The Friday Fillip: Stealright

Yes, you heardright: stealright.

I haven’t joined the Anarchists Who Nick; I think the kleptocracy we already have is quite powerful enough, thank you; and though I’m old enough to remember Abbie Hoffman and “Please Steal This Book,” the fact that he sold more than a quarter of a million copies of the damn thing kind of took the edge off that razor for me a long time ago.

What I’m on about isn’t even your run of the mill P2P stuff but rather A2A, perhaps: artist to artist. Or, better, artist from artist. Because that’s what artists do, it seems. They steal from each other, so we’re told.

By whom, though? Here’s the skeleton of the basic dictum: “[Good, lesser, small, bad] [artists, poets, painters, musicians] [copy, plagiarize, imitate, borrow], [great, mature] [artists, poets, painters, musicians] [steal, plagiarize].” And, wow, is there ever confusion as to who was the one true and only original author of it (making everyone who followed . . . great?).

The candidates for originator are legion, but typically include Picasso, Stravinsky, Faulkner — and Steve Jobs, for heaven’s sake. Turns out it was T.S. Eliot, and he apparently constructed it as a turn on someone else’s work. I learn this thanks to the fascinating diligence of Quote Investigator, who looked into the matter a year ago and came up, among other things, with this:

In 1920 the major poet T. S. Eliot published “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism”, and he presented his own version of the maxim. Eliot interchanged the terminology used by Davenport by suggesting that: “to imitate” was shoddy, and “to steal” was praiseworthy. This change moved the expression closer to the modern incarnation employed by Steve Jobs:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Sometimes it’s better on a Friday to hear theft happening, though, than it is to parse a document word by word to hunt it out, as we might do in the law biz, so in that spirit I offer you a seven-minute video in which CBC’s talented and engaging Tom Allen uses his training as a classical musician to follow a riff, shall we say, through the ages, as successive composers . . . lift it for their own use — all with something of a surprising conclusion, proving that taking is fine provided you stealright. (Sorry about the 12 second advert.)