How Kaavya got screwed, got despondent, and got a chance to be on Oprah

It's hard to feel pity and sympathy for poor little Kaavya, on whose shoulders seemingly rest, squarely and oppressively, the heavy 'Burden of the Past.' The photo with the smug mug of an Ivy leaguer looks down on us mere mortals who have a snowball's chance in hell (or thereabouts) of securing a book deal and 500K advance. But alas, little Kaavya enjoyed the fruits of her exploits, erm, employ, all too briefly! The rise and fall of Kaavya Viswanathan, the young Indian-American Ivy league novelist cum plaigarist, proves to be great e-mail fodder, still. A cousin of mine mused on the origins and notions of plaigarism, arguing that copyright laws were brought into being in order to protect authors from economic harm. Does copying the same words in different syntax constitute 'economic harm'? Or is the copying of the plot itself the deal? In any case, appropriating the intellectual birthchild of another without credit where credit is due is just plain fraud. But isn't it just the case that a story told from the 'multicultural' angle is all just a bit old and, pardon my snore, boring? Do we really want to read another bildungsroman of young immigrant offspring straddling two (or more) worlds? Is the lack of freshness the real culprit? or is it the now-hardily-proven lack of originality? "Write what you know" a writer told me once, "write from your gut, your experience, and it will always be true." True yes, but interesting is another matter altogether. In 1970, with The burden of the past and the English poet, W. Jackson Bate argued that the writers of the 1660s to mid 1800s comprised the first generations to acknowledge and 'feel' the burden of the weighty literary past. He eloquently expounded what we already knew: it's all been said and done before. And most likely, better. Ms. Kaavya said that she had so 'internalized' her favorite writers that she unintentionally and unconsciously regurgitated not only the plot, but piecemeal passages (having apparently read them over and over and over again). The Harvard Independent is having a grand old time matching passages, image for image, sentence for sentence, for our reading pleasure. I suppose 'internalizing' is to become the new publishing buzzword (viz., the editor to the writer, sternly: Are you certain you haven't internalized Pynchon with this one?). A friend of mine, giggling in his office at work e-mailed me admonishing, "I think we seriously need to check through our e-mails. Surely she's picked up some of our stuff, too!" I'm sure there's more KaavyaGate to come. Perhaps a little scolding session on Oprah's couch? Bring it on!