[SIC]

by Davis Schneiderman

[SIC] is a completely appropriated work, readymade for a world populated and
reduplicated by copies. [SIC], taking its title from the Latin abbreviation for “as written,” includes public domain works, like “Cademon’s Hymn,” Sherlock Holmes, and the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, and features Wikipedia pages, intellectual property law, genetic codes, and other untoward appropriations. The text also pivots on Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” taking its publication history through a replicated series of Google auto-translations.

Andi Olsen’s photos of Schneiderman—a pathogen in Paris, France—in a Lycra suit, illustrate the text, which contains an introduction from Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker, and sampling-based tracks, already created for other projects, from Illegal Art label acts Yea Big, Oh Astro, Steinski, and Girl Talk.

The fine-art edition ($24,998.98) will be packaged with a biological pathogen, which the reader may choose to deploy over the text. In this way, [SIC] will make the reader sick—sick about copyright. The book is timed to the release of 25 free, fulltext
e-books—including The Red-Headed League and Young Goodman Brown, now bearing Schneiderman’s “signature.”

Genres: Contemporary, Novels

154 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

Davis Schneiderman works include the novel Drain (TriQuarterly/Northwestern); the DEAD/BOOKS trilogy (Jaded Ibis), including the blank novel, Blank: a novel , with audio from Dj Spooky, and the forthcoming [SIC] (Fall 2013), with intro by Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker, images from Andi Olsen and audio from Illegal Arts acts Oh Astro, Steinski, Yea Big, and Girl Talk.

His Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader (Remix Edition), contains remixes from Matt Bell, Roxane Gay, Alissa Nutting, and others. He is editor of The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing (vols. 1 and 2).

Schneiderman’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Fiction International, Harpers.org, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, and Exquisite Corpse; he blogs for The Huffington Post and is a Contributing Editor for The Nervous Breakdown .

He is the Associate Dean of the Faculty and Director of the Center for Chicago Programs at Lake Forest College. He also Directs Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books.

Reviews

[Arthur Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, light read that enacts as opposed to arguing the issues of authorship, plagiarism, and textual authenticity it seeks to address. Granted, the bits that aren't photos of Schneiderman making a public nuisance of himself are mostly just extracts from the works of others with his name slapped on them, but the point comes across just the same: language is a contagious little bugger, a "virus" as William S. Burroughs used to say, and all our efforts to contain it are probably even less effective than vaccinations in the face of more resistant strains. In our attempts to quell the text through ownership and copyright law, we succeed only in spurring it on to further mutations still.

I guess the only way to make a story like Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" even more problematic in terms of the questions it raises is to translate it into fifteen different languages one after another, which is cool in that it produces some (predictably) unexpected text, but then it was also cool back in the day when an acquaintance of mine ran the lyrics to his song "The Devil's Red Glare" through Babel Fish a few times, coming back with "The Red Staring of the Devil" as an alternate title instead. Language will do some fun, interesting things when we let it, or even when we simply pay attention to what it's already doing right under our noses, and this should give us pause to consider just how justified we are in trying to control it so tightly in the first place.

An important lesson to those who'd rather take the text captive than let it play in its natural state, but also sort of preaching to the choir for anyone who'd rather see it running free like the wild, promiscuous lover that it is.

[Bradley Milton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the book in one sitting. Seems we are on the exact wavelength here. Got with the program. Great to know this literature is happening. Surprize Is Coming. Even some handy phrasings from good ol' Huck Milton , so I think this is definitely what's happening now.

Finally, the book that proves new insight into the post-novel ideas of David Shields, Schneiderman's [SIC] is a feast for those hungry for reality and wanting more. Play around with it just a bit. Dipping into many ages and styles and reversible, too, with a white Invisible Man making a nice happy Waldo-ghost juncture inside public referendum (here photographically documented), the book will be taught in college-level poetry, short-story, and archeology courses, possibly combined into one. Here's how. There is also some wiggle room here for fans of history, drama, and junior high social studies. We are all making do without sugar, with a big dose of fine cryptography, with rooftop victory gardens. Perhaps Linux/WWW will eventually mean something. Stay Tuned.

[Christopher Nosnibor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve spent many years studying the work of William S. Burroughs, specifically his cut-up works. I was fascinated by the way these texts covered a plethora of theoretical angles and contained so much depth, not to mention the way the narrative voice felt so uniquely Burroughs, despite being a conglomeration of appropriated voices. Specifically, I was taken with the way the cut-ups challenged notions of authorship and the ownership of words.

