put differently...

These days I'm reading Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of The Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles and last night I cheated* and went right to the chapter that addresses plagiarism and forgery and this is what I find:

Yet citation, like namedropping, may simply be your way of rewarding a friend, honoring a mentor, injecting yourself into the mainstream, hitching your wagon to a star, deflecting doubt onto a stranger, disclaiming responsibility for a risky idea, proving fairhandedness, or demonstrating erudition in lieu of brilliance. (308)

Couldn't have said it better myself, though, as evidenced by my forthcoming article on citation, lord knows I tried. Schwartz's writing style blows my mind. Witness:

This is a book about what we are making of ourselves, in kind or in unkindness, as we so adeptly reproduce the world around us. The recurrent paradox of these pages is that the more pressing the ambiguities of our re-creations, the more we have looked toward binary pairs to determine how, one by one, each of us might take a stand. (27)

*Will I forever think of "skipping" chapters and not reading in a linear way as a form of "cheating"? I thought this was the year that Amy grew up.