This analogy holds for proposals of many kinds.

You want to say, I have a cooked chicken, leftover rice, and soy sauce in the fridge, but I need a pot to make some fried rice, which by the way will taste so good you'll want to come over and have some -- 100 of my friends always do.

You don't want to say, I'm hungry, and I know how to cook, so give me some money for a trip to the store and I'll figure out a meal -- trust me.

Publicizing Um on Wordsmith.org's author chat - read the transcript.

The writer's life today (or, why I want to write for video games):

Instead of accepting the industry’s turmoil as a given, then, some young writers and editors are just shrugging their shoulders and giving up on it before it gives up on them.

Like horses.

One of the books I love the most is Toolbox by a Mexican poet, Fabio Morábito, which was translated from Cajas de herramientas by Geoff Hargreaves. This is the first paragraph of chapter about "oil":

Oil is water that has lost its get up and go, its cheeky forward drive. Having exhausted all its routes, it's discovered treading over ground it trod before. It is water that has turned its back on the world. It is de trop. It has forfeited its old rights of way across the floor and now has to step to one side of favor of fluids younger and grander. It is luxury water, which after so much flowing has felt the weight of experience, maybe bitter experience. it's as if it had other water at its service; hence its sumptuousness, not far from prostration, for where there is sumptuousness, there's always somebody on his knees, tied with bonds.

Last week I appeared with Ammon Shea at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, reading and talking about books. (He talked about his, me mine. Maybe next time we can swap.) His is a word book: he spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. But it's not a word book like a lexicographer would do, it's a delightful book about the experience of reading a book that's a list of words (and he's working on another book about reading books that we don't think of as books: phone books, catalogs, etc.).

Anyway, I had a blast, and here are two photos:

The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:

Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn't replace writing, and I've never gone out until I've done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it's repetitive work but has its art, too. You have to jam the clipper mouth around the tree stem below the dirt so the stump can't find the light and send up sprouts, but not so low that you grab a rock and chip the blade. Always in the back of your mind you have to know the line you're walking and working, more to guard yourself than for cedar-cutting efficiency, because the bigger trees would rather beckon you into the thick stands, where they grow fourteen, twenty feet high, and deep in their midst, where no sun ever reaches, the dry branches will first blind then skewer you, and there you'll wither and twist out of sight of the sky. Jerky gifts for coyotes.

And with that I'm also a contributing writer at Design Observer, where I've been happily writing sporadically for a few years. (An archive is here.)

Over at Design Observer, my Dream Job Project was recently launched. In this first post, I invited people to post the concrete aspects of the work they do or the work they want to do. Later I'm going to boil down this input into a set of parameters that would serve as the outlines of modern, creative work. Some of the postings so far have been about values, like autonomy. While those are important, certainly, I'm more interested in articulating the concrete, practical aspects of this "autonomy." Other people have posted about content, along the lines of, "I want to work with dogs." This, too, is crucial, but it's not the whole story: I doubt the dog lover would want the job as the canine euthanizer at the local pound.

I rather fear that I've been too abstract in my requests, but then again, this is an experiment: whatever people leave in the comments is what I've got to work with. This isn't a utopian project, in which "dream jobs" are available for everyone, and in which we can ignore the particular historical moment we live in, which creates needs and provides rewards but no escape hatch (except for suicide, I guess) from the reality of toil itself. Neither is it dystopian, in which we're nailed to the reality of toil (like the figure in the movie Metropolis, chained to the giant rotating arms of the clock), so we might as well count our blessings and make the best of it.

Really, it's this: if humans are meant to find meaning in work, and if "dream jobs" are really just variants of existing kinds of work, and if we're driven by our aspirations, then what can we give people to understand how close they might actually be to work they want to do? Or how far?

Last week, The Morning News published an essay I was first assigned to write by Rolling Stone back in 2002, in which I found the first student I caught plagiarizing and interviewed her about how it impacted her life. The piece got killed (because I didn't know what I wanted to write) but I remained fond of the work and recently decided to resuscitate it. The essay is here.