Continuing the trajectory of the discourse initiated by Burroughs, I immersed myself in the work of self-proclaimed plagiarist Stewart Home, before arriving by a circuitous route at the work of Kenji Siratori. Subsequently, I decided I should stop simply dabbling in cut-ups, and commit: enter ‘THE PLAGIARIST’, the anti-novel I didn’t write in three months in 2008. Spam emails collided with ‘Hamlet’ in a virtual blender to create a text that said ‘fuck you’ to copyright and authorship. And then Stewart Home published ‘Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie’, even though he didn’t write it. But then, I couldn’t exactly lay any claim either.

And now we have Davis Schneiderman’s latest ‘novel’, ‘[SIC]’. It’s a crash-course in literary history, a compilation of all the books you should read but probably haven’t, from Anglo-Saxon classics ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ and ‘Beowulf’ (not in translation) via ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and continues through ‘Hamlet’ (a literary obsession for any writer preoccupied with literary parentage), Pope’s ‘The Rape of the the Lock’,TS Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ all the way to excerpts from ‘An Act for the general revision of the Copyright Law, title 17 of the United States Code, and for other purposes’, ‘Linux 2.0 Penguins’ and ‘Microsoft Beta Test and Commentary’.

In all cases, the only change to the text is the author’s name, and the pieces of text are accompanied by some nice, if strange, photographic visuals (courtesy of Andi Olden). Many of the texts are out of print, others uncredited or otherwise the extracts could reasonably be considered ‘fair use’. And so Schneiderman plays the game of appropriation and continues the debate concerning issues of ownership and authorship.

Time was that plagiarism was considered evil, low-down and dirty, and in certain circles it still is, but Schneiderman is a savvy author who can be seen applying the literary theories of his day-job to his creative output, and this lends his work more credibility, while at the same time rendering it all the more audacious. Talking about her novels ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Great Expectations’, Kathy Acker asked ‘if I repeated the same text, would it be the same text?’ Davis Schneiderman would evidently contend not.

Like Schneiderman’s previous literary works, ‘[SIC]’ could reasonably described as a ‘concept’ novel. Yet despite the fact he hasn’t technically written a word of it, as you sit and endeavour to untangle the theoretical and ethical complexities of such a work, you realise Schneiderman has produced an entertaining and curiously readable text. And why shouldn’t it be so? As Burroughs asked ‘what does any writer do but choose, edit and rearrange words at his disposal?’ It’s a fair question. It just so happens that with ‘[SIC]’, Schneiderman has applied a very light touch on the editing front.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book for everyone because it's by everyone, and Davis Schneiderman has had almost nothing to do with it. What does that mean? Every word is taken from someplace else, from hymns, speeches, famous books (read and unread), plays, transcripts, and recast in the context of copyright. Yes, the literary equivalent of a knife fight in a telephone booth, copyright law cuts and divides and slices texts, users, audiences, lawyers, publishers into book ribbons, and then switchblades back to text again.

Schneiderman as channeller is amusing as heck in a relentless kind of way, and this book can be read, and enjoyed, along with its preface by Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker, as an artistic piece, a conceptual joke, or one can skip the words and read the graphic novel that runs like a silent movie throughout, and here is meant the photographs by Andi Olsen.

So Schneiderman came up with the idea. He needs to be given that. He's already taken it, anyway. The royalties must go to him, so support this fellow as he contemplates coming out with the third book in this trilogy, INK (Blank is the first, and also worth getting). Or his life as a professor. Or that blonde on the left or whether or not a third cup of joe is what he needs before eating breakfast in this cold, cruel spell of polar vortex weather. The prose is a vortex, Schneiderman is a Vorticist, and that's much more spiky than a collagist; all the prose in the world is funnelled through a sifter.

None of this review is my own. Think of the movie "Tune In, Tomorrow!" and how Falk's character asks Reeves' character something like, "And whose words do you use?"

Back to [SIC]: it really is worth reading. More than that, it's worth buying. In sets. For unsuspecting aunts and uncles, and for those miserable reviewers lingering like unwanted cheese rinds in staid, small-minded newspapers. And for good friends. Yes, this can end on a positive note, on proof that new ideas are out there (read the last page to see what that means).

[Leo Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

So these are the notes that I made while I was reading this book- I was going to craft it into a review, but then realised the fractured nature of it might actually be fun to piece together yourself a la [SIC]- please tell me if I was wrong!

