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Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed for a means of flight No one ever accuses the descendants of ancient birds of plagiarism for taking heat-retaining feathers and modifying them into wings for flight In our current system, the original feathers would be copyrighted, and upstart birds would get sued for stealing the feathers for a different use Almost all famous discoveries (by Darwin, Edison, Einstein, et al) were not lightning-bolt epiphanies but were built slowly over time and heavily dependent on the intellectual superstructure of what had come before them Eg, the commonplace book was popular among English intellectuals in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries These notebooks were a depository for thoughts and quotes and were usually categorised by topic Enquire Within Upon Everything, a commercially successful parody of the commonplace book, was published in London in 1890 There’s no such thing as originality Invention and innovation grow out of networks of people and ideas All life on earth (and by extension, technology) is built upon appropriation and reuse of the pre-existing Mixing passages of his own approximately 50/50 with passages from other writers, Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave is a cry of mourning about dissolution – of society (WWII), the body (ageing), love (divorce), and literature (‘The English language has, in fact, so contracted to our own littleness that it is no longer possible to make a good book out of words alone’)   Published with footnotes in the UK and the US, Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic masterpiece, Minima Moralia, first appeared, in Germany, in 1951, sans footnotes What was unexplained art in the German edition became dutiful scholarship when published inEngland; citation domesticated the work, flattened it, denuded it, robbed it of its excitement, risk, danger   Rather like Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man in that the art consists of taking someone else’s material and reframing it, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip juxtaposes photographs and historical documents from turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jackson County, WI, to create what he calls ‘an experiment in both history and alchemy’ – the alchemy being Lesy’s transfiguration of American pastoral into Munch nightmare   In