It sparked some conversation around the interwebs when it was reposted at The Awl, Huffington Post , and D Magazine. You can read how and where it was tweeted around here.

It also provoked a letter to the editors at The Morning News, which was posted today here. The letter came from Elliot Hartwell, a graduate student at UC Davis. Here's my response to Elliot:

Dear Elliott,

Your note is puzzling. You start out agreeing with me, and by the end you're in full-blown ad hominem mode. I won't venture to diagnose what this suggests your experiences as a graduate student or as an instructor might be. I will say that nowhere in my piece do I say that I removed a statement of plagiarism policy from my syllabi. Nowhere do I claim to have stopped hunting plagiarists. And nowhere do I say that I stopped dealing with people I caught. You have felt free to read that into my essay. I wrote an essay that pursued nuance of morality and biography, yet it seems to have provoked you (and a few other readers, judging by the comments that were left on websites where this essay was linked) to accuse me of some sin against civilization itself. I invite you to quote for me from my essay where I said that moral standards do not matter. I'll make that offer even broader: I invite you to quote for me from anything I've ever written that glorifies or sanctions cheating in any form. But the essay is imperfect, because I didn't describe what I did when I discovered plagiarism in the semesters following. I responded by doing my primary job, which was to teach writing. Of course, I had to uphold institutional policy, but when policy conflicted with teaching, I let the pedagogical guide my hand. I should have assigned more writing to Haley, not less--as it stood, she only wrote six papers that semester (three drafts, three revised drafts), not the eight papers that her classmates did. I should have made her write me an apology. I should have made her write an apology to the website's author. I should have made her accountable, and I should have made her articulate her accountability in writing. I happen to think that school at any level should endeavor to make better people, not merely better students. In that, the punishment failed. I failed. As for the integrity of the academy you believe in, well, let's just say that scholars and researchers are part of the culture, not apart from it, despite their insistences to the contrary. I don't know you, but allow me the presumption of hoping that you learn this gently when the time comes.

Michael

Clearly, the conundrum that is student authorship in higher education hasn't gone away, and neither has the tendency to moralize simplistically about what instructors' proper responses should be.

So plagiarism is in the air; the NY Times caught the bug (with a reasonably nuanced nondemonization of the perpetrators) the other day, with an article that's, at this writing, the most emailed. Or maybe they stole the idea from me -- my essay for The Morning News, "Cheater, Cheater," burned up the tweetosphere (for a summary, go here) in June. The Times did an earlier story about the technology being employed to catch plagiarists. (Just kidding about them stealing the idea.)

The focus of both of those articles is on student writing -- but not student computer programming, where the plagiarism of code is also a rampant problem. That's a tougher situation to think about, I think, because if you're talking about literary (loosely construed) authorship, you have recourse to a couple thousand years of authorial traditions, with all its various threads and permutations. You also have recourse to reconsiderations of the postmodern sort, like mine, one result of which is to alter the moral valence of plagiarism as an activity, but also introduce new themes for pedagogy. Instructors of programming have no such recourse.

Another complicating difference is that writers actually do have to come up with their own language and ideas a great portion of the time, depending on appropriation, pastiche, riffing, paraphrasing, etc. as legitimate tools but one that, from a craft perspective, you don't want to use too often. And if you do use them, you may not want to admit to it. (Naturally, there are some writers who embrace the pastiche as a practice; see David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto as the most recent example.) My point is that the gap between what the classroom ideal is (you do your own work) and the actual practice (you come up with your own language) are very close.

I don't know much about the coding world, but what I do know suggests that the gap between the pedagogical ideal (you do your own work -- some of which means facing the blank screen and making the first steps) and the actual practice is much, much bigger than in the literary/compositional world. the coding world, And yet, in the actual work of writing code, copying/borrowing/appropriating is the only way to get the job done, so the gap between classroom practice (and academic values) and actual practice is much wider than it is in composition. I got an email recently from someone in response to The Morning News essay; the writer (who disagreed with my take) then admitted, "In my line of work, copying code from others is essential to getting my job done and an important skill, but also the worst kind of cheating if done in class to avoid completing an assignment."

Could someone get back to me and fill this in?