of Samuel Beckett. It's perhaps a strange thing to compare a modernist playwright to a post-modern rock band. But I see Radiohead as doing to rock music what Beckett did to the theatre. As Radiohead moves forward in time, they are seemingly deconstructing rock music.

They began innocuously enough with their 1993 post-grunge "Pablo Honey" which some have taken to be a subversion of grunge music (using as evidence the eerie similarity between "My Iron Lung" and Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box.")

Thom York has expressed dissatisfaction with that first album and their albums since have gotten progressively more ethereal and less musically unified. Their last two albums, "In Rainbows" and now "The King of Limbs," are particularly deconstructive. One blogger even calls "The King of Limbs" Radiohead's "least accessible album to date."

In both these albums, the music has become more and more electronic, increasing the level of mediation between audience and artist. The songs are also almost completely without hooks, making it easy to get lost in the music, rather than to sing along with the songs. Finally, it often seems that the melody (where one is recognizable) and the rhythm section are in two different meters, creating a disjointed feeling, as if one can never quite catch up.

The wonderful thing about Radiohead's dissection of music is that it questions the genre and indeed music theory in general. Radiohead seems to be asking just how important our Western notions of aesthetic actually are? Can music that doesn't conform to this aesthetic succeed, especially in a genre as flippant as Rock?

What Radiohead is doing is extremely interesting, artistic, and intelligent. I hyperbolically predict that, if Radiohead continues to make albums, their music will eventually consist only of screeches, feedback, and disembodied sounds. And I'm looking forward to buying these.

Memoirs of Spruill, a Plagiarist

In my composition classes, my students just read their rhetoric's chapters on plagiarism and how to avoid it. Of course, because of my own ideological perspectives, I have wanted to subvert common-sense, naturalized views of plagiarism and copyright as moral/ethical issues. So, my students are also researching the history of copyright and blogging about their thoughts.

Teaching these chapters and thinking about the issues from the perspective of an academic interested in new literacies (where issues of what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement are considered problematic) has made me recall the one time in my life that I myself plagiarized. What follows is my own confession along with a self-analysis of why I plagiarized.

As a sophomore at Moore High School, I was assigned a term paper in my Biology class. The way the assignment worked was as follows: the teacher had a list of possible topics which students were to sign up for, so that there were never more than one person talking about the same topic (probably to combat plagiarism, since students couldn't copy off of other students). I was one of the last students to get a chance to sign up, so I got stuck with the topic of Prostatitis.

The night before the assignment was due, I realized that I hadn't done a bit of research or writing. So, I sat down with an old medical reference book that my mother had bought second hand when I was a baby and she wanted to stop calling the pediatrician for everything. I performed the classical plagiarist move of copying the book but changing words that I didn't know so that they didn't seem out of place.

I was (and still am) the kind of kid who was scared to death to do anything bad, because I was always convinced that I would get caught. So when I got the paper back with the comment, "you should write for medical journals," I just knew that the teacher knew and that his response was a subtle way of saying "I know where you got this." But he didn't, and I got an A, both on the paper and in the class.

Now, years later, I am a writing teacher. So it's valuable to look back at my own crime and analyze why I did it. After all, I was not a lazy student. I was a very good student, which is actually probably at least partially what allowed me to get away with it. So, why do good students plagiarize? Obviously, I do not claim that my experience is representative, but here is what led me to commit plagiarism:

1) The topic. I was a good student, who loved to read. But this topic was a total dud. By the time I was able to pick a topic, I could only pick a topic in which I was not at all interested and a topic that was actually kind of creepy (high school boys do not want to think about or talk about inflammation of the prostate). This problem led to problem two.

2) I waited too long. Only hours before I was to turn the paper in, I still had not started. Many teachers agree that it is often the good students who plagiarize. This is a product of last minute pressure by students who are afraid of failing an assignment that they waited until the last minute to begin. So there is pressure on good students to perform well. For this reason, a good student will not want to turn in aomw have baked crap. And, for me, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that the assignment was a dud. I am and was a meticulous student, but and I am and was also a bit ADD. So, the fact that the assignment was not the least bit interesting to me made it awfully easy for me to neglect.

So what, then, are the implications of my story? How do we see to it that our assignments discourage, rather than encourage plagiarism? To finish off here, I will address what we can do to write assignments that will help to our students avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

First, design assignment topics that tow the line between too open and too narrow. Allowing a students to simply write about anything may keep a student from straying beyond his comfort zone, and would make it easier for a student to hand in papers from the fraternity file. So an assignment should be specific enough and closed enough that the student must write his own material in order to fulfill the assignment.

But there must also be enough wiggle room in the assignment that the student does have at least some input into the topic. Freedom within boundaries is the goal. This allows the student to make the assignment her own in such a way that it will hold her interest, at least enough to get the assignment done.

Secondly, revision should be built into the assignment sequence. Though, by and large, we all except the importance of revision, a number of classes still do incorporate revision into the class. A teacher should be viewing, and commenting on multiple drafts of each paper. Doing so allows the teacher to watch the process of the student, which makes last minute plagiarism much more difficult. It also provides milestones for the student so that the student must work on the paper bit by bit, draft by draft. This negates the possibility that the student is waiting until the last second to begin a paper.

I don't intend to argue that these techniques will solve the plagiarism problem. Though these are cornerstones of the writing process in my classes, I still do face about one plagiarism case a semester. But these do a long way toward solving the problems that cause otherwise conscientious students to plagiarize.