Tarnished opal

Jack Benny had an adage: 'A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny.' An art form has a language its best practitioners master as the wannabes effortlessly mangle the nuances. How mysterious, creative minds. How can one spin out poems, another speak oil-on-canvas or hand-on-keyboard? Why can most of us dream stories while very few dreamers translate their imaginations into novels?

Another mystery: Harvard's Kaavya Viswanathan, the young writer accused of plagiarizing Megan McCafferty's work. Was Viswanathan naive enough to think nobody would notice the similarities or, as she says, had she internalized the passages so completely, she thought they were her own?

Readers, bloggers, finger waggers assume the worst, a get-rich-heist of another author's intellectual property. But many a songwriter has wondered, when a phrase comes dazzlingly into consciousness, 'did I really write this, or did I hear it someplace?' The cauldron's a thick soup of old bones and grizzled memories.

Intellectual property is vulnerable to poaching. Who will keep watch? Maybe someday a computer will have 'plagiary check' to run creations through, so the art vigilantes can take a break and, who knows, go throw some clay, carve some wood, sculpt their own fictional masterpieces.