Robert Louis Stephenson

TOURISM: HEALING SAMOA

The co-owner—with his sister Sosa—as well as being chief of his own village of Falealili and honorary chief of Siumu village, home to most of the resort staff, the warm, humorous 60-year old Annandale—part Samoan and part British—had, in his youth, enthusiastically learned almost every western folk song doing the rounds, as well as a stack of radio pop hits from the early days of the Beatles and their ilk. Combined with a brace of Samoan traditionals taught by his gregarious ‘Uncle Fred’, Ann had assembled a repertoire of good-time singalongs, performed with dexterous ukulele accompaniment by himself, Fred and various members of the Annandale family, that enlivened many a night in the Sinalei bars and restaurants, including my own. I wasn’t there when it happened but I picked up the tales of how the gregarious Connolly had heard the melodic notes wafting on the sweet night breeze and, in short order had toted his trusty banjo up the bar, walked right in, sat right down and effectively recreated the hootenanny spirit of the Humblebums, the Scottish folk duo he recorded with before becoming a ribald comedian. The riotous renditions would go on into the wee hours and fortunate be the guests who happened to be in residence at the time. Back to the Sinalei four years on and Annandale, when dinner was done, with only a little more persuasion than the last time, again pulled out a guitar and a ukelele and, with his cousin Chris from New Zealand, sent song out across the water; water which had very much re-arranged his life and his realm. It was plainly a tonic for the man; and a sign to his visitors that what had been so brutally torn apart was well on the way to being put back together. Well, almost. When the Pacific Tsunami—submarine earthquake of an 8.1 magnitude—sent forth waves up to 14 metres high in September 2009, Annandale was in his village, at home in what was effectively a beach house. When he saw the waters recede in a matter he’d never witnessed, he gathered his wife Tui, her wheelchair-bound mother Anna and a nurse, bundled them into a Hyundai Wagon and tried to escape to higher ground. At the resort, death on a large scale had been averted by the quick thinking of Sosa and her son, who, of their own accord, set off a ringing alarm that had guests—both at Sinalei and next-door Coconuts Resort—out of their beds on that early morning and away from waves just in time.

antishurtugal: Robert Louis Stephenson on Plagiarism in 'Treasure ...

,&Nbsp;two passages of which are directly relevant to The Bricks, and fantasy writing in general. Here's the first:  

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began The Sea Cook, for that was the original title. I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency. It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying: departing, they had left behind them ‘Footprints on the sands of time / Footprints which perhaps another’ — and I was the other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters — all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.

Interesting, no? I confess I had never even heard of Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller See, there's an author whose figured it out. :) The current educational model for teaching literature beats students over the head with Important Meaning (TM) until they lose track of why the work is so incredible. Understanding the work is more about exploration and teasing out meaning than dictation from on high. The challenge of the second method is that it needs to provide students leeway to make their own guesses and provide their own evidence from the text and it can't punish one for being wrong.