Reading my own posts on Updike without knowing they’re mine
I recently was looking up some information about John Updike and clicked on a link to another website. There I found an essay on Updike and read it thinking, hey, this is pretty good. Then I thought, wow, the person who wrote this agrees so much with me!
As I read on, the feeling of mind-meld became more and more astounding. I felt a yearning to meet this person with whom I had so much in common. We’d get along so well!
And then I thought, hey, wait a minute. I hadn’t recently reread the tributes to Updike I wrote at the time of his death fifteen years ago. So I looked them up and was surprised to find that they were identical to what I’d just read. In other words, someone at that site had simply posted my own essays without attribution (this one as well as this).
At first I was somewhat miffed. How dare they? And then it struck me as very amusing. How had I not immediately recognized my own work? It’s like someone looking in a mirror and not realizing that’s his or her own reflection and starting to greet the stranger.
The explanation is that after writing close to 21,000 posts over the years, I can be forgiven for forgetting the exact content of many. At least those Updike ones seemed a bit familiar. Sometimes I see old posts of mine and have zero recollection of ever writing them, but I think I do remember the vast majority.
Yes, amusing, but aggravating that they didn’t give you credit! I’m guessing also illegal, assuming that the posts were copyrighted.
Still, a sincere form of flattery.
A relative of mine who was a professor was notified by Amazon that they discovered that some of his writings were translated into another language and sold on Amazon. IIRC, he received a nominal bit of money in compensation.
Geez…what a data base that must be—with comments, pics & videos added in. Ditto on the Geez!
Amazing job…and not missing a beat since at least 2009. I can look back at old posts on a 2004 blog (moved from Blogger to WP back then) that gets no updates since 2023, and my Style (?) has changed quite a bit since the early posts – like the Swåmp Herms “Penis Shrinker/Reducer…” (2004) and “Gone ‘HUT’ shopping…” (2009 – a TALL tale about Manatee poaching ‘n the pending arrival of a new “new 16’ harpoon”).
Just love this! You are more erudite than you give yourself credit for!
So, absent more findings like this on your part, we’ll just have to keep reminding you!
Wow! That’s quite a few. Do you find that you’ve gone through anything like distinct stylistic periods (“early,” “middle,” “Meiji-era” Neo…)? Obviously we don’t want to say you’re in your “late” period of work yet, as that will probably only be known after the fact.
This would happen to me when I had a blog with a few colleagues. We had a decent number of readers and the site needed constant updates to ensure readers kept coming back so I probably averaged 8 posts on a slow day, 15 or more on busier days. We had a saying, “the beast must be fed.”
It wasn’t unusual that I’d be writing a post and thinking that it was going too well and somewhat amazed at how quickly the words were coming to me. I’d pause and search the site. Sure enough, I would find I had written something similar or nearly identical on the same topic in the past.
Something similar must have happened often to figures like Will Rogers and Samuel Clemens. With the number of public speeches they would give and the writing they did I imagine they sometimes lost track of what they had said to which audience.
I am somewhat relieved that you found yourself agreeing with the “anonymous” author, and weren’t noting major points of interpretation that you challenged.
My mother found Updike’s novels exasperating. She said his female characters were just devices which were placed there to interact with his male characters. She thought he viewed women that way in his mundane life.
Art Deco:
I don’t like any of Updike’s novels. I love his short stories. They are surprisingly different.
I don’t write, but do build things. Same might be what happens to me. Remember most of what I build, or places but sometimes not sure what I did there. When one has a lifetime of work, guess forgetting some happens.
My husband and I moved a couple of years ago and we did a major clean out of all of our worldly possessions. I had saved quite a few papers from my graduate school days and found myself reading them in utter amazement. I couldn’t believe that I had written them. At first I was impressed because they held up pretty well. But then I was depressed because I don’t think I could write like that again. A time and a place…
I do, on occasion, run into something, and say to myself that it sounds like me. And, ultimately it always is. I have a voice, and know it well. For example, I overuse commas and subordinate clauses. Sometimes very long sentences, and paragraphs. Oxford commas. Predicate nominatives. Etc. Often very fact dense. Distinctive, at least to me.
So far, whenever I have encountered my voice, I have been identified as the author. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Neo is a much better righter than I, so I am not surprised that she has encountered stuff that she recognized as her own, that wasn’t obviously attributed to her, and I have not.
When I was an IT geek sometimes I would look at a program that needed to be “maintained” and would wonder what moron wrote that horrible code.
A lot of the time that moron turned out to be … me.
Tuvea:
LOL.
I don’t like any of Updike’s novels. I love his short stories. They are surprisingly different.
–neo
That could explain my experience. “Towards the End of Time” is a terrible novel I once got for Christmas. It was not because Updike couldn’t maintain proper grammar nor pull off a decent metaphor. I was pleased to find David Foster Wallace calling out Updike:
_______________________________________
It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.
–David Foster Wallace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toward_the_End_of_Time
_______________________________________
But those jewel-like stories Updike wrote for “The New Yorker” were another breed entirely.
Maybe the blog’s slow downs are “scraping” bots…?
Great minds think alike
I have had the experience of coming across comments in an old discussion and thinking, “Wow! This person gets it!” or “That’s exactly what I’d say!” only to discover that I did say it. Of course, I’m only likely to look up topics that I care about and know something about. A lot of my comments about other things are probably clunkers, but I don’t go looking for them.
I don’t think much of Updike’s novels or his poetry. I suppose much of his poetic oeuvre would have to be better than “The Beautiful Bowel Movement” or the one about pulling the tampon out with his teeth, but those two discouraged me from exploring further. Updike’s stories are said to be good. They may be less about his bodily functions and extramarital relationships. We read the one about shooting the pigeons in the barn in school. Maybe I was too young to appreciate it.
Updike did keep the New Yorker from going overboard on the woke stuff. They’ve been liberal or progressive or left for some time, but old white guy Updike represented a demographic that no longer contributes to the magazine. David Foster Wallace’s critique of Updike is worth reading. I believe he called Updike (quoting a younger female acquaintance) “a penis with a thesaurus.” The review was an early sign that this century, at least in our corner of the world, and at least among men, may not be as sex-obsessed as the last:
https://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/
Abraxas:
You should try his short stories. They are rarely about sex.
I’ve read old posts I’ve made on forums and I’ll be agreeing 100% before I realize I wrote it. I guess it at least means I’m consistent.
I have moved around professionally and now make a living by writing.
My style is greatly simplified from those days in Expository Writing class… much of what I write is read by ESL readers, and even native English speakers have little patience (or focus) for long constructions.