1. I didn’t expect to have so much to say about this experiment, but I sure do ☺
2. funny references in initial 99 notes
3. this guy is off his nut
4. This is one of the classiest toilet books available!
5. Favourite reference was Zero Wing from Sega Mega Drive
6. Plagiarises the definition of plagiarism!
7. Alasdair Gray did a funny thing at the end of Lanark where all of his references were exposed, and he categorised them into three groups of plagiarism (find out what these were - WIki). So perhaps [SIC] is the natural extension of this. Perhaps this has a message about not constantly beating yourself up about re-invention, because it could not be said that [SIC] is not re-invention, but perhaps re-invention for re-invention’s sake is anomalous.
8. I also dislike that Martin Amis quote about Nabokov (WTF does it mean?!)
9. Says you don’t necessarily need to read it- true, a lot in Latin, some parts I didn’t read because they were appropriated from sources I had yet to read and didn’t want to spoil. In any case it didn’t take long.
10. images are funny- starts to become apparent that Schneiderman is the ghost re-visiting important literary locations through time and space, in images as in writing. At least that’s what it first looked like, but then he just seemed to start scaring children.
11. How does a man make a mark on literary history? When does a reference cross over into plagiarism? What is a fun nod to a literary giant and what is a tiresome rehash? What has literary merit and what doesn’t?
12. The fact that I was not asking myself these questions, but that I am now, is testament enough to the value of this bizarre experiment. And sometimes the writers in his appropriations reference other writers… then my head started to hurt.
13. And asking someone to buy this book is part of the fun- it’s part of how its message extents beyond the pages to its transaction and takes dada-ism and postmodernism to a new level. So to honour what I think this book represents, and in drawing attention to the reader, I ask you: should you buy it?
14. Well, when Schneiderman eventually does put hypothetical pen to non-existent paper, I’ll read it. As for this experiment in copy-paste throughout time, here’s my own plagiarism for you: “You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention”
15.
16. obviously clever
17. interesting to see the multitude of sources of great literature that you can now claim as your own, that statement I at least understood.
Hm, on second thought I don’t want these notes to speak entirely for themselves. I had a lot of fun browsing these clippings, and they were not without purpose. Schneiderman is not only one to watch, he is one of the literary greats of our time! For where would we be today without The Canterbury Tales? The Confidence Man? Hamlet, the greatest play ever written? He’s also the abhorrent author of Mein Kampf, but then he actually wrote the number π, then mathematicians started using it, he gave us Ulysses, the Jabberwocky, and how can you say someone has plagiarised when they themselves presented you with the definition of the word plagiarism as you understand it today? Anyone would be hard put not to be overwhelmed by the literary offerings that Davis Schneiderman has given us throughout time. As D. Schneiderman once said, ‘I take my hat off to you”!

[Steev Hise · Rating 5 out of 5]

My high rating for this book is for its high concept, and I'm biased since it's a concept (appropriation, plagiarism, recycled culture, there are many terms one could use) that I've been involved with, both in my own artistic practice and as a subject of study and documentation.
[full disclosure: Another source of bias is that a review copy of this book was sent to me by the publisher]

With this slim volume, Schneiderman pushes at an envelope of that concept of artistic appropriation. In it, he reprints excerpts from across the history of literature and philosophy, making the book feel a bit like a freshman Western Civ course or somesuch. However, his twist, his "value add" as they say, is that for each pre-existing work, he changes the byline to his own. It's an open act of "piracy" or, if you're more generous, "creative borrowing," but also an exercise in artistic curation.

The author of the forward mentions that Schneiderman told him that it's not necessary to actually read the book, because of its conceptual nature, and this is true. There's literally nothing new. It's enough to be paging through it and pondering why he may have chosen each selection, enjoying the cognitive buzz of seeing a different author name slapped onto each masterpiece. It's an avant-garde work in the truest sense, because this book is about showing other artists where the extremes are, not actually providing a cultural product for "civilians" to consume. That will come later, when someone else synthesizes Schneiderman's one-liner, perhaps with some related ideas from David Shields' "Reality Hunger" and some hard-won storytelling skills, to write a novel or memoir that is a tapestry of source material but that still somehow entertains and inspires, in a deeper, more personal and more complicated way than this art world gesture. Until then, we have this stepping stone to admire.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davis Schneiderman’s latest conceptual art book, [SIC], a fully “playgiarized” text (that is, the text is from other sources, rearranged, illustrated, played with, cut and pasted, mutated and illuminated by the artist) is a joy. It is challenging, trippy, humorous, clever and, ultimately, just plain beautiful. Though Schneiderman didn’t invent this form here he makes it his own through wit and acumen. His ghostly figures, traversing the mundane world, seem disembodied spirits responding to the changing manuscript (Borges, Eliot, Woody Guthrie, found writings) surrounding them. Pick it up. [SIC] is a highbrow hoot.

[Trevor Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://bindblottyandcajole.wordpress...

[Lori]

An interesting concept - its not so much a book to be read, but more-so a look at the ways in which literature is changing, books are changing, copyright and plagiarism is changing...

Who owns what anymore? If I tweak something, does it then become unique? Can I stick my name to it and call it mine?

I will not rate this book because I am promoting it. Those who are interested in reviewing the book here on goodreads should message me.

[Kim Heimbuch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will post review once posted at place of origin.